Dave Walker’s weblog alerted me to an interesting bit or public art that has been planned for London’s Notting Hill neighborhood: a pair of very large, glowing “eco halos.” They look pretty stunning from the pictures, and I really hope they will be up in time for my March visit. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any indication of when (or even if) they are expected to be completed…
Considering that they remain a subculture, webloggers have certainly spawned an impressive arsenal of software to grease the wheels of their online self-publishing. Moveable Type seems to be the heavyweight (and I do mean heavyweight) champ among weblogging apps, but there are a number of other contenders (Dean Allen’s Textpattern, in particular, seems to be an up-and-comer).
When I began to consider reviving my own weblog several weeks ago, I knew that I would need a better content management system than the old, self-designed, PHP-based setup I once used. None of the choices really appealed to me, however, until James Duncan Davidson’s weblog turned me onto Rael Dornfest’s entry into the fray, Blosxom.
Blosxom’s killer feature, as Rael will readily tell you, is its simplicity. Installing Moveable Type entails negotiating an enthusiasm-stifling array of scripts, libraries, and configuration files, but installing Blosxom only requires that the user drop a single Perl script on a web server and edit a few global variables. Moveable Type requires a back-end database, which necessitates the use of specialized front-end editors, but Blosxom entries are simple text files stored in a directory hierarchy, and can be created and edited using any text editor. In its own minimalist way, Blosxom supports most of the features of the big boys—an RSS feed, categories, index pages, single entry permalinks, static and dynamic rendering—in a much smaller footprint.
Moreover, since Blosxom is so simple, and since it was written in Perl, it is a trivial matter for the “do it yourselfer” to add features that the standard distribution lacks. In this spirit, I offer the following, ever-so-simple Perl script, which compensates for one of my only frustrations with Blosxom: the fact that it relies on the system date and time to determine how blog entries are displayed. Nobody’s perfect, after all, and sometimes blog entries need to be edited or updated after their initial posting. This script, quite simply, makes it possible to edit the contents of a file without changing its last modified stats, so that Blosxom will continue to display the entry’s original posting date and time.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use File::stat;
$file = $ARGV[0];
if (!defined($file)) {
print “ERROR: Please enter a filename.\n”;
}
else {
$mtime = stat($file)->mtime;
system ‘vi’, $file;
utime time, $mtime, $file;
}
Simply save this in a file (call it “blosxom_edit” if you like) and run “chmod 755” on it. You should then be able to type something like “blosxom_edit BlogEntry.txt” and edit the file using vi without changing the date.
Users of Mac OS X and that most venerable of text editors, BBEdit (6.5.3 or above), may also be interested to know that they can replace the line that executes vi in the code above with the following:
system 'bbedit', '-w', $file;
Of course, this last trick will only work if you’re editing your blog entries locally on your Mac (not using telnet or something like that).
Don Wrege and I once worked together on a website called DiveIn. It was a city guide launched by US West in those heady times (1997-98) when people thought online city guides were going to be the next big thing. I was just starting college at the time, and Don, who liked to say that he was in multimedia when back when it still had a hyphen, epitomized for me the glamour of the nascent web biz. The guy had actually had a strange video of his own creation played in normal rotation on early, experimental MTV, for crying out loud (yes, kids, there was an MTV before Carson Daly)! How cool is that?
I learned a lot of things from Don, not the least of which was how to use Photoshop. If you’re reading this on the current version of my weblog (and not through some sort of RSS feed or future redesign), you should see a photo of some Trafalgar Square pigeons in the upper right corner. The duotone coloring and the fade on the left side are both tricks I learned from Don, and they make me look far more competent with Photoshop than I really am.
Don owns several domain names, but his principle one, Mediawhore.com, is by far the most appropriate to his personality. He’s not famous, exactly, but he seems to have an almost preternatural ability to get the media’s attention. When I worked with Don, Peter Boyles (a local radio talk show host here in Denver) was beating the JonBenet Ramsey drum daily, and Don was right there, supplying Boyles with hilarious parody songs that taunted John Ramsey, the police, and the entire, uptight, bourgeois bohemian enclave of Boulder, Colorado (all of whom deserved it, of course).
Lately, Don has catered to the public’s insatiable appetite for all things Osbournes by reincarnating himself as an Ozzy Osbourne impersonator. I find this highly amusing, since the whole time I worked with him I definitely felt he looked an awful lot like Ozzy. As Ozzy, he has made appearances on numerous TV talk shows (including Live with Regis and Kelly), and radio programs. On one occasion, while Don and local radio personalities Lewis & Floorwax were driving around Denver in a limo, he actually had a chance encounter with the Insane Clown Posse. This, of course, was highly ironic because there has apparently been a longstanding feud between Mr. Osbourne and said clown posse.
I haven’t seen Don for awhile now, but we do email occasionally, and you can rest assured that, whatever his next move, I will continue follow his brilliant career with the greatest of interest.
Now that I think of it, there is one more reason I decided to revive my weblog. You see, like many Mac fans, I love to play armchair Steve from time to time and make grand pronouncements about which direction the company should take (witness Jason Kottke’s recent “Sherfari” mockups, for example). And lately, I’ve been developing an idea so good that I simply can’t keep it to myself: Apple should—nay must—bring their considerable ingenuity to bear on the digital camera!
Unlike the PDA, that perennial object of Apple rumor mongering, the digital camera is a device whose time has truly come. While the PDA market has become a particularly dreary sinkhole in a tech economy already full of them (see this article if you don’t believe me), digicams have experienced rapid mainstream adoption, which is likely to only increase in the coming years.
Indeed, from the snapshot-taking tourist to the fashionista shooting the next Vogue cover, the world’s photographers have seen the future, and it is digital!
However, as a serious amateur myself, I can tell you that there is only one problem: current digital cameras (at least consumer ones) are a lot like MP3 players before the iPod. There are many very good ones (I say this as the owner of a string of Nikons), but no truly great ones. Most have very limited storage space, offer hideous user interfaces, transfer through slow USB interfaces, and produce pictures that (let’s not kid ourselves) can’t compete with a simple 35mm slide for sheer image quality.
How can Apple solve these problems, you may ask? What might an “iCam”
look like? Well, if I was Apple’s digital photography product manager (and, God willing, someday I will be :-), I would start by doing a deal with Foveon and working to secure Apple’s place as the first to market with a consumer camera incorporating that company’s X3 imaging chip. Unlike the charge coupled devices found in most digicams today, the X3 is capable of making images without resorting to interpolation of red, green, and blue values that makes today’s digital photos look so digital. Foveon’s images look remarkably natural because the X3 chip is capable of actually assigning the proper color value to each and every pixel of the image. This may sound like a simple concept, but it is very powerful and produces images that truly rival film.
The rest, I suppose, should be obvious: incorporate the same Toshiba drives from the iPod for storage, include a Firewire interface, and build in that trademark Apple UI design that no one else making digital devices seems to understand. My only other request personally would be for a top notch lens—preferably a Leica (although they’re already working with Panasonic, unfortunately). Such a package would, like the iPod, be a quantum leap beyond anything consumers have ever seen.
If Apple was to create such a device, I find it very difficult to imagine that it would not be a monster success. Apple has already discovered through the iPod how attractive the consumer electronics market can be (for gaining both market share and mindshare), and this would have the potential, in my opinion, to make the iPod look like a sideshow.
If anyone from Apple is reading, however, and all of that is not enough to convince them, I will offer only eight more words of encouragement: Foveon has already been working with Microsoft. Wouldn’t want to see the boys from Redmond and their henchmen at Flextronics produce the next iPod, now would we?
If, for some reason, you visited the Sci-Fi Hi-Fi site in the last year or so, you probably noticed the, shall we say, minimalist aesthetic of the site’s designer. Admittedly, at one point, during my long and torturous period of post-collegiate unemployment in 2001, I had some pretensions of maintaining a weblog in this space—but they didn’t last. Once I finally landed a job and began once again to code all the live-long day, the appeal of keeping up my website faded and the space fell into disuse.
Alright, I admit it, that’s bollocks: my job wasn’t the only reason I abandoned on my weblog. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I had probably started it for the wrong reasons: to impress the insular, SXSW-attending, Lomo-toting, weblog “elite,” rather than simply to record my life experiences, Pepys-like. It is one of the singular oddities of Internet life that weblogs have transformed journaling from a private, introspective pursuit into a way of attaining minor celebrity. Somewhere along the line I forgot that it was about the writing and not trying to gain cred with a bunch of dot-com losers.
All of that changes today, however—at least for me. The annus-horribilis (shut up Beavis!) that began with my unemployment is now far behind me, I’m comfortable in my job and profession, and my first independently developed software application has been an unalloyed success (thanks PodWorks users!). I just came back from MacWorld in San Francisco, and am thrilled to say I will be making a long awaited return visit to the UK and Ireland in March. I’m starting to feel like I’m back on top after a long period of decline, and, now that I’m revisiting my failed journal and the “writer” part of my personality, I’m once again firing on all cylinders.
So, watch this space.