1. Looking to join/start a casual recorder consort in Reykjavík — anyone know of one, or people who might be interested in joining? Preferably with a focus on early music, not vital though.

  2. Had many basic software development lessons hammered in by personal experience over the last couple of years: hierarchy bad. side effects bad. many moving parts bad. undue complexity bad. inconsistency bad. SQL databases fragile. always be reducing.

    It’s amazing just how seductive complex, unproductive tools can be. Successfully overcome+abandoned:

    • Codeigniter
    • Doctrine ORM
    • Bootstrap
    • Backbone, Ember, Angular
    • Symfony Security component

    PHP remains productive and speedy (with composer, delightful dependency management), python nice with some irritations. jQuery useful when absolutely necessary, plain with small libraries loaded via requirejs handle most progressive enhancement concisely. node.js nice for some things, preferring go’s approach to async programming but still not much everyday need for it.

    Avoiding middlemen: LESS, SASS, Coffeescript. Unnecessary for most of my work, and more moving parts is bad.

    Now bothering me is the frameworky nonsense accumulating in . Need to cleanse.

  3. Indiereader

    goal: by 2014-01-01, no longer be using twitter.com to read+reply to my friends’ content.

    It’s already possible to use web action toolbelt to add indieweb reply/bookmark buttons to twitter.com and weave to expand POSSEd copies into full posts, but I think that’s as far as the “progressively enhance the twitter UI for indieweb support” train goes. Remaining pain points:

    • Ads and other UI noise
    • Lack of good search
    • Lack of control over timeline — lists, following and blocking are the only ways to control what you see
    • Very weird in-timeline threaded conversation view

    Pieces in place allowing a seamless transition from using twitter.com:

    • A whole bunch of indiewebcampers publishing their notes+articles on their own sites using microformats2
    • An open source microformats2 parser
    • App.net mark up notes with microformats2 h-entry and h-card
    • h-card and xfn for follow lists, e.g. my contact list
    • Shim to parse twitter.com into microformats2 data
    • twitter-activitystreams to consume personal twitter feed as microformats2

    Pain points still to be resolved:

    • How to fall back to subscribing to someone’s twitter feed if they don’t publish their notes on their own site?
    • Whether or not to support ATOM+RSS — sure there’s a lot of it around, but it’s a nightmare, and I don’t want to encourage publishing invisible DRY-violating data. Perhaps superfeedr’s normalisation will be of use
    • What to do about all the wordpress blogs around with half-baked microformats support — auto-detect and use their ATOM feed? Try to find a related twitter account?
  4. Cut a process which was taking 20 mins down to 40 seconds — moral of the story is: building systems which allow you to see the system work in real-time and get an intuitive sense for how long things take is more effective than poring over SQL logs trying to figure out what on earth’s going on in retrospect.

  5. speakers: is there a German word for German words for concepts for which there isn’t an equivalent in English/x other language? (bonus points if that word describes itself)

  6. Had a go at making Dosas (cc @roopagulati) — simple potato+cumin filling, used hjartasalt (hartshorn powder) in batter instead of baking soda. First one was pretty good, second one a bit too wet.

    Is the filling supposed to be easily spreadable? Mine may have been way too thick.

  7. @|p^): Here I am at 5am, deciding to learn recursive functions in python, @gakera & @Hvitur_Hrafn I blame you both!

    @w03_ recursive functions are fun. Once you’ve figured them, closures and first-class functions out you’re pretty much there :)

  8. Julien Genestoux: @BarnabyWalters I'd love to chat about your #yahoopipes clone! I believe @superfeedr can help/learn!

    @julien51 indeed, I have plans for a caching system using superfeedr, as I’ve quickly found that keeping the feedback loops as tiny as possible is vital for productive piping! What’s your preferred communication method? I hear jitsi does pretty good encrypted voice/video calls these days…

  9. EEEEVIL:

    “Council can now steal instruments from . civil disobedience campaign begins” [1]@indyrikki via Jovian Salak

    As reported by: Ham&High News Change org

    Threatening to fine someone £1000 is bad enough, but for musicians, confiscating instruments is much more than theft — an instrument is an extremely personal extension of your body.

    Of course, no-one wants excessive noise pollution, but charging buskers a yearly fee and holding legal threats above them is going to achieve the exact opposite goal, by putting acoustically playing children and amateurs off, leaving more room for the serious buskers - the ones who can make troublesome noises with all their amps and equipment.

    As a long-time busker in the UK I’ve always found the police to be supportive and helpful (once memorably dragging a drunkard off me at Christmas late night shopping). Hopefully the police in Camden are equally reasonable and won’t strut around intimidating children.

  10. How to watch a film, Háskolábíó style:

    • Pay 1550IKR for a ticket
    • Watch 20 minutes of adverts
    • Watch the first 45 minutes of the film
    • Wonder what happened to the projector when the screen goes blank mid-sentence. Realise it’s an intermission. In a film. In a cinema. With adverts.
    • Watch another 15 minutes of adverts, or optionally escape into the popcorn-vending zone
    • Settle back in and watch the rest of the film
    • Exit out of the opposite corner you came in from, optionally expressing surprise when it turns out you just walked out of the back door, into the rain and cold. Hastily put your coat on and reorient yourself. Watch out for the puddle.

    Tjarnabíó is like this too. Not that it isn’t well-priced or enjoyable, but… there are some optimisations which could be made here.

  11. Watched Gravity with friends — a beautifully made film about Murphy’s Law and the importance of international UI conventions. Reminded me a lot of the scene from Explorers on the Moon where Captain Haddock gets drunk and starts orbiting a nearby asteroid before he is saved by Tintin and a sturdy rope.