3. 2012-12-03

    In November 1955, Bo Diddley was booked to play live on the Ed Sullivan show, the middle America's favourite TV variety show. As legend has it, he was booked to play a single tune, but he misinterpreted his cue card, which had his name, followed by a song title, launched into his, perhaps slightly racy for the times, eponymous calling card - "Hey, Bo Diddley!", immediately following it with the song he was booked to play, the only slightly more sedate "Sixteen tons". They tore the roof off the house, and got themselves banned from the show. 


    Here's a particularly rocking performance from 1965



    That lady on the second rhythm guitar is known as The Duchess .


    Not many musicians get to name their own beat. And in this case, it's a beat that refuses to die. Not many musicians can play it well, but that hasn't stopped them trying through the years. I put a playlist of the most egregious examples I could find up on spotify . There's some direct lifts, some re-interpretations, some slightly tenuous reaches, and hopefully some surprises. It's an editable playlist, so please feel to add any that you find.



     


    I feel sure there ought to be a Spiritualized song in there, but for the life of me I can't find one from memory.


    Once you get into the habit of spotting them, it's quite an addictive hobby. I find that I often only spot them a while after I've picked out a song as an earworm.

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  4. 2010-12-06

    One year ago




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  5. 2012-11-29

    If you find that your Mac's 'Open With' menu is growing cluttered with identical menu entries for the same application, this indicates that your Launch Services database is confused. 


    In the normal course of action your computer scans for entries to merge into this database at boot time, and then at login for the user domains. The Finder updates it with new application information, as and when new App or Framework bundles are encountered during it's normal operation. Unfortunately this database does seem to be capable of becoming persistently corrupted, which will result in symptoms like a duplicate-riddled 'Open With' menu, or incorrect or inconsistent Filetype/Application associations. 


    On Mountain Lion, you can interact with the system database from the shell, using the lsregister utility. Run it without arguments to get basic usage instructions. It is not on any default, paths, it's buried away inside /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework .


     /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Support/lsregister -dump 

    will show you the current database in human readable form. To scrap and rebuild the database completely you might do something like this 


     /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -all u,s,l -r -v 

    The -domain argument there is specifying that we should recursively ( -r ) scan for bundle directories in the the u ser, s ystem and l ocal domains (i.e. "~/ /" , "/System/ ", and "/ " ) and register their document type bindings and other information with the Launch Services agents, which will update their database with this information. The -v switch turns on progress logging, which is all done to stderr.


    If you're in the habit of installing apps or library bundles to some alternative roots than the builtin domain types, you can add those paths to the command, instead of the domain flags.

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  7. 2012-11-01

    Rat Avatar : A research project has seen human subjects control a rat-sized robot, and rats control a human-shaped avatar in a VR environment.

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  9. 2012-10-08

    Original Sim : From Marvel Fanfare #25 (1986) - Dave Sim Marvel character portfolio. Yeah, me too.

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  10. 2012-10-07

    Manga-Camera is a free camera filter iOS app. The intent is to render live photos in the style of a manga action frame. You pick a background effect and then snap. There doesn't seem to be a way to apply the filter to library photos, you have to shoot live, which is the way I prefer these gee-gaws to work. It takes a little practice, but I found the results can be entertaining, and occasionally even a little convincing.

    manga camera

    Jack was made for manga, obviously.

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  13. 2012-10-03

    A-list iOS developer shop Tapbots today released a remix of their excellent twitter client ( Tweetbot ), focused on tiny pay-subscription social network platform app.net . I think Tweetbot is probably my favourite thing about my  iPhone, and so I immediately purchased it. No obvious disappointments, all the slick performance I like is there, and it brings across some features I've been lacking in ADN for a while, like the ability to swiftly upload photos. I promptly celebrated by taking photos of every last.fm staff member with an ADN I could track down . I think this will probably increase my use of ADN moderately. Mobile is an essential component of gathering the off-the-cuff asynchronous status updates a service like this is built upon.


    I'm not sure that it will gigantically increase my engagement with ADN alpha. I was a bit suspicious of all the frothy cliques, with an intangible unease that I struggled to define, at least until I suddenly realised it was a cogent reminder of the very earliest days of bootstrapping the IMDb message boards . That left me feeling more comfortable with what the thing was, but no more inspired to engage. I'm still in love with the idea and the ideals of the place, and I'm reasonably confident it hasn't yet fallen into it's proper, more useful place. I'm shallow enough to enjoy my sexy low user id on some level that even I don't properly understand.


    Has App Dot Net "arrived?". I think not yet. Netbot feels like a threshold event of some kind, in as much as serious developers are prepared to put enough effort into the ADN platform to produce fully realised software harnessed to it, and this degree of finish does not come cheap. ADN seems to be on a little draught of second wind recently, there's been a couple of fun toy apps, some positive press, and the recent price drop, bringing a wave of fresh users in. I'm still very positive about ADN as a concept, an indicator that there's now a long tail of internet folk interested enough in paying for stuff to make services like this potentially viable. I won't be really  excited about ADN until I see the first compelling application built over it that is some mostly new and useful thing, rather than a new skin on an old one.

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  15. 2010-12-05

    I've been having persistent niggles with my home router / 802.11x base station / DSL modem. It's a D-Link DSL-2740B , itself bought as a replacement for my ISP-provided machine, an O2 wireless III (a re-badged Thomson SpeedTouch) which proved itself a low performer at both wireless and routing, and particularly dismal at doing both simultaneously.

    I picked up the D-link cheaply, in a clearance bin in John Lewis. In most respects it has been a splendid replacement for the O2. WiFi is fast, routing is consistent, ADSL sync is better. However, it does have one stupid bug. It can't do DHCP reliably. After a certain period, it starts sending out broken leases to clients; either issuing them with IP addresses that are already in use, or more commonly issuing a working address, but nullifying the nameserver settings. A reboot will restore sanity, but involves an irksome couple of minutes of network outage. Afterwards it is only a matter of time before the problem re-emerges, noticeably quicker if there's an increased rate of new leases issued, such as a group of visitors armed with smartphones popping in.

    I'm consistently amazed at how flawed home router appliances are. How anyone 'normal' is supposed to cope with these things, I have no idea. I've updated the firmware to the last available revision, fiddled with the limited options in the admin interface, to little avail. Web searches turn up a few people commenting on the same problem, but no solutions offered. This leaves me with three straightforward, yet unappealing options.

    1. Buy another router. Either another toy one, which seems likely to smuggle in some fresh nugget of buried failure, or buy something more professional, and hence eye-wateringly expensive
    2. Set up static configuration for every client. Seems a stupid solution in 2010 for a primarily wireless network
    3. Disable DHCP on the router, and add another, more reliable DHCP server to the network


    Option 3 initially seems least aggravating. In the past, my strategy for service infrastructure has always been using home servers, with some form of UNIX. These days though, I'm trying to minimise the number of computer-type devices I have to keep running 24/7. I no longer find any joy in being a home UNIX administrator, and it's nice to correspondingly reduce power consumption, fan noise, and cabling. So the idea of setting up a computer just to act as a DHCP controller is slightly repellant.



    The only machine tethered to the network is a modest, first-generation, G4 mac mini . It's chief use in the past was as a basic freeview PVR, using Elgato eyeTV , but the London flat's TV reception is too poor for this, so it mostly acts as an AFP -capable network interface to my firewire Drobo . It's a very old, low power machine, but would certainly be capable of acting as a DHCP server.

    It wasn't immediately obvious how best to do this. Obviously I could install any of the common free UNIX DHCP software, using MacPorts , or homebrew , or fink , or even just hand rolling something from tarballs, but all of these come with overheads, adding dependencies, requiring build tools, and subsequent package management, and all the little bits of service glue needed to make it run neatly as a daemon. Experience has shown me that integrating third-party UNIX services into a vanilla Macintosh can get fiddly, fast.

    There's no obvious DHCP server component on desktop OS X, but there's a latent capacity somewhere, demonstrated by 'Internet sharing', which lets you easily set up a Macintosh with a network connection as a basic router. After a little bit of poking around with this, and some internet searching, I discovered that this facility is part of the bootpd service. It's documented, and after a little trial-and-error, I figured out a way to run a DHCP server facility only, using just the built-in Apple utilities.

    Here's an overview of my network configuration
    • The D-link router provides NAT routed internet via O2 ( actually Be ) ADSL 2+ with a static IP.


    • The private subnet is 192.168.1.0/24


    • The router's internal address is set as 192.168.1.1


    • The mac mini is connected to the router via wired ethernet with an address of 192.168.1.4, and runs headlessly.


    • Everything else connects to the D-Link router wirelessly, using a mix of 802.11n and 802.11g




    Here's how to set up bootpd to act as a DHCP server for this network.



    First, configure the mac mini to have a static IP. Using screen-sharing from another Mac ( Cmd-K, vnc://192.168.1.4 ) to configure the network interface in system preferences.








    Next, configure your computer to also have a static address on the same subnet. If you get something wrong, and need to troubleshoot settings, you'll still need to be able to connect between the router, the mini and your workstation. I picked 192.168.1.111, as being well outside the range of anything I'd expect to be routinely allocated.

    Now you need to produce your bootpd config file ( /etc/bootpd.plist ). Unfortunately this means an XML property list. Every time I feel smug about how the Macintosh is re-invigorating UNIX with the old, crufty bad bits removed, I ought to remind myself about the maniacally stupid idea that is XML plists. Instead I thank my stars that I have a capable text editor. It's not that fearsome a property set, and is well explained in the man page , so you could build one by hand. An alternative approach, the one I used, would be to set up internet sharing temporarily on the mini for an interface you're not using; I chose firewire. Take a copy of the /etc/bootpd.plist file this will create, e.g. / etc/bootpd.plist.template , and then disable internet sharing again, which will remove the /etc/bootpd.plist file if it still exists. Now rename your template back to /etc/bootpd.plist and edit it.

    The options are all well documented, and it turns out that you need hardly any of them to get up and running.

    The key options are


    • dhcp_enabled: an array of network interface device names to answer dhcp requests on - I just have en0, which is the built-in ethernet
    • Subnets: an array of property dictionaries, that represent networks we're interested in serving. We only want a single dictionary for 192.168.1.0/24.
      • net_address: , is the network address - 192.168.1.0,
      • net_mask: the netmask for our subnet range - '255.255.255.0',
      • dhcp_router: default gateway address - 192.168.1.1
      • net_range: an array of strings representing the bounds of a pool of addresses to allocate from - 192.168.1.12 to 192.168.1.254
      • allocate: a boolean that is set to indicate that we're interested in issuing addresses for this subnet
    <ul>

    Most of the other defaults are sensible. I've kept all the other values that were generated for my template. Here's what I have in my file.


    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
    <key>Subnets</key>
    <array>
    <dict>
    <key>_creator</key>
    <string>cms</string>
    <key>allocate</key>
    <true/>
    <key>dhcpdomainname_server</key>
    <string>208.67.222.222,208.67.220.220</string>
    <key>dhcp_router</key>
    <string>192.168.1.1</string>
    <key>lease_max</key>
    <integer>3600</integer>
    <key>lease_min</key>
    <integer>3600</integer>
    <key>name</key>
    <string>192.168.1</string>
    <key>net_address</key>
    <string>192.168.1.0</string>
    <key>net_mask</key>
    <string>255.255.255.0</string>
    <key>net_range</key>
    <array>
    <string>192.168.1.12</string>
    <string>192.168.1.254</string>
    </array>
    </dict>
    </array>
    <key>bootp_enabled</key>
    <false/>
    <key>detectotherdhcp_server</key>
    <integer>0</integer>
    <key>dhcp_enabled</key>
    <array>
    <string>en0</string>
    </array>
    <key>replythresholdseconds</key>
    <integer>4</integer>
    </dict>
    </plist>

    Next, create two empty files that bootpd expects to use. ' /etc/bootptab ', for any static address maps, and /var/db/dhcpd_leases , which will be a persistent database for issued leases. Now connect to the router, and disable it's DHCP server.

    The bootpd binary lives at /usr/libexec/bootpd . If you run it from a terminal with a -d flag, it will stay in the foreground and emit debugging info to stdout. You'll need root privileges for it to run, I just used sudo /usr/libexec/bootpd . Now request a dhcp address from a different network client. I used an iPad. It's a good idea to make a note of the network MAC address. If everything is working, you should see some output acknowledging the request, and then some more as a lease is issued. The client should then configure it's network interface with all the settings from your Subnet definition above. If it doesn't, and the output isn't helpful enough, there's also a further -v switch for more verbose logging.

    Initially I had trouble getting any leases issued although all requests were logged fine. It turned out I'd misconfigured the netmask when I set up the static address for the mini. If the network details don't match the defined subnet exactly, then bootpd will just fall back to default behaviour for the subnet, which is to just observe. Once I fixed that, things started working as they should. By default, a line is written to logs in /var/system.log for every request recieved, and one for every lease issued.

    The remaining task is to configure the service to run as a daemon from launchd. Luckily, there is a launchd profile for bootpd present, /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps.plist .

    You can install this persistently into launchd like so

    sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps.plist

    Running sudo launchctl list should then show a com.apple.bootpd service enabled. If for some reason you need to disable it once again, you can uninstall the service using

    sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/bootps.plist



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  17. 2010-11-28

    How about some photos of squid flying through the air? I've heard anecdotal reports of this sort of thing happening, which on the face of it sound reasonable, if not a little far fetched. They do possess all the right sort of equipment, and controlled jet propulsion through the air isn't really that far from their usual method of locomotion at speed, which is controlled jet propulsion under the water, after all.

    The full writeup in the parent post contains plenty of detail about a recent observation of groups of squid exhibiting fairly controlled, short flight. Not only does the article contain lots of interesting links to scientific write-ups of arial squid observation , but it also contains several high-resolution photo images of the buggers captured in the act.

    It would make a lot of sense for them to use as an evasive action. Squid can manage impressive accelerations in their submarine environment, but through the air, they would perform even more rapidly, over short distances. "Short" is of course, relative. One of the write-ups based on observations estimates 20cm squid reaching 10m in a controlled flight. They seem to form their bodies into lifting, braking and stabilising shapes as they go. Squid are ace.

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  18. 2012-09-13

    If you've ever tried to take over somebody else's detatched screen sessions, by using the su command to assume their login identity, you've probably seen an error message something like


     Cannot open your terminal device /dev/pts/3

    This is because your pseudo terminal device is allocated when you login to the session, and remains owned by the user id you logged in, after you've changed your effective uid by su -ing. 


    You can try and kludge your way around it by chmod -ing your pty device file to make it more arbitrarily readable, but that's ugly and stupid, and needs escalated privileges. A slightly smarter way to work around this is to force a new pseudo terminal for the assumed login session. A really simple way to do this that I've recently discovered is to use the script  utility. script is a useful tool intended to preserve a transcription of an interactive terminal session.   To do this, it creates a new pty device for the current user id. So you can use it to help you recover a detatched screen by typing this


     su - someuser

     script /dev/null

     screen -r somesession

    Passing /dev/null to script just means that the transcript is discarded.


     

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  21. 2012-09-10

    Founding Omni : Wil Shipley recalls the origin of The Omni Group.

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  23. 2010-11-22

    I'm amused that on porting his blog to wordpress jwz has seemingly reached the same level of disgruntlement with wordpress in about a day that it's taken me twelve months or so to reach.

    Don't get me wrong, wordpress certainly gives you all sorts of awesome features OOTB, but at a certain cost of complexity, which makes things tricky to customise. Themes are hard to tweak, and the cost of entry to plugin-writing is large enough to put-off simple customisation in favour of out-sourcing to the lazyweb directory of plugins, which correspondingly increases the complexity of your install.

    Most pertinently, there's the security record, a cynic might suggest it's a lack of security record. I'm gradually coming around to the line of thought that the frequency of updates actively contributes to the problem. The continual treadmill of manually updating drives people to investigate the auto-upgrade procedures, which are all built around interfaces that sound to me like designed-in exploit vectors, like having all the .php files in the software tree writeable by the httpd user, or running an FTPd service on the webhost that can chdir to the http script directories. Furthermore, the autoupgrade process is prone to terrifyingly unfriendly fail-states .

    I'm not sure if there are any significantly appealing alternatives out there. I think there's probably a circular life cycle to the blog software used by any mildly technical person , that moves serially from 'simplest possible lazyweb solution', through 'this simple thing has been customised past the point of sanity, I'll write my own' all the way through to 'writing blogging software is hard, I'll just use wordpress' and subsequently right back to square one.

    The elephant in the room is the simplest option. Just host your data in an fully managed service like wordpress.com , or tumblr or posterous . Or if you really don't care about handing every last bit of data you can generate about yourself into the possibly malevolent skynet-cum-panopticon Google-monster, you could get all oldskool with blogger As ever, I just can't get with the idea of giving all my content to an at-best disinterested third party. After all, that's where jwz started out , and look where that's got him. Manually migrating to wordpress, and grumbling.

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  25. 2010-11-21

    If you can read this message, it means I have properly configured blog posting by email. Is this useful? Is this a good idea? Time will tell.






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  27. 2010-10-14

    In my piece yesterday, about my blog on last.fm I didn't link correctly to the article . Fixed now.

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  28. 2010-10-13

    The other day at work , prompted by a shoutbox conversation with one of our users , I did a little bit of exploring some of the artist catalogue data. The idea was to find band names that were repeating words, such as ' Talk Talk ' and ' The The '. Coincidentally, I had a freshly installed database server with just this sort of information on it, and needed a good excuse to stress test it a little. PostgreSQL's regular expression support is brilliant , and it was a very trivial exercise to quickly knock up a query that returned promising data. In the process of refining it, I got a chance to play around with the Hadoop cluster. I wrote the whole thing up over on the company blog, if you'd like further details. Fame fame fatal fame, it can play hideous tricks on the brain, as the song goes .

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  29. 2010-08-26

    Yesterday at work , I had to clean after up a particularly freaky Slony-I replication fault. I still haven't managed to understand quite what went wrong there. So this morning, I arrived at work in full diagnostic mode, jokingly grumbling about 'howfuckedismydatabase.com'. Laurie was particulary amused by this curmudgeonly joke, and we bantered about it. I pitched a few ideas about how such a joke site might operate, and we left it there and moved on.

    Except Laurie didn't. Despite my attempts to dissuade him, he registered the domain, and started knocking together some pages based on the earlier jokes. I chipped in a couple more suggestions, and suggested some error messages, and within twenty minutes or so he had an operational site . Then we shared it with a couple of like-minded people, and left it be. A few of the other people at work passed it around, and a couple of people submitted it to reddit.

    Within an hour or so things had started to really snowball. One of the reddit submissions gathered hundreds of upvotes, and for a period of time we were the number one story on hacker news . Laurie added a twitter button and a comment form to the site, and retweets and emails started accumulating fast. By mid-afternoon the site was approaching 200 hits a second, which it handled with aplomb, because he had coded it efficiently, and
    configured the server sensibly.

    It felt great to watch so many people comment positively about some of my dumb jokes, pretty much in real time. It gave me a really direct experience of something I'd always innately understood about the internet, but had not yet witnessed close to home; the ability to quickly reach an appropriate audience for almost any content, regardless of how specialised. Our little shared joke quickly reached out to thousands of people, who found something within it they also related to. This really amazes me.

    It also showed me something about my own character. While I was perfectly happy to joke about the idea, it needed somebody like Laurie, with the skill and enthusiasm to pick up on it and make it into something tangible and exciting. I'd instinctively shied away from broadcasting it further than my desk, and my initial reaction was that developing it any further would be a waste of time and money. I was very wrong about that, it turned out to be an interesting experience, and enormous fun. I think this means I should endeavour to be a little less cynical.

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  30. 2012-09-08

    It's not exactly the done thing on today's web, but I'm a huge believer in paying for web services. I've never been comfortable with the ad-supported web. When pure advertising is the only revenue stream supporting a product or service I worry about the deleterious effect upon that product or service.


    I don't like the implication that they're really working for their sponsor's interests ahead of mine. I don't like the mental effort of hunting down all the opt-outs, of second-guessing potential consequences of the creepy data-mining and covert information sharing with networks of 'trusted partners'. More straightforwardly, for many cases, I suspect the numbers don't really balance; I find it difficult to rely heavily on something with a potentially precarious revenue stream. I don't want to push too much content into, or build infrastructure around things that won't necessarily be around in a year or two.


    Paying directly for things makes everything seem more explicit and straightforward. I'm the customer. I can make informed decisions about the cost and usefulness of the thing. It's in the better interests of the service provider not to abuse the relationship. A product unspoilt and unhindered by commercial marriages should stand a better chance of evolving towards it's essential form. So I'm a relatively easy sell as a consumer. Offer me a useful service, at a reasonable price, and I'm quite likely to pay you for it. 


    The flipside of this is that I'm really cautious about the reverse. Purely ad-supported sites, especially ones that seem to be offering far too much  for free without being noticeably saturated with advertising make me feel slightly paranoid. I like to see which way the money flows.


    Here's a list of the sort of internety things I currently pay for, and will happily endorse. 



    • Spotify - I'm a long-time tenner a month customer. I think it's too expensive, but I somehow never quite unsubscribe.

    • Flickr - I have a pro account for photo hosting. 

    • DynDNS - I have a paid account, which gets me DNS zone hosting as well as a dynamic hostname

    • Pinboard.in - I like this bookmarking service. I was a very early adopter, and therefore my account cost a pittance due to the unique way pinboard is funded. 

    • Lastpass - I like this service so much I subscribed, just to do my bit to ensure they stay in business

    • Linode - my internet hosts are linux virtual machines hosted with this service. Linode is excellent. 

    • Word Podcast : I subscribed to the (now sadly folded) Word Magazine, primarily to access their very enjoyable podcast.

    • Metafilter : I don't use this site very much any more, but back in the old days, I got so much surfing out of it, I eventually bought a paid account just to contribute back.

    • Reddit : Similarly, I bought a founder Reddit Gold account when they appealed for cash, because I really enjoyed Reddit back before the eternal September.

    • iTunes : I use iTunes for quite a lot of things, apps, movie rentals and purchases, music purchases, and I have an iTunes Match subscription. If you have enough Apple gear to make an 'ecosystem', it's a good service.

    • Amazon Prime : I love Amazon. Some days, I wish I still worked for them.

    • Netflix : Most of my TV watching these days is netflix via Apple TV

    • App.net : - I signed up for an app.net account the second I heard about it.


    It's not a huge list. I'd like it to be larger. There's whole categories of things I'd probably cheerfully pay for should they exist. I'd pay a subscription for a decent search engine that wasn't a front for a creepy advertising juggernaut. I might pay for a subscription 'social' network, maybe something like a family-focused Yammer . I'd love something like a cheaper netflix that just focused on pre-1960s movies and archive TV. I'd like something like the old programming.reddit or hacker news. I'd love a smart news aggregator, and if I can't find one to pay for soon, I may have to invent one.

     

    In the olden times, there was a lot of talk about internet micropayments , and about how they couldn't possibly work, or how they were imminent and essential to safeguard the future of the web . They never really quite happened, and the shiny allure of the internet as a huge content pipe of free everything triumphed over all, but lately it feels to me like the mood is perhaps shifting a little.

     

    People seem to be wising up to some of the privacy considerations of infinitely free stuff that is only ever paid for covertly. The mobile app store culture has engendered a user community more acclimatised to fee-paying for services. Kindle is powering a minor revolution in self-publishing . Finally, there's Kickstarter , which is perhaps the most interesting current development in internet financing.

     

    There's nothing particularly new about the thinking behind Kickstarter. Through a combination of great execution and timing, it seems to have hit critical mass over the last 12 months. In the midst of all the long-tail nerd-bait (I recently signed on for my first funding )  and snake oil there are signs of some interesting funding efforts converging towards the mainstream. Champion self-publicist Amanda Palmer recently powered her project past the magical $1,000,000 mark, to flurries of 'old media' press interest.

     

    App.net is a manifest demonstration that I'm not completely alone in this line of thinking. Launched slightly before  twitter's recent frantic, shark-jumping, repositioning of it's terms of service , it seemed a futile, quixotic gesture when I signed up to fund it on it's kickstarter-esque ( apparently kickstarter's TOS precludes funding things like ongoing businesses, so they rolled their own thing ) signup page . I fully expected it to fall short of it's goal, but maybe pick up some positive news coverage as it flamed out, much like Diaspora did before. To my surprise it charged past the funding target ahead of the deadline, and closed way ahead of the target figure. Since then, they've launched the API, and built a sort of twitter clone built across it at alpha.app.net , which is busy enough to be an almost useful, slightly cliquey chit-chat network of it's own. It seems like app.net has the potential to self-host itself as at least a niche social network for privacy nerds and web developers. For some, that might be good enough, but I suspect the real power of app.net lies within it's potential to become a kind of ad-hoc real-time message bus for higher layered services over it's API. It remains to be seen if it can gather enough developer / user mindshare to deliver on the potential.

     

    The most high-profile campaign I've yet seen is the Penny Arcade Sells Out . High profile, high traffic funny-picture sites are the gold-standard of high volume ad serving, with content that massive audiences enjoy, but are used to reading for "free".  Although they fell short of their more extravagant targets, including the 'complete ad removal', they hit their funding target, and raised half a million dollars. An A-lister website demonstrating the ability to generate competitive income with top level ad-sales entirely from direct user funding? Nearly. Is the tide turning? I don't know, but I can feel it pull.

     
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  33. 2010-08-06

    I ran into some problems while I was trying to install python bindings for the Growl notification framework on my MacBook Pro. My Mac is running the current release of Snow Leopard ( 10.6.4 ) and I'm using a python.org installed binary package of python, under /usr/local/python. Building using distutils and the supplied setup.py failed, seemingly because the compiler was unable to find quite routine include files, such as stdarg.h and float.h .

    /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdarg.h:4:25: error: stdarg.h: No such file or directory

    This error message both confused and perturbed me, because stdarg is a fairly fundamental component of a working C library, and I am pretty certain that my compiler isn't that fundamentally broken.

    Picking apart the build output from the generated Makefile, I see that it is setting the -isysroot gcc flag, to /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/ . I presume this is because the python installation is built to use the OS X 10.4 compatability SDK. This is why it's pulling in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdarg.h . That header is a stub, and included the following stanza



    /* GCC uses its own copy of this header */
    #if defined(GNUC)
    #include_next


    #include_next is a gcc extension to cpp, and instructs the preprocessor to start searching for the include file again starting with the next directory on the include path after this one. Standard libraries like stdarg and float can be quite compiler specific, and as the comment indicates, GCC is expected to have it's own copy of this header file, which would be put away somewhere under /usr/lib/gcc .

    At this point, a nagging memory of building cocoa apps with XCode resurfaced, suggesting that the 10.4 SDK isn't compatible with gcc-4.2 ( the system default gcc under snow leopard ). GCC 4.0 is supplied though, for use with building against legacy SDKs. On this whim, I tried exporting CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.0 and rebuilding, and everything worked as it should.

    From inspection, it seems like the snow supplied leopard python is built to use 10.6 SDKs and gcc-4.2 and may well be a more sensible python to use. Further googling ducking , turned up this bug report .

    posted by cms on
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  38. 2010-05-19 

      It's been a good long while since I've been able to blog anything of substance. Some of that is down to lack of time, I've been frantically busy the last few months, much as you'd expect. There also were some dull technological barriers that were making it awkward to update and maintain this site. <br><br> I've moved the hosting to a new location, it's currently residing on a xen virtual server instance provided by <a href="http://linode.com">linode</a>. While I was migrating things around, I've tried to package it up a little more portably, and in future I ought to be able to move it easily to anywhere I can run a linux host. I also took the opportunity to tidy up the page templates, and cobble together a new theme. I'm still poking that around a little bit, let me know if you find any rough edges.<br><br> <h4>New job!</h4><br><br> Aside from adjusting myself to my <a href="http://beatworm.co.uk/blog/ada/im-a-rapper-with-a-baby/">wonderful new daughter</a>, I've gone and got myself a new job. I wasn't really aware that I was looking for one, but life can surprise you like that sometimes. I'm now working as a Database Architect at <a href="http://last.fm/user/colins/">Last.fm</a> and I couldn't be happier about that. Not only is last.fm an awesome site, which has long been one of my favourite things on the web, but the intersection between high volume web services, big databases, and music nerdery is very definitely my kind of niche.<br><br><br><br> <h4>Move to London</h4><br><br> One small drawback with this full-time role was that it was based in London. We did weigh up the various commuting options, but after some deliberation, decided to take the plunge, and relocate, at least temporarily to London.<br><br> This meant finding somewhere to rent. Somewhere to rent that would take a baby and a dog. A location in the city with suitable dog exercise routes close at hand. Ideally a place from which I could daily commute to <a href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=last.fm&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=16.450021,44.428711&ie=UTF8&hq=last.fm&hnear=&ll=51.528457,-0.086882&spn=0.004052,0.010847&z=17&iwloc=A">Shoreditch</a> without too much trouble. Obviously we'd have to be able to afford it on one salary, whilst still maintaining a mortgage on the house in Bristol in the interim. Rather a tall order.<br><br> After balancing up the variables we settled on the Balham/Clapham area. After a few complicated expeditions up to view properties with little success, we managed to secure something with only days to spare, just down the road in Tooting Bec. A rather roomy <a href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Elmbourne+Road,+Wandsworth&sll=51.434735,-0.150461&sspn=0.008628,0.015535&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Elmbourne+Rd,+Wandsworth,+Greater+London,+United+Kingdom&ll=51.434655,-0.150611&spn=0.008575,0.015535&z=16&layer=c&cbll=51.434733,-0.15047&panoid=hH03gMlSJRXaMcWDe_cQ_w&cbp=12,273.93,,0,6.37">ground floor flat facing right onto Tooting Bec common</a>. It's just a short walk to the Northern line, which leaves me with a manageable half-hour or so trip to work, door to door.<br><br> So the last few months have seen quite a furious pace of changes. Mostly I've been finding it all invigorating, and exciting, rather than incapacitating, but things can seem to be wooshing by, and there <em>definitely</em> aren't as many hours in the day as there used to be. Five years ago I'd have been amazed at what the me of 2010 would be getting up to. Interesting times.
    posted by cms on
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