Very interesting indeed.
Is this the latest front in the battle for hearts and minds? Distribution of the brand across multiple cultural media in order to render it pervasive? Exploration of new product types in the face of the inexorable commoditization of software? Tool for subliminal advertising? MS as entertainment company?
Or something more prosaic?
So many questions, so little time. The fun we’re going to have with all this conjecture…
Definitely one for the “What were they thinking?” department.
The story so far: w3c.org HTML 5 differences from HTML 4
It doesn’t get more evocative than this collection of songs. Four geezers from Oxford who recorded the whole lot in a day and apparently thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the process.
There’s no pretentiousness, no pandering to a more instrument-heavy, commercial sound, no focus-group vetted melodies, no airbrushed “Celticism”, just a collection of authentic-sounding, working songs from the sea, some pretty, some gritty.
The tunefullness of many of the tracks belies the fact that most of the men who originally sung songs such as these were as hard as nails. It’s clear from the surviving stories that on wooden-hulled, ocean going, sailing vessels you had to be incredibly tough to survive.
Despite the toe-tapping nature of some of the tunes, their heritage and evocative nature makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and I get a rush of pride at hailing from a seafaring nation.
Support a worthy cause, get a copy of the CD for yourself and one as a birthday present for a friend.
“In the spring of 1976, The CRAMPS began to fester in a NYC apartment. Without fresh air or natural light, the group developed its uniquely mutant strain of rock’n'roll aided only by the sickly blue rays of late night TV. While the jackhammer rhythms of punk were proliferating in NYC, The CRAMPS dove into the deepest recesses of the rock’n'roll psyche for the most primal of all rhythmic impulses — rockabilly — the sound of southern culture falling apart in a blaze of shudders and hiccups. As late night sci-fi reruns colored the room, The CRAMPS also picked and chose amongst the psychotic debris of previous rock eras - instrumental rock, surf, psychedelia, and sixties punk. And then they added the junkiest element of all — themselves.” J. H. Sasfy, Professor of Rockology, from the liner notes of The Cramps 1979 release Gravest Hits
The Cramps were one of my favourite bands when I was in my mid to late teens. They were pretty out there, as this footage from a gig they played at the Napa Vally Mental Hospital in California in 1978 attests. (Oh don’t look at me like that, they used to call such places by such names back then.)
“The Way I Walk” was one of my favourite Cramps songs and was on the 12″ EP referred to above (which I still have somewhere, in an old archive box).
http://youtube.com/watch?v=n5OMuj4FpII
Edit: Here’s another another Cramps video (there’s no shortage of them on YouTube), check out Lux Interior’s gravity-defying “hipsters”: Tear it Up.
Interesting, the locations on Audrey Tang’s (Perl 6 lead architect) visitor map presumably represent a geography or current Perl use.
Pretty much every link results in the message:
“It appears that the article you requested has been temporarily removed”
A current thread on reddit seems to indicate that some miscreants may have ‘injected’ some mischief.
Couldn’t have happened to nicer people, I say.
It’s interesting to note that RIAA uses an open and free language (PHP) for its web application. This means that chances are, they’re using MySQL as well. Perhaps the cost of paying for all of those proprietary software licenses became bothersome?
EDIT: A quick check of the response headers reveals that they’re running on Apache and RedHat as well. Nice.
EDIT 2: Yep, it’s a hack.
EDIT 3: “Pics or it didn’t happen“.
One of the GNOME features I’ve most come to appreciate since abandoning Windows XP last summer is workspaces (Virtual Desktops on KDE, Spaces on Mac OS X Leopard). I now find these so useful, I simply can’t imagine how I got on without them.
As I write this, I’ve got my code editor, a couple of browser windows, Nautilus, an IRC client and a terminal window open in my first workspace. In my second workspace there’s a text editor containing my development notes (notes I write as I learn new stuff), a document open in OpenOffice Writer, and a couple of FreeMind windows containing a functional overview and database schema outline of the application I’m currently working on. My third workspace contains my email client, news feed reader and the browser in which I’m writing this. This is fairly typical although needless to say some days I have more, some days fewer windows open.
Even with dual wide-screen monitors (I’m using a standard 1280×1024 and a wide 1680×1050), a dozen or more running applications would for me be unwieldy and counter-productive in a single workspace. I generally find three workspaces to be optimal. I’ve adopted a pattern of use in which the first workspace is where I do my main work and monitoring, the second holds supporting applications and reference materials (which would only be in the way in the first), and the third I use for communications and personal stuff, especially that which distracts from the work going on in the first two workspaces. That said, for obvious reasons I regularly bounce my IRC client back and forth between my first and third workspaces and not having my email client in the workspace where I spend most time is not a problem thanks to visual and audio alerts.
The two straightforward keyboard shortcuts for swapping between workspaces and moving applications from one to another use the arrow keys to indicate the direction of movement and make managing them easy. The shortcuts are now as ingrained as any other I use on a daily basis.
When I first saw workspaces I thought “Neat idea, might use them occasionally, but for the most part, no thanks”. They appeared to be an attempt to use a software device to overcome the size limitations of a desktop on a single monitor and I erroneously thought that they had been rendered less relevant by the increasing popularity of widescreen monitors and setups utilizing multiple screens. What I had failed to appreciate is that in addition to their desktop augmenting role, they also play a useful and liberating organizational role, and it’s this latter feature that I’m finding such a revelation.
GNOME allows you to have as few or as many workspaces as you need and so you can tailor them to suit your needs. The keyboard shortcuts for manipulating the workspaces make them fast and easy to work with, meaning workspaces become your friends rather than leaving them as awkward features, too clunky to use productively.
If you have access to workspaces on your desktop, give them a whirl. The idea can take perhaps a little getting used to, but now I have, I couldn’t live without them. Without exaggeration, they are one of the most useful (and simplest) complexity management tools I’ve used.
