One and a half fake teeth

Tagged

I've been looking for an excuse to tag someone "tagged" on 43 people for a while now, and today I finally found an excuse.

Negative Fridays via OSX

Today I stumbled across a tip that hitting ctrl-option-apple-8 flips OSX into an inverted mode where the entire screen is a negative image of itself.  People turn blue!  Shadows become backlights!  It's like driving your own tacky, souped-up, underlit Honda all over the internet.

For me, all Fridays from here on out are Negative Fridays.

There's a place called 43 Places

We opened up 43 Places to the world today.  I have a lot of doggedly-offline friends to whom I'm always trying to make analogies between software development and other creative endeavors, and one direct analogy is between the nervous excitement we experience on launch day and the same feeling artists have on their "drop dates." Audiences, chalking it all up to some sort of magic, tend to underestimate how much work - from hours of open-ended brainstorming and debate to hours of detailed, sometimes menial labor - goes into producing an album or a film or a zine or a theater production...or a web site.  It takes a lot, and it's universally exciting to see people finally experiencing something you've spent weeks or months creating.  On 43 Places, people are now writing about and tagging the places they're passionate about.  They're making plans to visit new spots in their own hometowns or around the world.  And we're enjoying it.  The best part about web development versus all those other endeavors (including other forms of software development) is that a website is a dynamic thing that has no hard deadlines, no physical street date.  It's never "finished."  What we're excited about launching today will undergo much improvement over the next few days, weeks, and years.  We'd just gotten started with 43 Things, after all.  Now we have two kids to nurture.

But, as if I haven't made it abundantly clear, all that's too difficult to write about effectively, so I'll just jot down a handful of things that have been entertaining me during day one.

1. At the time of this writing, the state of Oregon has three tags: hippies, no tax, strip bars.
2. A part of the site we found compelling, but didn't necessarily believe the users would find immediately compelling, is the Other Places "continent", in which people can create content around fictional, spiritual, and extra-terrestrial places.  Heaven and Hell were obvious contenders, but I personally did not anticipate the appearance of Funkytown, Memory Lane, and Where the Streets Have No Name all by the end of our first day.
3. The sparse, white-washed, nerd-infested room we call the Robot Co-op Office is the most popular destination in all of Seattle.  (We know this won't last, but by damn, we'll bask in it while we can.)
4. Clearly, the grandeur of South Dakota's Corn Palace is wildly exaggerated in its own wide-spread advertising campaign.
5. 43 Places itself has already been represented as a virtual place, featuring both a cartoon data model and a mocked up, recursive screen shot.  Apparently, early adopters of our site are not of the  doggedly-offline variety.

We Win One Webby

We just learned that 43 Things won the Webby for Social Networking this year!  Wow.

Scene from my Hi-Tech life

The CEO of the Robot Co-op maps out the future of our company.  On the floor.  With crayons.

Enabling M3U file use with iTunes and Audioscrobbler

If you're a Mac user using a web server to stream MP3s, you've probably run into a couple problems with some otherwise cool apps.  First and foremost there's iTunes which, bless its heart, totally botches the handling of M3U files.  Instead of recognizing a net-based playlist as just that - a playlist - it executes some sort of "import" function, loads all the listed URLs into your library, plays the first one as expected, then continues on in alphabetical order through your entire iTunes library.  As an example, my M3U playlist is likely to start with The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1 by Neutral Milk Hotel.  (It's quite rightfully the first track on every indie rock playlist created since 1998.)  I don't deny that it's a great song, but by the end of it, iTunes has all but forgotten the playlist and has apparently acquired a royalty fixation rivaling British tabloids.  Here's what's on deck:

King & Queen Of Siam -- Frank Black
King And Caroline -- Guided By Voices
King at Night -- Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
King Chico -- Donner Party
King Horse -- Elvis Costello
King Kong -- The Kinks
King Kong -- Daniel Johnston
King Kong -- Tom Waits covering Daniel Johnston

...and so on.   It's arguably an interesting playlist, but it disregards the M3U file I just downloaded, which may have had some other, non-alphabetical theme (carrots?  flowers?  non-arbitrary song streaming via the web?).  Anyway, it took me a while, but I finally found the fix in this ancient post, and it works like a charm.  (It's a small applescript file you can save and associate with downloaded ".m3u" files so they're imported into iTunes as "native" playlists and then handled correctly.)

Then there's the cool semi-social network service, audioscrobbler, which always seemed like a good idea to me...if only it was a networked service that actually worked with networked music.  The problem is that the plugins are coded to ignore streamed MP3 files...so no matter how many times I'd installed audioscrobbler tools on XP or OSX, they simply wouldn't register that I was playing music.  Today I discovered another old discussion about enabling audioscrobbler with tracks streamed via rendezvous, which lead to another simple applescript trick.  I only had to comment out one line (maybe because the OSX plugin I'm using is newer than the thread), and here's how to do it.  Open the applications folder, right-click on the audioscrobbler app to "Show Package Contents".  In the Contents/Resources/Scripts folder, you'll find the controller script.  Open that file with the script editor, comment out the return "RADIO" line in the URL case as shown below, save the file, restart the audioscrobbler app, and your audioscrobbling has begun.  Lucky me, I'm already up to 13 tracks!

if trackClass is URL track then
  set songLocation to address of theTrack as string
  (* next line commented out to make URL MP3s work *)
  (* return "RADIO" *)
else (* shared track *)
  set songLocation to "Shared Track"
  (* commenting out the next line makes rendezvous MP3s work *)
  return "RADIO"
end if

Masochistic Fun with CSS: An iTunes Stylesheet for the Web

Hoping to sharpen my CSS chops with a project as amusing as it was challenging, I recently dressed up my home MP3 server with an iTunes CSS skin.  Building an exacting stylesheet to work across machines and browsers without using tables for page layout was demanding to say the least.  But despite the fact that I am by definition (or at least by law) the only active user of the site, I stuck to my guns--even adopting the strict XHTML 1.0 DTD.  It's all about self-edumacation, see.  The stylesheet is pretty much there at this point, with a few trivial hacks to accommodate IE's block model rendering.  I'm still stuck with scrollbars that pop up pointlessly (allowing you to scroll a pixel or two horizontally within a window, for instance.  I have yet to figure out how to fix that in one browser without horking the layout in another).  Other things simply can't be fixed: Safari restricts styling on form text input elements, so the stylin' search box is a lost cause there.  But otherwise the layout renders fairly well in everything I tested.  Namely: Firefox 1.0 and IE 6.0 on Windows XP, Firefox 1.0 and Safari on Mac OSX.  I abandoned pixel-perfection in IE 5 for Mac for the time being, and ignored Opera because I'm a man of principle. 

Here's hoping there's no such thing as a CSS and desist order.

Flickr Is My New Addiction

As I was finding more and more and more tags on Flickr that unearth mostly fascinating photos, my bloglines list of tag subscriptions started getting unwieldy.  I was about to propose to Flickr that they allow multi-tag subscriptions in addition to individual ones, so I clicked on their "Flickr ideas" link.  Instead of deflecting me through a "leave us alone, we're busy" pipeline of FAQ friction, they provide a forum containing a thoughtful discussion between users (and employees) about how to consolodate tags into a single feed and the possible repercussions on the service in case it's an unwelcome hack.  (It's not.)

Letting users help users, and paying attention while it happens.  Flickr gets it.

Plugging in

Today I officially began unemployment by playing squatter in the office of some friends I made during my 6-year stint [typo: sting] at amazon. I got busy enough with the hanging out, catching up on their embryonic company's goings-on, and figuring out the practicalities of my squatternship that I didn't end up doing any of my own preproduction work. Luckily, I'd started on it over the weekend.

Since I left amazon primarily so that I could pursue development without obstruction and since I've just begun thinking about what I'll be developing, I may as well plug a product I've found very helpful in thinking without obstruction. During mild manic streaks in anticipation of my luxurious downtime, I've fallen back on my affection for MindManager as a means of drilling down from high-level project concepts into their discrete tasks. I owe Andrej Gregov my introduction to the tool, but he debuted it to the personalization team during an off-site meeting where the very charter of the team was under consideration, and we deliberated on heavy but high-level issues exclusively. While somewhat helpful for visualization, the slick software was not used in a tangible, project-brainstorming context, and I had a knee-jerk reaction to it as vaporware.

Later, when I was assigned the "honor" of presenting to middle managers an organized description of amazon's rather chaotic web development platform, I employed the software for my own purposes. I had a daunting technical communication task ahead of me, and damn if I was going to learn PowerPoint in order to complete it. MindManager (maybe all mind mapping software?) succeeds because it represents structure without having its own language or syntax; the tool never gets in the way of the drafting process, no matter how messy that process is. You can insert, delete, cut, copy, paste, and move leaves, nodes, and branches without having to think about the organizational side effects of your decisions. Something that was analogous to, say, a "4th-tier bullet point" in a word processor can be promoted to a top-level ("heading 1") category without a moments consideration for its category of display properties (font weight, line spacing, tab indentation, parent topic, page number), or those of any of its children. You grab it, you move it, voila, you're done. Mind mapping is to traditional brainstorm outlining as plug-and-play is to traditional hardware installation. It takes task enumeration, which many developers would consider "documentation" tedium--and makes it fun. I even ended up buying my own copy for home use, finding mind mapping invaluable in specifying the 1.0 version of my personalized mp3 server project. I was completely rewriting the prototype and implementing lots of new features while migrating to an upgraded dev environment/methodology, so the mindmap grew to a monstrosity...with ease. It's possible that I've become too enamored of that basic constant-reorganization ease, since the software presents lots of functionality I've yet to explore. But I may be using it for a lot more than preproduction spec'ing since one of my biggest pet peeves--the inability to transform a mindmap into a traditional, prioritized and time-ordered task list, appears to have been solved.

Anyway, I've been lugging around intentions to build several small-to-medium-sized web apps, or to reinvent ones that I haven't touched in years, and I'm relieved to finally be able to chip away at their task lists every day. (Or every other day. Or once a week if that's all the ambition I can muster.)