Scripting News

What BigTechCo's announce

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:41:10 GMT

Big Tech Companies enjoy a weird kind of megalomania, when viewed from outside. The net-effect of their announcements usually are: "We will tell you soon how we plan to announce our universe-changing plan to make everything work the way we think it should. When we figure it out we will announce how we will announce our plan. You will be even more impressed then than you are now."

It is thus because in the meetings leading up to the big day, they can only agree that they will make an announcement, not what it will be. That comes later.

In the meantime the partners have some demos. They don't do anything other than show how, when the BigTechCo's finally figure out how to announce their plann, they will submit to their will and become rich and powerful in their own domain.

What really matters are the TechCo's, large and small, that are not on stage. That usually is the point of the whole mess. "We invited them," they will say, "but they wouldn't come to be part of our open announcement of how we will announce our plan to dominate everything and do things the way we think they should be done (when we figure it out)."

What is Twitter up to? (podcast)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:35:21 GMT

I recorded a little podcast that explains what @anywhere is.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/cn10mar16.mp3

From my point of view. Your mileage may vary, etc.

Twitter as a force for good?

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:00:04 GMT

If Twitter wants to be a force for good they should stick to small things they have high leverage over, not fancy "big picture" things that any other rich person could do.

Bill Gates made this mistake. Instead of cutting off the air supply of his competitors and landing his company in antitrust hell, he could have been a Force For Good by welcoming competition as a way to keep his company tough and on their toes and responsive to customers. It would have been good for business and made him a force for good.

Instead, he's giving money for education and health care, obvious good things, but places where his money is no better than anyone else's. Had he chosen to make less money 20 years ago the world would have been a better place today, not some day in the future.

For Twitter, doing good would mean decentralizing, not making every tweet flow through their servers. This makes the network weak, slow and fragile. To add bells and whistles to a flawed architecture is irresponsible and definintely not something a Force For Good would do.

People wonder if they'd still be a force if they decentralize. Of course they would. They'd be even bigger than before. On the web, people return to places that send them away. We could trust them because we'd have a choice. People don't trust entities that force themselves on you. Look at how hated Microsoft became and how Google is going the same way. Twitter's future is in their hands. They could either trust us to come back or force the issue. If they use force, eventually Twitter will break.

I use twitter.com when I could use any of dozens of clients. In the same way, in a decentralized loosely-coupled space, most people would use Twitter, as long as it remains reliable. And they would have an incentive to be the most reliable. Today we have no choice.

If they're worried about Google eating their lunch, or Microsoft, forget it. Look at the Buzz rollout for a clue. Google is too messed up by strategy taxes to be an effective competitor. Facebook might be a problem, but Twitter decentralizing would apply pressure for Facebook to decentralize. Look at all the upside there. Not just for Twitter shareholders, but for the web.

Try really being good, not just saying you're going to be good.

Finally a comment on the little popup cards. They break Twitter, as far as I'm concerned. Because of the 140-character limit, I have to be able to easily see the last few tweets for anyone I'm reading. And they need to read my tweet stream too. Try to get there (using Firefox/Mac at least). It requires a bunch of clicks to get the attention of the software. To replicate this paradigm on other sites makes me wonder if they're doing any real user testing at Twitter, Inc.

PS: Please get rid of URL-shorteners. They make the web more fragile.

Today's Rebooting The News podcast

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:42:19 GMT

Another "keeper" -- this week Jay is on the phone from SXSW and I'm in the studio at NYU.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar15.mp3

Topics include: Jake Tapper, problems with WordPress, Thursday evening meetup, Dave pre-orders an iPad, Jessica Roy, general mayhem.

I got my firewire cable

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:25:58 GMT

So now I'm following Lee Joramo's instructions for installing Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini, in target mode. So far I've got the Mini showing up as an external hard drive on the MacBook.

Update: It worked. I got a clean installation of Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini, using the method outlined by Lee. Unfortunately it didn't get the scanner working. I give up on that. I'll try getting another scanner. Canon LiDE 700F is a bad deal. I hear the hardware works, but the drivers are a nightmare. I concur with the drivers part, never got to use the hardware.

Update #2: Netbook haters are going to scream when they hear this. The Canon scanner works great on Windows XP on my little Asus netbook. The cool thing is that Windows has this built-in function that gets the drivers for you. I have no idea where they go or how it works, but -- it worked. I was able to scan all my tax forms, about 100 pages, in about an hour. I did it using the built-in Windows scanning software. No I did not do this just to irritate Mac zealots, but I'm kind of pleased that it probably will.

In a moment of insanity

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:42:24 GMT

I take the Fifth.

I plead temporary insanity.

Nolo contendere.

I threw reason out the window.

I felt smug for some reason.

And I was feeling jealous of all the people who, on April 3, would have their iPad. And I won't.

So, after reading that Andrew Baron ordered one with his winnings on AAPL stock, I figured I could do it too. So I sucked my gut and pressed Submit.

Now I have one of these things, whatever the frack it is, on its way to me in just a couple of weeks.

At least I'll be able to watch Fargo on it.

PS: I am totally out of my mind.

The lesson of Ikea

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:27:18 GMT

Every few years I almost get snookered into making a major furniture purchase at Ikea. Then I come to my senses.

First, what Ikea is good for -- the little chotchkas you need to get a house started. Dishrags. Flatware. They have a starter box with a few pots and pans, measuring cups, a spatula, scissors, cheese grater. A hundred little things that if bought separately would cost $500, but they charge about $100. And you don't have to think of everything. A shower curtain. Cheap drapes.

But when you buy things that require assembly, that's when I get in trouble. And it's even worse if you have to make a dozen choices before getting your order number. That's when you have to deal with Ikea sales people.

Some of them are really nice, I imagine, but I always get the mean mofos.

You know how we have unconferences? These are unsalespeople.

I really appreciate them, because they save me from having to deal with the assembly contractors and delivery people. Their function is to kick the people out of the system who have low tolerance for Ikea. For that, they are a blessing.

So I buy real furniture. And I pay more for it. But the sales people treat me like a customer, and the delivery people actually bring the stuff into your house and set it up. When you're a kid I guess you have DIY this stuff. But when you get to be an adult, you should pay to have it done for you.

That is, imho, the lesson of Ikea.

Twitter is down this morning

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:16:15 GMT

Not sure how long it's been down, but it's been a while. Nothing on status.twitter.com.

This reminds me what I'm going to talk about at the 140Conf on April 20. How we are fools to think that something like Twitter can run entirely on one company's servers.

The Twitter guys should know that can't work, and should be planning on a resilient future, one where we can trust them because we don't have to trust them.

OPML Editor universal app testing

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:44:49 GMT

See this announcement on the Frontier News blog.

Installing Snow Leopard on a headless Mac Mini

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:11:39 GMT

I bought a Canon scanner to use with my MacBook Pro 13-inch laptop, but it just doesn't work. Once in a while it produces a scan, but most of the time, the drivers say they can't find a scanner attached to the computer.

I've been advised this may be because the device is powered through USB, and there isn't reliable power coming through USB so the scanner doesn't power up.

It first I thought I was out of luck cause I don't have a desktop at the NY apartment, but then I realized I do have a Mac Mini. So I tried installing the drivers on that computer, but was told they require Snow Leopard. Okay but the Snow Leopard disk is back in Calif. So I spent $25 to get another copy of the OS, and tried to install it on the Mac Mini, but...

Well first, it's a headless Mac Mini. No monitor, no keyboard, no mouse. So when the computer rebooted it never showed up on the LAN. So I plugged in a keyboard and mouse and the disk starts whirring again, the installation continues, but eventually the disk stopped whirring and the computer still doesn't show up on the LAN.

After waiting an hour I recycled the power, but the computer still doesn't show up on the LAN.

That's where I am now. Anyone with experience installing Snow Leopard on a headless Mac Mini? Help! If this works I'll put in an order for an iPad today.

Me and iPad: Not now

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:50:47 GMT

I was up this morning at 8:30AM Eastern and saw the notes that the iPad was now available for pre-order. So I went through the process, updated my credit card on Apple's website, changed the address and phone number. The total price was a bit of a shocker -- approx $650 including tax.

I hesitated. I was typing the order on a $350 Asus Eee PC that I had bought a long time ago. It gets about 8 hours on the battery. It has a 160GB hard drive, three USB ports, Ethernet, webcam builtin. Real keyboard. No DRM.

I went to Amazon to see what I could get for $650. Lots of stuff I'm not buying that I'd like to have. A nice Polk Audio soundbar is about $500.

I could fly roundtrip to San Francisco for that amount.

I thought about which I would bring with me on a trip to San Francisco, an iPad or the Asus. No doubt, I'd bring the Asus. I have no idea what I can do with the iPad, and most important, I have a pretty good idea that I won't be able to run my software on it, or watch a movie I ripped from a DVD. Or listen to a podcast I downloaded with non-Apple software.

I decided that no matter how important it is for my work to understand what Apple's product does, it can wait until I find out what the product is. I guess I no longer have the Apple bug up my ass that says I have to get one of everything they make on the day it comes out.

So for now at least, the answer to the iPad is "no."

Update: People say here and on Twitter that you'll be able to watch movies you rip from DVD or listen to podcasts downloaded with non-Apple software on an iPad. They reason that since you can do it on an iPod you will be able to do it on an iPad.

I like abbreviated RSS feeds

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:04:41 GMT

Just read an article by Felix Salmon in response to a decision by Gawker to stop pushing the full text in their RSS feeds.

I've heard this argument over years, from many people, but I've never agreed with it. I prefer if publishers include thoughtfully written synopses in their feeds, with links to the full articles.

The reason I prefer this is that I am probably one of the few people to use River of News approach to feed reading, which imho is the only rational way to read feeds.

I skim. I don't need the full text of each article, in fact I was so annoyed by feeds that publish full text that I made my aggregator truncate the articles at 500 characters.

My eyes are very good at scanning. I can quickly tell whether I need to read the full article. This allows me to consider orders of magnitude more stories than I would if I had to wade through feeds with full text.

Another point of view that's rarely considered in these debates.

BTW, everyone reads a River of News these days. It's called Twitter.

Mine is better. (No 140-character limit.)

Still waiting for my HTTP-scanner

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:39:12 GMT

Many years ago I wrote about an idea for simplifying hardware devices that scan stuff producing digital images. They shouldn't require any drivers and they should work effortlessly. But the architecture they use for these devices is still rooted in the 1980s, when it should have and easily could have made the transition to HTTP.

I'm thinking about it again because I wasted a bunch of time on a Canon 700F scanner that, because of driver problems, just won't work with my Mac laptop. Now that I've got the problem I see that dozens of other users had it too (the problems didn't show up in the Amazon reviews, but do show up in various support forums).

After all these problems I'm reminded how scanners really should work. Thus:

1. It has a power cord and an Ethernet jack.

2. You plug the power cord into the wall and the Ethernet jack into your router.

3. A new device appears on your LAN called "Scanner."

4. Type http://scanner.loc/ into your browser and a simple configuration screen shows up. It lets you change the name of the device, turn security on, give it a username and password.

5. The device has about three buttons on it. The first turns the power off and on. The second creates a JPG image, the third creates a PDF.

How to use it: Lift the lid, put a document in. Close the lid. Press a button. Refresh the home page of the scanner and click the Docs link. A list of docs in reverse chronologic order appears. To view a doc, click its link. To download, right-click its name and choose Open or Save or whatever other options your browser allows.

No drivers, no fuss, no muss. Nothing to go wrong. It just works.™

Please, please -- someone make this device. Thank you.

Location-based content

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:58:21 GMT

I can't figure out how the new location-based Twitter works. Firefox can't figure out where I am. No surprise, My 13-inch MacBook Pro doesn't have GPS. Is there some place I can click on a map to say This Is Where I Am? Not at all obvious. Other people say they see it. Not on my machine.

Anyway, that doesn't mean we can't have fun with location stuff.

On Twitter, I posted a link to a Google Map asking if this was the location of the Fillmore East.

I got back an answer that it was close, but the supermarket next door is where the Fillmore was. I tweeted back that I had read somewhere that that was where the Ratner's was, next to the Fillmore, and if you go in there you can even see a giant R on the floor. Ratner's was a great Jewish dairy restaurant. Until I read the article (can't remember where it was) I only knew about the now-gone Ratner's on Delancey St. I once took a blonde shiksa VP-Marketing from California to Ratner's on Delancey, and the waiter yelled at me for bringing such a fine woman to such a lousy neighborhood. That was before it all got gentrified and yuppified.

Both Ratner's are gone now.

Anyway, the same guy dug up a picture of the old Fillmore just before a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert. My theory was correct. It's the site of the bank.

I went to the Fillmore a few times. The most memorable concert was a Grateful Dead show with a surprise toward the end. A bunch of dirty hippies with long hair and beards come out and jam with the Dead. The music sounds weirdly familiar but hard to place. They were being deliberately misleading. Then all of a sudden a rock and roll standard -- Good Vibrations. It was the all-new dope-smoking Beach Boys! Oh man those were the days. I also saw the Incredible String Band there. Ten Years After.

We're getting ready to do an East Village blog for the NY Times. Going down memory lane is my way of getting ready.

PS: I read about Ratner's on Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, an intriguing blog with lots of great stories about the ever-changing and not-always-for-the-best New York Shitty.

RSS enclosures from 2004 and 2005

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:36:19 GMT

I was doing some research for a blog post and came across this folder of RSS enclosures from late 2004 and early-mid 2005.

These were the months when podcasting was beginning to take root.

I was doing Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry was doing Daily Source Code. Together, we were doing the Trade Secrets podcast.

Dave Slusher, Steve Gillmor, IT Conversations, Dawn and Drew, Tony Kahn at WGBH, Engadget.

It occurred to me that this slice of early podcasting might be worth preserving, so turned it into a torrent and have uploaded it

http://static.scripting.com/misc/earlyPodcasts.torrent

If you have questions or comments, you can post them here.

PS: Another reason I like it is this is a non-infringing use of BitTorrent. We need more of those to protect this excellent distributed technology.

Please fix WordPress for podcast feeds

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:01:06 GMT

Jay and I use WordPress to do the http://rebootnews.com/ site.

It's a mixed bag. On the pro side, we both know how to use WordPress, and because Jay writes the show notes and I do the tech stuff, it's a good tool to put between us.

But WordPress doesn't do podcast feeds well.

And that's being generous.

Here's how the UI works currently. You edit your post and link to an MP3 or a movie or an AVI or some other media object. The first one that WP encounters as it parses your text, it will supposedly turn into an enclosure. If you happen to link to two MP3s but the second is the enclosure, you're out of luck. And for some reason if you store the MP3 on Amazon S3, as we do, it usually doesn't even find the enclosure. But this is variable. Today they've hacked up our link to point to some server on wordpress.com, totally without our permission. What a mess. And even so there's no enclosure in our feed for this week's show (which btw I think is one of our best, one I hope everyone listens to).

For the last three episodes of our podcast, it's failed to add an enclosure element to the feed. As a result none of our listeners get the podcast on time, and it always takes some fussing by the WordPress tech people to get it working, and for all I know a bunch of people never hear the podcast. I suppose it depends on whether or not the client sees an item as read if the guid doesn't change but all of a sudden the item has an enclosure. Imho a proper podcast client would just watch the guid, and therefore would miss the enclosure. Regardless, it's simply unacceptable that WordPress work this way and that Automattic doesn't do something to fix it.

This is how we did it in Radio 8, in 2002, eight years ago.

Here's a screen shot.

Click the screen shot for the full effect.

See the red arrow pointing to the box called Enclosure? That's where you paste the link to the enclosure. Anyone no matter how technical they are not, could be taught to do that correctly.

We never had the problem WordPress is having. Granted a lot fewer people did podcasts then than now. Maybe. I'd argue that the way WordPress works now is killing the art of podcasting because it's so unpredictable and it's virtually got the market cornered. Regardless, I'm a paying customer, and I'd like to continue to use WordPress, but eventually I'm going to have to switch because it's killing our product.

Please Matt and company, fix this!

PS: I wish Wordpress.com was more hackable, if there was a way for me to patch our feed I could fix this without their help. Alas it's not something I can fix myself and I don't have any interest in running my own installation or fussing around with PHP etc.

A nice boost for rssCloud

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:36:30 GMT

It's been a while since we could announce new major support for rssCloud, but today is one of those big days we'll remember for a long time.

Status.net has now enabled rssCloud support in the RSS 2.0 feeds for all its users.

This means that identi.ca, the server operated by status.net, has the feature, as well as all other sites they operate. I assume it will be baked into a subsequent open source release (status.net is GPL software).

What does this mean? Well, when I post an update to my account on identi.ca, any cloud-aware aggregator will receive an update notification. River2, the aggregator I've built for Frontier (it runs in the OPML Editor) has support for rssCloud.

For a demo here's a screen shot of an update I posted to identi.ca. Note the time of the update. I immediately refreshed the home page of my River2 server, and there's the update. Elapsed time ==> 12 seconds. That's what real time means.

This is my feed. A source screen shot shows the <cloud> element.

It's also a holy grail for the idea of a distributed loosely-coupled network of Twitter-like services, linked together in real time using RSS. (What a mouthful!) It's very elegant and lightweight and it works today.

18 interesting firsts

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:27:18 GMT

I stumbled across this very interesting list of 18 firsts on the Internet. It's a good way to look at things. You could argue who invented what first, and you often get nowhere that way, because "invention" is such a poorly understood concept. Everyone's work builds on other people's. The guy who invented the car used a lot of other people's work to create something with four wheels and an engine. Did it have to have a steering wheel to be a car? We could argue about that, and that would change who the inventor was.

It may be more useful to say who had the first car. Who drove it, and where did they go?

And on the Internet, there's no doubt, for example that Tim Berners-Lee had the first website. Unless someone else says they did. (Haven't heard anyone say that, btw.)

I was glad to get credit for creating the first podcast.

Who wrote the first blog post? They give credit for that to Justin Hall (and mis-spell his name).

I wrote in the About page for weblogs.com that the first blog was also the first website. TBL's info.cern.ch was a reverse-chronologic list of new websites. That's how central to the web I think blogs are. But if that wasn't the first blog, let's see Hall's first post, and decide if that really was the first one.

Who had the first feed? That's going to be an interesting debate for sure. I can show you mine, it was first published on December 15, 1997. But what makes something a feed? Can you have a feed with no aggregator? Is it the aggregator that makes something a feed? If so, we'll have to figure out who wrote the first aggregator and when, and what feed(s) it read.

One of the criteria for being "first" is, imho -- Did your work lead to other people imitating you? That test says whether or not your work commercialized or popularized the concept. The implies "hitting the spot" where being the only one seems, somehow, less significant. That's one argument against Hall as the first blogger, but in favor of TBL. As far as I know there were no bloggers that formed a community in the aftermath of his Links from the Underground.

Pretty sure the first blogging community, in the sense that we think of blogging today, was formed around Scripting News. Most blogs today can trace their roots back to Scripting News, if you go back far enough. I suppose some communities are disjoint. Did LiveJournal spawn out of a blog that spawned out of something that came from Scripting? I have no idea. But I do know that most of the early bloggers were readers of this site, and many participated in the discussion group here. There was a website that traced the lineage, called BlogTree, and it verified that the root of the tree was Scripting News. This is something I'm proud of, I think justifiably.

One of the reasons I'm proud of it is that blogging was created without the lock-in you see in systems like Twitter, Facebook and though they'll argue for sure, Buzz. Even Posterous, Tumblr and Wordpress.com don't give you easy ways off their servers. Blogging started without the concept of a single server, so there was no place to get off of. The whole point was to be as distributed as the web itself, to give people independence, to let billions of websites bloom. This is such an obvious feature of blogs that people don't usually see it. But it's there, and it's hugely important.

There are a lot of very vocal people who work to remove credit rather than give it. I'm sure some of them will comment here. As long as their comments are respectful they will stand.

Promising competition

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:46:46 GMT

Several interesting half-developments in the competitive landscape from non-dominant tech entities. I believe in supporting the second and third tier companies and startups, when they offer alternatives to the BigCo's. I like the little guys because they have an incentive to listen to and please users, without the strategy taxes almost always imposed by the big guys.

First, there is Mark Fletcher's SnapGroups. It's basically a threaded discussion group with a modern browser-based UI. It's perhaps a framework that something like FriendFeed can develop from, although it's just a framework. There are no feeds in either direction -- you can't subscribe to feeds from within SnapGroups, and it doesn't generate feeds, so I can't subscribe to stuff from SnapGroups in other RSS-aware environments. But it does look nice, and Mark is the author of Bloglines, so we know he understands feeds. These days, you can't even get into the game without basic feed support. I'd of course also like to see him support rssCloud so the connections in and out can be real-time.

Second, I just got an email from Zach Copley at Status.Net saying their software, which is an open source Twitter workalike, now supports rssCloud. That is very welcome news. I tested it with River2, and while the initial handshake worked, I'm not getting the realtime updates. I expect we'll figure out the glitch quickly and then we'll have another realtime connection. What can we do with it? We'll have to explore that. Meanwhile, it's nice to have a reason to get reacquainted with Identi.ca, which is the mother ship of Status.Net. And thanks to Zach for sticking with it.

Finally, Marshall Kirkpatrick, who writes for ReadWriteWeb, says the big players in his market, TechCrunch, Mashable, AllThingsDigital, don't pick up stories once RWW has covered them. This gives vendors an incentive to give exclusives to the big pubs, assuming they want coverage from them. Vendors who buy that are making a mistake. The news will find the people who need to know it, more now than ever. Pick a reporter who you think will understand your product and give them enough time. That's one approach, if you think you can get the attention. Otherwise, just write your own blog post, and send the links around to all the reporters, and hope they find it interesting. I know this isn't the standard advice, but the gatekeepers figure you need them a lot more than they need you, and act accordingly. It's hard to get insightful reporting from them, and I think the readers have figured that out. All pubs should follow this simple rule: write up whatever you find interesting, whenever you discover it, no matter who has already written it. Anyone who plays it differently will eventually pay a penalty. And these days "eventually" is a lot sooner than it used to be.

Remember: "People come back to places that send them away."

Great photo of Jobs at Oscars

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:10:18 GMT

Zadi Diaz got this great picture of Steve Jobs on the red carpet at the Oscars last night.

Click the thumb above for the full effect.