Links from 2009

"Partners have little or no incentive even to investigate non-fee-producing options. Therefore, open source or lower cost, more out-of-the-box CMS solutions are rarely if ever offered as possible solutions. In fact, my experience found that more times than not, the Big 5 partner already knew exactly which CMS solution she was going to pitch before she walked through the client’s door. This was something that never ceased to amaze me, but the lesson here is to beware of software recommendations from any Big 5 firm." No shit.

"A digital audio workstation: a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment." $60 for the discounted license - bargain.

Playful write-up from Edge.

In addition to the standard CPU, GPU, VRAM, FPS, Disk and Network info, atMonitor allows interaction with processes, setting up triggers, logging, purging RAM and more.

"Even today, people will cite the ancient, irrelevant rule of The Fold as if it's still law. In fact, I was just talking to a friend of mine who expressed his frustration at dealing with a middle manager who was using the "content must be above the fold" rule as a weapon, and demanding that all page content appear above the fold. It's terribly misguided."

Always do good things, never do bad things.

Grrr. Cheaper than buying designers rulers.

A utility-belt library for Javascript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in Javascript objects. It's the tie to go along with jQuery's tux.

I understand that there are several local variations on this delicacy of British cuisine, I'd like to hear about the individual variations that existed in your collective recollections. How do you remember the full fry up? And when typically was it served? (day of week, time of year, specific point in parental hangover) And any other details you feel like sharing.

A not-for-profit company helping the music industry cut its greenhouse gas emissions and create a low carbon creative future.

Allows you to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page.

Identifies and blocks malicious activity, including blog/wiki spam, e-mail address harvesting, automated cracking attempts, and more. It does all of this looking only at the HTTP request headers; for POST data, the content of the spam is not analyzed at all.

About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues.

The as yet unreleased iPhone app is called Breadcrumbs and it will give consumers access to information about grocery food items. The app will be able to scan barcodes and deliver a summary of the ingredients in a food item, along with when it was manufactured.

Recorded as part of One & Other. This was Anthony Gormley’s piece where a member of the British public would have one hour on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square to do whatever they wanted. I decided to film a music video.

My hour was between 2 and 3pm on October the 2nd 2009, at the beginning of the Divali celebrations. The lip-synching isn’t bad considering I was listening to a different piece of music at the time.

"If you like Andre Michelle's ToneMatrix or the Tenori-On, then you will absolutely love this app." Spending way too much time with this. Wish you could chain sections together.

Hosted @font-face. For cash, of course.

Good and bad things about the WebKit within an iPhone app.

"An HTTP viewer and debugger that integrates with IE and Firefox to provide seamless HTTP and HTTPS monitoring without leaving the browser window." Win only, basic (free) and pro (pay) versions.

The PIAS Entertainment Group, which represents 200 independent labels, has signed a global licensing and marketing deal with the online video giant that will mean artists and their record companies get a share of revenues from adverts shown alongside their works. The deal covers both official audio and video releases as well as user-generated content.

HNews allows publishers to easily attach machine-readable news semantics to content on the web. Today, the AP announced the completion of the first draft of hNews. In addition, TownNews, announced that is will support hNews in its BLOX content management system, which is being used by over 1,500 newspapers in the US.

Social capital is an abstract measure that wraps up how many people you know, the information flow in your network, how many people owe you favours, that kind of thing.

A new cocktail bar and lounge at 69 Colebrooke Row, Islington, London N1 8AA, just round the corner from The Charles Lamb.

Breaking the back button, proposed fix.

I’m being cyberstalked by a paranoid existentialist chalkboard.

Ouch. "My first piece of advice is to avoid using @font-face unless it’s critical to the page. The primary reason for this advice is that font files block rendering of the entire page in IE until they’re done downloading. Stylesheets also have this problem. But stylesheets provide styling for all aspects of the entire page, whereas font files only add one thing - a custom font."

Bottom line: the font sucks. This should not be a surprise. Most free fonts do. Don’t get me wrong. There are a few great free fonts out there. But 98% of free fonts suck badly, and maybe about 20% of typically-priced retail fonts suck badly, so set your expectations appropriately.

Second-hand furniture shops in and around Hackney.

A workshop and performance. It involves people from all walks of life making electronic sounds with one another, out in the world and in the open air.

If One & Other is an image of British democratic life in our time, it is a pessimistic one. It is a portrait of a society in which people will try anything to get their voices heard, even stand on a plinth, but where no one can hear what they're saying.

"Last month, stretches of the river Lee were included on the list of 117 "bodies of water" across England and Wales that, according a new European rating system, are now classified as "bad". In total, just five of the 6,114 rivers surveyed received the "pristine" classification; three-quarters failed to attain the "good" grading."

"A unit testing framework/tool for cascading stylesheets that allows you to write tests for you webpages to pass." Early days.

Far from delivering the look BoingBoing was going for, @font-face fell flat on its face; when the changes went live Tuesday, not only were the fonts Boing Boing wanted to use not legally available for the web, the font it settled on — specifically BPreplay — ended up looking terrible for most users.

Django, 5 weeks, 30k pages of content transitioned. Impressive.

Just like modular synthesizers, people connect with each other in order to achieve diverse objectives. In Voltage, robots, half-human and half-synthesizer, powered by a huge amount of energy, connect to each other in an electric and chaotic trance.

Today's big news is that Amazon are going to start selling Kindle ebook readers world-wide. Let me explain why I think this is very bad news for writers.

"[Imaginary Landscape] performed a comparison of an 11-field Contact Us form with a 4-field Contact Us form. They found contact form conversions increased 120% when the number of fields was reduced from 11 to 4 (a 64% decrease)." Not surprising but metrics are useful.

What if there was some shift in emphasis from designing for the building, to designing for the community, or the wider urban space? If everyone could agree just to turn the lighting down a bit, or even a lot, night-time city centres could become much less competitive, noisy places in terms of ambient light.

Wheel of Stars

“A musical clock made of stars. To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things. I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock – it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate.”

"All 10 mobile WebKits I’ve identified so far are subtly or wildly different." Bugger.

A TubeSat is designed to function as a Basic Satellite Bus or as a simple stand-alone satellite. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite's structural components, safety hardware, solar panels, batteries, power management hardware and software, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer, and the required programming tools. With these components alone, the builder can construct a satellite that puts out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver.

"How big an impact does performance optimization have on the business metrics of a typical media or e-commerce site?" Potentially quite a lot, which is why we keep banging on about it.