On Twitter, with its 140-character limit, there's little focus to the discussion about the new filitering they just announced. Here are some of my comments, in bullet form, hopefully to add some more substance to the discussion..

1. We don't know very much about what they're doing, and it's not clear that we ever will.

2. The examples they cite, laws in France and Germany that prohibit pro-Nazi speech, are somewhat reasonable. But I suspect this will be used in the future to prevent leaks of information they don't want leaked. If Twitter-like tech is the new world stage, and I think it is, they want to control who has what access to it.

By "they" I mean the unspecified governments and companies that can tell Twitter to make something inaccessible somewhere.

3. The Internet is not a law-free zone.

4. I am not passing judgment on Twitter. I will gladly concede they have no choice.

5. What we're deciding, by our actions, is whether the Internet will be like TV, a medium where individuals can perhaps comment on what's being broadcast (that would be the innovation, the interactivity) but without the ability to organize ourselves outside of the control of huge corporations and governments.

6. Yes, the governments can shut down anything they want.

7. But, as I've pleaded previously, if we force them to shut down the Internet to control the flow of information, everyone will know. If there is an ability to shut off communities selectively, that would be hard to detect.

8. Clarity on whether the Internet is up or down is something we should value and protect.

9. It's possible today to be on a decentralized network and still participate in Twitter. If large numbers of us do it, Twitter won't be able to quietly turn this feature off, or limit it, without lots of real users feeling it.

10. We should have tutorial sessions at every Internet policy conference that show people how easy it is to operate your own infrastructure. It's really there now, ready to teach users how to do it. But you have to make a commitment to standing up for the Internet. It will never be as easy as Twitter. However, if Twitter shuts you off, it won't effect your presence. That's worth a little more complexity. (And the complexity is all in setup, not in posting. Once set up, it's faster than in Twitter itself.)

11. If you work or study at a university in compsci or journalism, learn how to run a server, and then teach others how to do it. If you want to make a real contribution to the Internet, that's how to do it. Signing petitions or forcing minor movement in Washington really isn't that effective.

12. Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet.

Anyway, that's it for now.

 1/27/2012; 12:06:19 PM.   .

Three years ago, I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poets that made it relatively easy for a technically proficient user to set up a Windows server in Amazon EC2. A few hundred people tried it, and were able to get servers running. They could install apps, and run web apps that they then could access from home or on the road. Having your own server "up there" can be pretty cool, makes a lot of things possible that otherwise would be hard.

For example you can run a personal river of news. That's what I do on one of my EC2 instances. Not only for myself but for a few friends at universities and publications. I'm now working on one for a friend who teaches at Harvard. And there's a biologist at Columbia who's using Radio2 to keep a linkblog running. This stuff really works, and is not so hard to set up. And once it's set up, it pretty much runs itself.

Running a server may sound hard. But in practice it's as easy as running a laptop. In some ways it's even easier.

And Amazon and Microsoft just made it possible to run an EC2 server for a year for free!

That's a pretty big deal if you were thinking it might be too expensive just to play around.

So in summary:

1. EC2 for Poets.

2. River2.

3. Amazon EC2 pricing page.

Just to be sure everything is working, I set up a River2 installation on a micro EC2 instance, and it really went smoothly.

 1/25/2012; 7:08:12 PM.   .

I know the Repubs like to demonize Nancy Pelosi, but I really like her.

Check out this exchange with John King at CNN.

Fascinating. What does she know?

Some possibilities...

1. Newt is secretly a Democrat.

2. Newt is secretly a woman.

3. Newt secretly slept with Nancy P.

4. Newt is secretly Osama bin Laden's long lost brother.

5. New paid no taxes until he was 45 years old.

6. Instead of fighting in Vietnam, he signed up for the Khmer Rouge. He's Prince Sihanouk's long lost brother.

7. He was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In fact the bay was named after him. He's Fidel Castro's long lost brother. (Hence his hatred of Fidel.)

8. ???

 1/25/2012; 9:59:37 AM.   .

President Obama asks that we suggest ways for the movie industry to control the Internet that we might not find so objectionable.

Nat Torkington tells an old joke in a new context. It's a good one. God already gave the movie industry the Internet and it's been shown you can make many billions of dollars selling things there. So why not sell movies too?

I think the President asks the wrong question.

What can the movie industry do to freshen up their product in the age of technology to make it more fun and interesting for their customers. Rather than try to destroy the new playground, how about coming out to play!

So here are some ideas.

1. The best suggestion I've heard is to make it impossible to use a cell phone or send or receive text messages in movie theaters. Just block the incoming signal. True, some people might stay home because they always want to be online, but I bet a lot more people would come back.

2. Work with Apple and others to emit a special "no alarms allowed" signal to be broadcast in the movie theater. That way the user doesn't have to do anything to turn off the alarms. The owner of the venue could do it.

3. I find it's hard to hear dialog sometimes in movies. Maybe it's because my hearing isn't so good. I like the sound systems they have. But I could use my mobile device and headphones to tune into an audio track that's broadcast locally to those in the theater. Sure hackers could use this to get a great recording of the sound of the movie. So what. It would make the experience better for the people who pay. Those people are your customers.

4. Open the theaters to amateurs. Have contests for local creative movie people in your neighborhood. Have Saturday showing for the kids in your area. Get involved with your community. They could be a source of ideas. And we could find out where the great movies are coming from, geographically.

5. Why aren't there cafes in the lobby of at least some theaters. Aren't we always looking for a place for a snack or coffee after the movie? A place to talk about what we just saw with people we came with? Or a place to talk about the movies with people we saw it with. Instead they just move people in and out. Missed opportunity, imho.

6. Make the theaters more attractive and comfortable! Upgrade the experience. You're competing against my home theater which isn't really that great compared to the theater. But it is much more convenient.

7. Stretch the genres. So many of the movies are stupid rehashes of stories that weren't that great in the first place. Movies like The Artist show that there are still a lot of ideas that are not fullly explored. Challenge the movie-makers to be more creative. I think that's a big part of the problem.

8. Start a dating site based on people's like and dislike of movies.

Anyway, just some ideas. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments.

 1/25/2012; 9:35:52 AM.   .

In yesterday's piece about wanting an exit from Google, I mentioned that I might use DuckDuckGo, but had reservations because it's "another Fred Wilson company." Fred, who is a very cheerful dude (no sarcasm) responded with evangelism, which is what I like about Fred. Of course he can handle criticism, even when it's as vaguely defined as the bit in my blog post. Come right back with a great product pitch. I wouldn't expect any less.

Even though I know Fred personally, he has a bigger presence in the tech world. Like it or not he now is the leading tech VC. He occupies a slot that John Doerr used to. Who came before? Not sure -- Don Valentine? Arthur Rock? Eugene Kleiner? I've heard about them. But they're not of my generation. I'm a little younger than Doerr, and a little older than Wilson. And I know JD as well. He bought a company of mine, I served on a board with him, and he lived on the same street in the 90s (not bragging, I lived a little beyond my means, and Doerr is more modest than his).

Both Doerr and Wilson are genial, charming, politically active, and I think for the most part share the same values I do. However, where we part is on the role of users in tech. I have chosen to identify with them. And while Fred does as good a job as he can, given what he does, of understanding the user's perspective (I'd say this is the reason he rose to be #1 in his field) he really is sitting on the other side of the table, business-wise, from the users. I doubt if he views it this way, but I do.

The way to align our interests is to own a common stock. Back in 1998, it turns out, it would have been a good idea to not switch to Google unless we as users could buy it. I think the Google guys sort of intuited this, because when they finally went public in 2004, they cut out the investment bankers, and went with a very web-like approach to stock called the Dutch Auction IPO, invented by Bill Hambrecht. What a pioneering idea, it paved the way for Kickstarter, which is growing like a weed, and changing the way we think about funding startups (Kickstarter is Fred Wilson company, btw, and Google is a John Doerr company).

So Google started out on the right path, but eventually they went wild and desperate, and did all the things with their product that users probably thought they would never do. So now I'm shopping for a search engine to invest in. DuckDuckGo could be that, except for this one problem. Imho, it's inexorably on the same path that Google was on. That means they're going to spend years of our time pretending that they are still on our side, until one day it'll be blatantly obvious that we just wasted years waiting for them to give take us somewhere we'd want to go . They are using us as pawns, as big techco's always do.

In other words, I want to use a search engine that I, along with you, and everyone else on the web, own.

In the same sense that we own the web. Can we operate our own search engine? Can the developers who lead us there get unreasonably rich even if they don't control our future? These are all questions that I believe we can address. I think we can all win. And I think that until we do this, and do it right, we'll be stuck in the same infinite loop we've circling as long as I've been in tech.

This isn't intended to generate an action item on anyone's todo list (to use tech management terminology) rather to raise the question, once again, how we can build a future with technology that is allied with the interests of users. That's where I want to invest my most precious resource -- time.

 1/24/2012; 10:08:03 AM.   .

Google's feature-creep is creeping me out.

I did an image search the other day and it made me stand up and pace. They were showing me posts on Google Plus with pictures from people they know I know because I email with them in Gmail. I don't want to go there. I want search to be search and just that. I want the same search everyone else gets unless I specifically ask it to search images from people I know who are using Google-Plus. There are times I don't want to be marketed to. Like when I'm using image search. That's almost always part of creative work. I will do the driving Google. Thanks.

Maybe it's time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly that's another Fred Wilson company, and even though he returns my calls and answers my emails, I don't want to be so dependent on him. I already us Twitter, Tumblr and Disqus. That's enough.

One thing is for sure, the Internet experience which has been pretty steady for the last five years or so is about to upheave. I'm planning on doing some of the heaving myself.

 1/23/2012; 11:15:42 AM.   .

I've got three main projects and lots of little utilities that tie them together.

They are River2, Radio2 and World Outline.

River2 and Radio2 are at 1.0 level. Totally functional, polished UIs, but they're still being worked on. There will be new major versions.

World Outline is rock and roll. But it's coming out soooo nice. I love this product like I loved outliners in the 80s and blogging tools in the 90s and 00s.

As you might imagine, outlines play a big role in the World Outline. And when you can make an outline behave and look like an outline, well that's strictly good. In December I finally invested in making outline objects work just like outlines. That meant rolling up my sleeves and making no apologies for my Javascript coding. And it came out nice. Then I rested on that front for a while, let it burn in and dug some new holes over the holidays. Now on my todo list is to roll up the outline rendering tool so it's used to render other forms of outlines. And in my world, scripts are outlines. So what the hell, let's make it so that script code renders as an outline. There are good reasons to do this. For one it makes the code more readable. And I have lots of code. And I want to send pointers to code to Frontier newbies who are coming up now (yay!) and I didn't want to send them pointers to flat text. That would seem to miss the point. Yes? Yes!

So here's an example of what a code object looks like now. As you might imagine, to expand something click the blue wedge.

Text in italics are comments. One of the cool things about programming in an outliner is that the comments collapse up to a single line. So there's no penalty for explaining what's going on. As a result, some of the scripts in our world are really blogs! Here's an example, tcp.httpClient. It started out in 1998 as a utility to replace code that was being replicated all over the place. Over time we realized that this was a pretty central piece of code, and invested in it. And from time to time it needed a new feature or a new optional parameter. Naturally we documented the changes in comments at the top of the script.

And because we love CSS you can control the look of code objects by editing the template. Here's the default template for code objects in the world outline. But I imagine that these templates will be traded like themes in Manila or templates in Tumblr. I love investing in template languages because it's where geeks and designers meet. Power meets power. (The template is an outline, so you should open it in an outliner that understands OPML.)

And all this has Bootstrap baked in, and it surfaces at the top level. When this is done, I think it'll be the easiest and most powerful Bootstrap prototyping and design environment in addition to all the other stuff it does.

Just wanted to mark this milestone here....

 1/23/2012; 11:00:01 AM.   .

Good evening everybody. It's time to watch football. And inbetween plays a place to write some notes. Not necessarily about the game.

I had a thought about Apple's hype that their products "just work" and how it causes pain for the support system for their products. The users hear how easy everything is, but when they go to their spouse or child or parent or S.O. to get help they make it sound so complicated. Hand-waving and exasperation. This disconnect causes infinite angst in family relationships. I guess it's part of life. But it would help if Apple told users that their friends who try hard to help really are trying to help. (Assuming they are.) Or they could do more to realize the "just works" promise.

Last night Newt Gingrich gave a disgusting victory speech, which is why we tune into Newt. To see how low he can go! And he can go pretty damn low. He helped me see how Republicans use ideas that no one understands and make them sound evil the way they use the terms. The Republican fans tune in. Oh Sharia Law. That's great I mean awful! Can you just imagine the Supreme Court taken over by Sharia lawyers. What will the liberal elites think of next! Answer: Saul Alinsky. A Jewish communist who worked against "racism." What could be better for a Southern racist than getting to hate a Jew who loves blacks. Oh Newt! You know just what to say to get us excited. The silver lining? Republicans outside the South aren't quite as low as Newt. And some of them are even Jewish, African-American or Muslim.

Yes, I hate the Republicans. Delete the party and start over. That business with driving the country to the brink of default after running up the deficit for so many years, that was a line they shouldn't have crossed. That kind of arrogant anti-Americanism deserves the death penalty. As Newt says it's as close to despicable as anything I can imagine!

 1/22/2012; 4:21:50 PM.   .

Central Park was absolutely lovely, with kids sledding and everyone out to experience the snowy landscape and really cold air. Wonderful.

 1/21/2012; 7:36:20 PM.   .

Truth is this -- users are caught between tech and media. Neither of them is looking out for our interest. Each of them own politicians each owns tech. The tech industry is better at tech (no surprise) and the media industry is better at a lot of other things, including getting Congress to do their bidding.

I've been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out.

Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don't already.

Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read indpenedently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.

I still hope that there's a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it always-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it's hard, but it doesn't have to be! Each of us can have the equiv of a printing plant, that's the magic of tech. No harder to keep running than a laptop. To those people in tech who still hold to the ideal of free communication unrestricted by government or corporations, please use some of your profits to help guarantee the future of an independent Internet.

Otherwise, I think we can all see this clearly now, the net will be a single amorphous disneyfied mess, not too far down the road.

 1/21/2012; 11:29:46 AM.   .

I remember reading an article in the NYT magazine that had a picture of a young woman who had been horribly disfigured in a fire when she was a kid. They showed her the picture. She didn't know she looked like that. They asked what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She said there was a way of tilting her head and looking only at certain features that made her appear attractive. That's how she hid the truth from herself. This made an impression, obviously, since I read that piece many years ago, but the story stays with me.

Yesterday, I tried to configure an iPad with my mother, for my mother, and we failed. And in the process I saw clearly how awful the process still is, even though you no longer need to tether the iPad to a computer to set it up.

I understand it can be a hard problem, but I also see evidence of different teams working on different parts of the setup and not talking to each other. What else could explain why you have to enter your email address twice in the process?

And why exactly do they need to know her email address? And why does it need to be verified? We paid good money for this device. It's ours, isn't it? How does Apple justify getting in the way of our using it whatever way we'd like to? (Yes, I know that shows how naive I am and what a throwback I am to the days when computers were really ours, when they were personal computers.)

They didn't like the password she chose. It was a good password given that she just wants to play a game with it. But it required 8 characters, at least one had to be uppercase and one had to be a number. The chance of her remembering the password we created? Pretty slim. (And what good is a password that the user can't remember?)

They use so much techinical jargon in the setup process that a normal person couldn't possibly be expected to understand. I didn't write it all down. I knew what to do because I have almost 40 years experience using computers and a couple of degrees in computer science. But if they commissioned a study at Apple to evaluate the setup process, by someone who didn't have a stake in "it just works" as applied to Apple, they would have their eyes opened. This thing is not easy to set up or use. (It is easy to buy, however. That process they have invested in streamlining.)

All I wanted to do was give my mom a way to play Words With Friends with her friends. She's a lifelong Scrabble player, and I think she would enjoy it. But we didn't have a way to access her email from the Starbucks where we did this work, so she left without the iPad. And she's not good at following instructions over the phone. I had reservations about giving her something that would further complicate her computer life. Now I can see what a bad idea this was.

But what if Apple lived up to their claims? What if the iPad really were easy to set up and use? What if they streamlined it so that all unnecessary steps were taken out of the way of a user who just wants to have fun?

I read a quote from Steve Jobs where he said he didn't want to compete with Dell and have the computers delivered by UPS or Fedex because he wanted to experience the joy of an impulse purchase. He wanted to get the credit with his family for bringing home something fun, powerful and easy. I agree. But today's Apple doesn't deliver on that.

My mom says that all her friends who have iPads had to go to the Apple store to get them set up. I'm not surprised. I can't imagine how it could be otherwise.

 1/21/2012; 9:50:51 AM.   .

I've known this was coming, Matt told me about their RSS aggregator when he told me they were supporting rssCloud.

So theoretically, I should see this update over there immediately because I'm subscribed, and of course scripting.com supports rssCloud.

A couple of problems off the bat.

1. I tried subscribing to my linkblog feed, which is valid RSS, but got an error saying it couldn't find a valid feed.

2. I don't see any way to import or export an OPML subscription list. Not saying they don't have it, I just didn't find it.

And of course it's good news that Wordpress is embracing RSS fully, as a way to connect reading and writing. It's what I wish Twitter and Facebook had done from the beginning. They said it wasn't possible. It's good to see that Matt & Co didn't fall for that.

Also interesting to see that they subscribed me to some stuff before I had ever been there. They are blogs I'm interested in. How did they know?

Update: Apparently you can only subscribe to a blog, not to a feed. I have quite a few feeds that don't have blogs. No reason to. Here are a couple of examples: NYT firehose, Hacker News firehose. Thee are two of my most-used feeds.

Update: I tricked it into subscribing to Hacker News by creating a pseudo-blog "wrapper" for it and asking Wordpress to subscribe to it. However, it did not like the wrapper for my linkblog. Weird and frustrating.

 1/19/2012; 10:32:32 PM.   .

Matt Waite, a professor at University of Nebraska, has written a very timely post about the dearth of student developers to work in newsrooms and j-schools. I wrote a comment, but my browser crashed as it was submitting it. Then I posted another comment, but I put it under the wrong post. Serves me right. I should have made my rather longish comment a blog post, as I so often recommend to others. So here goes.

First read Mr. Waite's post. If you're a regular here, you will find it on-topic, in many ways.

Now, my observations.

Lots to say on this subject, but most to the point -- I have lots of working code that's relevant to journalism, and lots more ideas. Also have a track record at getting ideas adopted. Not only am I available to work with academics who want to get stuff done, I have experience at it. Just finished a two-year fellowship at NYU J-school, and also worked as a fellow at Harvard Law School to get blogging adopted across the campus.

However -- it's been over 30 years since I was a student.

There are plenty of 50-somethings like me, with lots of relevant experience who are looking for ways to contribute.

Based on my experience at NYU, I think what the young folk are mostly distracted by are the VCs, who believe the way to riches in software is through people in their early 20s. It's hard to keep them interested in school, or anyhting other than being "the next Zuck."

One more thing I wrote a piece last year about educating the journo-programmer. To summarize, I think the one skill we should be teaching all journalists is how to manage their own infrastructure. And we should help compsci students learn how to make that easier and more powerful for the journos. And the ones who have talent at the intersection will be fairly obvious.

 1/19/2012; 12:09:24 PM.   .

Now that the big blackout is behind us, does it make sense for us to be buying the products of corporate media here in the US? No, in fact it doesn't. That's where the pain really makes sense. Let Hollywood have their share.

Don't just write or call your Congressperson. They're the employees, hired help. And the people who pull the strings aren't just the entertainment execs either. They're hired to play the bad guys. The ones who want to somehow stay above the rape of the net are the stars. If they get an idea that their reps are suffering because of SOPA, they're going to act fast. That's how they make their money. It's their images that belong on this campaign, not the ones no one has heard of. Congressmen come and go. But Matt Damon wants to be making movies for decades. Same with George Clooney, Kate Winslet, Ryan Gosling, Meryl Streep.

Go through the list of actors nominated for Oscars this year. Go to actors featured at Sundance right now. That's who we ought to be contacting. And if they don't respond, make them famous for that.

Where's OccupySaltLake? Could you guys make a trip up to Park City this weekend? It might be worth it.

 1/19/2012; 10:03:22 AM.   .

Now that the big blackout is behind us, does it make sense for us to be buying the products of corporate media here in the US?

No, in fact it doesn't. That's where the pain will really make sense. Let Hollywood have their share.

And by the way, don't just write to your Congressperson. They're just the employees. The people who pull the strings aren't just the entertainment execs either. They're hired to play the bad guys. The ones who want to somehow stay above the rape of the net are the stars. If they get an idea that their reps are suffering because of SOPA, they're going to act fast. That's how they make their money. It's their images that belong on this campaign, not the ones no one has heard of. Congressmen come and go. But Matt Damon wants to be making movies for decades to come.

Go through the list of actors nominated for Oscars this year. Go to actors featured at Sundance right now. That's who we ought to be contacting. And if they don't respond, let's make them famous for that.

 1/19/2012; 10:03:18 AM.   .

I had this site blacked out for the day, but went back to full-color at approx 10PM.

I did the blackout by changing the DNS mapping for scripting.com from the Apache server we usually use, to a Frontier server running a custom script that returns HTML with no content. It did have a web bug in it so I could count hits.

I thought it was wrong to do anything other than return an empty black page. If you tried to sell an idea or retain your rep with the search engines, then you really didn't black yourself out. I doubt if our friends at the MPAA would be so kind.

So much stuff broke on so many of my sites and people who use my software. Many of my images and scripts are hosted on scripting.com so that stuff broke even if it was being referenced from another domain. The problems rippled all through my little world. It was a learning opportunity.

Not sure why in the end I decided to go black. I don't think anyone really cared for any reason that mattered. A much more powerful way to go would have been to help people get their flow out of centralized corporate-owned media. But of course the people who own the media, some of whom were leading the blackout, would lose money if that happened.

 1/18/2012; 10:09:04 PM.   .

The US government speaks and people listen.

What we hear: Danger!

And our first reaction: Protest!

Protest is good, esp if people hear you, and understand what you're saying, and repeat it accurately. However, given that most people still depend on corporate media for their news, and since they are the sponsors of SOPA, we'll probably find that one side of the story is told better than t'other.

But there are other reactions that make equal sense.

1. Backup. A commenter points out that someone could post infringing content that would result in Flickr being taken down. And you might have all your non-infringing family pictures on Flickr. Should that day come, it probably makes sense to have a copy of all your Flickr pictures somewhere else, just in case.

2. Decentralize. Maybe you shouldn't be on Flickr in the first place. Make the net less vulnerable by learning how to set up and run your own server. No this isn't for everyone. But surely some people could do it who aren't feeling the motivation. Maybe the threat of government attack and your love of the Internet might be enough to get you going? I figure that eventually it will. Better too soon than too late.

 1/17/2012; 2:03:20 PM.   .

The list of sites blacking out on Wednesday is growing. I might do it with my sites, if I understood why.

The most offensive parts of SOPA have been removed. They aren't talking about giving the RIAA and MPAA power to hack DNS in the US.

So what's the message that's meant to be conveyed by a web strike on Wednesday?

 1/16/2012; 3:24:12 PM.   .

Amazon apparently has announced that they will provide free use of a Windows server on Amazon EC2 for a year.

This is a big deal for us because the EC2 for Poets server package runs on Windows on Amazon's system. Now the ability to run a server for a year costs nothing, so there's no barrier for its use in education.

We had asked Amazon to allow students to create servers at no charge so they could learn how to operate their own publishing and editorial infrastructure. I didn't imagine getting this much free server time for students. And of course the offer is open to everyone, not just in education.

This is a huge deal. For example it will be possible for one user to host rivers for a whole company (even a very large one) for one year for nothing. Or publish linkblog feeds for a few hundred users -- all for nothing.

Thanks to Amazon and Microsoft for putting this together.

 1/16/2012; 9:19:56 AM.   .

BTW, there is a good and consistent fix to the alarm-interrupting-the-Mahler-symphony problem. When the user chooses to mute the iPhone and there's an alarm that's going to ring in the next three hours (a reasonable upperbound on the length of a performance, a concert, play or movie) warn the user that the alarm is going to ring even though the phone is silenced.

It's like advising the user that saving something will overwrite an existing file. It's just good manners to let the user know about possible negative consequences of their actions.

 1/15/2012; 1:47:20 PM.   .

When the Republicans eventually choose a candidate I assume the debates will stop, and that will be a sad day for me.

Maybe, if the Republicans lose the election and wither as a political party, they can form a TV network for political debates. Or at least do a Sunday night HBO or Showtime series.

I bet the Comedy Channel would pick it up!

A bunch of white male guys in suits, with a token female (short and spunky!) and a token black guy (9-9-9) get up on stage and tell jokes for an hour while political moderators from the networks take turns at trying to catch them saying something that can be understood and therefore fact-checked. The judges rate the candidates by the color and humor of their gaffes.

It would (already does) make great TV!

 1/15/2012; 10:20:06 AM.   .

I went to a Broadway play yesterday, Relatively Speaking.

It was actually three one-act plays written by Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen.

The middle one, which starred Marlo Thomas, was the best. All were comedies, with lots of laughs, but the middle piece was also poignant, human and sad. The suspension of disbelief was complete. As you sit in the dark theater, with a few hundred others, you forget you're there. Instead, you're drawn to a small apartment, where the actors enter and exit. Your emotions go up and down, left and right. The designer in this case is a team. The playwrite, the actors, and the director, John Turturro, who you never see, but if you know him as an actor, later you realize the gestures were very much his.

You could say the play "Just Works" -- as Apple technology is supposed to. But they don't make the claim. Each of us decides for ourselves how well the story-telling works.

The NY Times has a two-part story about design run amok. It takes place in Linclon Center, where a few hundred people were watching a Mahler symphony, performed by the NY Philharmonic. Toward the end of the performance, from somewhere in the first row, a phone starts ringing. And it keeps ringing. So the conductor does something unusual. He stops the performance.

You could think of the conductor, Mahler, the orchestra, and even the ushers as the designers of this user experience. The iPhone was not supposed to be part of the design, but it was. The user had silenced the phone, but it has a rule that under some circumstance being silent meant playing the Marimba ringtone. Over and over.

Now there are reasons why the iPhone rang even when it was told explicitly not to by its user. That's not the point of this piece. Not whether they were right or wrong to design it this way. The point is there are other designers at work in the world the iPhone lives in. And their choices matter too. Not just to other designers, but to the users. Who, coming to a symphony, and at least some of them not being Apple customers, expect to have it "just work" too.

 1/15/2012; 8:49:26 AM.   .

I did a two-day project to rewrite our web-based prefs system to run in Bootstrap tabs.

It works great. Then I went one step further, and created a new worldoutline nodetype called tabs. So you can create a tab-based interface without knowing any HTML.

It's pretty amazingly easy.

Here's a demo.

And a screen shot of the editing environment that created that document.

Have to keep working on connecting up all the bits so this software can be used by lots more people.

 1/13/2012; 11:29:50 PM.   .

A few days ago I got an ominous message from the NYT website when I went to read a story about political page-turners for this election season. That's one of the things I like about the Times. Their cultural articles tend to be pretty interesting and insightful. That the message popped up on this article, saying I had used all but 5 of my 20 free reads for the month of January, was pretty good salesmanship. Would I rather not read this article and ones like it? What about all the books and movies I'd miss out on? Hmmm.

I looked into the price. Too high! I'll worry about it later.

And later never came.

Looking at my linkblog stats page for 2012, I can see that I've already passed on 14 links to NYT articles in January. That must mean I've read lots more than my allotted 20. A bug in their paywall, perhaps?

Not complaining.

And I don't see myself using one of the circumventions. Either I pay, or go without.

But it seems we could come to some kind of arrangement. Or a discount. After all I am a developer. I did help them get their RSS support going. And they have called on me for free advice, thought that was a long time ago. And I do help get them flow. All of this obviously is part of the grieving process. If I decide to go without I will surely miss the Times. Much more than I miss Facebook, which I quit back in September. I don't miss Facebook one bit. I'm sure if I knew what my friends were doing there I would miss it. But I don't. One of those times that ignorance is bliss.

 1/13/2012; 8:48:39 AM.   .

I've been playing WWF for about a year now, and it's still holding my interest.

I keep getting better. And each game is different. And each opponent is different too.

My friend Yvonne once suggested we play a different game, one where the goal was to maximize the sum of both our scores. I like that idea, but I've never actually played anyone with that goal.

Sometimes when playing against children or people who are obviously unschooled in the competitive aspects of WWF, I just put down moves that I find interesting, without worrying about how many points I score. But the thrill of a 100-plus point move is still the best feeling. I love watching the points rack up. And I dream of a word where a Q and a J both land on triple-letter and some other letter lands on triple-word. Let's see. That would be 30 plus 30 times 3. Pretty good move!

In a recent game with a friend who I won't name or characterize (oh the politics of WWF!) I did a fanciful move that connected three parts of the board in what I thought was a clever way, but it didn't amount to a lot of points. I made a comment to that effect. He pointed out that I had a huge lead at the time, so my esprit de corps (or is it joie de vivre) was in question. So I made a point in the next game, when I was behind, to do something similar! Hah. That'll show him. (And he surely will read this blog post.)

The odd thing is that I come from a family of Scrabble players, but I never liked Scrabble. I don't like having to be creative while other people are watching. And I'm very visual, apparently -- I need to be able to move the letters around on the board to see the move. In real-world Scrabble you'd never get away with that. Also I like that I can go away for a few hours and come back and look at the board again. That's how I find my best moves. In real-world Scrabble I'd often get stumped, and what do you do then? That's why I always declined an invite to play Scrabble. But I absolutely love WWF.

 1/13/2012; 8:26:44 AM.   .