July 2022

There were 16 posts published in July 2022 (this is page 2 of 2).

Resistance to learning something new

In “The Art Of War”, author Steven Pressfield talks about the concept of “resistance” as it relates to creative work, that writers/creators struggle to create and have to overcome obstacles (mostly self-induced) to create. I had the experience recently to have to learn how to use a tool for work, and to figure out some tool feature for personal use. In the work instance, I delayed installing the tool, because I knew it was take a significant effort to get up to speed. When I did try to install it, the installation failed, so I had to find an open source alternative. Then, I had to learn the quirks of the open source tool before I could use it effectively, which was a significant effort.

In the personal tool issue, I had three browser tabs with tutorials/examples waiting for weeks for me to look at it, but I didn’t. I just knew that reviewing those was not going to be enough, and that it would take several hours to get the understanding of the tool feature. I finally had some free time to invest in this tool over the weekend, and – sure enough – it took several hours of reading, searching, and running examples to get a basic understanding of the tool feature – ugh!

In these examples, I resisted getting started because I felt I would have to make a significant investment of time and effort. That feeling was proved out both times. For work, I eventually had to get that task done, so I had to work on understanding the tool. For personal use, I waited until I had the time and motivation to press forward with figuring out the tool feature. I guess I should have looked back at one of my previous posts to see that a way to make progress is to figure out a first step and then take it. I hope writing this down will help me in the future, and will help my readers as well.

My remembrance of Apollo 11

When I entered today’s date in my day log, I had a thought – “there is something special about today…mmm…what is it?”. After a few seconds, I remembered – today is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. It was 53 years ago today, and I have three memories relating to this that standout in my mind.

The first memory is the actual date. I was six years old, but my brothers and I had been watching all of the coverage on NBC, with Frank McGee as the anchorman, and sponsored by Gulf Oil (there was a Gulf logo attached to the anchor desk – outrageous by today’s standards). Anyway, it was late at night when the event happened (10:53 pm EST), I was living in Texas, so we were on Central time. The TV image was black and white and grainy. We had been watching for a long time, then Armstrong exited the Lunar Module and started down the ladder. To me, though, it seemed like he was standing on that ladder for at least 10 minutes. I finally got up from the couch, announced that I was going to bed, and left the room. I did not see the final descent on the ladder – but I WAS only six years old….

My second memory is working at NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. There were a lot of events for the 25th anniversary in 1994, and one of them was a reunion at the Gilruth Rec Center on-site. The Apollo 11 astronauts were scheduled to appear, and I decided to go. The crowds were huge, and I never could get closer than about 5 feet to Armstrong/Aldrin/Collins – there were so many people who wanted to meet them. We did get commemorative pins for the anniversary at work.

The final memory was attending a banquet sponsored by the organization Spaceweek, originally started by a NASA employee by the name of Dennis Stone (now called World Space Week). I don’t remember if this was on the 25th anninversary or not (it was probably earlier). During the banquet, a film clip was shown of a speech by President John F. Kennedy on going to the Moon. The speech was at Rice Stadium in Houston, part of Rice University, a private university. The part of the speech that most people have heard is “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”. But before those words, Kennedy lists several difficult achievements (climbing mountains, flying across the ocean), then says “Why does Rice play Texas? Not because it is easy, but because it is hard!” I fell out of my chair laughing at this line! I went to the University of Texas when Texas played Rice in football, and we never lost to them when I was there. Indeed, Texas lost to Rice only once, maybe twice in their last 30-40 games, so this was a great bit in the speech, but I had never heard it until that banquet. 

As a former NASA employee and still working aerospace engineer, I look back at those events with pride that I can say “I was there”, and that later I was able to be a part of the great organization that made that event possible. May we all have good memories to look back to in our lives… 

The way ahead for RSS and podcasting

Dave Winer has released some new tools/apps using RSS this week, and referenced some recent posts on podcasting concerning innovation in that space. Both of these deserve some review and context.

The RSS tools Dave initially demonstrated showed mailbox-reader styles of displaying the content of a RSS feed. Next, Dave talked about two-way RSS as a method to connect outliners with other publishing systems. I voiced an opinion that I did not understand why RSS needed to be involved. With the Twitter + Markdown + RSS unveiling, my view of “the way ahead” is becoming a little clearer. A tool is used to create tweets which contain Markdown markup. Those tweets are sent to Twitter. At the same time, a RSS feed of the tweets is created containing Markdown markup. Finally, a feed reader app is consuming that RSS feed and rendering the Markdown markup in the presentation of the RSS feed. Now, where is the value added by this workflow/system? Twitter is not making use of the enhanced RSS feed, but another app is using those features. And – those features are enabled by the use of a namespace (the source namespace), a feature in RSS that has been there for a long, long time. This is a demonstration that new apps can be built around RSS and using RSS. Now, what else could be done with this RSS feed? Well, at some point, who needs Twitter? Someone could create an app or service that uses the RSS feed as the content container and notifies users when the feed has been updated. Historically, feed reader apps do this when you start the app (highlight new entries), or rivers of news display the new items at the top of the page. But it could be done in a much quicker manner, perhaps using some other protocol like Micropub/Microsub or XMPP. Dave Winer has written about this in 2016 (The Internet’s Twitter), 2011 (fractional horsepower Twitter feed), 2009 (Fractional Horsepower Twitters), again in 2009 (A Billion Twitters). I also wrote a series of posts in 2016 where I also put forward that RSS could be the basis of an open messaging system.

Now, I will turn to podcasting. In the past week, Michael Mignano wrote about the lack of innovation in podcasting. Dave Winer commented that this is not the case. Alberto Betella then had an excellent reply to Mignano, pointing to the work Adam Curry has done on his Podcasting 2.0 initiative, supporting micropayments and other cool features. Again, the vehicle for innovation was using the RSS namespace feature. This is how the rest of the world can overcome the juggernauts of Spotify and others (which I have written about here, here, and here).

So – nothing keeping people from being innovative here – let’s get to work then!

What does “two-way RSS” mean?

I read Dave Winer’s post on Two-way RSS earlier today, and I agree with the concept (publishing tools should allow other editors to create content), but I am not understanding referring specifically to RSS. In the Micro.blog site, a user can publish to a timeline from a RSS feed. However, all the editing in that context occurs in the tool creating the RSS feed. In past posts, Dave Winer has advocated for publishing tools to allow other editors to create content for that publishing tool. I am just having difficulty seeing how allowing “inbound RSS” solves the problem.

Demo of OPML Includes feature in opmlPackage

Dave Winer released an update to his opmlPackage NPM module in May 2022, adding a feature to be able to include other OPML files within an OPML file. I wanted to create a demo of this feature and show the outlines within a web app. I combined code from the outlineBrowser toolkit to create an Express application demonstrating this feature. A live demo is available here – check it out! Comments and suggestions welcome on the Github repo. Ken Smith and Frank McPherson were collaborators on this demo, I appreciate their input!