This is the mission statement I seek to uphold when I provide support on the Freenode #node.js channel.

To support users of node.js and their related projects to create a collaborative, creative, diverse, interested, and inter-generational sustainable culture of programmers of all skill levels, with room and encouragement to grow.

One of the great criticisms of IRC channels for software support is that they’re often the blind leading the blind. Experts have little direct incentive to jump in with half-formed questions, and it takes some real skill to elicit good questions that can be answered accurately. There’s some incentive for some members to use questions to opine their favorite tools, and to show off clever answers not necessarily in the best interests of the person asking.

The other problem is times of day – American nights and weekends have a lull, and questions asked then are often left to the void. Hard to answer questions – vague and incomplete ones especially – are the easiest to ignore. Let’s do the hard work to encourage good discussion, even among the less carefully asked, hurried questions.

We can do this and be unusual among technical channels. We’ve the critical mass to do it, and we’ve a great culture to start with. Let’s keep it up!

originally posted on Medium

There’s a sharp divide between the people who make the Web, all of us, everywhere, and Silicon Valley Tech.

It’s a cultural divide I’ve seen come up again and again and again in discussions of tech culture.

On one side, we have the entitled, white frat-boy mentality of a lot of Silicon Valley start-up companies, with a culture going back years in a cycle of venture capital, equity, buy-out or IPO, repeat; a culture often isolated from failure by the fact that even the less amazing exits are still a solid paycheck. I suggest that this grew out of American industrial culture, the magnates of the nineteenth century turned inward into a mill of people all jockeying to be the next break-out success.

On the balance, we’ve the people who make the Web outside those silos. The lone designer at a traditional media publisher, doing the hard work to adapt paper print styles to the rapid publishing and infinite yet strangely shaped spaces of browser windows. The type designers who’ve now made their way out of lead blocks and work in Bézier curves. The scientist at CERN who realized that if every document had an address, scientific information would form a web of information. They don’t labor in a Tech Industry, they labor in their industries – all of them – connected by a common web.

In media, it appears as one giant “Tech industry”, and perhaps this is bolstered by the fact that a great number of people don’t know what a lot of us do – a software developer and a designer are so much the same job to someone who’s not paying attention to the details.

And yet, on Wednesday, a great many people turned their Twitter avatars purple in support of a family who’s lost a child to cancer. Looking over who they were, something dawned on me: They were some of the best and brightest on the Web. Authors, developers, designers. The people who know and know of @meyerweb are the people who make the Web. This is the Web I care about, have always cared about. It’s the web of caring and sharing, of writing and collaborating. We take care of our own.

In skimming over the people who’ve gone purple, I notice one thing: The bios that list locations say things like “Cleveland, OH”, “Chicago, IL”, and “Cambridge, MA”. “Bethesda, MD”, “Phoenix, AZ”, “Nashville, TN”. “1.3, 103.4”. Their titles are “type designer”, “map maker”, “standards editor”, “librarian”, “archivist”.

And far, far down the list, a few “San Francisco, CA” and “San Jose, CA”, “Software Developer” and “Full-stack engineer”.

You do occasionally visit Boston Public Library, yes? If not, get on it! You were raised in and on libraries. They are in your blood!

You called me out rightly on that one! I’ve never actually been inside the BPL – it’s on the Green line, the cantankerous part of the subway – and I just haven’t been out there. Somerville’s is pretty limited – not nearly as big as Englewood’s library, and it’s got a selection that’s definitely not aimed at me.

I just saw the Arlington library night before last, actually, and it’s this big huge modern building, it reminds me of the Koelbel library we used to go to. It’s the first one I’ve been so excited to try to go to in a while.

It’s funny that you bring this up right now. I’ve been reading article after article for the last year, but especially in the last weeks by librarians and book publishers and authors talking about what the role of libraries are in a world where it’s relatively easy to get ahold of the actual text anywhere and anywhen.

There’s a whole argument that libraries are obsolete; a lot of this came out of the crazy world of the California tech scene, where there’s this huge Libertarian ‘government is evil, technology will solve all our woes’ thinking, but that tends to assume that everyone is on average white, male, and upper middle class. They’ve got a point, though, that for pure access to thought and information, the Internet has done something unprecedented.

But libraries serve a few other purposes that e-books and the Internet can’t solve. So many of my queer friends pointed out that that libraries were their refuge as kids and teenagers, from a world that was pretty intent on being horrible to them. Often they come from families that were more than borderline abusive, and the library was their safe place. There’s a whole generation of us for whom that rings true, and kids coming of age now less often say that – but there’s never been anything to replace that need for them.

Libraries are one of the few first-class public service, one of the few that historically has ignored what economic class you’re from and has just provided a service to everyone. That’s starting to change in some ways – inner city libraries are starting to think of themselves as intervention points for kids who won’t have access to reading before school, for poor families who can’t cross that ‘digital divide’ and get on the Internet, they’re buying computers and setting up more and more space for non-book-oriented services. They’re focusing on the poor around them and abandoning the universal service model.

(I read a great quote today – “In Europe, public services are for everyone. In the US, public services are for the poor who can’t afford a private alternative” – and libraries are one of the few services where that’s not been true.)

I’ve never been too keen on the model of librarians-as-authorities to appeal to for information, but even so, having someone who knows the information out there and can guide you is super important – it’s the role teachers really should play, but don’t.

There’s a lot of thoughts on this rattling around in my brain trying to escape coherently, but nothing’s made it out beyond this yet, and certainly not me figuring out how I fit into it yet. Libraries are in my blood, but I’m not sure if the thing I’m after is there, or if it’s something more abstract that I’m chasing.

Anyway just wish we could be sharing another book together.

I’d like that, a lot. I think that’s one thing that’s been lost in the mostly fast-paced tech words world is sharing thoughts about a big piece of writing. I comment on blogs and articles, and discuss on Twitter a lot, but books don’t have the convenient handles where you can just link to them and highlight something and say “THIS is what’s right about this”. I want to share some of those things and it’s not happening as much as it used to. I miss sharing them with you!

Aria

Recipe: Storm in the Garden

Ingredients

• 10 ml lavender vodka
• 10 ml orange vodka
• 10 ml hibiscus vodka
• 200 ml ginger ale
• ice

Instructions

1. Drop the ice in a pint glass, pour in the ginger ale. Add the vodkas layered gently on top, ending with the bright red hibiscus.

Preparation time: 2 minute(s)

Number of servings (yield): 1

My rating 5 stars:  ★★★★★

Perfectly Timed Photos - Water Globe - collyr.com.

via YouTube.

Sometimes people get confused about the difference between having something and owning it.

“I have an ipod” signals ownership. “I have a dog,” or a child, or a spouse, implies a relationship, a mutuality between sovereigns. Things get messed up for us, and for those with whom we are in relationship, when we confuse the one for the other.

Ownership denotes control. Relationship is wrapped up in reciprocity.

Ownership is unilateral. In relationship, something is always owed to the other. Always.

As a general rule, if a thing is alive — and for the animists among us, this includes pretty much everything — what you have is a relationship. Even if the law says otherwise.

[Having vs. Owning | ps pirro](http://pspirro.com/2013/01/20/having-vs-owning/).

If It’s Reasonable in Denver: Lessons in Location Tracking from Colorado.

http://youtu.be/m3KdpzL3Hkk

via World smallest V12 engine - YouTube.

Augmented Reality TARDIS! - Cheezburger.

If there’s one thing that has always made me annoyed running a web hosting and services business it was the low level details of configuring virtual hosts in Apache and every other web server on the planet.

It’s all scriptable, but it’s error prone and completely graceless.

Users want to be able to define their own rules.

Apache configuration syntax, when included, can break the entire configuration. It’s not dynamic. Reloads in a hot web server can be expensive.

Ngingx and Lighttpd are marginally more consistent, but still stink at delegating.

Configurations are sometimes order-dependent, sometimes evaluated root to leaf node, sometimes leaf node to root, and sometimes require recursing into the request handler to make decisions based on on “what if” scenarios.

I’d willingly trade a lot of power in configuring a web server for something simple and able to be delegated to users.

There are some basic requirements:

• Ability to configure redirects (and custom responses) for specific URLs and for entire subtrees of URL space. (I’m of the opinion that this should often not be handled at the application layer, since it’s most often needed to deal with changes to URL structure during application upgrades and transitions.)
• Ability to map URLs to handlers located within the document root, without exposing the filenames of those handlers. (Thank you, PHP, for moving us backward 5 years in URL structure in an effort to teach us how simple deployment should be.)
• The ability to direct entire subtrees to a handler.
• The ability to direct entire subtrees to a handler if the request is not satisfiable with a url-to-path mapping.
• The ability to direct requests to a handler if url-to-path mapping yields a file with a particular suffix (or perhaps indirectly via MIME type)
• The ability to tweak url-to-path mapping if url-to-path mapping yields a directory.
• The ability to add a variable passed on to a handler at any point in the subtrees of URL space, including setting it to a value from any part of the request headers, including a fragment of the URL.

And operationally, I want to be able to delegate the configuration of entire virtual hosts and preferably also subtrees of URL space to users, and have them only able to break the parts delegated to them.

This is a red velvet cake made in a WW2 era way, using beets for moisture and color. The trick to getting good color rather than mud is to keep the batter acidic: lemon and buttermilk and a complete lack of alkaline leavening are what make this recipe unusual.

Boil two medium beets and puree. (You need one cup)

Cream two sticks of butter with a cup of sugar. Beat in two eggs as completely as you can.

Mix two tablespoons of lemon juice with 3/4 cup buttermilk. Add a cup of the beet puree.

In a bowl, mix a cup of flour and a quarter cup of natural (non-Dutch process) cocoa powder. (I used Hershey’s).

Beat the three mixtures together, adding some of the butter, egg and sugar mixture alternating with some of the beet and buttermilk mixture.

Pour into greased cupcake pans and bake at 350 until a toothpick or straw comes out clean.

This will be a soft, moist cake, almost custard. It released from the pan easily for me, though my cupcake pans are cast iron and a little unusual.

I used most of my batter as a layer under a cheesecake, but that’s a story for another time.

An excellent and beautiful work by my friend @vruba.

Perhaps it is broken, the cover of your diadem […], darkness collar […]?.

[gist id=3927254]

Part 1 of an ∞ part series

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