Me and a couple colleagues found ourselves in a pickle when Muxtape shut down. All those great playlists lost! We'd buy all the songs if only we could only remember their names. I was the only one in the group that never copied down any of those playlists for posterity. Lucky for me, Muxtape has made a frozen copy of the system available, just sans music. Amazon MP3 store, here I come. (#)
TNF
Hi. I'm Matt.
Wanna see something cool?
Oct. 10, 2008
4:27 pm
Describing a world in which wholesale money markets were now refusing to lend to banks, even overnight, the UK authorities warned that the world was on the edge of a collapse of the financial system.
Chris Giles, Financial Times editor, clearly trying to scare me outta my britches. (#)
2:31 pm
A “perfectionist” and a “purist” are not the same person. The perfectionist seeks to do everything to the best of their ability against standards that are often set higher than average. The purist, on the other hand, seeks to adhere to some set of rules that are written for conditions in a world wherein Tom Cruise is taller and a lot less creepy, and every morning the box of Trix is full and fresh without all those lame crumb particles at the bottom of the box … Clients, supervisors, vice presidents, and so forth—they don’t want the purist. Purists freak them out. While they might make for interesting subjects on the Discovery Channel, purists aren’t the best fit in the business world. Purity costs money and dedication to a path that often leads to even more unwanted or unnecessary expenditures.
Greg Storey, on lessons learned from a recent run-in he and Cederholm had with an asshat xhtml fundamentalist. (#)
Oct. 8, 2008
Oct. 6, 2008
When I made the big jump from WordPress to ExpressionEngine this past spring, I dumped all my old posts. There were many reasons for the decision, and one of them was that I couldn’t figure out an easy way to migrate the URLs for existing articles over to the new system. Granted, it wasn’t the biggest of reasons, but it didn’t help. While ExpressionEngine doesn’t serve up nice date based URLs by default, it turns out it can be done. In fact, it’s quite easily accomplished.
Oct. 3, 2008
Stack Overflow users post some of their favorite programming funnies. Do you write code – any kind of code at all? I can't promise belly laughs, but a couple might bring you close. (#)
Oct. 1, 2008
Pragmatic Programmers have released some killer screencasts. I was a huge fan of Ryan Irelan's ExpressionEngine series. Now the group's turning their attention to iPhone development. Given the scarcity of good iPhone development tutorials (mostly because of Apple's NDA), these screencasts are bound to be a big hit with aspiring XCode ninjas the world over. (#)
I could play with this junk all day. In honor of their 10th birthday, Google's gone and fetched their oldest available archived index and made it available via a retro search page. Added bonus: most pages are available as they were then via a link to The Internet Archive. Oh, nostalgia. (Via Gruber.) (#)
Sep. 30, 2008
9:18 am
Thus, the Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown … This is again a case of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses; a bailout and socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street. And it is a scandal that even Congressional Democrats have fallen for this Treasury scam that does little to resolve the debt burden of millions of distressed home owners.
Professor Nouriel Roubini, on the still imminent Wall Street bailout. (Via Glen Greenwald.) (#)
Sep. 29, 2008
12:17 am
Older people are definitely sillier and more open to admitting things they like that they may not have admitted before. We are so much more bored than young people, and I think we yearn for high-school-style communication.
Linda Keenan, offering up one explanation for the online exhibitionism of so many post-30-year-olds. (#)
Sep. 28, 2008
Just brilliant. Antique photos, most from before the 1920s, each one altered so its copy appears to have been taken from a slightly different perspective. The original and the copy are toggled quickly back and forth on a loop, producing depth. There's this brief explanation, but I can't find any notes on workflow. Anyone know how the photographer is doing this? (#)
Sep. 26, 2008
11:45 am
In May I had my first meeting with a major label, Universal Music Group. I went alone and prepared myself for the worst, having spent the last decade toeing the indie party line that the big labels were hopelessly obstinate luddites with no idea what was good for them. I’m here to tell you now that the labels understand their business a lot better than most people suspect, although they each have their own surprisingly distinct personality when it comes to how they approach the future.
Justin Ouellette, from a lengthy exposition on the death and rebirth of Muxtape. The RIAA is, indeed, a big stinking bully. (#)
Sep. 25, 2008
3:22 pm
I doubt that I’ll ever make anything one-tenth as intelligent, thoughtful, and engaging as The Wire, and, in all likelihood, neither will you. But, again, that’s not the point.
The inspiration you need to take away from this is the idea that every scene matters to some arc. Even the one minute with the drunk furniture assembly. Whether your given “scene” is in a screenplay, or an Excel spreadsheet, or the Tweet that you’re about to type about your flight delay: it matters. It all matters.
Merlin Mann, calling on all of us to write into our arc. (#)
Sep. 24, 2008
Yet another delightful animated short by some unknown-to-me art studio from the way far away. There are some fantastic details here. For instance, I'd love to visit a Greece where every roof has a pool that spans the entire length of the house. Also: it's got one of the true hallmarks of any great two minute film – a killer open-ended ending. (#)
Sep. 23, 2008
ExpressionEngine’s exp:weblog:month_links function is one of those basic blog tools you’d expect any leading software to include. It’s main responsibility is generating a list of links to monthly archive pages. But like a number of ExpressionEngine’s core functions, turns out it’s actually less flexible than the core system itself. If you’re creating an archive of future posts – say, for a list of upcoming events – there’s no way to pull those future dated entries. Luckily, there’s a workaround.
Sep. 21, 2008
I'm just getting started on a site dedicated to the baby bump and the little whirlwind he's sure to become. I've been concentrating on lifestreaming a lot as of late, so I've decided to use that model for his site – some flickr pics, some twitter tweets. Nothing fancy. Since Jeff Croft's had such success with Django on his lifestream-y site, this seemed like the perfect time to kick the wheels of this celebrated web development framework. Webmonkey's series of Django tutorials is what's making it all possible. Truly one of the best tutorials I've ever read. It's concise and focuses on getting you up and running so you can do now and suss out the inner workings later. (#)
Sep. 20, 2008
12:05 am
[Modern film] spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The ‘Watchmen’ film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.
Alan Moore, from an interview on Hollywood and its adaptation of his most celebrated work, Watchmen. (Via Jason.) (#)
Sep. 19, 2008
The whole "time lapse video of the last n-years of my life" is becoming its own little meme, built completely by the most anal retentive (and unbearably pretentious) among us. But this one gets more things right than most. For one, consistency – of position and expression. Another: brevity. Two minutes is about as much as I can handle. And most importantly, a joyful levity. Aging doesn't have to be such a total fraking drag. (#)
I've been ignoring all the posts Jeff Atwood's been posting about his latest project, mostly because I assumed if Jeff was into it, that probably meant the whole thing was a good six feet over my head. I didn't realize what he was building was actually right up my alley: a Wiki/Forum/Blog/Reddit-type-thing for programmers of all skill levels. No doubt there'll be the standard n00b insults and petty back-biting, but still – this site has some serious promise. (#)
Sep. 17, 2008
So this is how all those Objective-C blogs, with authors that clearly know not a lick of CSS, are formatting their code examples. Syntax Highlighter is a JS-based code highlighting utility for bloggers. Makes code pretty colors! Nice line numbering and indentation! Plain text view! If you can deal with slow, this might be a good option for your code-centric niche blog. (#)





