Archive for the 'geek stuff' Category

Ubiquity

Published on August 28, 2008 in geek stuff. 0 Comments

Note that my last post was pretty much inspired by thinking about cool things that could be done with Ubiquity. If you haven’t seen or heard about Ubiquity yet, check out the announcement at Mozilla Labs first (and watch the video), then just check google. Everyone is talking about it.

There is some debate about whether the video was edited to “speed up” the cool stuff that happens. I find it incredibly hard to believe there is essentially no load time with some of those commands, I don’t care how fast your machine is.

lazyweb: clustering for RSS feeds

Published on August 28, 2008 in geek stuff. 0 Comments

I mentioned to my co-workers Lloyd and Sheldon today that I had this great idea for a new website. You know how flickr does clustering? Well, what if that concept were applied to RSS feeds? I want to see all the new posts from all of my RSS feeds, grouped into categories and sub-categories.

But wait, there’s more!

It would be super sweet to me if EVERYTHING I READ was all in one place… that would obviously not be the sole location for these things, it would just be the aggregation of those things. And that place should also use clustering. So I’m talking about email, twitter, and sites I’ve subscribed to. This reminds me of a sweet article I read about online email aggregators, and how some of them do more than just email. Maybe one of these already does what I’m looking for!

But maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way… maybe instead of a website (what I’d been imagining) I should be looking for a thunderbird plugin. Can I view all my tweets I’m following from thunderbird yet? I don’t really have that many thunderbird plugins installed, just OpenPGP, I think. Hell, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t even know how to see what “add-ons” I’ve got installed… it’s not obvious anyway. Thunderbird is still my preferred email client, but it does suck in many ways. I should look around for more Thunderbird add-ons, but I’m too lazy even for that.

brief (but gentle) iPhone tirade

Published on July 17, 2008 in geek stuff. 0 Comments

I saw a post somewhere (too lazy to even dig up the link again) with their pie in the sky iPhone wishlist. And I figured, while I’m thinking about it, and while I’m waiting for the iPhone-devteam to get around to releasing the software that will let me upgrade to 2.0 (cause I can’t be bothered without the jailbreak), I figured I’d blort out a quick post about what I wish I had on the iPhone.

  • copy/paste — This is self-explanatory, and I don’t know a single iphone user who hasn’t bemoaned this lack from the beginning. I personally love the way tap-select (and two-tap-right-click) works on the new powerbook touchpads, and wish they’d just get around to implementing it, for crying out loud.
  • bluetooth keyboard support — This also seems like a no-brainer. I want to be able to use the iPhone for writing on the go. Not to mention using ssh in any sort of realistic fashion. ;)
  • multi-machine music add — With my iPod, I can add music from the various machines I’ve “authorized” to use my iTunes account. Why can’t I do this with my iPhone!?! It’s SO frustrating. I have hardly any space left on my home machine, and I didn’t even have my work machine when I got the iPhone initially.

I guess that’s it. I can’t wait to have (access to) a G3, so I can use the GPS features, but honestly, other than increased speed on the go, I can’t imagine much else that could be better about it.

art, poetry, podcasts and porn

Published on April 23, 2008 in about poetry, comic books and geek stuff. 0 Comments

Well, first of all, I’ve been meaning to link to this video of an interview with my brother john since it was posted (last saturday?) over at the walker’s teen website/blog. His site has been getting a lot of traffic this week as a result, although it looks like a lot of it is coming from this woostercollective.com post about it rather than the walker.

While I was trolling the wooster collective looking for the link to brokencrow.com, I found the art of one Zak Smith, who created this incredible painting called 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses back in 2005. (Note, that link is NSFW, though it is totally awesome, and you should click on it anyway. Further note that Zak Smith also goes by the monkier Zak Sabbath.)

This month’s poem-a-day hasn’t been going as prolifically as I’d planned, although I’ve definitely been writing (and reading) more poetry this last month than has been usual the last couple of years. I’ve been really having to force it out when inspiration just isn’t forthcoming. Yesterday, for example, I just riffed on my mindblurbs page (you’ll have to search for the date “4.22.8″, since mindblurbs don’t have permalinks) on each of the major topics in this fascinating youtube video I found of a talk by Marissa Mayer. She’s apparently a google high-mucky-muck of some sort.

Finally, yesterday also marks my first foray into the land of podcasting. Jason, Mike, Florence and I sat around for about an hour to create the first ReadComics.org podcast. If you do end up listening to it, I’d love to hear any feedback you might have about any aspect of this dubious operation.

Why Postel’s Law is awesome

Published on March 22, 2008 in geek stuff and programming. 0 Comments

Caveat: Web standards are good. Everyone knows this. Without standards we’d have anarchy, or anyway we’d be stuck in the late 90s, trying to implement as many versions of our webpages as there are browsers. In my opinion, this does not at all mean that Postel’s law is wrong.

Be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept.

Lets start by taking a step back. What made the internet into the thing it is today? What makes it so appealing for so many people, all over the world? I’m willing to venture some of these things had something to do with it: free content, diversity of content, breadth or scope of content, and ease of access to that content. The internet is SO amazing because it is so diverse, and so immense, and so incredibly huge.

Sure, technology is cool. I personally find all the latest trends in programming to be really cool. But the technology that runs the internet is just one very narrow slice of content. It’s no lie: Content is king.

Now why is the internet so huge? How come there is so much content? Well, the answer to that is Postel’s law. Or rather, the answer to that is that early browser developers adopted Postel’s law. Because they made it easy enough to put stuff on the internet that pretty much anybody can do it. And they did do it! And that’s why the internet is so fucking awesome!

Can you imagine how much more frustrating web content creation would be if you saw errors every time you fucked up some html? Yes, for those of us who are web development professionals, it can occasionally be frustrating when the browser doesn’t tell you what you’re doing wrong… but this is an argument for better debugging tools, not for stricter html. I mean, do you really think debugging should be turned on by default? Hell fucking no!!! I know I laugh whenever I see backend error messages on a webpage. Fucking amateurs!

So IMHO it’s only fitting that each new version of a browser, or each new version of a web standard brings with it new pains and frustrations for those of us in the web development profession. After all, it’s our job to make sure this stuff works… We get paid the big bucks for those pixel perfect designs!

But if the browser developers are doing their jobs right (and damn straight the standards people better be doing their jobs right), content creation should only ever get easier. After all, it’s what makes the interweb such an amazingly awesome thing.

Joel on software has lost all my respect.

Published on March 17, 2008 in geek stuff. 4 Comments

I have really enjoyed, or at least learned from Joel Spolsky (from Joel on Software) in the past. But his latest article has me wondering if he isn’t a M$ weenie (and a dickhead).

I don’t link to stuff that I don’t like, so I’m intentionally leaving the inspiration for this post unlinked. The name of the article was “Martian Headsets”, I’m sure you can find it if you want. If someone hadn’t sent this out at work today, it wouldn’t even necessitate a response, but they did, and I now feel the need to comment on how much I do not appreciate his bullshit rant.

I guess the thing that most pisses me off is that he’s actually trying to incite the very flame war that he “predicts” in his article. His main strategy seems to be making us all out to be at one end of two extremes. There are two kinds of web developer (or perhaps browser developer): “Idealists” and “Pragmatists”. He’s implying that pro-standard means anti-backward compatibility. He’s also implying that pro-pragmatism means anti-standards. Neither of these are even remotely true.

Anyway, the article is written with a very subtle sympathy for microsoft. The bulk of the article consists of a long-winded and misleading analogy involving martian mp3 players. (M$ is supposed to be the developer of these mp3 players, which are supposed to represent IE8.) Initially they make the players, and also the headphones. (In the analogy, the headphones are webpages.) So you can see right away how stupid his analogy is… if we “buy” this analogy, then at some point, M$ was somehow the sole browser developer, and they also developed all the webpages. He just keeps piling more and more shit onto this analogy, trying to sell us on this idea that the more webpage developers and browser makers there are, the harder it is for M$ to write a decent product. Oh, poor microsoft!

Go Team Clockwork!

Published on March 1, 2008 in geek stuff. 0 Comments

Watch the F1 youtube video.

F1 Website Challenge

Published on February 29, 2008 in geek stuff and programming. 1 Comment

A few months ago, Chris linked me to Sierra Bravo’s F1 Overnight Website Challenge. It’s somewhere between a grownup lock-in, a charity event, and work. The premise is that you (as a developer) sign up to help out a bunch of non-profits spruce up their websites in 24 hours. I thought it sounded like fun, and signed up. I also conned a bunch of my co-workers into doing it too, so we’ve got a team that’s worked together before, and should be able to actually pull something together in the alloted timeframe.

Chris isn’t local anymore, so he won’t be there (too bad, really), but there are a surprising number of other people I’ve worked with who are also doing the event. I’m looking forward to seeing (and competing against) approximately eighty other web developers all at once.

I’ll have my camera with me, and definitely intend to do some flickr uploading while I’m there. (Or if the network is bad, after it’s over.)

Wish me luck!

disturbing iphone correlation

Published on February 18, 2008 in geek stuff. 2 Comments

I have to do more testing to be sure, but I think I’ve noticed a disturbing correlation between days when I listen to music on my iPhone on the way to work, and days when my iPhone decides to randomly show “No Service” and disconnect itself from AT&T.

I don’t really use my phone as an iPod all that often, and this issue hasn’t shown itself all that often either.

Notably:

  • A power-cycle has (so far) always fixed the issue.
  • I usually just unplug my headphones when I get into work, having verified once or twice that this “turns off” music playback.

Anyone else noticed this?

MinneWordCamp anyone?

Published on February 18, 2008 in geek stuff and tweets. 0 Comments

Even though it makes me cringe every time I look at the code, I have to admit that I <3 WordPress. That is why I added my name to the Sign Up list over at the MinneWordCamp wiki as soon as I heard about it this morning.