I read Twitter primarily on the iPhone, and find tons of great links I want to read in a proper browser later on (I personally find reading most web sites on an iPhone to be more hassle than it’s worth). Perfect solution: Side-swipe an item in Tweetie and tap the star icon to mark it as a favorite. Later, visit the Favorites section at twitter.com to follow up.
Unfortunately, over the past couple of years I’ve favorited way more things than I’ll ever have time to read. As of now, I’ve got 1600 favorites waiting to be read. Ain’t never gonna happen. I declare Twitter Favorite bankruptcy! Needed a way to batch-unfavorite the whole collection, and twitter.com doesn’t provide a tool for that.
Ended up writing a script on top of the Tweepy library to get the job done:
Saw instructions for a giant bristlebot in this morning’s Instructables newsletter and immediately knew I wanted to build one with Miles. Then realized the smaller versions – based on a simple toothbrush head – were even more do-able. Decided on this improved version with antennae to help it resist falls and to bounce off walls and objects.
Parts needed:
Toothbrush head – with flat, not curved bristles
Button cell battery
Small vibrating motor from a pager or cellphone
Double-sided adhesive foam tape
Nails
Possibly a soldering iron
Radio Shack, unfortunately, doesn’t stock vibrating motors. Nor will they give you old/returned cell phones to pull apart to pull the vibrators out of – they’re all in a database, destined no doubt for China where they’ll be pulled apart by underpaid workers in toxic waste dumps. They did, however, give us a couple of flat batteries with a bit of charge left in them. Headed for MetroPCS to see if they’d give us an old phone to tear apart. Nope, same story. But a guy in line heard us, and offered to sell us his old one for $5. Bingo!
We were able to pull the vibrating motor out just in a few minutes. But it had no leads – I was going to have to solder some onto the two bare contacts. Hacksaw and sandpaper worked perfectly on the toothbrush head. Everything came together pretty easily per the Instructables instructions. We were amazed – our bristlebot worked WAY better than expected! Totally scoots along. Turns out the key to getting it to go straight and not in circles is to really bend those bristles back, so that they store and release energy in a forward direction.
Unfortunately, not everything went exactly to plan. I plugged in the soldering iron to warm up on a high-ish shelf while Miles was in another room playing with the cell phone leftovers. I went to the garage for a couple of minutes, then heard him crying loudly — he had wandered in, seen the electrical cord, gotten curious, and picked it up just to see what it was. Got burned pretty badly on his thumb and forefinger. Long period of tears, ice, ibuprofen, burn cream, and of course, ice cream. And of me feeling like a total bad dad for not warning him about it. I assumed he wouldn’t be in that room, and assumed he wouldn’t see if it he did come in. And got bitten by my assumptions. Felt horrible for the little guy. He’s doing OK, and we had a gas playing with the bristlebot at the dinner table.
After recently coming across a small package of Cheerios labeled “Donut Seeds,” decided to see whether Miles would go for it. He was skeptical, but yep – he planted a few in the back yard! I forgot about it until a few days later when he asked “Daddy were you joking about the donut seeds?” I was dodgy, and told him to keep watering them. Then, today, called him to the back yard, where I had stuck a bamboo shoot in the ground and slid a donut down over a branch.
When he came out, his eyes went wide. Took a full minute for him to reconcile what his senses told him with what he knew was possible and what was not. He figured it out of course, and enjoyed the heck out of his donut. Should have tried this when he was five instead of seven.
It’s sometimes said that Kauai is the last remaining vestige of “the old Hawaii” or “the real Hawaii” – the last bastion of island life as it was before much of it was taken over by hotel chains and tourism. Kauai isn’t without its share of commercialism, but it’s true that it’s almost entirely free of high-rise hotels, and that natural wonders abound.
At the same time, some of your old-school stereotypes about Hawaii just aren’t going to come true. Visitors are no longer greeted on the tarmac with a flower lei around the neck, you aren’t going to hear ukulele concerts or witness spontaneous hula dances on every corner, and luaus are no longer organic affairs where people sit around on the beach sipping Mai Tais and picking meat off a pit-grilled pig, scooping three-finger poi with bare hands.
To be fair, your visions of stereotypical Hawaiian nature are still real, while the stereotypes you may hold of Hawaiian culture are probably not.
View Kauai in a larger map The two blue marker points show where we stayed on our two-week Kauai adventure.
Kauai is encircled – for the most part – by a single road running through a dozen or so major towns. You can drive around the entire island in a couple of hours (note that “driving through” does not equal “exploring,” and that driving the outer rim will only get you to the beach towns, not to the juicy jungles that comprise Kauai’s interior). I say “for the most part” because the insane terrain of the Napali coast has proven impenetrable to road builders – it’s simply not possible to build a drivable road through the mountains of the northwest coast.
You won’t find the “real” Kauai by hanging around in the downtown areas. But if you make an effort to get even a little off the beaten path, you will find yourself surrounded by nature at its most powerful. Kauai is a volcanic wonderland of dense jungle, incredible ocean life, succulent wild fruit, and loose chickens.
Throw yourself into the environment, and you won’t be able to avoid swimming in impossibly blue/green waters, inhaling the cleanest air your nostrils have ever encountered (remember you’re surrounded on all sides by thousands of miles of wild Pacific). You will find that the Aloha spirit is omnipresent and real. You will find yourself slowing down, being reminded why you’re walking this earth, and what nature at its most raw can do for your soul.
In June/July 2010, we spent two weeks in Kauai, staying in two different houses with two different families, in two very different environments. In the end, I shot more than a thousand photos. Thought I’d turn all my vacation notes and photos into a quick blog entry on return; the process ended up taking a couple of days — which was OK since I needed that time just to transition back to “real” life and get the hang of cold weather and the absence of snorkeling grounds outside my back door. Editing the photos down to a “mere” 470 and filling in the details from my notes turned out to be the perfect obsessive/compulsive transitional gig.
Photos: Here’s the Flickr standard photo set view, but much better is the Flickr lightbox view. I’ve also embedded a slideshow version below, but for best results dim the lights, put some Hawaiian music on the hi-fi, and put your browser in full-screen mode.
Note: I lost my camera on the very last day — turned out I left it under the seat in the rental car — so the set isn’t quite complete. Fortunately I had been backing up the camera’s contents to iPhoto throughout the trip, so had an almost complete set. Super-lucky news is that Budget Rent-a-Car in Lihue found the camera and is returning it to me; I’ll add the final images when it arrives. Thanks Budget! Read the rest of this entry »
Wondering lately where I want to land on the spectrum between convenience and quality when comparing an ultra-portable Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS (Digital Elph) and a Canon Rebel EOS. The PowerShot is the size of a deck of cards and weighs ounces. The Rebel (a DSLr camera) easily weighs five times more and has much more bulk – it’s not going to fit neatly into a belt holster that doesn’t get in your way while hiking or biking. I’m not eager to have several pounds dangling from my neck, but at the same time, wouldn’t mind stepping up my game quality-wise in the photo department. Neither camera at my disposal is the latest model in its respective line, but I assumed the Rebel would take far better pictures by default.
Decided to do an informal test to find out. Running both cameras in fully automatic mode (since that’s what I use most often, and since it’s the only way to compare fairly), I took a handful of shots in the back yard, attempting to make the images as close to identical as possible. Tried to get a range of shots in full sun, mixed shadow, and shadow. Included one flash shot and one macro shot as well.
One significant difference not accounted for here is the fact that the Rebel has a full range of manual options that the PowerShot doesn’t have. On the other hand, the PowerShot has a quite good movie mode, which the Rebel lacks completely.
The results weren’t nearly as clear cut as I expected. Comparing the images below, I have a fairly clear preference for one of the columns, but prefer a few images from the opposite column. Can you tell which column is which camera? Which column do you prefer overall?
Half a year ago, I got this crazy idea to build a site where people could log and record all the things they wanted to accomplish before they died. But more than just simple list-making, I wanted to make it easy for people to tell stories about their goals, and to add images and video. I wanted to let people “follow” other people’s lists, to receive email when their friends accomplished their goals, to start discussions about getting the most out of life. I wanted it to be a place where people could get inspired by the goals of others, and to easily make copies of those goals in their own bucketlists.
I had a pre-existing love affair with the Python-based Django framework – there was never a question of what platform to build on. But no matter how good the platform, the devil’s in the details. Read the rest of this entry »
For as long as I can remember, every discussion I’ve had with Libertarians ultimately goes to the same syllogism:
All government is a form of force.
All force is bad.
Therefore all government is bad.
I question line #2 of the syllogism, and therefore don’t agree with the conclusion. Why is all force bad? Don’t we need force to protect us? Most Libertarians agree that we need a police force to protect us from bad guys. But we need protection from more bad elements than just bank robbers.
Corporations, driven by the desire to maximize profit (i.e. greed) place financial goals above all others. Left unchecked, they deforest continents, exploit workers, spew pollution, sell unsafe goods, and exploit loopholes in financial markets. Lax regulation led to the recent banking crisis and the BP oil spill. Child labor in unregulated 3rd world countries continues to be a problem supported by our free market, which is far more concerned with cheap jeans and TVs than it is with the welfare of humans. A world where corporations are unregulated is not a world we would want to live in.
It would be awesome if there were an alternative to regulation (force). It would be wonderful if the free market could control the power of greed, but history shows us that it does not… mostly because consumers either don’t know or don’t care what they’re supporting with their purchases. Corporations will work tirelessly to cut corners and find loopholes in order to maximize profit at the expense of the interests of the general population. Not even Adam Smith believed that an unregulated free market could work to the good of the general population.
We need to know that our citizenry are educated; therefore we need force to make sure all of our children go to a satifactory school. I would prefer if force weren’t needed for that, but it is. To keep our population healthy (and from going broke), we need protection from the exploitative practices of health insurers, so we must apply force in two vectors – we must limit what insurers can charge, and we must force our population to have insurance of some kind. Insurance companies have shown us what they’re made of — their interests are personal greed, not public health.
Without government “force” we would have no National Parks — all of that land would have been razed and populated long ago. Without government “force,” we end up with broken systems spiralling out of control at the expense of the people. What alternative to government “force” do we have?
Of course government force can be a dangerous thing too – it needs checks and balances to keep it fair and safe. But our representative form of government, and our system of checks and balances, ensures that ultimately WE ARE the government. We can remove entities that don’t serve us well. We get to look inside of government and control its workings. We don’t have that option with the free market, since we can’t look inside of corporations, can’t take control of them. Healthy governance is open and transparent in ways that the “free” market will never be.
Libertarians, help me out here. When you trot out the old “But government is a form of force” argument, what exactly do you mean to convey? That it’s OK to let greed drive our world rather than common sense? Do you really believe that free market forces can protect us and our land/water from the power amassed by corporations? Do you really want to live in a world with no government?
Miles and I have a perfect track record so far at Maker Faire, attending every year since its inception in 2006. This year was our fifth time out, though things took a slightly different turn this year. Rather than it being father/son bonding time, my extended family trekked out to the Bay Area for the experience. Corralling nine people meant a bit less explore time, so we saw less of the cornucopia, but what we did see was amazing, as always.
Highlights: RC-controlled neon land sharks chasing kids around in the dark. Tall bikes everywhere, including one with “roots” that could be deployed at the flip of a lever so the rider could stop at lights without toppling over. A grand steampunk calliope with half-sawn tubas, whoopee whistles, cuckoos, and tubes galore honking out a rendition of Yellow Submarine. The giant Tesla coils throwing lightning, but this time generating music at the same time (remember Hot Buttered’s “Popcorn?” Imagine that set to explosive blue electricity). A guy playing drums, didgeridoo and bass at the same time. 6-ft.-wide plates of paella. The life-size mousetrap, as always.
Unfortunately, the Wooden Bikes crowd was nowhere to be seen, and the Cyclecide crew’s human-powered carnival rides were shut down for a break when we arrived. Still, Maker Faire remains “Burning Man for families” – an explosion of creativity and weld joints like no other. Won’t be the last.
Took fewer photos than usual, but managed to put together an OK Flickr set.
Back in 2006, I posted a digitized copy of a 1950s Coast Guard hazing ritual on YouTube. In July 2008, the video suddenly became unavailable, with no reason given as to why, other than “Violation of terms of service.” I suspected that the video may have angered veterans who felt that the video depicted the military in an unflattering light, and that they had flagged it enough times that it was removed. I blogged about the takedown here.
A few nights ago, the Knight Digital Media Center (where I work) had as a guest speaker YouTube’s news manager Olivia Ma, who delivered a fantastic presentation. I took the opportunity to talk to her and try to find out what was behind the takedown, and whether anything could be done. In my view, the video was far more tame than tons of stuff on YouTube, and had historical/documentary relevance as well.
Ma took up the issue with her team and today let me know that the video had been reinstated, noting that it “qualified as EDSA (educational, documentary, scientific or artistic).”
While the version I put up on Vimeo in the interim is of higher quality, I’m happy to again be able to embed the YouTube version:
I’m now trying to learn what I can about any official appeals process for this kind of situation.
Building a site that needs to accept formatted user input? There’s no way you’re going to let random users input any old HTML – you’d open the door to all kinds of cross-site-scripting attacks and other nastiness. Nor can you just filter out the tags you consider dangerous – that road is fraught with peril. The only solution is to white-list a small subset of tags and unceremoniously drop the rest.
There are two layers to the problem – how to support formatted text on the front-end, and how to process submitted text on the back-end.
For the front-end, some developers are drawn to the Markdown syntax – a supposedly user-friendly wiki-like syntax that can be re-rendered as safe HTML. But while Markdown may look friendly to developers, it doesn’t to normal users – trust me on this. Even for tech-savvy users, Markdown requires that you place syntax instructions on your site (inelegant). A better solution is to use a rich text editor for the web, like TinyMCE or WYMEditor.
Ever notice that you often see rich text editors in content management systems run by trusted users, but seldom on public-facing web pages? That’s because it’s tricky to do securely, and without giving users enough rope to hang themselves formatting-wise.
With a bit of configuration though, you can deploy public-facing rich textareas securely, allowing only the input of tags you specify. But you can’t stop there – all the user has to do is disable Javascript in the browser to bypass your rich text editor. You must process submitted text on the back-end with the same set of rules in your view logic.
Miles and I spent Saturday building a PVC catapult for hucking pinecones. Started with inspiration from some YouTube videos, but scaled up and modified designs we found there. Capable of throwing a pine cone around 45 feet with a single bungie! Spent around $25 on parts. Build time ~3 hours. Considering adding a second bungie for extra distance, but don’t want to make it too strenuous for the kiddos.
Working with PVC is great – cuts like butter with a chopsaw, pieces slip together like Legos. In fact, the fit is snug enough that we’re not gluing it for now -nice to be able to disassemble for storage.
Finding the perfect throwing cup was the biggest challenge. Considered sewer pipe caps, chopped down paint mixing buckets, and tupperware, before deciding on this perfectly sized electrical junction box. Unfortunately it had a metal plate riveted to the back, which I had to hacksaw off – easily the hardest part of the build.
See full-size images and captions at the Flickr set (captions not available in embedded slideshow).
Shot some video too, but did that dumb thing where you record when you think you’re paused and pause when you think you’re recording. D’oh! Will try the video again later.
Catapult is available for rental for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs.
I just did something really hard – called up the San Francisco Chronicle and canceled the home subscription we’ve kept up for more than a decade. Working at a journalism school, I know exactly how difficult things are for newspapers these days, and how there is no online revenue model available that comes anywhere close to replacing revenue from print subscriptions. I really don’t want to pull my financial support, but the print edition just doesn’t make sense for our lifestyles anymore.
I’ve got nothing against the Chronicle. I’ve enjoyed it for years. Granted, we generally only read it in 5 or 10-minute skim-bursts in the mornings, but I always enjoyed those sessions. Unfortunately, over the past few months, we’ve stopped the skimming too. The sad truth is that right now I’m looking across the room at a week-old stack of unopened newspapers on the kitchen table. We haven’t even taken the rubber bands off a week’s worth of great journalism.
So where has that time gone? Mornings are a whirlwind of pushups and smoothie making, combing the boy’s hair and packing his lunch, going over the day’s plans. And then there’s the morning email – it usually takes close to 45 minutes just to parse all the stuff that comes in overnight, every night. And part of that email time includes skimming the daily email digests I get from NY Times, Washington Post, and the LA Times. It’s not like I’m not getting any news. Just that my lifestyle lends itself so much better to reading news on the computer than in print.
On top of that, my Twitter addiction has made a huge impact. Stories that really matter to me (rather than to the editors at the Chron) find their way to the top through the organic bubbling process of the hive mind. As much as I hate to admit it, I find that spending 15 minutes on Twitter is way more efficient at surfacing great daily reading than any single newspaper (and yes, some of the articles I end up reading will be at the web sites of mainstream media houses). In effect, I’m subscribed to the whole internet – why do I need a dead tree version of just one city’s paper?
Finally, there’s the iPad. We don’t own one – just borrowed one from work a few times. But from those tests, it became quickly apparent that the iPad could give us the best of both worlds. If we could replace all of our print subscriptions (oh yeah – there are five magazine subscriptions in this house that are also going mostly unread) with iPad versions, we’d feel less guilty about the wasted paper, have less clutter, and (ideally) pay much less. We’ll see how that plan pans out.
Chronicle – I love you and support you in principle. But it no longer makes sense to support you with our wallets. So long and thanks for the good times.
Quite a few re-usable Django apps and Python modules come with documentation in text files ending with a .rst extension. The formatting in them is odd, but they’re more-or-less readable.
To this day, I haven’t encountered a single package that explained why docs were formatted this way. I knew there had to be an explanation, but hadn’t gotten around to looking it up, and basically just waded through. Finally went looking for an answer today. Turns out .rst files use a simple markup syntax called restructured text and you can generate nicely formatted HTML (and other documentation formats) out of them if you have python’s sphinx module installed. For the benefit of future googlers, here’s how to get up and running quickly:
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$ pip install sphinx
$ cd docs
$ mkdir out
$ sphinx-build . out
Now take a look in the “out” directory and you’ll find the same set of files as a collection of handsomely formatted HTML docs.
Sphinx goes pretty deep, and I’m looking forward to exploring it for future documentation projects. For now I’m just happy to have an alternative to squinting.
The world has changed since you last rode a pogo stick. Namely, you’ve gotten bigger – too big to ride the spring-loaded stick that carried you down the block between ages six and twelve. But good news: A few companies are making pogos re-engineered for grown-ups, so you can recapture that marvelous elastic bounce. Even cooler – they’re not spring-loaded anymore – modern pogos are brought to you pneumatically, with cylinders of air that can be pressurized to work with your body weight and desired boing-ratio.
Lucked out at a picnic in the woods today when one of the guys pulled a Vurtego from the bed of his pickup and went for it. After watching for a while, I asked for a turn. Here are the results of my first three attempts. It had been 35 years since I’d been on one, but like riding a bicycle, the muscle memory never really leaves your body.
Yesterday I got to spend some quality time with an Apple iPad, and quickly discovered that I could not log into the App Store to purchase software. The message I got was “This Apple ID has been disabled for security reasons.” But I purchase content through iTunes regularly on the desktop and iPhone. What’s up? Googling for the error message revealed mixed results. Apple’s official knowledge base article suggested that this can happen if you enter the wrong password too many times. I knew that wasn’t the problem. Then I discovered an article at Redmond Pie talking about how people were being banned from access to the App Store when their usernames included certain “suspicious-looking” strings. My real last name is “Hacker” and I’ve occasionally had trouble signing up for certain services because of it (my poor Dad can’t get a Facebook account to this day – they just ignore his signup attempts). I put two and two together and concluded that I was being banned on account of my name.
Spent half an hour on the phone with Apple, getting bounced from rep to rep, trying to get to the bottom of it. They re-set my account, but the problem remained. Then I realized what I had been doing wrong. Back in the day, Apple services took single-word usernames, like “shacker,” which I had long used to log into the Apple developer center, support forums, and other services. At a certain point, Apple converted these IDs to require a login in the form of an email address. I had simply forgotten this and was trying to use my old Apple ID rather than the email address associated with my Apple account.
The fact that Apple threw this confusing dialog, combined with the blog post I had found referencing hackers being locked out, combined with my previous experience being unable to sign up for certain services, all conspired to make me think I was being blocked because of my name. The truth turned out to be much simpler.
The little music writing project I run with some friends, Stuck Between Stations, is now officially three years old. Until yesterday, we were still running with the original design, left over from a time when narrow content columns were in vogue (usability studies still say 420px is the ideal content column width for maximum readability). Trouble is, we run a lot of embedded video on the site, and YouTube/Vimeo have increasingly been defaulting to much wider video dimensions since more and more people have high-resolution displays. Web developers started assuming a baseline pixel resolution of 1024 a few years ago.
But simply widening the old design wasn’t really an option, since it all hung off a photographic banner image that came with a WordPress theme, and so couldn’t be altered. Decided to chuck it all and start from scratch. Chose the Titan theme as a starting point and went from there. Dug up shots of old radio dials from Google Images and pulled a new banner together, keeping only the broadcast tower from the original design.
Was able to run a series of search/replace operations in the database to increase the size of all the embedded videos already on the site. Interesting to see how many different aspect ratios we had accrued without even trying. Also interesting to see how many of the videos had been “Removed due to violation of terms of service.” Seems like the big publishers have been digging deep in YouTube’s bowels to find and skewer copyright violations, even if they do provide free publicity.
Added a bunch of new features while I was working:
Pretty happy with the results, though the banner still feels a bit crude to me. We’re no Flavorwire, but without a few dozen more unpaid writers and some Sand Hill investment, this is about as good as it gets for a while. Would love a plug if you’ve got one to give!
First couple of years at Marine World, Miles wouldn’t go near anything resembling a roller coaster. This year (age 7) it was a whole different story – ended up doing six trips on The Cobra, each one an adventure in unbridled joy. Reminds you why it’s so great to be a kid. Or to be near one.
… by acting like him for the first 15 minutes of recent show. This kind of brilliance knows no bounds… and it’s also the best possible way to make a point that so desperately needs making. Go full-screen on this one, you won’t regret it.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote or offer advice about my first pair of glasses. To be honest, the process was a bit of a rush job, because I wanted to have them in time for SXSW. Not that I like to rush decisions like this, but my distance vision was blurring out fast, and I knew I’d be spending a lot of time in big halls looking at far-away projection screens. In the end, I’m glad I did. I had no idea just how blurry my vision had gotten until I was able to A/B them in a real-world setting. I think I honestly thought that projection screens were inherently blurry – classic “boiling frog” situation.
As for the for the frame choice, it was tough – it really was. There were a lot of options I would have been happy with. But in the end, I defer most aesthetic decisions regarding my person to my wife, who knows these things. Her choice matched the choice of an artist friend of hers whose taste I also trust, and to be honest, this was the one pair that just felt right from the first moment I put them on.
It’s not all peaches and cream though – it’s been a mixed experience. Distance is fantastic. But these are bifocals, and that part isn’t cutting it. The close-range reading thing doesn’t focus until the very, very bottom of the lens, and then I have to tip my head way back to make it work. I’d rather just hold the page farther away than deal with that. And at the computer, where I spend most of my working hours, things are in way better focus with them off than on. So I’ll have to make a return visit to see about working stuff out.
I have a new-found respect and sympathy to everyone who’s dealt with glasses all their lives. I never really stopped to think what a pain in the neck this whole glasses thing is, or just how lucky I was. Ah well, I’m here now. Age stinks.
Jennifer Maestre creates incredible sculptures out of pencils and nails, inspired by the form and function of the sea urchin. Not quite like anything you’ve ever seen. I love the idea of taking things that are inherently linear and creating something so distinctly non-linear. Gorgeous.
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 panel discussion Is Canvas the End of Flash?. This debate is really heating up as more browsers gain Canvas support and sentiment seems to be rapidly turning against Flash. But how feasible is it to consider the canvas element a real Flash replacement? Five panelists hashed it out, with excellent points on all sides. Very useful session. Read the rest of this entry »
Loose notes from SXSW 2010 session Prototyping Web Apps – Nobody Loves a Wireframe, with Darren Delaye and Michael Leggett of Google. I’m more of a back-end guy than a designer, but with an increasing interest in design considerations and usability. This became one of the most useful sessions of the conference for me. Read the rest of this entry »
Wasn’t sure what to expect from this session, which had no title and no description. But a few weeks ago, the photo professor at the J-School handed me a copy of Larnier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget, a sort of backlash manifesto against the digital age. Well, that’s not entirely fair — it’s not so much a backlash as it is a reasoned, thoughtful wander through some of the gotchas and backwaters of the digital age. Larnier talks about dignity, culture, black boxes, the history of our relationship to technology, mean-ness in online communities, and everything in between. His talk was as meandering as the book is, but inspirational and amazing at every turn. Though difficult to encapsulate, Larnier and his thread is something I feel everyone and tech should be listening to.
Unfortunately, the “R.I.P. part of the session title was never addressed, nor were any of Drupal’s core shortcomings or architectural annoyances. This was unfortunately just a 30-minute informercial for Drupal.
Would really have preferred to have heard Dries talk about plans to address Drupal’s deep archtitectural problems like lack of object orientation, lack of an ORM, lack of MVC, and annoying templating system. Took notes anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday I got to spend some quality time with an Apple iPad, and quickly discovered that I could not log into the App Store to purchase software. The message I got was “This Apple ID has been disabled for security reasons.” But I purchase content through iTunes regularly on the desktop and iPhone. What’s up? Googling for the error message revealed mixed results. Apple’s official 
Loose notes from the SXSW 2010 session 
