Apple ’s slick new keyboards – they’ll make you type extra sexy
August at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2007 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web
paulcarvill.com
Hi, I'm Paul Carvill and I'm a web developer. I am Head of Interface Development at LBi, Europe's largest digital agency.
I also like walking, cooking, Bollywood and rock 'n' roll.
Archive for August, 2007
Ark Party – Costumed Disco Cruise
Thursday, August 9th, 2007Check out my colleague’s totally freakin’ mental party – it’s a costumed disco boat cruise, where the theme is Noah’s ark – but the animals have mutated into things like Ninja Shark, Fufu The Gambling Bear, Trouser Snake and The One Legged Spider.
It’s on the 18th August.
http://www.arkparty.net/ark/party/tickets/one
Fat Barry Bats A Fat One
Thursday, August 9th, 2007The fat baseball player Barry Bonds has now scored 756 home runs and holds the all-time record for the most home runs any one player has scored in their career, ever.
So, nytimes.com has made a chart. They always make good charts. All the time. They must have, like, a chart making department.
Anyway, well done Barry. You may look overweight and be struggling with accusations of steroid use, but it’s a mighty achievement.
Rogue economist turns rogue terrorist?
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007If you’ve read Freakonomics then you’ll already know about Levitt & Dubner’s groundbreaking economic approach to misunderstood real-world issues. If not, the method is simple – amass as much data as possible around a subject and apply in providing an economic answer to a seemingly obvious question.
Their extremely objective, information-based exploration of the world allows them to see new ideas in age-old mysteries. Their idiosyncratic, super-analytical view cuts through preconception and emotionally clouded judgement. Although their results can often seem simplistic and overly mathematical, the book is a fascinatingly different look at the world we live in.
Now they’ve finally crossed the rubicon. In their blog, hosted at nytimes.com, they regularly pose questions to readers with an aim of shedding light on a particular subject. Yesterday they got around to asking the inevitable – If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?
Sounding as nerdily analytical as ever, Levitt says,
“My general view of the world is that simpler is better. My guess is that this thinking applies to terrorism as well.”
There are 480 responses so far, ranging from blowing up the Canary Islands to flamers warning him about his responsibility to the average citizen – doesn’t he know terrorists read this column too?!
Get there and add your paranoid maniacal two pence worth now!
A bit of french – Keren Ann at the Arts Theatre
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007The Arts Theatre is an unpromising venue for someone anticipating Keren Ann’s sultry, smoky, after-hours vibe. Yes, it’s tiny, but something about the low ceiling, the creaky seating, the unimaginative lighting means it lacks intimacy.
Still, once Keren Ann starts into “Nolita” everything changes. Her voice is a thundering whisper. The music – bass, trumpet and drums – is spare and, yes, haunting. The trumpeter, wearing mirrored shades in the darkness, dances back and forth lke an extra from the Muppet Show as the runs his output through a wah-wah pedal.. His behaviour is jarring, but just goes to highlight the otherworldliness of that voice.
It takes a couple of songs for the atmosphere to warm up. The audience is polite, and Keren Ann seems reticent. But soon shes cracks a joke about her accent going “all Madonna” since she’s been in London., and things loosen up. The band start gossiping about each other behind each other’s backs – “…he thinks he’s the Jimi Hendrix of the trumpet…”. She runs through most of the Nolita and Keren Ann albums. They play around with arrangements, swap instruments, and generally have fun while playing some of the eeriest, sexiest jazz-blues-folk you’ll hear all year.
Why isn’t she more famous? Her relative obscurity is a good thing for the audience tonight, who get to see her close up in a crowd of 350. But she should be bigger. She should be huge. Her songs are pop. They are accessible. Maybe it’s because she (occasionally) sings in French. Perhaps the great British public can never take such a person into their hearts. She reminds me a little of KT Tunstall, in her inventiveness and willingness to play around with genres. Tunstall has made it, and made it big, through a combination of killer tunes, the sheer force of her personailty and an amaxing work ethic.
Maybe Keren Ann is just lazy?
The band do an encore which includes a lively version of Big Yellow Taxi, and something which has some beautiful three way harmonies. Then she sneaks back onstage for another one, requests that all the lights are turned off – that’s right, ALL the lights – then gives what I’d describe as a dark, breathy nursery rhyme. Apparently it’s “Manha de Carnaval”, a French classic.
She’ll be famous. One day. Watch this space.
Strictly for nerds – Using Putty Private keys on Mac OS X
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007Anyone who has worked with me will know about my lifelong avowed hatred of version control sytems. The problem isn’t the concept of version control itself, just awful implementatons and usage of it.
I’ve always found version control to be complicated, and necesarily so. I’ve tried reading books on the subject. They make sense. Then I try using someone’s system. It doesn’t work. It’s not sensible and practical and straightforward. It’s not like it says in the books.
On top of this, the user interface for these systems is poor or non-existent. You can talk about Ubuntu until it comes out of your ears, but surely in te 21st century we could have invented something better than the command line to do stuff? It’s totally unintuitive. I appreciate that front-end developers are increasingly nerdy these days, as the separation of design, presentation and data layers becomes ever more pronounced. But for someone who thinks predominantly with the left side of their brain (read: lentil-eating hippy) this stuff is problematic.
Tortoise goes some way towards easing the burden – it’s a nice graphic display of confilcts in your files, plus a handy contextual menu to help you update and commit things. But |I’m still left with using the command line to run build targets and everything else.
But, praise the lord, I’m beginning to see the light.
At The Guardian we’re using Subversion, and Cruise Control to monitor the continuous buils and integration. I think that almost made sense to me! I’ve been running a build on my PC but the box is a bit slow, so I’ve decided to try and run the build on my Mac, which is blazingly fast. I’ve decided to give Aptana a go – it’s based on Eclipse so should work pretty nicely.
First, install a source contol plugin for Aptana – http://www.aptana.com/docs/index.php/Adding_a_source_control_plugin_to_Aptana
Next, setup SSH. This took my ages to work out. Then I found this page: http://blog.whoiskevin.com/2007/05/using-putty-private-keys-on-mac-os-x.html
As I’d already setup Putty on my PC this made the whoel thing very easy.
Here’s the details:
Using Putty Private keys on Mac OS X
1. On the Windows side open puttygen and load your private key.
2. Select “Conversions” menu and “Export OpenSSH Key” from that menu. Save the file somewhere on your hard drive.
3. Copy the public key from the diaglog box and paste that into notepad. Save that file with the other as the public key.
4. Copy both these files to the Mac (maintain carriage returns). For ease of use name these files id_dsa (for the private key file) and id_dsa.pub (for the public key file) and store them in /Users/username/.ssh.
5. Permissions should be rw for owner and r for all.
Lastly, setup Subclipse – http://ist.berkeley.edu/as/ag/tools/howto/subclipse-setup.html
Links referenced in this entry:
http://www.aptana.com/docs/index.php/Adding_a_source_control_plugin_to_Aptana
http://blog.whoiskevin.com/2007/05/using-putty-private-keys-on-mac-os-x.html
http://ist.berkeley.edu/as/ag/tools/howto/subclipse-setup.html