We launched a new sixapart.com a couple of days ago, and I'm so proud to work with the team that built and implemented such a beautiful and useful site!
(Oh, and we also made some other exciting announcements, which as Mena says, bring back some memories of how we evolved.)
From Joel on Software: Martian Headsets:
If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility, because the laws are so complex and complicated and convoluted that it’s almost impossible to understand them all well enough to avoid traps and landmines, and you’re safer just asking for the fruit plate.
This made my morning, and it's only one of many fantastic quotes.
Having had a longstanding interest in geo-location--and, well, its intersections with blogging and online identity--I'm really excited about Yahoo!'s new Fire Eagle service.
I'm also really excited that we now have Fire Eagle for Movable Type plugin connecting an MT profile to a Fire Eagle account. This makes an MT profile location-aware and, just like Fire Eagle itself, opens the door to tons of other interesting features that the plugin provides: adding a map of your current location to your blog; tracking changes to your location in your Action Stream; &c.
I've written more about Fire Eagle for Movable Type on sixapart.com.
I can actually write (marginally) technical posts, too!
Oh shit, BillG and JT together at CES! [1]
Announcing MTV's new music service, Urge, together, onstage at Gates' keynote at CES. Best keynote EVAR!
[1] Thanks to Anil for bringing this to my attention.
So, I recorded Sign o' the Times on our TiVo this past weekend, and ever since I've been trying to figure out how to get it off of the TiVo. As in, off of the TiVo, and onto a DVD or my (Mac) laptop.
But so BTW, before I delve into the tech stuff, a brief aside that's worthy of the main post, as opposed to a footnote: Sign o' the Times is so fucking awesome. And it's not really easily available on DVD, which is just totally lame.
Favorite things about Sign o' the Times:
So, all of that said: We only have Macs around the house (around 6 of them now that we've amassed, but quantity doesn't help, in this case), so we can't use TiVoToGo. And really, what I most want is just to be able to burn this to a DVD, so I can watch it over & over again. It seems so simple: it's a file, made of bits, on a hard drive on (what is basically) a Linux box, that is on our fucking network. Why can't I just mount the box and copy the file to my laptop, then play it? [2]
So finally, from a comment on this post, I figured out part of the answer:
Open up a web browser and go to https://(the ip address of your tivo)/nowplaying/index.html and login as tivo with a password of your media access code (from the Tivo view settings screen) It will let you access a website where you can download the *.tivo files of your shows.
Yay! Now I have the .tivo file, though I can't actually do anything with it without a PC with TiVo ToGo.
And yet somehow, just the idea of having this file on my own hard drive makes me feel so much more secure!
Prince: you're safe now.
[1] Of course, it's not actually concert footage, which is the reason it looks so good. It turns out it's a lot easier when you reshoot the entire movie at your own studio!
[2] This is a rhetorical question.
I upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.4.3 the other day, and immediately upon reboot I started seeing massively annoying redraw problems. Windows would randomly get redrawn with part of another window on the screen, dock icons would be replaced by images found elsewhere on the screen. It was almost unusable.
I did some searches to find others afflicted by the same problem, and only found this post on a message board, which didn't have any answers or solutions.
So I started reading more about 10.4.3, and found out that it breaks support for Quartz 2D Extreme. Which is strange in and of itself, because I thought Quartz 2D Extreme was something new in Tiger—so why would they break it in a maintenance release for Tiger?
Anyway, everything I read suggested that Q2DE was disabled by default unless it was supported by the video card. There are hacks to turn it on even on machines that don't support it, but I'd never done that.
But I figured I'd check, so I opened up the CoreGraphics configuration file, and astonishingly, Q2DE was enabled! So I disabled it, rebooted, and the problem was solved.
If you're having the same problems with 10.4.3, here's what to do:
<key>Quartz2DExtremeEnabled</key>
<true/>
You can tell you're writing a lazy post when the first thing you type is <ul>. [1]
This is not so much television- or music-related, but I loved Joel's post about Web 2.0 today, just as as I loved Anil's post about Web 2.0 last week. Every post about Web 2.0 should mention Billy Madison or Bow Wow![1] HTML jokes are so lame—but lists are just so easy to write.
[2] By which I mean, Coryn. We started calling her Housequake for some very bizarre reasons—basically, because she's got some vaguely Prince-like characteristics (those cheekbones, etc), & she's from Minneapolis, and so Mena & I were like... what if?
No, admittedly, it doesn't make much sense when you actually think about it. But it amused us saying things like "Damn! Shut up, already" every time Coryn would come on the screen. And now, that joy is gone.
Let's get this out of the way up front: I actually really like Catalyst. And I also really like Rails [1].
But if you'd like to read something really funny, take a look at the history of the Catalyst vs Rails page on the Catalyst wiki.
Leaving aside the fact that this page—that is, the Catalyst vs Rails page—used to claim that Catalyst was more mature than Rails because its version number was, what, 8 times higher than that of Rails—leaving that aside—take a look at this amazing entry on the changelog of that page:
Removed comment about Java programmers dying to be full-time Ruby programmers.
Wow! Finally, a balanced critique of two different—and, presumably, not that highly competitive—development frameworks!
[1] Note, BTW, how much better Rails is at marketing than Catalyst (and I mean this as a compliment for Rails, though I'm sure some may take it as a compliment for Catalyst).
Rails: "Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups."
And Catalyst: "Catalyst is an Elegant Web Framework, supporting the MVC pattern, as well as a number of experimental web patterns."
I know which one I'd pick if I weren't already a Perl developer. [2]
[2] That said, I have a lot of respect for the technical framework the Catalyst team has built, and I am a Perl developer, so there you go.
I don't know why, but I've gotten into the habit of obsessively checking my last.fm profile over the last couple of days. And the thing is, nothing actually ever happens on my profile. I have no neighbors; I have no groups; I have no tags; I have just one friend.
The only thing that changes is my list of recently played tracks, & there's really no logical reason why I should obsessively check which songs I last listened to when I, um, just listened to them. But there's some bizarre pleasure that I get when, after reloading my profile, I see the song that I'm listening to/just listened to at the top of the list. Web services are magical!
Today, last.fm & I had some drama, because I'd listened to 8 songs that hadn't yet appeared on my profile! I kept checking, & the songs didn't show up. And when they finally did show up (they were queued, I guess), I must say, I was pretty relieved. last.fm was my friend, again.
I guess the point being that I feel like there's a lot of richness to last.fm that I'm somehow missing.
