Tim’s Internet Web Log

After playing about with that method for a while and having iTunes drop the stream from the last.fm client over and again I decided to spend £15 on Airfoil. Much better solution and works to send any audio from my Mac over Airtunes to my stereo.

Link to Airfoil

If you have an Airport Express you can shove your audio from the last.fm client through to iTunes and then across to your Airport Express.

Step 1.

Go to last.fm > Preferences > Radio and set a port for the client to stream on.

Step 2.

Quit the last.fm client and restart it.

Step 3.

Start playing the radio.

Step 5.
Right, now hope over to iTunes and go to Advanced > Open Stream… and punch in http://localhost:23456/ and select OK.

Step 6.

Rock on with your bad self.

Well, at least until iTunes drops the stream… grrr. YMMV.

Handy alt-characters from your Apple keyboard.

If you hold down alt-option and then hit keys you get these characters, laid out as per US qwerty keyboard.

With alt-{a, e, i, u and n} you get to hit another key and have it decorated with an accent. For example alt-n n will create ñ.

Google has just announced a partnership with the University of Washington to put some CompSci classes online.

I think I’ll check out: Web Security and Distributed Systems

Joel has written a fantastic post about web standards and IE 8. Really, read this if you write code and really, really read it if you build websites:

Standards are a great goal, of course, but before you become a standards fanatic you have to understand that due to the failings of human beings, standards are sometimes misinterpreted, sometimes confusing and even ambiguous.

The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard: it’s a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations, and therefore the standard is not serving the desired goal of reducing the test matrix in a MANY-MANY market.

DOCTYPE is a myth.

A mortal web designer who attaches a DOCTYPE tag to their web page saying, “this is standard HTML,” is committing an act of hubris. There is no way they know that. All they are really saying is that the page was meant to be standard HTML. All they really know is that they tested it with IE, Firefox, maybe Opera and Safari, and it seems to work. Or, they copied the DOCTYPE tag out of a book and don’t know what it means.

In the real world where people are imperfect, you can’t have a standard with just a spec–you must have a super-strict reference implementation, and everybody has to test against the reference implementation. Otherwise you get 17 different “standards” and you might as well not have one at all.

Link

Oooh, more interesting stuff about what is a really important topic. I reckon, though, that people are all getting a bit worked up about it at that site.

Link

Clearly there’s a lot of interest on both sides of this debate and I don’t know who’s right. I really do like programming for standards based browsers and I’m fed up with dealing with IE6 and IE7 but they’re still kinda important.

My ideal would be for IE 8 to just work like FX and Safari by default and then I can hack in fixes for IE6 and IE7.

That’s pretty easy to grasp.

Now, what if I had to go back and de-hack each page I’d written for each client to date to make it work for IE8? That would kinda suck.

Keen to see what happens in practice. It is good to hear the MS is trying to build a compliant browser.

More at ALA about how the opt-in to standards was going to work prior to MS deciding to default to supporting standards

What a tangled web we weave.

Heh, Mark Pilgrim fisks Joel’s article:

You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out.

This self-fulfilling prophecy has been brought to you by Google Adsense: funding Slashdot trolls since 2003.

Those documents are super confusing.

Hi, I’m Web Developer Barbie. Pull my string and I say, “Standards are tough! Let’s go shopping!”

The precise problem here is that you’re pretending that there’s one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it’s not a real standard.

I have never heard of test suites.

98% of the world will install IE8

I am high as a kite.

Link

Question your work at SvN.

Link

Good ideas:

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound–or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.

…

7. Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

Link to more good ideas at the MIT Technology Review

I’ve often tried to take panoramics but most of the time I don’t even get to the point where I can stitch the photos… the source material is crap… garbage in, garbage out.

Here’s a tip for getting great source images and a nice experiment for you to try to see why and how it works.

http://panospace.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/parallax/

Found while surfing the web…

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ ”

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Link

Monica and I have been getting rid of this and that recently and that’s been quite good. I’ve finally learned to get rid of books and have celebrated by donating or selling about 50 or 60 books.

We got rid of a bunch of other things too and now everything has a place. I try to get rid of things by default.

This weekend I helped Rory and Nina move all their stuff to their next flat and they both mentioned that they were having problems getting rid of things.

The Internet lifehacker/43folders scene is quite tied up with decluttering/minimalism too.

Luckily nobody I know though has these sorts of problems.

Eeeek… extreme hoarding!

And yes, these people have real mental disorders. See: http://ocdaction.org.uk/ocdaction/index.asp

I just got home from having lunch with Monica at Spitalfields.

We visited Dennis Sever’s house, an art piece that spans an entire house decked out in 18th Century stuff and set as if we’d just interrupted a family in the middle of their evening in.

Whether you see it or you don’t - the house’s ten rooms harbour ten ’spells’ that engage the visitor’s imagination in moods that dominated the periods between 1724 and 1914. Your senses are your guide.

There was food and fire and interesting smells, sounds all around too.

Visiting the house was a singular experience and I enjoyed the idea that I was seeing things as they were happening. I couldn’t stop thinking about who this person was that collected all the stuff and set up this crazy display though.

From Wikipedia:

Dennis Severs’ House, 18 Folgate Street is a Georgian terraced house in Spitalfields, in the East End of London, England. During the 1960s and 1970s it was lived in by Dennis Severs, who gradually recreated the rooms as a time capsule in the style of former centuries. It is now open to the public.

Link to the web site.
Link to the Wikipedia article