Monthly Archives: August 2021

Happy to Be Wrong — But I Almost Wasn’t

So 14 months ago, I wrote an essay about what Donald Trump would do to tear apart this country. I’m pleased to say that I was wrong. -ish.

Let’s go down the list and see what my score was:

  1. Trump will send servicemen into a city that doesn’t want them to quell the protests. This happened in both Seattle and Washington, DC.
  2. A shot will be fired by a serviceman, and somebody will die. Well… not really. January 6 doesn’t count.
  3. The protests will switch to “The government is out to get us.” Maybe in some places, but again, not really. Certainly not like the protests of the 1960s.
  4. The protests will get bigger. Actually, they didn’t, after the summer of 2020. If anything, they got smaller.
  5. COVID-19 will get worse. Well past half a million dead in the US, and counting.
  6. Trump will double down on the protests. The protests settled down, so that didn’t happen.
  7. People will fight back, and the summer of 2020 will be violent. The summer of 2020 was the calm before the storm, actually.
  8. Trump will declare Martial Law. Apparently he considered it, and some of his friends were advocating for it, but he didn’t actually do it.
  9. The election of November 2020 will be suspended. Thank God it wasn’t. There was a giant mess following it, but we had the election on-time, and it went surprisingly smoothly.
  10. ✓✗ Trump will declare himself president “until further notice.” I think we all know that Biden is the President, but some of Trump’s die-hard supporters are convinced he’ll somehow still be reinstated, and I’m not entirely sure even he believes he lost, even though, y’know, those pesky facts say he did. But I’m gonna claim half-credit on this, since, y’know, on January 6, he did try to commit a coup d’état.
  11. The year-zero rule will take out Trump. Didn’t happen. And here’s hoping President Biden stays safe.
  12. Historians will rank Trump as the worst president ever. Okay, there’s debate on this, but among respectable historians, the only real question is whether he’s at the bottom or just in the bottom five. I’m still claiming it, though.

That’s 3½ out of 12! I officially suck at predicting the future!

Of course, Trump did try to commit a coup d’état, and he is still tearing apart the country, and the hard right is still so far off the crazy deep end that every day I expect those lunatics to march on the Capitol again — but at least as regards the “Trump becomes the American Dictator” timeline, I’ve never been happier to be wrong.

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Redesign?

WordPress annoys me.

It’s not a bad piece of software. It does its job. But I’m a coder, and I like having control over how things end up, and ever since I installed WordPress here years ago, I’ve been doing things its way. I don’t really love the look and feel of this site right now, but I do like how little I have to do to maintain it.

But there’s a growing movement of blogs and websites that are pure, static content, like I used to do back in the day. Once upon a time, my website was just a bunch of text files, mashed together in interesting ways by the m4 macro processor to produce static HTML as output. I started doing that in 1996, and 25 years later, the rest of the world has started doing that too, using Go and JavaScript and Ruby, among others: Static content has made a real comeback, now that modern JavaScript and CSS can fill in the interactive parts.

What I liked about using m4 back in the day was that the code simply did what I wanted: There were no database or administrative tools to get in the way, just powerful macros that constructed HTML from single sources of truth. I ran a lot of websites on that technology, for years, and I miss the elegance of it.

So I don’t know. I may spend some time hacking my website into a new shape. I haven’t redesigned things in some years, and maybe it’s time to export all my old content and rebuild this site in a brand new way.

Food for thought, at least.

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JS thought of the day

In the old days if you encountered a badly-coded website, you could often fix it with tools like TamperMonkey: Hack a little JavaScript, and you could fix the worst of the site’s abuses, or even make it nicer and add features the original developers didn’t (or couldn’t) add. Everything was fairly open, so you could just drop new script on the page, and even substitute out functions if you had a better implementation.

We now live in a reality driven by WebPack, where every website’s JavaScript is packed, minified, bundled, and, importantly, smashed together inside a closure, making all of its innards and mechanics hidden and encapsulated, hidden even from its own code.

That’s great for application stability, if you have good developers. But it also means that the app you get is the app you get: Every bug, every design flaw, and every misfeature is hidden away inside that bundled ball — which means that no matter how bad it is, you can’t fix somebody else’s broken website anymore.

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