Here's a quickie -- I love my MacBook Pro, but it has a completely totally absolutely unconditionally useless key taking up space on the lower-right hand side of the keyboard: the enter key. Who the hell cares about the enter key? I have a return key, and it does me just fine.
So, after some Googleage, I found a cool app that lets you remap your enter key to something useful, ctrl in my case: DoubleCommand. Check it out.
Welcome the new age of intellectual property delivery. Radiohead is releasing a new album, named In Rainbows, and as widely publicized the price of the downloadable album ("A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s") is up to you. Literally. Don't want pay? Put in £0.00. How about $10? That'll be £4.91 please.
How are they going to make money? Physical copy value adds! Radiohead is also selling a Discbox containing all kinds of cool stuff:
THIS CONSISTS OF THE NEW ALBUM, IN RAINBOWS, ON CD AND ON 2 X 12 INCH HEAVYWEIGHT VINYL RECORDS. A SECOND, ENHANCED CD CONTAINS MORE NEW SONGS, ALONG WITH DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS AND ARTWORK. THE DISCBOX ALSO INCLUDES ARTWORK AND LYRIC BOOKLETS. ALL ARE ENCASED IN A HARDBACK BOOK AND SLIPCASE.
The hardcore will eat all of that value-add content at a cool £40 Sterling ($81.32). This is brilliant, daring, marking an epoch. Digital content is unrestrainable, ether-suspended -- one cannot contain it. The old business model of guarding the IP within a phisical form in order to extract money from it is dying and has been since Napster. But Radiohead is taking a queue from other innovators, such as Sean Combs, Dre, Snoop... don't sell music, sell shit. It doesn't really matter what it is: shirts, shoes, hoodies, 2 x 12 inch heaveyweight vinyl records, artwork and lyric booklets incased in a hardback book and slipcase. The margin is huge. Oh yeah, and tour like crazy.
I bought the digital. I figured $10 was fair, so I rounded up a bit to £5.00; after a transaction fee, I'm happily shelling out $11.08. Here's the email I received:
Discbox customers.
You goods will be shipped on or before 3rd December 2007 by post. Information regarding the download (included with the Discbox) as per below.
Download customers.
YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT LATER THIS MORNING 10th OCT(UK TIME).
THIS CODE/LINK WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:
THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.
MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT >INSTALLED PRIOR.
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THEM HERE:
PC: http://www.winzip.com/
MAC: http://www.maczipit.com/IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING YOUR FILE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM AT downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com
We value your custom.
Welcome the new age of intellectual property delivery. Radiohead is releasing a new album, named In Rainbows, and as widely publicized the price of the downloadable album ("A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s") is up to you. Literally. Don't want pay? Put in £0.00. How about $10? That'll be £4.91 please.
How are they going to make money? Physical copy value adds! Radiohead is also selling a Discbox containing all kinds of cool stuff:
THIS CONSISTS OF THE NEW ALBUM, IN RAINBOWS, ON CD AND ON 2 X 12 INCH HEAVYWEIGHT VINYL RECORDS. A SECOND, ENHANCED CD CONTAINS MORE NEW SONGS, ALONG WITH DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS AND ARTWORK. THE DISCBOX ALSO INCLUDES ARTWORK AND LYRIC BOOKLETS. ALL ARE ENCASED IN A HARDBACK BOOK AND SLIPCASE.
The hardcore will eat all of that value-add content at a cool £40 Sterling ($81.32). This is brilliant, daring, marking an epoch. Digital content is unrestrainable, ether-suspended -- one cannot contain it. The old business model of guarding the IP within a phisical form in order to extract money from it is dying and has been since Napster. But Radiohead is taking a queue from other innovators, such as Sean Combs, Dre, Snoop... don't sell music, sell shit. It doesn't really matter what it is: shirts, shoes, hoodies, 2 x 12 inch heaveyweight vinyl records, artwork and lyric booklets incased in a hardback book and slipcase. The margin is huge. Oh yeah, and tour like crazy.
I bought the digital. I figured $10 was fair, so I rounded up a bit to £5.00; after a transaction fee, I'm happily shelling out $11.08. Here's the email I received:
Discbox customers.
You goods will be shipped on or before 3rd December 2007 by post. Information regarding the download (included with the Discbox) as per below.
Download customers.
YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT LATER THIS MORNING 10th OCT(UK TIME).
THIS CODE/LINK WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:
THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.
MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT >INSTALLED PRIOR.
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THEM HERE:
PC: http://www.winzip.com/
MAC: http://www.maczipit.com/IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS DOWNLOADING YOUR FILE, PLEASE CONTACT OUR DOWNLOAD CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAM AT downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com
We value your custom.
I am so completely frustrated right now. For the last few hours I've been working on a digital art project in The Gimp (a free Photoshop alternative) and failing to produce what I want. It's infuriating.... I can close my eyes and picture exactly what I want to create, every detail, but I just can't bend this illustration software to my will and draw the damn thing.
I suppose this happens all the time. Having never take an art course past Art 101, I'm sure the inspiration vs. execution argument comes up: are you really an artist if you can't actually create your art? Are you an artist if you can't paint the picture in your head? Are you a musician if you can't compose the melody you hear in your mind's ear? And what of the inverse of this problem, the Bizarro-inspired -- producers without originality? Is the "value" of an artist's work lower if they can only perfectly copy another artist?
Maybe I should outsource my illustration, go with the "With my mind and your hands" approach. I'm too impatient to learn Photoshop well enough to produce my idea, and my inspirations are fleeting. There are plenty of skilled designers out there who could turn my simple idea into a .psd file in about 30 minutes. But this idea makes me feel like a failure. Why? Should it? People do it all the time. My profession is to write software for inspired people who have an idea but lack the skills (or raw manpower) to execute: they can't write the code. I doubt that architects feel guilty for not pounding every nail, welding every joint, or installing every insanely-curved piece of titanium in the buildings they design. Songwriters often don't sing their own tunes. But there's something about drawing for me that I just can't get over: I have hands, dexterous ones. Regardless of how good or bad my ideas are, I want to create them myself, and if I fail I usually let the idea fall away. And drawing on a computer? What do my hands have to do with that? My fingers, dexterity, or control... what are their factors now, with this damn illustration software?
Do you think my being faster, stronger has anything to do with my muscles in this place? Do you believe that's air you are breathing now?
Frank Chu was the the iPhone SF launch on June 29, but the conspiracy against him has expanded to 800 galaxies, up from the original offending 12 galaxies.
Today is June 29, 2007... also known as the Day of the Jesus Phone. The iPhone was released at 6pm and the whole geek/style world went ape-shit. For several days our office of elate metro-sexual geeks have been salivating of the prospect of the thing, but today the Jobs hit the fan. Hardly a moment went buy when we were not talking, speculating, arguing, or fantasizing over the iPhone. We sent time watching demos, watching live Gizmodo coverage, Justin.TV coverage, finding loopholes in our competing cell phone contracts, and negotiating with those same company's customer service reps to wriggle out of our contracts. We spent time photographing the San Francisco iPhone campers (those with iWait t-shirts) and even shooting videos.
All of this obsession has sparked a strange thought in my brain: what was the GNiPL today? The Gross National iPhone Product Loss? How many millions, perhaps billions of dollars were lost today due to iPhone mania? Since most of today's elite geek neurons were allocated to processing iPhone fantasies, was money not lost?
Well, just wait until those neurons are focused on actually using the iPhone. And you thought that praying to the Blackberry God was a time-sink...
I wrote the following in response to a coworker's questionnaire about continuous integration (CI):
CI's impact has been higher on some projects, while lower on others. If we are including past companies and projects, CI was extremely valuable when builds took a very long time to run on an individual's workstation (such as hours) and when CI tests things that are "hard" to test locally, such as deploys.
In general, CI becomes more important to me as the project becomes larger (resulting in longer test runs) and more complex (resulting in longer overall builds plus technical overhead/pain-in-the-ass factor). For those reasons I really like having CI set up at the beginning of a project in preparation for the impending time-consuming pain-in-the-ass.
Specifically for projects I've worked on, here's how CI has affected me:
Where broken builds have hurt me:
"I'll take CI if I can get it, but I don't really care THAT much whether it's there or not".
I've had my MacBook Pro for a few months, and I really enjoy it. Since then, a few friends have purchased MBP's as well, so I've decided to update the list of Mac apps that I use on a regular basis, and also the list of those that I thought I'd like, but decided to remove.
Quicksilver: My God, it's full of stars. QS actually reminds me of developing with a powerful IDE: who cares where stuff is when you can search? Just find it. For me, it's Command+Space and start typing. Wonderful app. Much faster than the build-in Searchlight.
MenuMeters: Displays CPU, memory, and other system status information discretely in the menu bar. I display memory and CPU, but skip the disk and network info.
Witch: Allows you to ALT/OPTION+Tab through all of your application windows, not just the main application itself. For example, I have 3 Mail windows open and I can ALT+Tab to all of them.
NeoOffice Pretty free office applications. Gotta have at least one. Don't use it much but I feel better knowing that I have it.
Eclipse: Yeah yeah, I know there are many Eclipse haters out there, but it's a free IDE with lots of handy plugins. Maybe I'll buy TextMate, but free is free is free.
Jumpcut: One of my new favorites! From the site: Jumpcut is an application that provides "clipboard buffering" — that is, access to text that you've cut or copied, even if you've subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut's interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard's history.
VLC media player: Media player that plays Flac files. Much better than Cog in my opinion.
Gmail Notifier: If only it supported multiple email addresses...
TextMate: The text editor I'm using right now to write this! A great all around text editor. One of the 2 apps I've actually had to pay for.
Parallels: All the cool kids are using machine virtualization.
Adium: Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
VirtuDesktops: Multi-desktops. I feel like I'm supposed to like this, and I sorta do, but I don't use them much yet. Usually crashes on me after a while.
Cog: Replaced with VLC media player.
XTorrent: Kept expiring, forcing me to upgrade to the newer one. The search feature was handy, though.
