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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2020-04-02T19:37:12Z

- 2020-04-02T19:37:12Z
Today's Daily podcast interview with Anthony Fauci may be the most consequential podcast ever. In the last ten minutes they finally get to the important stuff, i.e. what's coming. Now I understand the next phase of the virus much better. I'm also glad to hear they're considering the functioning of society in their plans. At some point we're going to have to provide health care to the people who can't afford it, if we ever want to come out of this. Imho the sooner the better, but Fauci has to take as a given that the president is who he is. I've never said anything was more of a must-listen than this podcast. I think they should play the last ten minutes on Maddow tonight. Everyone with a mind needs to hear this.

- 2020-04-02T18:13:46Z
My poor uncle, my father's brother, was murdered. I think how sad that the last person he saw was someone who had just killed him. I feel the same way about watching The Trump Show on MSNBC every evening at 6PM. He's murdering us. Why would we want to listen to him?

- 2020-04-02T17:18:38Z
Posted on Facebook by Daniel Schmachtenberger. "Hong Kong and Italy got exposed to the same virus. The pandemic is not caused by a virus, it's caused by the failure of effective governance. In other words, the huge and preventable numbers of people dying currently...are dying from the effects of dysfunctional governance."

- 2020-04-02T17:34:23Z
Think before you RT. I am once again unfollowing people who RT Trump, and I am now also unfollowing people who RT Kellyanne Conway. They make us stupid. Waste our capacity to think. Reduce everything to emotion. Trump and Conway are intellectual pneumonia. They fill your mind with emotional nonsense, crowding out your ability to think. The cure is simple. Distance yourself from them, and people who are infected with them. Even people you like.

- 2020-04-02T15:50:50Z
I ordered dish towels from Amazon, just got them! I'm a happy home maker.

- 2020-04-02T15:20:44Z
I may have finally run out of things to write about! See below. I actually write about disinfecting wipes. If you had told me, in say 1998, that by 2020 I'd be writing about wipes, I would have assumed something terrible had happened, not to the world, but to me.

- 2020-04-02T15:16:46Z
So I finally got disinfecting wipes, and they're great, I just don't know when to use them. Can you use them in place of washing hands? When would you do that?

JavaScript plug-ins for PagePark - 2020-04-02T16:22:21Z

This is a technical description of a new server bridge between two apps, PagePark and Little Outliner. It's now possible to view user-editable files through PagePark as long as they've been made public. This is how the pieces fit together.

• PagePark is a Node-based HTTP server that has special understanding of two kinds of files -- Markdown and OPML.
• For Markdown files, it renders them in a template. So you don't have to repeat the envelope for each bit of text, and it's easy to modify, for all pages. So it's a bit of a CMS for Markdown files. It also can connect directly to GitHub repos, so it can serve from them, which is nice because Markdown is a default format on GitHub.
• PagePark also has a special ability to render OPML files. I use this feature for my this.how site which I've been using to accumulate documents that I want to revise over time. Unlike blog posts, they are not ephemeral. Examples include my Trolling howto and the Google and HTTP doc.
• So to sum up, what's special about PagePark, for this situation, is that it's really good at rendering OPML documents.
• Little Outliner is an outline editor that runs in a web browser. Its native format is OPML.
• Every file you edit with LO2 is either public or private.
• I have a copy of PagePark running on the same machine as the server that runs Little Outliner. I created a bridge between the two apps, on the server, that allows PagePark to serve from each users' public folder. When you access the page, you'll see a beautifully rendered version, like my this.how documents. Here's an example.
• This might sound complicated, because you've probably never thought of the software that runs these apps. But conceptually it's simple. There's a new bridge between LO2 and PagePark. That bridge is a PagePark plug-in.
• I've been talking about the new plug-in ability for PagePark. I needed that to create this connection. I've designed a lot of plug-in architectures over many years, and this is a good one. All web servers running in JavaScript should consider doing it this way. The plug-in I use for this bridge, is a bit of logic that translates a URL from the outside, to a file in the user's public folder. I've published the source. As you can see, there's not much there.
• To really nail it, it turns this source file into this rendering. That's it. The next step, soon, will be to present a document that explains how to edit and view these files through the new bridge. If you have questions, post a comment here.

- 2020-04-01T14:04:15Z
You know that scene in Goodfellas where the Ray Liotta character explains how they steal everything out of the bar they took over and then finally torch it to get the insurance money. That's America. Trump and friends are the wiseguys. And we're being torched right now. And we aren't doing anything about it. The press keeps waiting for him to turn into FDR or even Nixon.

- 2020-04-01T17:04:01Z
Podcast: What will it be like when the lights come back on? We've never turned off the world economy like this. We have had disasters where whole cities were decimated, but the world around them was able to absorb the flow of people, and send enough people and money in to rebuild. But what happens when there is no place to go, nor enough people to come in and help rebuild?

- 2020-04-01T16:12:59Z
Added a docs page for PagePark plugins.

- 2020-04-01T20:11:18Z
Mathew Ingram shared a relaxing clip of the creek near his house.

- 2020-04-01T20:08:45Z
I did the Census today. Noted the only choices for gender were male and female. Also they didn't ask about my occupation. I wonder if that's related to age.

- 2020-04-01T13:11:16Z
My friend told Facebook that his birthday is April 1 (it’s not) and all of the happy birthday wishes show up on his timeline as if on schedule. The best part is he doesn’t have to do a thing. Facebook does all the work.

- 2020-04-01T13:28:54Z
I'm going to turn 65 soon, so it's time to apply for Medicare. I finally got serious about it. I found the page where you apply for it, read the instructions, watched the video and thought this is going to be a breeze. I do this kind of stuff all the time. So I started to set up an account. They ask for your SSN, date of birth, address, phone, email address. I entered them all. It said no, you didn't do it right, go back and do it again. No indication which part they didn't like. So I tweaked my address. Still it doesn't like it. So I took out my middle initial, thinking my father, when he set up this account for me in 1957 or so might have left this out. They said no, and that's it for 24 hours. You can't keep doing this the message said. I guess they figured I was trying to hijack my account? So I tried calling the number they gave for assistance. Oy. I got every piece of information they think I might be looking for. It's pretty grim stuff. I left a callback number.

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