...more recent posts
Pretty important Clay Shirky article: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
Accept credit cards anytime, anywhere, using the iPhone. Wow, that looks amazing.
A couple cool new to me tools: htop is top on steroids, and iftop is like top for network usage. Very nice.
Rumors that IBM might buy Sun. I'm generally skeptical about huge deals like this. But I definitely want the cool Sun technology - especially ZFS - to stick around and mature. And if that means IBM needs to buy them then I'm good with that.
2009 web safe font survey. Not sure about the validity of this but it's interesting. Franklin Gothic Medium?
I have a new blog at jim.datamantic.com where I am going to be blogging about Geneva. Probably not of interest unless you are trying to use the software. If you are there is a fairly long first post that might be helpful, although honestly I haven't even proof read it yet.
Open source perceptual hash library: pHash. Would this be interesting to run over a music library? Could it identify duplicate songs with different encodings?
Whew, that was hard. But just finished the much more robust image gallery system for Geneva. And this is what I've been waiting for to move forward with some other projects that involve uploading binary media files (although not necessarily images.) Damn that took me so long to figure out. Not the technical programming parts, but the conceptual aspects of how to make the data structure.
Holy cow, WebKit just implemented, per the HTML 5 specification, multiple attribute on file inputs (i.e. <input type="file" multiple>)
The Safari 4 beta has it already supposedly. Hallelujah! I cannot understand why this took 10 freakin' years.
That'll teach me. I just wasted 3 hours trying to fix a website that had been working perfectly. Turned out I linked to some jquery files stored at jqueryui.com (in the /latest/ directory) and they updated while I wasn't looking. I had meant to download the files and link to them locally, but in the rush of development I forgot about that. When they updated their ui plugin libraries everything stopped working with my older code. Arggg! Took forever for me to figure it out.
Cache locally Jim, cache locally!