.Bard

Sorry, had to get in on the fun.

Attention! Nerd alert! This post is almost strictly intended as a write-up of some recent web code stuff I did, so if you're here for my normal ridiculous stream of cat / chocolate / kid pichurs or rantings, you may be left wanting:

I haven't posted code here in ages. That's a shame, actually, because I love sharing my code so people can school me on how much better it could be.

Read the rest of this entry »

I apologize for the near incoherence of this. I'm suffering one of my classic bouts of insomnia, and my penchant for tangents and over-punctuating tends to be a little overwhelming when I'm like this. I wasn't going to post this tonight but I'm afraid that if I read it in the light of day, I'll never post it. Screw that.

Part 1:

(Warning, unapologetically high whinge factor in some places.)

So, I had kind of a shit day working.

I recently blogged about the fact that I'm now freelancing. How's it going? Not TOO badly, but it definitely could be better. Let's recap:

I started working on my first site whilst I was still employed with the crappy day job. Site went live in plenty of time, even though it was kind of a pain in the ass, working day and night. No worries. I knew it couldn't last, and a little hard work and lack of sleep never hurt a geek (particularly a career sysadmin nn/ ).

A week later, a whole bunch of changes come through for said site, which ended up amounting to an almost complete site redesign. Fun. The first time around I had taken over for another developer who just couldn't ship the bloody thing, so a major part of the work was that I had to get the site fixed, and ship it in a very contracted time frame. To make up for the lack of time, I wound up papering over cracks instead of actually fixing a lot of things. This, of course, was extremely stupid, and came back to bite me in the ass when I had to completely rework the site and deal not only with some of the awful stuff that I didn't find the first time, but also deal with the hacks I put in place the first time around.

Sigh. So I wound up writing a new template from scratch (this is Joomla, btw) to help avoid some of the snafu's from the original site. This helped a lot, and the redesign got done fairly quickly, although still late (I was still working full time for the crappy day job then too). Luckily, I was able to maintain good communication with my client, and the lateness was not a big deal. All was well.

Straight away after that, I did another site -- same client, different sub client (client of my client, long story) -- which has yet to launch, due to some other difficulties, which is another post (or novel) in itself. The past few days, however, I've been working on a new site, for the same "sub client" as the original site.

This new site is much simpler than the last couple I've done, and in fact it really only involves re-using some custom Joomla code -- nothing fancy, just a couple of views and a slight plugin modification -- that I wrote for the original site, along with a new template to suit the new site. Sounded easy, and it has been easy, aside from the fact that they want the site up yesterday -- don't they all -- but they can't give my client a list of req's, only keep asking for a few more things every day. So, it's made the hours go WAY over my original quote. Luckily my client realizes all this, and is cool about that.

Today, though, sucked it hard. I ran into a considerable problem, which cost me a few hours (which is a lot of time in freelance time). I was suddenly, around 4pm, just when I was starting to THINK I might be done working before dinner time (HAH!) got sent a link to a 50M mp3 file, hosted on one of those idiotic "file sharing" services (y'know, the ones where you have to "wait 60 seconds for your download to begin!"). The site I'm building is a site for local DJ's and people who like to go see local DJ's -- I've requested free tickets -- and the mp3 is apparently a full live set (I have yet to listen to it). So, I labored through the bizarre sequence of clicks to get to the file (someone please explain to me why this is a good idea for these services, is it so they can scroll through more ridiculous porn ads??) and finally got the file to my machine. Then, the good part: I needed to get the file to the server where the client hosts all their customer sites. I knew this would be a challenge, because of the extreme suckitude of their server, but wow.. This went well beyond anything I could have imagined.. The FTP server doesn't support multiple streams, the FTP server doesn't support resume, and, to make all this really interesting, the stupid upload dies repeatedly at the 100% mark. Yay. Tried several different clients, a few different methods. Yada yada. 4 hours go by!!

Finally, over a cigarette -- where all good geek ideas, peace treaties, and movie scripts are born -- I thought of an actual solution. I plucked it from the tree of inspiration.. (read: pulled it out of my ass): If their server is too feeble to let me upload a fucking 50MB file (y'know, less storage than your average remote control) then why am I repeatedly trying to make it so do? Host it elsewhere. But where? My web server? Fuck that. With my luck, they'll actually promote this stupid site and I'll wind up serving 5000 hits an hour of this bloody file. So.. What? File sharing site? Not bloody likely, try streaming a file from one of them (I actually did try, I had to make sure). Then, in desperation, I did it; I searched google for a solution. I should have just done it straight away, I know.. Shut up. Anyway, I quickly found ourmedia.org. It's pretty cool. The thing I really liked is that they have an upload client for Mac. Plus, I liked their site design. I don't trust flashy websites (and my threshold is fairly low, twitter even bugs the shit out of me some days). Somehow a simple, functional website is something I find trustworthy, but, I digress.. The funny / best thing about their download client, though, is that is also has an option to upload things to another site, other than ourmedia.org, which brings us to..

Part 2.

In this age of social-media-2.0-ajax-restful-web-servicey-RoR-googley-goodness (I know that made no sense, and is absurd, that's the point) we (read: "I', and, yes, I reserve the right to project my stupidity, among other things, on to you, dear reader) tend to forget the simple things. The sites and services that, while possibly not buzz-worthy, are still doing good, useful, amazing work out there, in many cases -- and this is one of them -- for absolutely nothing. This gem of a "web .1" site, has been quietly sitting there doing it's thing -- including such services as "the wayback machine" -- for 12 years (see: this link from the world's most reliable source of absolute truth) and we -- that's me, and, by extension, you -- completely forgot about it. In case you haven't guessed, or clicked the link back there, I'm talking about the Internet Archive (IA, for short). How we -- Ok, fine, "I" -- could forget about this is beyond me. The IA in short -- see the link above for the long version -- houses any and all sorts of "free" content (as in, publicly available, non-copyrighted -- they by the way do a much better job of explaining their mission than me). This was the perfect solution to my problem and, thanks to the handy-dandy upload client from ourmedia.org, and the fact that my client only wants to share live, non-copyrighted material on their site, makes this solution a perfect fit. I can easily handle the uploads for them, and thanks to a little joomla view I wrote, the links to their mp3's will automagically be displayed using the lovely 1pixelout media player. Awesome (well, let's hope the client think so, they're having a look at it tomorrow).

So, now my mind is reeling with possibilities. How, oh how, can I, we, you extend and make user of this resource in our daily lives and code.. My mind is still boggling, and I haven't really had a chance to brainstorm effectively (plus, I'm friggin tired) so I'll mainly leave the question open, with a couple of small exceptions of things you really should check out on the site if you haven't already:

• The aforementioned wayback machine. See apple.com as it appeared in the imac era, see sites you yourself developed many moons ago. SO much geeky fun.
• Their amazing library of freely available music (including a lot of cool bootlegs)

There's a lot more, and I wouldn't spoil it.

For homework, go to the site and find something you like. I can almost guarantee that if you haven't visited before you'll find something amazing. Also, tell me if you have any cool ideas of how to "wrap" the groovy content on the IA into something that is buzz worthy!

Dairy Milk, baby.

Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster

I love dairy milk chocolate. It's 3am, I seem to be code-blocked, and I need a grin. Chocolate and a cigarette. Yeah, baby.

Jack in a box. Really.

Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster

The simple pleasures of a cat

The ancient shrine of secret wisdom.

Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster

I <3 my coffee maker.

And, this is what comes out:

http://brad.globeproductions.com.au/twitter_side_down

This may be the most pointless web app, in history, second only to the original app from whence I stole the javascript for the upside-downey-ness (at least mine posts updates to twitter! ).

I wrote it as an exercise in teaching myself to use the twitter API in PHP apps, which turned out to be ridiculously easy (thanks to this link). But, who knows, it may turn out to be a little fun as well.

Anyway, if you’re crazy enough to try it or, like me, want to create a new account and have some upside-down fun with twitter, go for your life!

Smoke break with the dogs

Originally uploaded by bugeyedmonster

Fan boy alert! The following post is a really disgusting ode to a web celeb. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, it just means I don’t wanna hear from anyone about what a fan boy I am. I acknowledge this fact, and I’m cool with it so... Nyah
Just a quick note to express how much I really admire @garyvee. I love his work on WLTV, the way it opens up the world of wine to the uninitiated and continues the education of the slightly educated (me, for instance). I dig his social media advocacy, and the way I learn something new from him almost every time he turns on his web cam. And, as of tonight, I completely DIG the fact that he actually appreciates the accolades and attention heaped on him by we teeming masses.

He sent out a tweet letting asking for people to add WLTV badges to their sites/blogs/etc and, partially because I thought it was a great idea, and partially because I’ve been working for around ten hours and wanted the distraction, I had it done in a couple minutes flat. Straight away, I sent him an email, with a link (as requested). I figured that with the deluge of emails like mine he must be getting I wouldn’t hear anything back for quite some time (if at all), but imagine my surprise when BANG less than 5 minutes later I had a personal reply from the man himself.

That’s just awesome. I don’t think I need to explain how awesome that is to anyone who’s ever tried to contact anyone with any sort of public profile.

I’m humbled to “know” you, Gary, and I’m happy and proud to display my new WLTV badge.

So, for those of you that haven’t noticed: Twitter is pretty much hosed.

See:
the getsatisfaction thread and
Twitter FAIL Day 3: Communications Breakdown

You may have this problem, and have yet to realize. In fact, I’d say that the majority of people who have this problem don’t know they have it (as the problem appears to be systemic, and there are only 272 people so far watching that thread).

Ok, so, if it’s documented, and twitter are apparently working on it, the question has to be asked: Why am I here bitching about it? Haven’t the twitter guys stated they’re working on it? Isn’t twitter a free service anyway, thus rendering them immune to claims of “bad service” based on the fact that we’re only really getting what we’re paying for.

Well.

Apart from registering myself as one of the few, the proud, the affected on getsatisfaction.com, and the occasional bitchy tweet on the topic, I’ve sat idly by. Mainly because I expected not only some sort of real communication on the topic from the twitter people, but also a quick resolution, as the whole problem seemed to have been an after-effect of the planned outage they undertook on the weekend (and, we’ve all been there). This, by the way, echoes the sentiments of a lot of people on getsatisfaction: Hello? Rollback?

Finally, though, after reading a reply to the thread on getsatisfaction by one mhutchin I started to get my back up. I became inspired by my annoyance and that of the other people on the thread. The thing that really started to bug me, though, was communication, or, the lack thereof. Aside from the ONE response to that thread, twitter have officially said nothing about this issue. This ires me greatly, particularly coming from a company who base their entire success or failure on the use of the software they write as a communication tool. It’s not as though they don’t know how to reach us all, basically. The thing that still amazes me is that a lot of my followers and some people I follow -- including some very “high profile” (read, lots of followers) people -- still seem to be only just finding out about the problem.. TWO DAYS ON. This is largely because twitter themselves appear to be living in some sort of vacuum (think of an ostrich, with it’s head in the sand).

As a long-time sysadmin, and sometimes developer, I know all too well the value of communication. It’s amazing what you can get away with in terms of outages, and things being horribly broken, as long as you keep patting the users on their collective head and telling them it’s all going to be all right, whether you really believe it or not. I’m not talking about lying, per se. It’s not about the message, it’s about people’s perceptions. If you’re still talking, and reassuring people, they feel loved, they feel looked-after, and they feel like their own personal concerns are being addressed. This last point is of particular import where twitter is concerned. Twitter has become something very much like what I’m sure the original developers wanted: It’s become an important personal communication tool. Microblogging isn’t like ‘blogging. It’s something much more up-to-the-minute and personal. It’s a shared conversation. It’s IM and ‘blogging combined. What’s worse, it creeps into your life in a very pervasive way that few other tools can (I’ve never sat across from my wife at dinner and commented on a blog, but I assure you that in the early stages of my fascination with twitter this happened on more than one occasion, with a tweet that arrived to my phone, much to her chagrin - and I’m sure I’m not the only guilty one there). We, the constant users of twitter, have become an army, much like those annoying kids with SMS messaging on their phones. We’re addicted, we’re engaged, and we’re starting to get a little unruly. We want action, or at least the appearance of it, and we want it now.

Thus, to twitter.com I have this to say, finally:

Pat us on the head, patronize us if you must, just please let us know we still matter, and that we can continue our shared conversation soon. The simple fact is that what you’ve created can be great, and that it’s shown us a method of communication that we enjoy, and that has become very important to us. The unfortunate reality is that now that we’ve had a taste, we’re going to continue this conversation, this interaction. The question remains whether it will be through your service, or through any of the hundreds waiting in the wings to scoop up a bitter, disillusioned user base for themselves.

UPDATE:
Twitter have finally publicized the outage with a link from their homepage and a blog post. This is exactly what we needed. Also, the word is getting out! Look here and here. Also, the number of people following the thread on getsatisfaction doubled over night! I’m glad to see that people are aware of the problem now.

UPDATE:
FIXED, apparently! Thanks to all at twitter