Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.
Rights: © copyright 1994-2024 Dave Winer.
Generator: oldSchool v0.8.12
It was so predictable. Shortly after Pete Rose died, baseball rescinded his lifetime ban, and now he can be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
He had more hits than any baseball player ever.
A role model in so many ways, and like all heroes he had fatal flaws. You may think he set a bad example for kids, but I say the opposite. You don't give kids enough credit. What he taught was that a man with average athletic ability could will himself to achieve.
I grew up with a Pete Rose ethos, why shouldn't I go for it all? I feel so sad that he couldn't have gotten the acceptance he so totally deserved. How could we not forgive him? He was Charlie Hustle! ❤️
A day away from the blog. Really enjoying the NBA playoffs, even though the Knicks are still in it. Nice turnaround after the first quarter for the Minnesotas. Still hoping for a finals between them and the Knicks. It'll be interesting to see how the Knicks change their lineup. Hopefully no more isolation-ball with Brunson. It's boring and doesn't work. Melo 2.0. Might make sense if he was LeBron, but he's not and LeBron's game is boring anyway. Let's do this well, win or lose.
I would pay extra for cable service to have no money go to Fox.
I should mention that you can follow my daveverse blog, which I write using WordLand, on Mastodon -- @scripting@daveverse.org. Mastodon preserves links and styling, and doesn't seem to have a size limit. I can edit my posts and you get the updates. So Mastodon kind of informally has become a blogging system, which I totally applaud. It checks a lot of the boxes on my textcasting manifesto. Slowly the world is starting to make sense.
A couple of little tweaks to Daytona. It now has a history menu which it saves in local storage. It's useful to be able to come back to a recent search. It remembers the last 50 searches this way. Also had to add a little hack that turns off other copies of Daytona when another one launches. Use a local storage trick, save a random string to a fixed location, and every second check to see if its value has changed. If it has, another copy of Daytona has launched, so I redirect to the home page of my blog.
Has Harvard considered opening a satellite campus outside the United States? If the Trumps keep making demands, like demanding that they stop admitting students from outside the US, the students the US government rejects could still go to Harvard, be taught by the same teachers, collaborate and socialize with other Harvard-quality students, without interference from Trump. I imagine there are a few countries that would be willing to help. If you want to really make a point, open it in China.
The Beatles
Personal computers
The web
Napster
AI
Prompt: Draw me the cover of a fictitious magazine called RSS Land. On the cover a picture of a news room, and in small type along the right edge titles of stories. Make it interesting.
RSS Land Magazine.
I turn off CNN when they start a segment on Jake Tapper’s book. The level of hypocrisy is intense. Who covered up what? Please. I remember Hillary's Emails. And weapons of mass destruction. And Trump may not be good for America but he's sure good for CBS. And on and on. They think we don't think. But their influence is getting close to nil. American news is one story at a time, debates between boring people saying the same bullshit over and over. Democrats who stumble over their words. An occasional glypse of Bernie or AOC. Something to get your bile up, and the next one and the one after that, but it doesn't work anymore. What Biden did or didn't do is no more relevant on CNN than it is on Fox.
MySQL, which I'm using for Daytona, has the idea of relevance in searches. Previously I had been showing results in reverse chronologic order. So now, a search for Matt Mullenweg gets the same results but prioritized by what MySQL thinks are the most relevant results.
I've been looking up all kinds of things now that my new Daytona search engine has access to my blogging going back to 1994. I just did a search for Mullenweg, and came up with this blog post by Matt in 2006 about the Feed Validator. The clarity is remarkable, and he's of course right. The people running the validator were actually promoting Atom over RSS, and were trying to tilt the table towards Atom. The goal was interop, not to give Google or IBM control of the syndication format of the open web. When you keep changing your mind about what to flag and what to pass you end up with a standard that's as murky as the tariff policy of the US in 2025. I think you have to assume that was the goal. They didn't like that RSS didn't fall apart when Atom came out. If there's no benefit in changing, people don't change.
How to understand Trump talking about tariffs. Remember how he talked about Covid. Same thing.
When I announced Chris Lydon's podcast in 2003, I called it a weblog for the ears. We didn't have the name podcasting yet.
I was going to use this code in the UI of my search engine, when it wanted to display an image over http, reroute it to use an https proxy server. But Chrome wouldn't stay out of the way, so had to give up. Hey I was trying to route around their outage.
Apparently Chrome has changed the behavior of images served over http in web pages. It's changing the request to https, so it gives an erroneous error message about the certificate which the page never claimed to have.
And with this update, we don't depend on OPML any longer to create the database, all the data is exported in a format that can be easily imported directly into an SQL database. I provide the schema and example JavaScript code that, via SQL, updates a database. Hopefully this creates a better more useful archive.
As the import script runs I just tried looking up Engadget, got zero hits. I expect that link will work in a while after all the importing is done.
Having the 90s and 00s in the index means I can look up old friends like Chuck Shotton.
I've been working on the search function for this blog, and now we have all the DaveNet pieces between 1994 and 2004 in the database. So here's a search for menu sharing which was a technology we made on the Mac that allowed people to write menus of scripts in Frontier that appear inside other apps. Netscape supported it as did MSIE, Quark, Eudora and many others. It was kind of magical, esp when the apps themselves were scriptable (many of them were in the 90s). Next up, I'm going to import the home page of Scripting News from 1997 to 2010. It was mostly a linkblog then.
What it means to be distributed. Mastodon can't go down, neither can RSS. But Bluesky can.
Not much to write, so impressed by the way the Knicks got past the Celtics. I don't know any Celtics fans, but I imagine there are some subscribers who are. Hard to imagine how hard the last series hit you all. I don't have anything against the Celtics these days although Paul Pierce is an asshole, and I hope you all know that. Just watched the OKC win over Denver. All around an incredible group in the final four, very diverse and inclusive. And btw now that I think of it, Jaylen Brown was grabbing Knicks players by the balls. I hope you all come to terms with that. We do love Kristaps in New York, a true gentleman. Maybe he and Giannis can come play for the Nets. We may have room for another great team in NY.
Does Joe Rogan know about what's happening with Medicaid?
The Knicks did actually win last night. I didn't dream it.
I remember when the Knicks sucked.
In my heart I believe they still do.
But here we are, my Knicks actually have an approximately 1 in 4 chance of winning the championship.
I hope it's Minnesota we end up playing.
All in the family. 😀
This is what my WordLand blog looks like now. Quite a transformation! Sooo pretty. We're going to keep tweaking it up, so it's even more beautiful and more and more useful, but it's going to take some time. As the Supremes used to sing. I need love love love to ease my mind.
