RasterWeb!
Apologies for the poor attempt at Pirate-talk, I was just excited to see that Phil Wilson mentioned me in his post about Scuttle.
My post Scuttle rides again! talks about how I was pulling data from Delicious and posting into my install of Scuttle. Phil goes the other way around and posts to his own installation of Scuttle, which then auto posts that to Delicious.
This is the awesome stuff that smart people can do with open APIs…
Keep hacking!
Are you doing the RPM Challenge this year? Well, I’ve done it twice successfully, and once unsuccessfully, so I have a few tips for you…
Have fun.
Really. It should be fun. It will still be some work, but in the end, you’ll hopefully have enjoyed the time you spent doing it. I know that when you’re still mixing at 2am on the 28th you’ll question why you thought it would be fun, but really… try to have fun. That should be the #1 rule.
Don’t get stressed out.
Remember, it’s a “challenge” not a competition. It’s about you, and what you can do, so don’t worry about others, and how far along they are, or how much better their stuff sounds. You should be doing it to challenge your own creativity. If you’re getting stressed out, you’re probably not having fun. (See #1)
Don’t get bogged down.
If you get stuck, move on. You’ve got either 30 minutes of music, or 10 songs to make, so getting stuck trying to get “just the right sound” or the “perfect drum loop” is going to kill your productivity. Either finish what you are working on, or abandon it, move on, and if there’s time later, come back to it.
Don’t expect perfection.
You’re recording an album in 28 days. That’s a little insane. Especially if you work full time, have a family, or do anything else with your life. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It won’t be perfect. Deal with it. You’ll hear things when you’re done and think “If only I had…” but hey, you only had 28 days! Perfection takes time, and time, and more time. I’m still trying to find it, and I’m old.
Have fun.
Wait, didn’t I say that already? Yes… don’t forget it. Unless you’re some sort of masochist (and some would argue anyone trying to record an album in 28 days is a masochist) you should enjoy the experience. I just listened to my previous RPM Challenge albums last night, and while they are far from perfect, I completed the challenge, and I had fun doing it.
If you’d like to read my previous blog posts on the RPM Challenge, please do… I hope these tips help you to complete the challenge!
I could probably condense my entire post about Scrabble for the iPad into 3 words:
Scrabble. In. Bed.
But I’m not one to quit after 3 words, so I’ll ramble on for 3 more paragraphs.
The wife and I are Scrabble fans, but two things prevent us from playing this time of year. First, we usually have to sit at the kitchen table to play. The kitchen table is fine for enjoying Chicken Tikka Masala, but I’m not a fan of sitting there to play games. Second, our house is cold… really cold… and in the evening the warmest place is in bed, under the electric blanket, so being able to play Scrabble in the comfort of a nice warm bed is ideal. You play Scrabble on the iPad by taking your turn and then passing the iPad to the other player for their turn.
But Scrabble on the iPad isn’t just limited to playing in bed. You could probably also play on the couch, at the park, in the car, or anywhere else a Scrabble board won’t easily go, like the International Space Station.
When Scrabble for the iPad first came out (which was long before I had an iPad) I joked that I could convince my wife the iPad was the greatest invention ever because you could play Scrabble on it… I’m still working on convincing her, but I think I’m getting closer.
In the olden days of blogging, before there were comments, if someone blogged about something and you wanted to reply publicly, your option was to post something on your own blog.
All of us early bloggers had blogs, so, you know, that made some sense.
Eventually bloggers wanted to be able to have people comment on their posts, so blogging software added the ability to leave a comment. A grand idea! Collect all the comments in one place, attached to the blog post, and you can easily see the discussion. Heck, people could even leave a comment and link back to their own blog with an expanded post on the subject. This was before the days of link spamming and even rel=”nofollow” nonsense.
So as you see in the screenshot of the comment form, it wants your Name and your Email address. This is all good, accountability, identity, etc. There’s also a field for “Website” which made sense, right? All of us early bloggers had blogs.
I think many of us believed that some day everyone would have their own web site.
Having your own web site isn’t the equivalent of owning your own home. I think that used to be part of the “American Dream” if you ever bought into that sort of thing…
People are fine being sharecroppers, and if they want a “home” on the web, huge corporations like Twitter or Facebook are happy to rent them some space. If your landlords are cool, then it should all work out, but if things turn sour, well… Let’s just say it’s nice to have a place to call home.
I needed this script last week… See, our ISP had a bit of downtime, roughly 7 hours of downtime actually, but throughout the day there were some periods where our connection would be up for a few minutes before it went down again.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::Ping;
$p = Net::Ping->new("tcp", 2);
$p->{port_num} = getservbyname("http", "tcp");
$host = 'www.google.com';
while (1) {
if ($p->ping($host)) {
print "Internet is up!\n";
# the next two lines will only be useful on osx
$cmd = 'say -v Victoria "Internet is up"';
system ($cmd);
}
else {
print "...\n";
}
sleep(5);
}
To alert me to these few golden minutes of Internet connectivity I whipped up this script. It keeps trying to reach some server (in this example I’m using the highly-available www.google.com) waiting just 5 seconds between each check, and if it reaches the server (meaning our Internet connection is up) it prints “Internet is up!” and on Mac OS X it also says “Internet is up.” I made it say that so I could keep staring at what I was working on and be alerted audibly when the connection returned.
I was tempted to run this on our Mac jukebox so it would announce to the entire office when the connection was up, but by that time things seemed back to normal.
Obviously you could reverse this code to check if a server is up instead of down, and in fact one of my monitoring systems does just that. If you’re ever at the 2XL Networks office and hear “Attention! The server is not responding!” being yelled from one of the Macs… you know there’s a problem.