Recommended (origins)

For the first time, we did everything ourselves: mastering, cover design, cutting, pressing, manufacture - and found out how easy it was.

There's just a great amount of understatement in that sentence, part of Chris Cutler's reminiscences on his musical collaborations through his career. It's an obvious foreshadow of the formation of Recommended and Re Records, but imagine if more people in general had realised this at the time, rather than thirty years later, when digital technology made it both unavoidable and necessary.

Comments (0)
Posted 1 day ago

NIN & Gary Numan: Cars

I've gotten to the point of spotting which songs will go with the "Dissociated Mixes" algorithm pretty well: this was one that I knew right away I needed to try. There are some head-scratchingly random moments, but I love how the cuts suggest a multi-camera shoot, when it's just one continuous shot by one guy with a DSLR.

The original:

Comments (0)
Posted 11 days ago

Yahoo! Taiwan's Hack Girls

Simon Willison has written about the latest viral outrage: the appearance of a "Hack Girls" dancing troupe at a Yahoo! Hack Day Taiwan. I've been trying to take into account the views of women who think this is no big deal as well as those who are saying it's in keeping with local culture. I personally found the event in poor taste and extremely ill-advised.

I came up with a couple questions that are my personal acid test for this situation. What we're being asked to accept is whether girls doing a lap dance  for a male geek-oriented audience is an acceptable "bit of fun."

The insensitivity question boils down to: When does "a bit of fun" within a social norm cross the line into being alienating to those outside that norm?

And I formulated the exclusion question as: When does a "social norm" itself cause offense and alienation and therefore need to be re-evaluated?

In other words, would seeing straight male geeks receive a lap dance on stage at an inclusive, corporate event cause some offense to those who are present that aren't straight male geeks? And how normal is it to assume that the audience of geeks are straight males (who naturally need to be brought out of their shells with this enforced fun)?

To a world audience, presumably those whom Yahoo! wants to impress with their openness of their Hack Days, those answers would probably be, "Yes, some offense," and "No, not really normal." To the local audience, I can't presume to know for them, but I suspect that it (ahem) straddled a line. The Hack Girls apparently made an appearance at the event a year ago, but all evidence I've seen suggests it was tamer, and clearly it wasn't called into question at a corporate level.

I get the sense that people with thicker skin or thought there was no big deal locally have been applying the first question. It's not personally offensive to them, and is unlikely to have been obviously insensitive in Taiwan, so where's the problem?

I suspect what has bothered people about the event is the second question, on exclusion. Regardless of whether or not it's a form of valid local entertainment, it throws light on the questions: "Should we assume that hackers are horny males? Do we want to propagate that idea and force others outside that group to adjust for that community?"

I say no.

(download)

Update: Just after I posted this, I noted that Yahoo! tweeted an apology. This post was much more about the different way people saw the event and treated it as a case of sexist/cultural insensitivity vs political correctness run amok.

Update 2: Now a post on the YDN blog.

Comments (2)
Posted 18 days ago

Get analytics on your bit.ly links with Tweetie 2

This is fundamentally a reiteration of what can be found in Tweetie and bit.ly developer docs, but some folks might find it helpful to use bit.ly's analytics with the new Tweetie 2 release.

  1. Register for a bit.ly/j.mp account.
  2. Copy this lengthy URL (click and hold on the link on the iPhone): http://api.j.mp/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=%@&login=MYUSERNAME&apiKey=R_MYAPIKEY&history=1
  3. Open Tweetie 2, and navigate to Accounts > Settings > URL Shortening > Custom…
  4. Paste the above template URL into the custom field.
  5. Go to your bit.ly account page and copy the API Key from the text box on the left-hand column. A double-tap on the iPhone will likely only capture the part of the API key after the standard-ish "R_" prefix. The template URL I gave you accounts for that.
  6. Return to the Tweetie custom URL Shortening settings, and replace the MYAPIKEY portion with the api key you just copied.
  7. Save and try to shorten a URL yourself (click on the character count button to expose that control) when composing a tweet.
  8. Return to your bit.ly account to see that URL.

I hope that's helpful to some.

Update: corrected typo that almost surely prevented it from working. Sorry!

Comments (2)
Posted 27 days ago

On DDOS and the importance of transparent monitoring

I use bitbucket.org for a few things and so the story was especially interesting to me:

http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/10/04/on-our-extended-downtime-amazon-and-whats-coming/

Comments (0)
Posted 1 month ago

Not everything needs to be remixed automatically

Via @fraserspeirs on twitter:

This:

from this:

Genius.

(Edit: better links to original.)

Comments (3)
Posted 1 month ago

The Beatles: Rock Band online friend code

Wii TB:RB FC: 0598-3335-7658

 Drop me a message if you want to connect...

Comments (0)
Posted 1 month ago

FAQ: LaTeX on OSX

My answer to people asking about "What's the best LaTeX environment on the Mac" has become sort of a personal FAQ. Naturally, it depends to some extent what you used on the PC side before.

Nowadays, I generally point people to the easy-install MacTeX package, which does a whole TeXLive-based install and adds the standard, basic GUI front-end clients, like TeXShop and BibDesk. Most people get on fine with those.

Nowadays, looks like I do most of my work in my text editor of choice (TextMate), and run the (PDF-centric workflow) job from the command line (alternatively triggered with a keystroke in TextMate), and open in Preview, which now automatically refreshes the document with each new LaTeX run.

If you haven't done so, do yourself a favour and switch to a PDF-centric workflow for TeX. This may be a more dramatic change than moving your files over to Mac, but I think it will reap the greatest rewards. The PDFTeX world is now much more capable than the classic PostScript workflow, and it integrates beautifully with Mac OS X. If you were to spend money on one application to support LaTeX on Mac, I would suggest looking at the exemplary OmniGraffle for diagramming. Simple to use, makes very sophisticated things possible, and gives gorgeous results.

And, I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't plump for the ConTeXt macro package as an alternative to LaTeX. If you want to write up a structured document, but it's not for a conference proceedings or journal, I would say that it's more worth putting the time
in to learn the basics of ConTeXt than, say, the Memoir class in LaTeX. ConTeXt's way of separating form from content feels much cleaner than LaTeX, and I feel like the learning curve for ConTeXt has a fairly constant and gentle slope, rather than a hockey-stick-like bend for when you want to customise a Class file.

I could go on for hours more, but that's enough for the basics.

Comments (2)
Posted 2 months ago

Camp pasta sauce

1/2 bag vegetarian cocktail sausages
Bits of onion, pepper, and tomato recaimed from leftover salads
2 tsp butter
Fry onion and tomato in butter, and add sausages, each halved. In turn, add:
3 tbsp ketchup
150ml (~1/3 tin) Heinz tomato soup
6 prunes, pitted and sliced
60ml (~2 oz) whole milk
1 handful "onion ring" crisps, pulverised
1/2 handful "bacon" crisps, pulverised
Stir and simmer for ~10 mins. Stir into pasta. Top with cheese (but it's rich already). Vow to get to the shop in time tomorrow.

Comment (1)
Posted 2 months ago