Historical Archive of Alpha-Geek.com (Entries Labelled "left")

Bad Music Justification

Trope:

I occasionally read a... newspaper article where a man... owns up to the “guilty pleasures” on his iPod... The structure of [his] argument:

1. I, the author, am an extraordinarily intelligent and cool person;
2. But I do listen to music that is considered to be shit;
3. However, this music (pick one):
   1. is actually good, and you, dear reader, are too much of a snob too enjoy it; or
   2. is not actually good, but despite my impeccable taste I deign to listen to it for amusement.
4. In either case I am awesome.

Over and over I read myself into a froth, sketching a mental picture of the essayist as a scruffy fucksimper who suffers from chronic index-finger-swelling brought on by speed-dialing through all the music he shat onto his 500G jizz-hued iPod. After he gmails his guilty-pleasure opus to his editbot, who will rewrite it into a charticle...

Let that be known as the first good writing to have appeared on a weblog in 2007.

And, as I elected myself judge and jury on that ruling, I will now go and listen to I'm Bringin' Sexy Back 17 times in a row and resist finding it catchy.

Instead of Google

As I was reading this recent O'Reilly Radar article Thoughts on the State of Search, it suddenly dawned on me that my use of Google has declined in the past 3-6 months by about 20-33%.

What has replaced it? del.icio.us.

For example, I was recently searching for some SNES ROMs (obviously, only for games I already legally own). Using Google to search for ROMs leads to a lot of spammy deadends. But, combinations of http://del.icio.us/tag/ and http://del.icio.us/popular/ got me where I wanted to go. For example:

• http://del.icio.us/popular/snes
• http://del.icio.us/popular/rom
• http://del.icio.us/tag/snes+emulator
• http://del.icio.us/tag/snes+rom

I did a similar thing when I was looking for different XSL engines for Apache (simple engines that would take some XML, apply an XSLT to it, and spit out the results). I wanted to poke at a couple. Googling for Apache XSL engines turned up a lot of "noisy" results that I didn't want to have to wade through. http://del.icio.us/tag/apache+xsl had just the stuff I was looking for.

Ovid's Recommendation

Ovid is looking for a contact at Yahoo! so he can recommend someone. I know, at some points, jr and Zawodny visited this site. So if I can help gather either of their eyeballs, I'm happy to help.

Ubuntu Blogs

Are there any good Ubuntu blogs I should be following in the same vein as macosxhints.com?

Lazy Web, SPEAK!

Creating Embeddable Flash Movie Screencasts on OS X

This is, honestly, the only way I could get this to work. If anyone has a better way, do tell.

First, I use iShowU to capture the audio and screen. This will save it as a Quicktime .mov ("h.264" ← whatever that means).

Then, I use iMovie to convert the .mov to an .avi. Why? Because ffmpegx chokes on the .mov file. Doing this in iMovie is non-trivial. You open iMovie. Drag the .mov file produced by iShowU onto its window. It will then spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 days "importing" the movie before crashing. After it crashes, repeat the process and pray.

Once you have the video in iMovie's clutches, you can export it as an .avi. Go to "File → Export", select "Quicktime" from the top menu, in the selection box for "Compression" choose "Expert Settings" and then hit the "Share" button. Another window will popup. Choose "Export" to "Movie to AVI" (hit the additional "Options" button if you've been trained for 4 years in A/V codec voodoo).

iMovie will do a great job in taking the ~35MB .mov file and producing a >500MB .avi file.

Once you have an .avi file, use ffmpegx to convert the movie to a .flv file. (Make sure to follow the installation instructions when installing ffmpegx.) Then, to convert it from .avi to .flv, follow the instructions at http://ffmpegx.com/flv.html.

Once you have a .flv, you will need an SWF wrapper. This one is good -- http://www.jeroenwijering.com/upload/flash_flv_player.zip.

To piece everything together, create a new folder "foo". Take the newly minted .flv file and put it in the folder. Take the flvplayer.swf file from the flash_flv_player.zip and put it in the "foo" folder. Create an "index.html" page in the "foo" folder. It's contents should look something like:

<html>
<head>
<title>Test FLV</title>
</head>
<body>

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="xxx" height="xxx" 
	wmode="transparent" data="flvplayer.swf?file=test.flv">
	<param name="movie" value="flvplayer.swf?file=test.flv" />
	<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<object/>

</body>
</html>

Again, if anyone knows of an easier way to do this, I am all ears.

Open Sourcing OSX Apps (Already Got 'em)

I don't have anything intelligent to add to the discourse of Why Apple Won't Open Source Its Apps. I did just switch to Apple from a Windows laptop (where I primarily used open sources applications... well... besides the operating system). After getting the Macbook Pro, I immersed myself with Safari/Mail/iCal/iChat. I used Firefox. It was slow. I used Camino. It was much better. I used Thunderbird/GCalendar/Adium.

I've settled on using Camino/Thunderbird/Adium/GCalendar.

It would make no difference to me, as a Mac user, if Apple released Safari/Mail/iCal/iChat as open source.

Well, it would make a difference if after open sourcing these items they suddenly became way better; and tons of people wrote blog entries and articles about it and enticed me to switch back. But, right now, I prefer the open source alternatives (I doubt I am the only one). I just need a nice GUI and "just works" hardware/software that wraps around an xterm and the open source "productivity" apps I use.

OSX/Apple-hardware-and-quality is just my shell to a terminal window and open source software. I have no idea how that plays out in the ideas of Apple open sourcing some of their software; I'm just saying that this is how I am using it. It makes no difference to me what Apple does with the source code to their "productivity" software.

Bloglines Updates Atom Support

Bloglines speaks!:

As we continue to develop new features, small and large, we also make necessary improvements to existing systems. Expanding our support for the Atom 1.0 syndication standard is the latest of these. You may notice duplicate posts coming from atom feeds as we make the switch from the old to the new atom parser. But have no fear, these duplicates will fade away and soon be a distant memory.

I can confirm that their handling of relative links and xml:base is fixed (my Tim Bray feed finally works). They're still getting tripped up on atom/entry/title and atom/entry/source/title (it seems that whichever one comes last in an atom/entry wins). Sam Ruby is tracking a couple more nits in Forward Motion!.

It's nice to see Bloglines back responding to people. Hopefully, they continue to do so. For an app that started from grassroots bloggers, it sure did clam up once Ask.com bought 'em. I thought it was going to get worse when I heard that Mark Fletcher left, but on the contrary, it seems to have gotten better. I was even able to find a blog of one of their workers – Paul's Journal – though he doesn't seem to talk about his $job too much.

Cheers, Bloglines, you may win me over again, yet.

Brand New Hotness

Apparently, I didn't get the memo not to use macs anymore.

Everyone should have two laptops.

Ten Dollars for Tag Clouds

$10 to get a downloadable O'Reilly "booklet" on Building Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP? Seriously? Is there an army of developers desperately seeking to make "tag clouds" out of weighted lists but can't figure out how to do it? If I didn't know better, I would think that they are trying to punk 37signals.

I haven't read it. Looking at the large cover image, it seems they managed to get 46+ pages of content on the topic of "tag clouds" (maybe they used those old high school paper tricks such as bigger fonts and bigger line spacing). So, it could be that it is filled with useful insight into all things tag cloud-ish; but I'll never know...

Update

It seems that O'Reilly has a section with about a dozen or so of these downloadable PDFs ranging in price from $5 to $10. I had never seen that before. (I still stand by my initial reaction when seeing the price tag for this one, though.)

Acura is the New "Old" BMW

If you don't care about pretentiousness and how-will-this-brand-impress-my-golfing-buddies, this is true – Acura has been producing the best "BMWs" on the road.
Oh how I wish for the E31-chassis and the like... thank god for Acura.

The Dragon Tail

Here is what The Dragon Tail looks like from a satellite.

One of these days I am going to make it down there so I can drive on that road.