Competing for the Tardiest ETech Entry Ever

… partly because I demand to win something, but mostly because I can’t properly do the next post without this one, and it’s been knocking at my brain for the past month. You know how it is.

So, after many years of trying and failing, I finally made it to ETech. Hell yes it was worth the wait (since you ask) and I got to present at two sessions – one of them our own (for which I must thank David for co-presenting so ably), the other a five-minute slot in the microformats talk (for which I must thank Tantek (again)). Anyway, if you get the chance please do check out our session – not only is it summarised neatly with useful links in that thar page, but there’s a screencast of the whole talk, which should answer most of the questions that most people fling at me about Ning. (Especially the “Can you explain Ning properly and give me some examples of how I’d use it? But hurry, I’ve only got 48 minutes and 51 seconds” one.)

As for the rest of it…

• lots of lovely chilled peeps
• debauchery and post-debauchery
• game of the conference: Werewolf or Animal Crossing?
• who can know what machinations churn in the mind of Shirky?
• Maker Faire Lite: battling Roombas, Atari VCS casemods and Esther Dyson firing marshmallows at everyone, hence gags about treading Dyson Spheres into the carpet. (We’d have cleaned them up, but the only vacuum cleaners available were busy fighting)

Neologism of the day

Accidentally created by Paul, in an IM conversation:

blonk (v.)

To blog without notable creativity, inspiration or merit; covering the same ground trod by countless others in the echo chamber; blogging as an alternative to thinking.

“I was going to write a considered piece about climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, but I’ve just been blonking pictures of my cat.”

(Not deliberately invoking the Mornington Crescent exclamation, but not totally unrelated either, if one considers the infinite space in which we play this game as a giant board, with 80% of the players continually shunting into each other on the Just Quoting an A-Lister square. Or, for that matter, on the Making Up New Words about Blogging square.)

Putting the Dual Boot in

If, like so many other people all over the net for the past 48 hours, you have felt compelled to type the words “The best Windows laptop is a Mac” (likely prefixed with “OMG” and suffixed with too many exclamation points) please take a moment to consider:

1. “Basic tracking works, but acceleration, scrolling, and right-click support are not available in Windows.” (my emphasis). No right-clickee, no laundry. Yes, you can plug in a mouse, but who regularly uses a mouse when they have a trackpad handy? Come back when you’ve got a two-button trackpad and then I’ll think about a MacBook.
2. Remember the lovely head-in-sand days of Apple trying to sell OS9 on G3s by showing how much faster Photoshop filters were than on the equivalent PC? (“If only,” Tim said while trying to port Starship Titanic to the Mac, “one could write games in Photoshop, we might get some decent performance out of this thing.”) Well, thanks to a combination of Boot Camp and Adobe being slack, the fastest way to run Photoshop on a Mac is by doing it on Windows. No, I know it doesn’t mean much, but… the irony, it overpowers!

On set with the IT Crowd

It’s been a lot of fun, hasn’t it? It was a lot of fun to help out with, too. (Thanks, Cory!) I took a couple of photos during my one set visit, and I’m waiting for Sean to upload his; in the meantime, a simple photo quiz for you retro-geeks out there… (Sadly, my father-in-law’s Commodore PET is out of the picture)

The Compleat Screencaster

Those who may have tried to GTalk with me over the preceding few weeks would have seen the cryptic status message: I am CASTING a SCREEN – and many did then question me about it, thus breaking the concentration I had tried to muster in said activity, rendering the whole thing superbly counter-productive. For screencasting is a remarkable concentration sink, the mere six minutes of footage that resulted having taken something like thirty hours – yes, thirty bloody hours – of effort to birth. Fortunately, the experience has blessed (ha!) me with a surfeit of knowledge in the area that I will now share with you, in the hopes that all those setting out on similar projects may find them completed in a mere quarter of the time.

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Reasons that never were (Update: IGNORE)

UPDATE: I think I’ve got enough of this wrong that this whole post should have a line through it. My apologies to Mr Godin, to whose excellent work I have done a great disservice. My only excuse was that I put this out in the middle of an incredibly hectic work day, when clearly I should have been less rushed about things…

Still in the process of blog moving, still about to blog about Ning, etc. But until then, a huge glaring fish in a bucket: Seth Godin’s post on legacy reasons. Lots of trackbacks, none of which seem to have caught on that it must be some kind of hoax.

The reason about Blockbuster? Not true. (UPDATE: Still checking this one.)

The reason about places of work? Obviously not true. (UPDATE: Not so sure. I’m thinking about organisational and output-gathering benefits as primary rather than power source, though clearly the power source also has something to do with it. Anyone want to supply evidence of either (which I completely lack, go me)? I’m still interested in this one, though I’m probably completely wrong.)

The reason about typewriter keys? Famously not true. (UPDATE: Boy, was I wrong. And even worse, I didn’t read the linked article properly, which clearly agrees with Seth, as Paul points out below.)

The reason about SUVs? True.

So, what’s Seth really asking?

(Addendum: I should add that the above question is not one of those A-list style pretending-to-know-the-answer-to-a-rhetorical thing. I have no idea what he’s really asking, or even if he knows that half of his reasons are bollocks. But, as Nick has already shown in the comments, it’s a fun thing to think about.)

MovableType advice needed

Right, I’m getting sick of this.
As you can see, I’ve fixed this blog, only now it’s getting hammered with over 200 spams per day (‘cos MT-Blacklist appears to be irreperably b0rked). I’ve installed MT3.2 elsewhere and I’m getting ready to move to it properly, only – how do I clear out all the old crap? There’s over a thousand spam messages in my export file, and while 3.2 appears to have all kinds of whizzy barbed-wire anti-spamness for incoming attacks, it seems to have no way of applying said whizziness to the buggers that have already nested. I’ve hunted through the UI, I’ve Googled around, I’ve even posted to the 6A support forums, all to no avail. Anyone? Please? Help?
(And, just to fend off the obvious, let’s assume I want to stick with MT for the moment until I’m certain there’s no chance of success, okay?)

Wicked crazy fun with Winamp signal processing

(Part Two in an occasional series. Part One was three-and-a-half years ago. Try the tip, though, it still works in Winamp 5.) (Oh, and the proper Ning stuff is coming soon, I promise.)

Occasionally, one wants to listen to music in computer data files. One also wants one’s llama’s ass really whipped. To achieve both of these in a single package, Winamp is recommended. (Poor Mac and Gnulix users! They have to choose one or the other. Ha ha ha! But don’t worry, Mac fans – there’s a bonus treat for you at the end of this blog entry.) Winamp gets much of its llama-whippingness from the hardcore n3rd-5|<i((5 of people like Mr Frankel, and this is visible in the insanity of its built-in expression languages.

NOTE how I said expression languages. Not scripting languages. Scripting languages are for arsing about with hotkeys that switch the equalizer mode for every room in your house, or post your current playlist into a Flash movie on your MySpace site every 12 seconds. They are lame, and you suck for wanting them. Expression languages are for manipulation of audio-visual magic using raw, high-power mathematiznics. And the engines for this come built in, super-optimised and remarkably under-documented.

You may have already played with the Winamp AVS – if not, go have some fun with it, ‘cos not only can you get it to produce some remarkably Minter visuals but it gives you the tools to build your own – both by piping existing things together and by writing exciting mini-programs inside of Winamp that you can see working live as you type them. This is incredibly cool, but I’m not going to talk about AVS today. I’m going to talk about something hidden a little deeper that I came across almost by accident.

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Squeak?

Phil Ringnalda, to Diego: You don’t *have* to promote your work in your personal weblog, but if you’re trying to hold it back to keep from being one of “those” bloggers, well, I think maybe you’ve overdone it.

Hello, everyone. I’m Yoz Grahame, Developer Advocate for Ning, and I think it’s time I started blogging again.

(I’m going to have to keep it concise; partially because there’s a balance to be kept, partially because attention spans are even shorter than they used to be (especially mine) and partially because it’s the only way I get get this thing started. Blogging is a Pillar Of Daunt for me at the best of times, but now that I’m working in public… it takes a run-up, y’know?)

Anyway, some of the story is this: We were mostly as the mice for two and a half months after Ning launched, then (after we realised that we were being way too quiet, and had not given people enough cause to investigate beyond thinking that we were just providing an easy way to make your own HotOrNot clones) decided that we should be a lot louder. And then this happened (and Diego’s post which was so good it was lauded by Salon) and it’s time to shout about things a little more, y’know?

Ning is not the Alpha and Omega, nor the cream that will revive your deadened scalp, plump your lips, ease the pounds from your waist. But it is the project I’ve been dreaming of working on since – goodness, is that the time? – since 1995. Yep, that long. (This is not hyperbole, and will be properly explained.) It night not take over the world, nor make us all rich, nor even provide me enough cash to get the kid through kindergarten; but it’s damn well worth a try, because it’s the latest iteration of the most interesting idea the internet has ever seen – an idea that’s been almost criminally underexploited, and whose time has come. That is the most prominent of the many reasons why I’m on board.

It’ll need some explaining, though. New web apps sell themselves from the word go; platforms take a little longer. Let me just get MT working properly again, and I’ll be right back…

Hey, Americans

We’re deeply grateful, if occasionally mystified, by the huge outpouring of emotion you’ve sent our way. Now, if you could redirect some of that emotion towards stringing idiots like this up by their testicles, we’d be even more grateful. Live8 happened because, believe it or not, there are more important issues in this world than terrorism. If you really do care about us, we’d appreciate it if your media would actually listen to what we have to say, and not merely use this as an excuse to put your government’s stupid, pointless crusade back on the agenda. Having now had a brief local reminder of what war can be, we don’t like it very much, and we’d like it to stop. All of it. Ta very.