Alt + Shift + Ctrl + K Follow what happens when Stephen Colbert tell people to all edit a wikipedia artical: The number of elephants has tripled in the last six months. Update: here’s the Youtube video if you missed it.
Archive for July, 2006
Pandora is a great music service that does a great job of matching up artists and songs to your tastes. Pandora claims to have hundreds categories it calls “genes” in it’s Music Gnome Project.
These genes are a great way to delve deeper in to your own music tastes then you ever have before. Pandora keeps these categories under lock and key though and only shows a few of them for each song.
Though there are probably categories they never show it would great if there was place that showed all the categories they did show to the public.
With that wish I launch the Open Source Music Genome Project. A project that will hopefully blossom into an awesome resource to people who want to better understand the music they are listening to.
Please visit the Open Source Music Genome Project wiki and help organize, add to, and develop a full list of categories and descriptions.
Below is what I have collected so far from Pandora. A small drop in the bucket of the hundreds of categories Pandora have behind the scenes.
Cyworld comes to the US. I’d be more obsessed if the site stopped giving me MySQL errors. See my previous notes on Cyworld and visit my Minihome.
Though I’m over a month late I just noticed Design by Fire is back. It’s always interesting the personal discovery people go through when they come back to blogging.
GameTap seems like a cool service that lets you play tons of console and PC games over the internet. It’s all about the selection though. I don’t know if I want it enough yet to pay for it just yet. One down side is that it does not seem they announce new games on the site. How will I know when that killer game I’m waiting for will finally show up? Here’s a list of the game I think I would actually play if I got a subscription.
2020 Super Baseball
Baldur’s Gate
Conquest: Frontier Wars
Heroes of Might and Magic 1,2,3,4
Homeworld 2
Kid Chameleon
Myst 1,3, Riven, Uru
Populous: The Beginning
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc
Sim City 2000 Special Edition
SimTower
All The Sonic Titles
The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions
The Oregon Trail
Tom Clancy
Tomb Raider
Tropico 1, 2
Wings of War
Worms (several different ones)
Well it took a while for me to really sit down and notice (Okay..Trey pointed it out) but I’m really pissed at Feedburner and wordpress. There just does not seem to be a good way to keep control of you’re readers and still offer all the wordpress feeds.
My ideal set up is that every one subscribes to the default wordpress rss feed and then I redirect them with some server magic. Then if feedburner sucks or something better come along I can just redirect them else where. In addition I still want the comment feeds to work as well.
WordPress had support for feeds for each comment thread but since the same file serves both the comment feed and the main feed you can’t just send all the traffic to feedburner since they only server the main feed.
There seems no good way to track stats on the feed and keep the full functionality working.
Some one really needs to come up with a stat program for feeds. Either some code I can install or anything that will give me stats as well as the full functionality of wordpress rss.
Update: Matt Shobe from Feedburner kicked my ass in the comments below and showed me exactly what I wanted. It’s really hard to no like a company when they fix all your problems. Thanks Matt!
I’m horrible at giving book reviews but I’m going to try and give a short recap every couple of books I read. Hope it helps.
Predator’s Gold (The Hungry City Chronicles)
This book really made me fully fall in love with the Hungry City Chronicles. I can’t get enough. The characters have such strong motivation for whatever they do. So of the logic about how the cities roll around can be hard to buy but the ideas is just too much fun for me to get bogged down in the details.
The Amber Spyglass
I was actually disappointed in how the trilogy ended. I was much happier in the first book.
Sabriel (The Abhorsen Trilogy)
A solid unique book. some of the turns of phrases seemed a bit awkward and the characters just didn’t really grab me as much. I still enjoyed it and will definitely get around to reading the others in the future.
Infernal Devices (The Hungry City Chronicles)
This series can’t really go wrong in my book. I love it so much. It continues to surprise and bring strong character driven plot. I’ve order the net book strait from the UK. I can’t wait.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Not as good as Down and out in the Magic Kingdom but still a good book. I got a bit confused by how the time line jumped at a few placesbut it didn’t stop me from liking the book.
Odd Job Jack, a Canadian cartoon, is releasing the master flash files with all art work for all 13 episodes. I can’t stop thinking about what an amazing resource this will be for art students. A lot of time you get stuck at the beginning of a project because there so much work you need to do before you can start making a flash movie. This will be great for people who want to focus on content creation instead of endless illustration.
Oh how I love social networking. I’m glad this isn’t my buddy list.
It’s really interesting to see designers get more and more in to development. Luckily I’m just getting used to Subversion. I wonder how long till A List Apart has a tutorial for Vim.
Movies to look out for: Children Of Men, The Fountain, The Illusionist, American Hardcore, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Prestige. Okay. Some of these movies will probably be bad (you’ll notice I didn’t even list the Transformer movie) but I think they have a fighting chance.
Well this redesign is a long time in the making. There are still plenty of loose edges to clean up but as long as you don’t dig too deep everything should be fine.
This redesign is feature rich with lots of additional feeds and functionality.
You’ll notice to the right my info from Last.fm, Trackslife, Netflix, and links from Del.icio.us. Since I’m using all of these services I might as well put them in one place where everyone can see.
The easiest way to integrate an RSS feed is with MagpieRSS which made adding Del.icio.us and Netflix super easy.
Anything that’s not in an RSS feed become a bit more difficult. Tackslife has an RSS feed but it’s horribly formed for getting out small bit of information.
Last.fm only has weekly artists in an XML file and while it would be nice if MagpieRSS supported XML it dies not.
Anything not in an RSS file I got the info with cURL and the pregmatch function as I’ve outlined before.
One last feature that is a great trick is how the site re-sizes if they screen is smaller then 1024. Re-size to 800 and the 2 columns will turn in to 1. Thanks to Collylogic for the tip on how to make it happen.
All and all I’m very happy with the final outcome and I’d love to help anyone who wants similar RSS integration in to their website. I’d love to hear any feedback!
Did you know that Firefox, Opera and possibly Safari have a minimum font size? I didn’t.
It’s easy to think of why you would want one. If I’m making a browser I don’t want my users to come across a website with tiny font they can not read.
As a designer if I want a tiny font for whatever reason I should be able to choice one. IE give you the ability to choose any font size.
FireFox has it’s default size at 10px and it can be found in Tools > Options… in the Content tab under the Font’s & Colors’ advanced tab.
No matter what you do in the CSS the font will not get smaller then 10px. If you don’t know there is a minimum in place you can really get caught off guard as you become baffled that the CSS isn’t doing what you want.
I really didn’t think 9px font size was really that unreasonable.
First there was Harry and the Potters. They really were not that good but very amusing.
Draco and the Malfoys is the real deal. amazing music.
Update: The Remus Lupins — I think Harry Potter has officially spawned it’s own music industry.
harrypotter, malfoy, draco, dracomalfoys, music?
Keri and I just watched the Boston fireworks but not from where most people saw them. Instead we just walk up the hill our apartment is on, Corry hill. There is a small park at the top with a view that points north and we thought we might be able to see the fireworks from there.
We were not alone as 2 – 300 other people had the same idea. Police had the street block and clearly they knew this was a yearly thing. I wonder if the same people come every year though as there was on tree that was exactly in the way.
You could still see through the tree but it was amazing how many fireworks exploded in the center and expanded exactly to the edges of the tree.
I don’t know how that trees survives from year to year because just about everyone wanted to cut the tree down.
Another interesting point was how there was no one selling any type of food at this small gathering. I know almost every hot dog and funnel cake vendor must be at the river but it was surprising that some one hadn’t though to sell something there as they would have no competition. Was I not moving to Malden I might have brought a cooler of soda up and made a killing.
All and all it was one of the more unique experiences here in Boston.