Month: December 2004

Incredible Beatles mashup mixes 40+ different tracks (BoingBoing)

Incredible Beatles mashup mixes 40+ different tracks: “Cory Doctorow:
Hank sez, ‘Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!’ I concur; this is mind-blowingly amazing. Man, all these Beatles mash-ups this year are really making me yearn for my old Beatles vinyl. I especially love the juxtosition in this track of the old skiffle-Beatles with the later psychedelia. Soo-poib.

5MB MP3 Link

(Thanks, Hank!)

PS: I am reasonably certain that this server will be shortly overwhelmed. If you’ve got a mirror, email me and I’ll post a link to it. However, I have no such mirror, so if you find yourself unable to get a copy, don’t look at me!”

I’m listening to this right now. It’s crazy cool incredible. I’ll upload it to my own server and drop a link to it in email to anyone who wants a copy — but I’m not sure enough of my bandwidthosity to volunteer to be a mirror for Cory. :) email me at edheil at fastmail dot fm to get a copy.

(Via Boing Boing Blog.)

Programming with Continuations

this article from IBM describes how one can use “continuations” to write simpler, clearer, more powerful web-based applications. It assumes the use of a special programming framework which makes continuations trivial to use. I don’t happen to have access to that framework but it was a cool read because I’d heard about continuations before in my old “learning about lots of obscure and interesting programming languages” habits, but I had never really felt I had understood what they were good for.

Specifically, it discussed the use of “continuation-passing style” which is possible even in languages which do not explicitly facilitate the use of continuations. More on that here.

Ubuntu Linux

For eons I’ve had a little linux desktop machine that’d degenerated into a headless server sitting around. I have these dreams of eventually doing more with it.

I wanted to move it. That was difficult networkingwise. But I got a Best Buy gift certificate for Christmas, and I decided to use it to buy a wireless PCI network card for the beast, so I could move it wherever I wanted (e.g. the living room).

I soon learned that getting the Linux pci wifi drivers for my card working on old-school Debian would be an exercise in pain. Ugly recompilations of this and that. Precise instructions on the web that don’t actually work and result in ugly C error messages during compilation.

I happened across this article at O’Reilly which described Ubuntu Linux “just working” with a wifi card. I decided to give it a try. It had been literally years since I’d installed Debian on that box; why not give a new distribution a try?

It didn’t go 100% smoothly but it did go remarkably smoothly. The wifi card did not work out of the box with native drivers, as I’d hoped, but it did work with the help of ndiswrapper, which turned out to be gloriously easy to use. (Strangely, also, it only works when I have my regular ethernet card in the box too. I tried taking it out and the wireless one stopped working. The regular ethernet card doesn’t have to be plugged into a network, or even configured in /etc/network/interfaces — it just needs to be physically present in the box. Whatever.)

I couldn’t get sound working right, but that might be because the box has two soundcards, both of which are crap (one built into the mobo and one installed), and it couldn’t decide which piece of crap to use. I don’t know. Linux sound hates me.

But everything else just worked, with no hassles. It was a whole new Linux experience. All that and it’s Debian under the hood, and if you want you can use the pleasant, easy to use packaging tool to install Debian software from the main Debian repository as well!

I would highly recommend Ubuntu Linux.

Blockin’ Out The Scenery, Breakin’ My Mind

Found out from Phil O at the party the other night that the Kava House on Kalamazoo south of 60th street has free wifi. This is really near my house, so I needed to check them out. A lot of my friends who live in Eastown love the Kava House in Eastown all to pieces.

My reactions are mixed. Two signs on the door seemed very unfriendly to me. “Restroom for customers only” and “Wireless for customers only (1 drink minimum)”.

This is a coffee house in a strip mall out in the pucks. Do they really have a problem with an excess of people walking by and trying to use their restroom? Has that really caused a problem in the past, such that they need to put it out there on a sign? Or are they just kind of jerks who resent the idea that they might possibly be duped into providing a service to the public without remuneration?

As for the “wireless for customers only (1 drink minimum)”, I can understand that they don’t want people plunking down and using their connection for hours on end without buying anything. I would never do that. But I’d like to imagine that they feel they could trust me to do that without the sign. (Also, isn’t the “1 drink minimum” redundant? How could you be a customer by buying less than 1 drink? Are they saying it wouldn’t count if I bought breath mints? Have they seriously encountered a problem with customers coming in and using their wireless but buying LESS than one drink?)

Oh, there’s also a handmade sign saying “Kava Cop says STOP: One Drink Minimum.” So not only can’t you use the wifi without a drink, you can’t even be there without a drink.

The signs out front give the impression that these people are obsessed by the fear that someone may get something from them for nothing — that their precious seating space and ambience and wifi may be abused by the unwashed, no-drink-buying masses. This comes across as massively hostile to me. I have not seen anything like it at any other wifi enabled coffee house in the area. It’s bizarre. I have a hard time believing, given the location, that it’s based on actual problems with deadbeats rather than just a general mean-spiritedness.

Apart from the signs it’s been good. Lots of available power-pluggage, pleasant atmosphere, reasonable connection, a guy who I assume was the manager was helpful, wanted to make sure I could find a plug, friendly staff. Everything’s good, but man, the signs really convey hostility to the public.

A copy of this review was posted at grwifi.net. If you’ve been there, drop in and post a comment yourself!

Framing & Gaming

I’m working on a roleplaying game, called Odyssey. Trying to get the rules together, get things clear, and I just realized a big old hole in what I’m doing — I don’t have any rules for “scene framing.”

I realized this cause of this post — the comments thereof — where Emily offhand mentions how important Scene Framing is. I’m like, huh. Haven’t thought about it.

I dink around on the forge a little, google search on “forge” and “scene framing” — and I find this glossary page with links to some wicked fine Forge posts about it — especially this post by Paul “My Life With Master” Czege.

And it’s starting to fall together.