monkinetic the blog

In the 1960s, Disney discovered and used an incredible “greenscreen” technique to film the Mary Poppins actors in an animated scene, perfectly capturing flowing semi-transparent clothes and motion blur and sharp animated characters. They then lost the tech.

Corridor Crew found out about it, someone figured out how to replicate it, and they worked to demonstrate it. And it’s fucking amazing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk

This is a little picture of what #climatechange means: Sitting on my back porch in Arizona this morning at 5:45am, enjoying only the second summer monsoon rain this season. Sipping a coffee in a damp wind, with the temperature at 82ºF (28ºC).

I realized that – after nearly a month of temperatures over 110ºF (43ºC), a record-breaking length of time even in Arizona – I had forgotten what 82º felt like. This is not typical, normal, or a cyclic phase.

This is a permanent, ongoing, man-made problem.

Fedi/Mastodon programmers… with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a “local” ID that is suitable for passing as the “inReplyToID” in a toot payload?

Wondering if I need to:

• perform a search (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/search/)
• find the relevant status in the results
• use the ID for the status

Would that be the “local” ID?

#MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb

Yehuda Rothschild republished (with permission) a presentation by Lara A Jacobs, Mvskoke citizen and Native scientist, on settler colonialism - what is it, what is colonization, what happened when settlers (in North America) arrived.

The whole thing is excellent, and I hope there’s a video version, or one is done one day.

Some particular points I want to mention/synthesize:

Colonization is not a historical event, but a continuous process that requires ongoing support through social and legal systems and institutional violence.

Colonization doesn’t just mean moving in and kicking out indiginous people, though it definitely means that. It’s also continued occupation of their “lands, waters, and environments”, the forced breakup of families and communities through unjust and cruel laws and foster systems, the intentional obliteration of native peoples’ languages, cultural practices, and value systems (often through forced fostering and the original residential homes).

We (the White European Settlers) operated – and still operate – under a value system and ideologies that are manifestly destructive (the following is quoted):

• Conquer and defeat their surroundings
• Biases against undeveloped areas
• Associated uncivilized areas with evil
• Commodity-based utilitarianism (e.g., extractive practices)
• Extraction of ‘natural resources’ (e.g., forest products, marine fisheries, mining, etc.)
• Capitalism

All of these in direct opposition to the beliefs, ideologies, and practices of Native cultures and communities, which had been existing largely in balance with their environments for many thousands of years before settlers arrived.

There is much much more in the slides that were shared and I’m grateful to Lara and Yehuda both for making these available.

I recently learned about a small town in Alabama that has not held a public election for more than sixty years. The town is Newbern, Alabama. While nearly eighty-five percent of the town residents are Black, before 2020 the town never had a Black mayor.

An unbelievable and yet completely believable story of voter suppression in the deep south

Guy Nave, Jr gives a well-written and succint history of voting rights for former enslaved Black people in the south, then tells the story describing the incredible “hand-me-down” white mayorship in the majority-Black town.

“We’ve never had an election out here. We don’t have ballots and machines to do it.” Stokes became mayor in 2008, when he inherited the position from Haywood Stokes Jr. Their ancestor, Peter P. Stokes, served in the Confederate Army and “owned” enslaved Black people when Newbern was a cotton plantation town.

Over on Mastodon, @[email protected] said:

I’ll be excited to beta test another blogging platform. (Still a Tumblr nerd at heart.)

Unfortunately I’m not sure I’d inflict Goldfrog on anyone at this point. 🤣 However, it’s still fun to hack on, so here are some salient points:

My favorite features:

• A Twitter-sized posting form right at the top of the home page for posting short notes, supports Markdown, has a character counter for fun
• Posts support tags, and #hashtags in posts are auto-linked for searching by tag on the site
• I have a separate posting form I can use for longer posts
• Posts can be syndicated to Mastodon, POSSE-style

As for running Goldfrog, it’s just a Go binary running off a config file, a theme directory, and a directory of content. There’s a separate tool for indexing posts from the filesystem into sqlite (usually only done when installing or updating from git).

• Runs on a DO droplet, currently deployed with ansible
• The only “admin” functionality is posting and editing posts, everything else is editing a config in git. “Admin” is based on a security-through-obscurity login url and a hardcoded user and password in the configs. This is dumb ;) and I’m experimenting with supporting Gitlab OAUth for login.
• Posts are stored in git as Markdown files with yaml headers
• posts are read into a SQLite db for serving and searching

I enjoy hacking on Goldfrog, and sure I’d like it if someone had a barebones product like it, but I have no interest in supporting either an actual open-source product, or running an entire damn “platform”. 💜

Danah Boyd: What if failure is the plan?

Network effects intersect with perception to drive a sense of a site’s social relevance and interpersonal significance.

#twitter #failure #socialmedia

When people praise the lack of #viral content on Mastodon (or the #fediverse in general), it’s seems to be mostly white tech folks, happy for our clever bubbles to be left alone.

But for people who desperately need to be seen and heard, going viral on Twitter is one of the only ways for their stories to get told. #BlackLivesMatter, oppression in the middle east, genocides in Rwanda and South Asia, the #metoo movement – these movements couldn’t be ignored because they grew fast and visibly, making it hard for them to be ignored, dismissed, or covered up.

The Fediverse as it exists right now would see these movements isolated, defederated, gated by content warnings, and probably DDOS’d by bad actors running malicious instances. (“Mal-odons”?)

I guess right now I don’t want to see posts and think pieces about how “content can’t go viral” on the Fediverse (whether or not it’s true) is only a net-positive. For all its faults Twitter has been a positive force for social change and visibility in millions of people’s lives.

We must learn from it and ask how — if we are going to make a case for the Fediverse as an alternative to Twitter — we can be better while not throwing those of us in the most need back to the wolves.

What with Twitter (aka birdsite, hellsite, muskosite) flailing in the clammy hands of Dr. No, and interest in the federated web re-emerging, I figured it was time to review my own web presence and see what was the situation.

Dear reader, it was Not Good.

Warning one was hitting this site from my work network and getting a BitDefender screen of doom saying the site was serving a keylogger. NOT GOOD.

Then the site - which was hosted on Linode and runs my own homegrown blog software, Goldfrog - went completely down. After some “where did those ssh keys get to, where is this thing anyway” I got logged in and figured out that my server had been hacked in some way, TLS and letsencrypt removed. I haven’t had time to troll the logs for evidence as to how the server was accessed, but I downloaded them and have them set aside to look later.

We Can Rebuild It

Thus entered a week of figuring out once again how the heck Monkinetic is built and deployed, migrating the code from Github to Gitlab (which I’m more familiar with due to $dayjob), and refactoring the Ansible code that builds the server and deploys the blog/content.

Finally today I got it 85% done, which is pretty good for a full migration between hosting providers (I also moved from Linode to Digital Ocean where I already have some other services).

Masto-tootly-don

With the insanity on Twitter, I logged back into my Mastodon account on toot.cafe and enjoyed the huge stream of new folks migrating from Twitter to federated platforms (mostly to mastodon.social since that’s the first/largest instance, but folks are making their way from there to smaller instances as they get more comfortable).

Apparently Mastodon 4.0 is out (release candidate) and they’ve changed the annoying-until-it-was-gone “Toot” to “Publish”. I’d have preferred “Post” myself, but 🤷‍♀️.

Maybe servers should just change it to suit their audience?

Fred Joseph asks:

One thing that’s been interesting about Trump’s presidency is how accessible it has made conversations about white supremacy.

I wonder how invested white people and the media will be in racism and anti-racism after he’s gone.

I’ve been wondering the same thing: assuming Biden wins, will white liberals (myself included) sigh in relief and go back to our pre-Trump, pre-Breonna Taylor, pre-George Floyd comfort?

I know that I’ve been working hard on following and learning from Black Americans and POC, and it’s been good work, but white liberals have just scratched the surface of what we must learn from the lives and histories of POC.

Trump has been SO awful that it has been a catalyst for many of us to finally face the systemic injustice and racism that allowed him to rise to prominence, riding the post-Obama racist reaction. But a Biden win will not fix anything yet, it just puts a better public face on the administration. The hard work will be continuing to fight to reform the Senate, our law enforcement and justice systems, all the entrenched ways of thinking and working that our nation has been built on.

My “worst case” scenario right now is a Trump removal, Pence win. Pence is the “nice” face of a corrupt administration, and will happily go along with anything the abusive GOP can think up, bringing even the never-Trumper Evangelicals with him. And I know white democrats who are outraged at Trump-the-character, but not so much his racist, unjust policies.

Detroit, early 1980s, techno is invented by three friends who happen to be black:

High school friends Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, known as the Belleville Three, are known as the creators of techno music. Kevin Saunderson is the person who made sure techno music got to the masses by 1983.

The History of Techno Music from Black Music Scholar

Techno came out of Detroit in the 1980’s as underground dance music and subculture. Techno music took technology and made it a black secret.

The three tracks linked on that page would play in any house club today. I’d’ve danced the crap outta these when I was clubbing. HT to https://playvicious.social/@paralithode for suggesting I google “black inventor techno”.

#blackhistory #musichistory #erasure

(I may or may not be chairdancing to Tranzister right now)

Folks, this is Sister Rosetta Sharpe, the queer black woman who invented rock and roll, before Elvis, Little Richard, or Chuck Berry were out of short pants

https://www.theroot.com/sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-queer-black-woman-who-invent-1823198999

#blackhistory #musichistory #erasure

(Source: https://playvicious.social/@paralithode)

I might be hitting the wall on my Jekyll-inspired storage system for #goldfrog. GoldFrog uses Jekyll-style markdown posts as the “system of record”, but read into SQLite for serving/searching content. #webmention activity add a new type of data that I haven’t figured out how to store yet.

Soon we are headed out to California for 5 days just to get out of Arizona for a bit. But this is not “vacation”, this is “move the quarantine temporarily to another state”. We realized this morning that planning family #travel is more complicated now, with way less mental energy available to plan.

What used to be pretty standard “get us out of the house for 5 days” activities now feel like huge tasks which we have to accomplish with our brains 94% occupied by #covid19, #blacklivesmatter, #racism, and other current events. Just the idea of cleaning house (for the pet-sitter) feels insurmountable.

To my shame, it took until the events surrounding George Floyd’s murder for me to really begin attempting to educate myself on “the rest of the story” of America’s history of institutionalized racism and violence. I’m trying to focus on 3 things:

• LEARN the facts, outside of what was in my history education (“we win war for independence, we win ww2, happily ever after” - at least that’s what I generally walked away with)
• LISTEN to black writers and voices about their American experience
• Focus my own small voice on speaking to my fellow white Americans on our complicity in these atrocities and the system they’ve perpetuated.

I have SOOOO far to go. In the meantime, talking to my wife we decided that something we could do was to donate to support these organizations fighting for racial justice:

• Black Lives Matter Global Network
• National Bail Out
• Know Your Rights Camp
• Black Voters Matter Fund
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
• The National Police Accountability Project

If you feel like I do, please consider donating - it’s the easiest way to get started - but it’s not enough. We’re going to have to start acting too.

Mordecai Martin, a thinker and writer who I follow on Play Vicious, posted this powerful piece on the Jewish response to racial protests and - yes looting - during the 60s and now with the George Floyd protests.

I’m not sure that – being neither Jewish nor black – I have a platform for comment, but Mo’s writing speaks to his own Jewish people with real power and love.

As Artist Marcia X on Play Vicious responded:

imagine being this tender and powerful at the same time???

AZCentral: Phoenix has its own ‘I can’t breathe’ case. The outcome was far different

“Three years ago, Phoenix had its own “I can’t breathe” case. But its outcome has so far been very different than that of George Floyd’s.”

Let’s see, black man doing basically nothing at the time:

“In 2017, Muhammad Abdul Muhaymin Jr. tried to take his dog with him to the bathroom at a city community center in west Phoenix. The police were called, discovered he had a warrant for his arrest, and decided to detain him.”

Sounds the same to me. Maybe the police response was entirely different?

At least four officers got on top of him and held him down. Some put their knees on his neck and head.

Exactly like George Floyd. Perhaps Muyaymin was released without harm?

“I can’t breathe,” Muhaymin is heard saying several times in police body camera footage. When officers eventually got off him, Muhaymin had no pulse, according to comments from officers in the video, and lay in a pool of his own vomit.

With the same unnecessarily violent, incomprehensibly callous response from law enforcement, same tragic outcome for a non-violent black man.

The outcome was exactly the same. The “outcome” that matters is the life or death of this black man. The rest is just wrap up.

Once the headline had to say Phoenix had it’s own ‘I can’t breathe’ case, it was too late. I want to see the headlines saying “Our community has not had a case of police brutality in 5 years”, “…10 years”, “… 50 years”.

It’s time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me. Trump’s election victory speech

When I hear Trump speak about “all Americans” - I cannot in looking at his actions believe that he means African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinx Americans, or any other minority, disadvantaged population here.

Armed white protesters are “very fine people”, black and brown protesters are “THUGS”.

Trump says that he defends the rights of “citizens”; but citizen is a legal/political construct that can be redefined and narrowed to exclude those without power or privilege.

Consider the new (Feb 2020) Denaturalization Section of the Justice Department:

The Denaturalization Section “underscores the department’s commitment to bring justice to terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization,” Joseph H. Hunt, the head of the Justice Department’s civil division, said in a statement.

No one wants “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders” in the country, but –

“The Denaturalization Section will further the department’s efforts to pursue those who unlawfully obtained citizenship status and ensure that they are held accountable for their fraudulent conduct,” Mr. Hunt said.

Trump’s Justice Department considers entering the country illegally to be a crime (of the worst sort, considering the resources they have put behind CBP and ICE). There’s the real goal: the power to strip the rights and liberties from any immigrant who has been here as a productive member of society long enough (7 years?) to become naturalized.

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, established after the civil war to establish and protect the citizenship of former slaves, says in part:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The Denaturalization Section is in practicality an end-run around the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution. And to drag out a long post longer…

This clause reversed a portion of the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which had declared that African Americans were not and could not become citizens of the United States or enjoy any of the privileges and immunities of citizenship. Citizenship Clause (Wikipedia)

The goals of denaturalization laws now are the same racist goals as the Dred Scott laws of the post-US Civil War era.

From Sojourners in 2018, When White Nationalist Christians Redefined Their Neighbors :

Ludwig Müller, who became the Nazi-sanctioned Reich Bishop, went so far as to “Germanize” Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In his 1936 translation, Jesus says: “Happy are those who are at peace with their fellow Germans [Volksgenosse];”

In doing this, he captures how German Christian nationalists had already redefined who counted as their neighbor. If neighbors can be defined primarily as the “non-foreign” members of one’s nation first, then one can morally justify all sorts of actions against people who are categorized as outsiders.

I want to focus on my own white Christian community here. We are seeing this redefinition in action right now in our nation. Americans who consider themselves Christians are reading Facebook, watching FOX News, and watching Trump’s speeches and going “you know we definitely do not want thugs or illegals in our streets! LAW & ORDER!”

But the “thugs and illegals” are whoever Trump considers them to be today. That photo op at St. John’s Episcopal in DC? Among the “violent protesters” that were dispersed with tear gas and flash grenades was a priest from the church Trump wanted to visit.

We must take stock and recognize how much even our faith has been shaped by the systematic recism of our nation, and re-evaluate our worldview in the light of the scripture we claim we follow:

Who Is My Neighbor?

Luke 10:29-37:

29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” …

This is what Müller’s false interpretation was targeting, for the same reason the questioner in Luke did: to narrow the definition of who he was expected to . But Jesus insists on the wider interpretation - even to the those whom the Jews considered heretics to be treated as dogs:

33 “But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out [his own money] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’”

36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

(Emphasis mine) While our cities burn and police departments are instigating riots… on whom will we have mercy?

If we are not heartbroken and angered at the every day treatment of black and brown people in our communities, cities, and nation, if we will not speak up for them, if we will not spend our resources to give them reprieve, then we no longer consider them our neighbors.

Our nation is deeply, systematically racist, and no amount of “I’m not like that” changes that. Anti-racism activist Jane Elliott says it perfectly:

“If you, as a white person, would be happy to recieve the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.”

“Nobody’s standing here. That says very plainly that you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you, I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or allow it to happen to others.”

I’m not standing either, and that makes me deeply ashamed.

Sifting Through the Pandemic is a site about how to recognize misinformation on social media, focused – obviously – on information about the pandemic. OneZero provides an example in this article, where someone claiming to be a doctor posted that hand-sanitizer would do nothing to kill the coronavirus (False!).

What I love about the infodemic.blog system (SIFT) is how simple and memorable it is:

• Stop
• Investigate the Source
• Find Better Coverage
• Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context

Trump seeks to further distance himself from increasingly unpopular and politically costly coronavirus lockdowns.

“Unpopular”, “politically costly”, but effective at flattening the curve. I think maybe people don’t realize that in order to #flattenthecurve on #covid19 you have to maintain the suppression activities over the life of the curve. If you stop, the curve goes back up.

This are projections for Arizona from CovidActNow.org:

Right now the “expected hospitalizations” curve is nice and flat, but lift the restrictions on activities too soon, and the demand for beds exceeds supply in about 10 days. Calling for new restrictions after they’ve been lifted would be a hard sell to a population frustrated with the isolation and hurting from the economic effects we’re already seeing. There’s no easy answer, but I believe that solutions are going to involved more government aid to – yes, small businesses – but especially to disadvantaged populations who are getting hit the worst.

#lockdown #stayhomestaysafe

(R_t) represents the effective reproduction rate of the virus calculated for each locale. It lets us estimate how many secondary infections are likely to occur from a single infection in a specific area. Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer.

R_t Live is tracking daily transmission rate values across the US States. My home state of Arizona is currently in a downward trend with an R_t right now of 0.77:

Looking at the daily case numbers, you can see how small rises in R_t result in muliplicative rises in case numbers:

We are noticeably flattening the curve in Arizona since late March, but opening up businesses and social gatherings any time soon will change these trends for the worse.

I have friends and family for whom RSS is not easy to explain or subscribe to, and who don’t really follow blogs in general, but who have expressed an interest in my writing here, such as it is.

So I’ve hacked up an experimental feature, where I am sending out a nightly email (subscribe in the sidebar) that is comprised of all my posts for the day. Right now the blog posts and notes will be intermixed, so there might be some confusion in the content, it’s an ongoing experiment.

If this is something you’d like to try, you can subscribe form in the sidebar of the site or use the subscribe page.

“Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you’re not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go.”

– Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett

#coffee #humor #reading

What with #stayhomestaysafe and all, a comment from Les Orchard on Twitter inspired me to re-install Quake 3 Arena… behold the return of Mr. Ni.

Yeah, I powered through this series due to #stayhomestaysafe, and happy I did. A really fun story, and enjoyed seeing many characters in theIo books introduced here in some more depth.

Between the two Io books and the three Tao books, I really want to read Io 3 (write faster, Wesley).

#scifi #reading #quasingwars

“You are you”, and it took me until the just before the end to put the pieces together. Touches on #technology and #identity, #race and #racism, empathy, compassion, revenge, and a humdinger of an ending! #reading #scifi #reading2020

TL,DR: I’m joining YouGov as a Senior Python Developer, working with the survey systems team.

Slightly Longer Version…

For the last 6 years, I’ve been working for Wells Fargo as a python developer and unofficial feature team lead for a team in their infrastructure technology organization. I started with Wells as a web developer (in fact my title remained Web Developer (level) for my entire career there) but my focus really become building and supporting systems that connected OpenStack and bank business systems. It was challenging, rewarding work, and the team that grew up around this effort is one of the best I’ve ever worked with.

But there came a time I looked around and realized that my work and responsibilities did not reflect the goals and priorities I had set for myself and my career.

My work with YouGov will involve lots of Python application development, naturally, but also give me exposure to big data, ETL processes, some statistical work, and some devops work. There’s a lot that I can bring to the table, and a lot that I’ll be learning, which is one of the things I was looking for in a new position.

I am really looking forward to this!

Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University, describes misogyny as an ideology that serves, ultimately, to reinforce a patriarchal status quo. “Misogyny is the law-enforcement branch of patriarchy,”

What we get wrong about misogyny

#misogyny #sexism #patriarchy

It’s not showing up on Elizabeth Warren’s site yet, but Axios is reporting that Warren is suspending her presidential campaign. I’m heartbroken – she was the smart, tough candidate that actually inspired me.

Senator Warren: Thank you for your leadership, your humility, your willingness to hold those in power accountable. You would have been an incredible president. Keep fighting for Americans and for what America should stand for.

(Image from Politico)

I’m sick to death of #oldwhitemen

What a cool idea:

All else being equal, these are the tools we use.

https://github.com/HangarOrg/defaults #engineering #bookmark

#supertuesday Get out and #vote!

The powers that be want us apathetic, or alternatively too cognitively and emotionally overwhelmed to get engaged. I’m struggling with this myself, and with Arizona was voting today.

Personally I support Elizabeth Warren. She’s smart, tough, and terrifies #oldwhitemen. All of which I can get behind.

Article: “Tech was supposed to fix X”

Narrator: “Tech made X far far worse”

“Tech” practices problem-space-reduction to reach MVP, reducing messy, complex, human situations to linear engineering problems, optimized for what “works in most cases” where “most cases” is bounded by systemic and institutional bias (including systemic racism).

Systemic bias is an inseparable part of organizational culture, the common pattern of thinking that goes with it, and the premises by which all human systems function. Therefore each of us has a systemic bias. However, we may be unaware of its unstated assumptions. compression institute, 2011

Hence, “Tech” makes many things far, far worse.

For the most part I appreciate the design decision that the #mastodon developers made to not show reply/boost/fave numbers on the feed lists, because it puts more focus on the content and less on gaming an algorithm for popularity or “engagement”.

but I also realize that this makes it harder to know if there are responses! For example, this post by Jun on #playviscious actually has an interesting thread that I’m learning from, but nothing in the UI signifies that there is more content to find connected to the post.

I wonder if there could be an additional affordance in the #UI that there are replies (boosts and faves not so much)?

I’ve started messing around a bit with javascript-enhanced UIs for #goldfrog. Rather than use all of JQuery, I decided on a small subset of Jquery’s functionality as implemented by Sprint.JS.

1. I only load the JS for me, since I’m logged in.
2. It’s only used on the home page to power the new switchable post form, and
3. It powers a character-counter for the note UI.

Here’s the new posting UI:

I’m trying to implement some basic progressive enhancement - the forms work as is without javascript, but the switcher and the counter are niceties for me, the author.

Ran into a friend today at church and he asked me “hey I’m trying to learn Python, do you have any good sites or books to recommend? I’m kinda… bored.”

Now some of us geeks can’t imagine being bored learning something new, but I went through this when I first started learning Go. I had decided I wanted to learn a new programming language, and Rust was way too… Rust, so I picked Go and started building a small o-nothing web app. I got part way in an realized that I had no interest in what I was doing, and it (and some bits of Go that hadn’t matured) was killing my fun. So I put it down.

Fast forward to this year. I was ready to pick up Go again, but this time I also knew that I wanted to start writing again, and that the friction in my blogging process was killing my joy there, too. So I decided to write my own blog software (see #goldfrog), and I was going to write it in Go.

Suddenly I was energized to learn, because I had all these feature ideas for the site, and I had to learn the #golang techniques for tasks I’d only one in #python before. Also, it got me into the golang newbies Slack, and connecting with a community - for me at least - helps.

So my advice to my friend was:

• Find a project you’re passionate about, or at least really interested in
• Be willing to re-learn things you think you already know
• Find a #community!

Sometimes in software design it’s great to develop a visual of the system in question to help in the thinking process.

Josh Barratt is a software architect at Twilio, and blogs about system design at [Serialized.Net]((https://serialized.net/). His recent post Effective Technical Diagrams has some great guidelines for improving the technical diagrams that we use to communicate.

Images convey ideas and structure far more effectively than text. Especially for software systems, they can even help with reasoning about things like capacity, connectivity, reliability, security and performance.

Like any craft, methods of designing visuals that communicate effectively and efficiently can be studied and improved. We have probably all seen diagrams which led to an immediate “aha!” – and others, that after minutes of squinting, led to only more confusion.

I too, adore OmniGraffle, and have made my share of good and bad technical diagrams in my pursuit of a better design. Here’s one I made in the last year, the usefulness of which could be argued both ways:

A little something on the lighter side

I recently found the following in a bit of #python sample code:

random_data = random.sample(string.hexdigits, 8)

Wait, hexdigits? I’d use string.ascii_letters and string.ascii_lowercase before, but this was the first time I’d seen hexdigits, which is exactly what you’d think:

The string ‘0123456789abcdefABCDEF’.

That’s useful.

(Courtesy of Craig Maloney on toot.cafe)

Dammit

Now that I’m blogging more often, I often find myself uploading screenshots. MacOS’ capabilities are fine, except that I don’t really like uploading files with names like “Screen Shot 2020-02-10 at 10.38.34 PM”.

Yesterday I asked:

Are there any #macos screenshot utilities that will simply let me name the file before saving it? (My needs are simple, the OS’ own utility is quite sufficient except for the name thing)

My old Six Apart mate Simon Wistow mentioned Monosnap a free utility that does exactly that - lets me name the file before saving it.

(Conveniently, it also make recording gif screen captures stupid easy)

Unacceptable. Americans, please give this a read, Helen is speaking truth about us.

Ro had this article sitting in his “saved” list, and I’ve been reading it all afternoon on and off. It’s by Helene Schouten, and was written in October 2015, and it’s a real eye-opener. I won’t quote it yet, because that would mean reducing it to “important” or “notable” parts and I haven’t spent nearly enough time with it to tell which parts to safely extract without breaking it.

Jacky Alciné is an active member of the #indieweb and #activitypub communities, and a web developer working out of Oakland.

Imma make this clear: I’m not building software for developers.

I’m working to building tools for people.

You shouldn’t have to know to maintain and secure a server to have your own independent identity online. You shouldn’t need to know what libsodium or similar library to be secure online.

That’s my objective.

https://playvicious.social/@jalcine/101366378320531511

I really like a good #codeascraft comparison. From DeployHQ, via Zeldman:

Woodworkers and web developers have this in common:

Visit a professional woodshop and ask a master carpenter what her favourite tool is. You may find it’s not a tool in the traditional sense, but a “jig” she built. In woodworking, jigs are patterns or templates built to make repeatable tasks more efficient and outcomes more consistent. Building a one-off bookcase may not warrant building a jig. But, if you’re building three or four of the same bookcase, it’s likely worth building a jig first, then using that jig to build the bookcases.

Our jig consists of a small command line application which integrates publicly accessible API’s from these service providers

Taking the time to make the tools to help do the work is the best thing to do, and knowing when to take that time is an important part of an engineer’s maturing process (see #yakshaving, Code As Craft)

I’m sure it didn’t happen to everyone, but can you see when my use of Twitter took off?

I’ve imported my old tweets as Notes on the site here, which is why I can show those stats. To be fair, my blog had not been very active for a while, but it’s interesting to see over 20 years where my posting activity went:

Via old friend Jim Roepcke, from 2006:

Jacob G. Hornberger: How Hitler Became a Dictator:

But how many people know how Hitler actually became a dictator? My bet is, very few. I’d also bet that more than a few people would be surprised at how he pulled it off, especially given that after World War I Germany had become a democratic republic.

Although the National Socialists never captured more than 37 percent of the national vote, and even though they still held a minority of cabinet posts and fewer than 50 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, Hitler and the Nazis set out to consolidate their power. With Hitler as chancellor, that proved to be a fairly easy task.

I read this back when Jim first posted it in 2006, and a couple of times since, and it’s even more apropos today.

“Those cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – probably George Santaya

Senate Republicans just paved the road to American authoritarianism:

The precedents they have set are alarming. Trump’s defense partly argued that a president must violate a specific crime in order to be impeached.

The defense made the argument, probably with the guidance and support of the right honorable Mitch McConnell and co, who than affirmed it. This whole debacle was an exercise in providing cover for Republicans to make their predetermined votes. And their complaints about the House Democrats amount to “it’s their fault for bringing this to the Senate when they know we rigged it – what did they think was going to happen?”

But imagine the following scenario: This weekend, Trump tweets that he will pardon anyone who engages in blatant voter suppression or voter intimidation before the November election. Hundreds of henchmen take it upon themselves to act, helping ensure his reelection. Trump’s legal and constitutional authority to pardon them is unquestioned. It would be a corrupt abuse of presidential power, but not a crime.

Trump now has a blank check. We all know that he will try to cash it.

He’ll cash it, and cash it, and cash it, with the Senate Republican’s co-signing and cackling the whole time.

The only date format YYYY-mm-ddTHH-MM-SS

(knuckle tats generator)

Republican Senators today are telling us that none of us should be allowed a fair trial, while sending a signal to this and all future US Presidents exactly how to avoid impeachment, and to other countries that we don’t mean it when we tell them to fight corruption honestly.

https://twitter.com/allatti2d/status/1223376266893516800

Chris Aldrich wrote a blog post about manually adding Webmentions for links to his posts from sites that are not themselves Webmention-enabled.

This reminded me that I’d like to add a “I linked to you” feature for the post detail page in #goldfrog for this site. (Goldfrog does support Webmentions, so Chris should get an automatic link from this post :))

I think we’re looking at the coming end of a government with co-equal branches. The Senate Republicans, tying their pursuit of personal power to Trump’s own, have abdicated their Constitutional role and are effectively handing Trump a monarchy.

I suppose they cannot imagine a Democrat taking the position again, or believe in that case they will simply find a way to again redefine the Presidency on their own terms? I don’t know.

#kingtrump #uspol #crimeboss

This could be an embarrassing failure, preserved for posterity for all time!

this link goes to one of the test pages on webmention.rocks

Update: templates should now support h-card with u-photo better.

While we are definitely not “live off the land” #farmlife types, my wife and I live on an acre of land in a rural neighborhood tucked in a large swatch of suburbia in metro Phoenix.

Due to circumstances we still don’t entirely understand, we find ourselves now in “possession” of 6 adult chickens, and 8 not-quite-young-adult chickens. The adults quickly learned to fly - well, flap semi-effectively - over the 5’ fences we used to contain them. So on Friday I did some research on how to clip the chicken’s wings to keep them earth-bound, and yesterday my daughter and I spent 15 minutes grabbing chicks one by one from the coop and giving them flight-curbing trim.

The article I ended up using was this one on Instructables, simply titled Clipping Chicken Wings.

> The hardest part about clipping chicken wings is catching the chicken. Some chickens are docile and like being touched, others fear humans and run away like their lives depended on it (which I guess they do sometimes).

Resident Advisor reviews the new Claro Intelecto compilation:

Some say dance music lacks heart. This compilation might be among the best responses to that claim.

I’d never heard of this artist until I started listening to the track linked from the review, and I really like it. Will be digging into these compilations, and more of his back catalog as well.

Michael Stipe is selling recordings and videos of his new track, Drive to the Ocean, with much of the proceeds going to Pathway to Paris:

> Pathway to Paris brings together musicians, artists, activists, academics, mayors, and innovators to help raise consciousness surrounding the urgency of climate action and offers solutions to turning the Paris Agreement into action.

Purchased - and would have even if Micheal was putting all the proceeds in his lovely pocket - but I’m really glad to support Pathway to Paris as well.

Michael Stipe, who just celebrated his 60th birthday, is making music again, and it’s really good music.

Hearing this makes me happy and sad. I can hear echoes in this song of some of R.E.M.’s work on Up and Reveal, which were departures from their previous work and were generally disliked by fans (myself included at the time). Listening now I feel like this was a direction Michael wanted to go a long time, but fans weren’t ready for it. I’m really glad he’s getting to make his own music now.

R.E.M. recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the release of 1994’s MONSTER, an album that french-fried expectations of both critics and fans of R.E.M., after the success of the rich, string and mandolin-y flow of ‘92’s Automatic For The People.

Me? I loved AFTP so completely. I have multiple singles and special releases, including the one in an actual wooden box with vellum prints of the band (back when packaging was a thing). I was living in the states when MONSTER was released, and I recall rushing to play it for my small group of friends, who honestly looked at me like I was insane. Monster was SO different, so raw, simultaneously in your face and hiding behind a flash facade. Grinding electrics, stripped back thumping percussion, and Michael Stipe alternatively crooning or growling.

The first track, and first single, Whats the Frequency, Kenneth? – I was hooked from the first guitar, and Buck’s possibly-recorded-backwards-then-played-forwards solo left me agape. My CD copy of the single is scratched now beyond believe, but treasured.

Crush with Eyeliner’s droning guitar wah, backed by Mike Mill’s walking bass lines #chefskiss she’s three miles of bad road

Make your money – King of Comedy introduced voice-crushing compression on Stipe’s and Mills’ vocals, perhaps for the first time? I was all “whuuuh whoa”

I don’t sleep I dream, dreamy piano, atmospheric distortion, and a more tom-driven drum background that keeps the song less driven than almost rolling forward. Also featuring Stipe – Stipe’s falsetto – on lead vocals.

Star 69 starts fast, stays fast, and still Mike Mills lays down interesting bass lines throughout. The title makes sense to us olds, ask your mother. squirrelies didn’t chew the wire

“I don’t know, why you’re mean to me”, starts Strange Currencies, a slow, rising tune that doesn’t so much confront as much as wish. Stipe brings his plaintive, meaningful voice to this and I’m there for it. During a bridge, playing the strings above the bridge of his guitar, Buck adds a childish, toy-like section that is both sweet and creepy.

Tongue is a full falsetto crooner from Stipe, over a (likely Mills-provided) Hammond organ. Not my favorite track on the album, but I won’t skip it either.

Bang and Blame is a pretty full rocker, still with Bill Berry’s steady but tom-heavy drums keeping the song rolling more than driving. The guitars, with a long, echoey reverb, are more accent than impact.

Nice tag at the end, too.

I Took Your Name is another guitar-heavy rocker, with the wah and distortion cranked to 11. Another one that’s not a fave, but I usually won’t skip it. It definitely has its moments. There was some confusion, some confusion, as to who’s to blame

Let Me In – another song I will often put on repeat, Let Me In is Stipe’s, and the bands’, tribute to Kurt Cobain. The guitar is heavy, droning, omnipresent. I believe in concert Mike Mills sometimes played Cobain’s left-handed sky blue guitar for this track. Stipe’s voice is almost reverent, plaintive, then powerful as he sings out his love for Cobain.

Circus Envy – another WTF tune that is really fun to listen to even while SMH at the crawling, self-loathing lyrics. Put pepper in my coffee I forgot to bark ON COMMAND

You – I woke up in a sleeping bag, with no where else to run I love you crazy just keep on I love you madly just keep on I love this album just keep on

Chris Krycho wrote a thoughtful post about the state of browser development and web standards, and as developers, the tendency sometimes to see Chrome as the standard for what features browsers should be supporting. Chrome is not the Standard:

> Over the past few years, I’ve increasingly seen articles with headlines that run something like, “New Feature Coming To the Web”— followed by content which described how Chrome had implemented an experimental new feature. “You’ll be able to use this soon!” has been the promise.

> These are tradeoffs, plain and simple. Chrome ships new features fast, but they’re not always stable and they often have performance costs. Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well.

> That’s what makes the web so great, even when it makes things move more slowly. Sometimes — often, even! — moving more slowly not in the experimental phase but in the finalizing phase makes for a much better outcome overall.

Fellow #webnerds, it’s a good read.

Much has been made lately about Twitter having become a trashfire, with rampant trolling and abuse of women, monitories, and non white-dude-being folks. Being a white dude in tech, I was generally ignorant of the direction things were going, as my timeline was mostly other white dudes in tech congratulating themselves for their cleverness.

Around the time that GamerGate was blowing up, I made the concious decision to start following a larger variety of people on Twitter, in an effort to break out of the cocoon I found myself in. One day I need to write a post about that, but this is not that post.

This post is about how I discovered that, while I wasn’t looking, an alternative began growing up from its very nerdy roots and is becoming something real people could - and should - use.

Life In The Silo

The major social media sites - Twitter, Facebook - are commonly referred to as silos - great collections of content with few connections to the outside world. Content flows in from users (and the web) but not out again.

The picture I’ve recently started forming is the Dystopian Underground Community from the science fiction genre: The Haves live near the surface, in the Silo’s highest levels, blessed by light and air (and attention). The Have-Nots live below, garnering less and less light from the source, instead inheriting the castoffs and scraps dropping from the levels above them. The Upper-Midlevels can still see the light clearly, pretending that they are not dependent on the goodwill of the Haves for access, and pretending that there are not hundreds of levels of population below, struggling for life.

The residents in the Midlevels are used to life in the twilight, move in their circles of family and friends, and have grown to believe that making a life from the hand-me-downs from above is normal. They know of the lower levels, they depend on services that the residents there provide from time to time, but are convinced that either life there is not so bad, the residents are living in the dark by choice, or the worst: believe that they have earned the right to the light, rather than being born to it, and those below somehow don’t deserve access.

The further one’s social circle gets from the dominant Haves, the deeper into The Below, the harder life in the silo becomes. The Below is rife with roving gangs of trolls, descending even from the Midlevels where they live in relative comfort, to harass and abuse the citizens struggling to make ends meet on the scraps of attention and spaces left to them by the Haves and those in The Above. The trolls have little to fear from The Below, save the reminder that they too are Below - somon else. And perhaps it is that thought that drives them to stand on walkways and corners, hurling insults and petty self-justifications at the passing residents.

The Silo is a terrible place for those not born into, or assigned to, the upper levels. Fortunately, there is hope: The federated Colonies…

The Colonies

Out on the surface, separated from the Silo, a new set of colonies is being built. Each colony is self-sufficient, with resources for every inhabitant, and attention to spare. Some are small - just a few tens or hundreds of inhabitants. Others are massive, home to hundreds of thousands of residents. Here the domed and towered structures bask in the light, with a vitality and energy long since lost in the Silo.

The colonies are home to nearly a million former residents of the Silo. Some still descend into the Silo to visit family, friends, and invite others to the colony. Some have moved permanently, homesteading a new network of sheltered structures here. These colonies are a federation - communication and residents move freely from one to the other, local administrators making sure that their respective codes of conduct are maintained, provide space and facilities for the residents, and coordinate relationships with the other colonies. Residents find a colony of likeminded individuals, and can move from colony to colony as desired, with some paperwork to transfer residency.

This isn’t a utopia; there are always disagreements - we’re human after all - and adminstrative conflicts have led to colonies disassociating with one another. But here on the surface they are free to do choose their connections, joining and leaving the federation as desired.

Leaving the Silo

If Twitter and Facebook are the Silos, blessing the privileged while taking advantage of the Outsider and the Other, the Colonies can be found in the federated web, the open social networks - sites like Mastodon, Diaspora, Friendica, and GNU Social.

Mastodon in particular has established itself as a viable alternative to the murky depths of the Silo. With a million-plus users spread over more than a 1000 instances, each server, or colony, is a full-fledged social network, with users posting, sharing, following, and liking each other’s content. But more than that, each user can remotely follow users in other servers, bringing new viewpoints and content into their space.

Is a migration to federated social media sites going to break the power fo the Silos? No. There are enough users happy to be near their friends and family, or eager to harangue and harass those in The Below, while jealously eyeing The Above.

But maybe some at every level of the Silo will find themselves looking for something better, a place with something for everyone, a system that is not designed to entrap and enclose them, and make them subservient to the whims of execs and advertisers.

The Revolution will be Federated.

• Tunnel image by Ishutani
• Colony image by Ken Fairclough
• The Silo concept was partially inspired by Hugh Howey’s book WOOL

> “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America – People For The American Way

Working to discourage one’s political opponents’ supporters has a long history, but the machinations on display in the last decade, and this election in particular, are offensive.

Election committees are moving polls to difficult-to-reach areas in youth and minority populations, as Jonathan Katz tweets:

North Carolina. In 2012, Duke students could vote early on the main campus. This year, the polls were moved to a little-known spot. Result: pic.twitter.com/GPWZuUfQNL

— Jonathan M. Katz (@KatzOnEarth) November 3, 2016

Donald Trump is encouraging his supporters to:

> “…go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times”

Trump Is Recruiting an Army of Poll Watchers. It’s Even Worse Than It Sounds. [Emphasis mine.]

Pro-Trump trolls are buying fake Clinton ads on Twitter targeting minorities, telling them they can text in their votes (you can’t):

>The recent social media ads target Clinton supporters with the hashtag #ImWithHer and give instructions to “Vote Early” by texting “Hillary” to the number

Some other tactics being deployed, mostly derived from the aforementioned PFAW study:

Burdensome of ID Laws

From my own home state of Arizona:

> In November of 2004, Arizona voters passed Proposition 200, which implemented harsh voter identification requirements (as well as proof-of-citizenship requirements—discussed in the next section of this report). The law requires voters who cast a ballot at a polling place on Election Day to present photo identification deemed “acceptable” by Arizona’s Secretary of State, such as a driver’s license, or two alternate forms of ID that include the name or address of the voter such as a utility bill or a bank statement. Such requirements can disenfranchise voters without photo ID by making it hard for them to cast ballots if they live at a residence where someone else, such as a spouse, parent, or roommate pays the bills, or if they are uninformed about the rules. Students, the poor, and senior citizens are among the groups that are most likely to be adversely affected.

Proof-Of-Eligibility as Voter Intimidation

> In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites.

> But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote.

Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters from Rolls

Fear-Mongering and Voter Registration

>Such proof-of-citizenship requirements are often rationalized through fear tactics—namely the claim that non-citizens (especially “illegal immigrants”) are attempting to register to vote. But no evidence exists to indicate that this is a problem.

The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America – People For The American Way

Reduced Polling Resources and Lines

In communities where the number of polling places and hours of operation are reduced, resulting long lines impact voter turnout.

> While long lines can suppress the vote in any precinct, evidence indicates that such lines often form at polling places that are frequented by students, people of color, and low-income voters who often do not have the time or the resources to wait many hours.

The New Face of Jim Crow: Voter Suppression in America – People For The American Way

In North Carolina, as one example, Republicans lobbied to limit the hours during which minorities tended to vote:

>Emails uncovered by Reuters through a public records request revealed that local Republican leaders lobbied at least 17 county election boards to limit the hours that voting sites could stay open — particularly to cut down on weekends and evenings, when Democratic voter turnout tends to be higher

North Carolina Republicans conspired to limit early voting to keep African-Americans from the polls

Update Nov 1, 2016: I first posted this series of tweets as a Storify but the embed UI was so bad I couldn’t leave it here. I’m going to rewrite this as a blog post once I have time to digest it some more. In the meantime you can read An accounting of The Acountant on Storify.

For a bit of variety, I decided to figure out how to generate a new front page header background and link colors whenever I rebuilt the blog (new posts, etc). This is still a static site, so no wizzy javascript stuff, I just wanted to do it in SASS.

This is what I came up with.

    $colors-list: (
      // background color, link color
      #DAE076 #AD5C55,
      #A9C9C5 #4A676D,
      #AD5C55 #5E7D68,
      #374768 #718A8A,
    );
    $color-index: random(length($colors-list));
    
    // Header description box
    $colors: nth($colors-list, $color-index);
    $header-desc-background-color: nth($colors, 1);
    // Link color
    $link-color: nth($colors, 2);

I may rework this as a map (dictionary) later on so I can add other theme-y things, but it was kinda fun to work out for now.

Shared by comic book writer KellySue DeConnick:

IT IS THE ANTI-LIFE EQUATION AND YOU WILL TELL ME THE RECIPE

The whole thing is priceless on many levels.

THAT’S A COFFEE THAT SHOWS TRUE DEVOTION TO AN ABSTRACT CONCEPT MADE PHYSICAL.

Update, 2020-02-08

Ran across this while cleaning up some old posts, and decided to find the original (Kelly Sue’s is a re-post). I believe it is this one at Plastic Farm Press.

GO SEE IT NOW.