Navarr's Tech Side » dave winer

I’m sorry but we need government

Navarr — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:48:00 +0000

When I was coming of age, in the time of Watergate and Vietnam, like many others I was so fed up with government, that I came to believe that we needed to fuck up the government so it could stop fucking with us. The United States was bad, that’s what we thought, and there was a lot of justification for that point of view. I voted for Reagan, as a lot of other people did, because he said what we believed. Let’s get on with doing our thing, and keep the government from screwing up. Of course it turns out that isn’t what Reagan was doing, he was just saying that to get our votes. Figures.

Anyway, now we live in different times. Now the problem are the mega-corporations. The cure, imho, is to create new business entities that serve the users first. Sure the shareholders make money, when you take a risk and produce a product or service that people want, that’s great and there must be rewards or people won’t risk. I’m a capitalist. But the things these companies are doing now is not capitalism. They know we don’t have time to understand all the ways they can screw each of us individually. If we did, there would be no time for living. So we should hire people to study what they’re doing and route around it. Either make it illegal, or start a co-op to offer the same service or product without the gotchas.

That’s the reasoning behind the health insurance “public option,” which is a damned good idea. We’ve tried it the way the insurance industry wants to do it, and the result is a lot of needless death, sickness, and wasted money. So, they can keep doing what they’re doing, but we’re going to pool our resources and self-insure. We could either form a new entity to do it, or we could use the one we already went to the trouble to create.

That was what the American Revolution was about, freeing ourselves from tyranny. There we go again. We allowed ourselves to be snookered into thinking that using our power is a form of weakness. Reagan. I don’t think Obama is our friend (remember, he likes Reagan), but I think if we kick his ass and show our power, he’ll come around. I heard Markos say the other day that they need to reactivate the base — but that’s bullshit. We need to reactivate ourselves. Obama didn’t organize this, that’s why we’re all so confused. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t particularly want Obama. I desperately wanted to get rid of Bush. For a while I was going to vote for Hillary. So were a lot of other people.

Sure, I cried tears of joy when we elected a young black man with his young black family. It was a wonderful moment, but that moment has now passed. Now we have to decide what we really want. It’s not up to Obama to activate us, it’s up to ourselves.

But don’t be kidded, we need government, without it, companies will just make more meaningless paper value and we’ll keep having collapses. Those guys don’t have a clue where to go either. I think that may be the problem. We don’t know what we’re doing here. More on that later.

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Needed: An Open-Protocol System for Commenting on the Web

Navarr — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:14:04 +0000

One thing that many blogs have embraced is the trackback system for blogs to shout out to other blogs that they’re linking to them or using their information. This is a wonderful idea, and a similar solution should be applied to comments.

Now, I’m not fully up to speed with micro-formats and RDF, and such, but such a system should be easy to create and implement. The first thing we should do is extend RSS to include it. We already have the tag, which should obviously link to an RSS feed of comments for the item (using this new system, anyway.) So we need to add a tag, yes?

This tag could go in either the element (for Comment-Streams) or in the element (for news-streams and/or as a direct reply to other comments). Lets break it down something like this:

<postComment method="post">
    <link>http://www.example.org/postComment.phplink>
    <input type="hidden" name="newsID" value="12345" />
    <input type="text" name="name" required="true" />
    <input type="text" name="email" required="true" />
    <textarea name="comment" />
    <captcha>
        <link>http://www.example.org/captcha/render.phplink>
        <desc>How many kittens are in the picture?desc>
    captcha>
postComment>

This would allow a large amount of customization for systems that have different fields without too much change needed. Just an extension to the current RSS spec. Essentially something similar could be done. What are your thoughts, improvements, and ideas for this?

The Day the Internet Broke

Navarr — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:52:00 +0000

Everything was going normal, until I wanted to go look at my feeds using the wonderful Google Reader of course, when this showed up in my browser:

Then, I asked twitter about it and got a reply from who is now a newfound friend @MathGeek06, who reported that he too was having troubles. After a couple messages or so, I got this:

It looks like the Internets are conspiring against me tonight. Google, tell me, why are you crashing so much lately? We need you, we depend on you, YOU ARE THE INTERNET!

I'm just kidding of course, but this has allowed me ample time to reflect on how dependent I am on central services. Just about the same time as I was giggling at Dave Winer for blogging about Why Decentralizing Twitter is so important. I'm starting to agree with him.

JavaScript: Changes to the Simple Twitter Feed

Navarr — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:27:00 +0000

Recently, I had resumed working on the Simple Twitter Feed, and decided to make some improvements after reading Dave Winer's "What am I up to?" post.

So, the Simple Twitter Feed has one fix, and four additional optional parameters.

start	STR - Symbol or Text to look for at the beginning of a post
time	BOOL - Whether or not to display the "about x minutes ago"
client	BOOL - Whether or not to display the "from x"
br	BOOL - Whether or not to place a break between the tweet and the extra data

The simple fix is that the count parameter would check the last (x) amount of tweets, whereas now it displays up to (x) amount of tweets.

First Post

Navarr — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:14:00 +0000

This is the first post for my new technical blog. What will go here? Well, probably stuff like XHTML, CSS, HTML, Dave Winer, Twitter, and other random useless things that have something to do with the internet.

I'm not really sure how to start off this blog but by breaking the third wall and recognizing its a blog.. or does that only work in Cartoons and Movies? Either way, Third wall broken, Hello Audience :3

I guess that is all for now, I'll write some more later.