I’m sheepishly watching more TV and embarrased of it, but Jaws just has this great blend of realistic characters, drama, and humor. I think it’s aging much better than Star Wars, for example, which I also embarrassingly re-watched recently.
Category: Unfiled
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Handy
Just watched the Ask this Old House show on rocking toilets, then fixed my own rocking toilet. I love that show.
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Time to MT
I hear it can take 10 minutes to get up and running with Movable Type; it took me 2 hours. While the instructions could be a little better, the popularity of scripting languages demands friendly installers. If they’ve become standard for Linux, they should be for perl too.
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The Kitchen Table
The phrase comes from Owen, who once compared the conversation among blogs to chatting around the kitchen table.
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Temptation
With a Titanium G4 and a copy of Reason, I’d be unstoppable. But given the state of the Internet industry right now, I might be wise to save my pennies in case I end up jobless soon. Or do I spend money in order to make money? Yeah! That’s it…
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Mutopia is free, legal sheet music. A longer description from the Scout Project:
Modeling itself after Project Gutenberg, this volunteer project aims
to make copyright-free musical scores available to everyone. Although
copyright on a score expires 70 years after the composer’s death,
music publishers retain copyright on their typeset editions. Thus,
the only legal way to copy this music is to write it out or typeset
it yourself and allow others to make copies. This is precisely what
contributors to Mutopia have done. All music at the site has been
typeset using GNU Lilypond and is available for download as .pdf,
PostScript, or Lilypond .ly files. MIDI files and preview images of
the scores are also provided. Visitors may browse the collection by a
number of options, including composer, instrument, style, and last
updated. Some sections are still somewhat thin, but interested users
will certainly want to pay the site a visit and monitor its future
development.
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User interface designers of audio software seem to be doing the most interesting work around, even more adventerous than on the web. Take for example this emagic ES1 screen shot. It looks confusing at first because it’s unconventional, but (assuming you’re familiar with these functions from prior audio experience) you quickly understand how to operate everything – I can especially imagine grabbing these big blue arrows and adjusting them.
Knobs still don’t map well to mouse movement though. Interestingly enough in this example they use an arc instead of what is usually adjusted via a knob, to good effect. And somewhat ironically they use knobs for a mutually-exclusive set of discrete options, which could just as easily appear as radio buttons (which they use elsewhere in the interface). I suspect they favored the esthetics and visual balance of the design just a tad too much, but show so many interesting ideas here.
Steven Johnson’s Long Live Analog is an interesting look at the idea of modeling physical devices in on-screen interfaces for audio software.
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The New York Times self-reflexively looks at its five years on the Web. Meanwhile, the home page has balloned to 60K of HTML plus at least 14 images, a slug even on my cable modem. They have officially crammed too much garbage on the home page.
