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Radio Sunpig 2008 – The Seeds Of Something Better

Around 2006, we were operating at a local maximum; 2007 was the big disruption. If you look back at Radio Sunpig for 2006 and 2007, you can infer some of this from the music I was listening to. In 2006, I was featuring songs like See The World by Gomez and Use It by the New Pornographers. 2007 was much darker, with harder riffs, melancholy chords, and a significant dose of Malcolm Middleton. The cover I made for Radio Sunpig 2007 captures a lot of my state of mind for the year: not so good.

2008 was still not great, but at least it showed promise. Hence the title for Radio Sunpig 2008.

Radio Sunpig 2008: The Seeds Of Something Better

As for the fact that I’m posting this at the end of August 2009, well. I did actually put the compilation together in December 2008 — it has just taken me some time to write about it.

  1. The Bird And The Bee – Again & Again
    I first came across the Bird And The Bee by watching Dennis Liu’s delightfully playful video for Again & Again. The official video does a better job of capturing the 60s retro tropicalia vibe that suffuses the song, but nonetheless I will always think “Mac” whenever I hear it.
  2. Friendly Fires – Jump In The Pool
    Another slice of electro pop with tropicalia influences. The smooth 10cc-ish harmonies and keyboards give the song a laid-back background, while the drums and vocal exhortations to jump in the pool drive it forward. It shouts “summer!” — but in a cool and understated way.
  3. Los Campesinos! – Death To Los Campesinos!
    Jangly power-pop chaos! Rainbows! Unicorns! Kittens! Simply awesome.
  4. Mates Of State – My Only Offer
    I came across Mates Of State via The Yellow Stereo. They’re a husband and wife duo, and here they sing about a marriage that is not going so well. The insistent kick/hat drum beat and simple piano line walk the song forward at a brisk pace, while a glockenspiel drops tiny tinkles of sad tears along the way. Kori and Jason alternate vocals, playing the parts of the couple in question, dealing with the life they feel trapped in. Upbeat and poignant.
  5. Spoon – Finer Feelings
    Not my favourite track from their album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (that would be the hauntingly sparse The Ghost of you Lingers, but the one that fits best here in this mix. This is comfortably mature indie rock – practiced, but not worn.
  6. Ladyhawke – Paris Is Burning
    The first Ladyhawke song I heard was the thumping Magic, which comes at you like a dancefloor zombie, relentless and hungry for synth. Paris Is Burning is a lighter track, but still bursting with shimmering disco flavour.
  7. Tegan And Sara – The Con
    A roiling song full of bitter lovesick emotion and heartfelt vocals, harmonizing and clambering over each other.
  8. Deastro – Light Powered
    I found Deastro’s album Keepers as a special exclusive on eMusic. 2008 was a bit of an electro-rock year for me, and I was blown away by it. Light Powered in particular sounds like a mad experiment from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It would not be out of place as as the title music for a bizarre 70s BBC science fiction adventure, filled with classically trained Shakespearean actors, well-intentioned special effects, and lots of Welsh quarries.
  9. Boulder Acoustic Society – Does It Really Matter
    You’re not going to have heard of this, but it’s great. It won the Best Song award in the Americana category of the 7th annual Independent Music Awards. It’s a 3 1/2 minute slice of peppy fiddles, guitars and accordions that sounds like it belongs in a Pixar film. In fact, the track sounded so familiar to me even on first listen that I was convinced it must have been used in the credits for one of their animated features…but no.
  10. Of Montreal – A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger
    “I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown
    while living in Norway”     If anything sums up Radio Sunpig 2008, this is it. Crazy sweet electro pop, with spot-on lyrics.
  11. We Are Scientists – After Hours
    Just a perfect simple indie pop song built up from a few simple drums and guitar layers, full of easy fills and hooks. The video has a great sense of fun that perfectly matches the track.
  12. Guillemots – Get Over It
    The common theme of MASSIVE POWER-POP SOUND is apparent here again. I loved this song from the first time I heard it. Fyfe Dangerfield’s shouty vocals are backed by a subtle but insistent drum groove that keeps up the pressure from the opening to the fade.
  13. The Futureheads – The Beginning Of The Twist
    This is the Futureheads in all-out rock mode. Great fun.
  14. Attic Lights – Never Get Sick Of The Sea
    Guitars, pounding drums, sweet Beach Boys harmonies, full of infectious energy. If this doesn’t put a spring in your step, nothing will.
  15. Elbow – One Day Like This
    This is a glorious sweeping finale for 2008. Sudden love revealed. The shock of remembering that beauty exists. Eyes wide open to the potential of the road ahead.
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Is dit jouw poes?

There are many reasons for me not to have a cat:

  • I’m allergic to cats, dogs, and pretty much anything with fur or feathers.
  • I’m uncomfortable about the idea of getting emotionally attached to a creature that is likely to die before me.
  • When I’m lost in thought, I’m very easily startled (to the point of jumping and shrieking) when someone approaches me unexpectedly. How would I react to a cat slinking around quietly?
  • The kids are finally old enough that I don’t have to run around after them cleaning up their pee, poo, and barf all the time. I have no desire to start doing that again, with the added bonus features of hairballs and dead mice.
  • I don’t want to set a pet precendent, because sooner or later the kids will want a puppy, and there’s no way I am getting up every morning at 7 to walk a dog when they get bored of actually taking care of it.

Nonetheless, I do actually like cats, and I find myself in the awkward position of getting attached to the one that has made his home in our back garden. We found him mewing pitifully in one of our plant beds on 22nd July. His left foreleg had got stuck stuck through his collar, and he was walking with an awkward limp. He was extremely thin, and very skittish. We fed him some tuna, and put a cushion in the garden shed, so he would have some place to shelter from the rain. He has been with us ever since.

Our first theory was that his owners had gone off on holiday, and their feeding arrangements hadn’t worked out. Perhaps the cat flap had got jammed shut, or the person they had asked to feed the cat while they were away had forgotten about it. We have been feeding him twice a day, but trying not to make him feel too welcome, in the hope that eventually he’ll give up on us and return to his owners.

That’s…not really working out so far.

We’ve treated him for fleas. We’ve bought him a cat toy. He has made himself a comfortable home in our vegetable patch. And even though we chase him out of the house with a water spray whenever he sneaks in the back door, I think he kinda likes it here. We call him “Lol.”

So now we bring out the heavy artillery: posters. I’m going to put some up around the neighbourhood to see if anyone recognizes him and wants him back. He has a small wound on his left hind leg, and it looks like the fur there has been shaved, so it’s possible he has had an operation recently. Next week I’ll take him to the vet and see if the vet recognizes him.

Is dit jouw poes? poster

Ideally, someone will claim him, and the decision about what to do with him will be out of my hands. I’m looking forward to missing him when he’s gone.

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Writing and coding: doing it right

First, some back story: The Wheel Of Time® is a massive and enormously popular 11-volume epic fantasy series by Robert Jordan. The first book was published in 1990, and Jordan sadly died in 2007 before he could finish the highly anticipated twelfth and final book. In December of 2007, Tor Books (Jordan’s publisher) announced that Harriet McDougal (Jordan’s wife and editor) had asked Brandon Sanderson to complete the last book in the series, “with scheduled delivery of the manuscript in December 2008 and a planned publication date of Fall 2009.”

Big job, power to him. Now fast forward to the present day:

Tor Books is proud to announce the November 3rd, 2009 on-sale date for The Gathering Storm, Book Twelve of The Wheel of Time and the first of three volumes that will make up A Memory of Light, the stunning conclusion to Robert Jordan’s beloved and bestselling fantasy series. A Memory of Light, partially written by Jordan and completed by Brandon Sanderson, will be released over a two-year period.

The final volume has expanded into a three-volume set! Brandon Sanderson has written an excellent post on how it came to be that way. Here are some snippets, but if you have an interest in writing and publishing, it’s worth reading the full post:

Around January or February, I posted on my blog that I was shooting for a 200k minimum. This surprised a lot of people, as 200k would not only have made AMoL the shortest Wheel of Time book other than the prequel, it seemed a very small space in which to tie up the huge number of loose ends in the book.

…

April 2008. I had to make a decision. I realized that the book would be impossible to do in 200k. I’d begun to say on my blog that it would be at least 400k, but even that seemed a stretch. … And this is where the first decision came in. Did I try to cram it into 400k? Or did I let it burgeon larger?

…

I wrote all summer, and the next point of interest comes at Worldcon. Tom [Doherty] and I were on a panel together, talking about AMoL. I noted that (by that point) I had around 250k written. He said something like “Ah, so you’re almost done!” I looked chagrined and said “Actually, I feel that I’m only about 1/3 of the way there, Tom.”

…

By December, after my book tour, I was pushing hard to even get 400k done. I still had this phantom hope that somehow, I’d be able to spend January, February, and March writing harder than I’d ever written before and somehow get to 750k by the March deadline that Tom had said was about the latest he could put a book into production and still have it out for the holidays.

Anyone who works in software will recognize the process at work here: you start working on something, and it turns out to be much larger than you expected. It’s not scope creep — that’s a different beast entirely — it’s a matter of doing it right. Ian Hickson magnificently put it like this:

Someone asked for onbeforeunload, so I started fixing it. Then I found that there was some rot in the drywall. So I took down the drywall. Then I found a rat infestation. So I killed all the rats. Then I found that the reason for the rot was a slow leak in the plumbing. So I tried fixing the plumbing, but it turned out the whole building used lead pipes. So I had to redo all the plumbing. But then I found that the town’s water system wasn’t quite compatible with modern plumbing techniques, and I had to dig up the entire town. And that’s basically it.

There are a lot of similarities between writing and coding. They are both intensely creative occupations, and both can be frustratingly unpredictable. There are some types of project that you can estimate and write or build fairly accurately, but in many cases (a novel, the next Twitter) you’re breaking completely new ground. You can start with an idea, but until you get it out on paper, or down on the screen, you really don’t know how it is going to turn out.

Sure, you can write a detailed outline or specification, but you still have to hammer out the details on a line-by-line basis. Unless you take a lot of time to extend that outline or spec down to the line level, unexpected stuff will slip through the cracks, and you’ll find yourself dealing with the unknown.

Which is where the magic happens.

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“Connect to a server” option in IIS Manager is not available

If you are running Vista, and are wondering why you can’t use IIS Manager to connect to any remote servers, sites, or applications…you’re running the wrong version.

Here’s what the wrong version looks like:

The wrong version of IIS Manager in Windows Vista

You need to grab the “IIS Manager for Remote Administration” instead, as shown in the picture below. It has an active toolbar in the connections panel, and extra menu options. It allows you to administer IIS sites and applications on remote machines.

The right version of IIS Manager in Windows Vista: IIS Manager for remote administration

Download links:

It took me ages to figure this out — I thought there must be some option, service, or permission I was missing that would allow me to connect to remote sites. But no, you need a completely different version of the damn tool. Vista Ultimate, my ass. I hope this makes the answer a bit easier to find for the next person who is stumped by the same issue.

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2008 in review: Films and TV

Early on this year I gave up on tracking films and books in my Quick Reviews list. I hope this is a temporary condition, because I’ve come to the end of the year and I’m struggling to remember what I have watched and read.

At least with films, I know for a fact that the list is very limited. I caught a few of the obvious ones (Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Quantum of Solace), but there there are many more I wanted to see, but missed: Hancock, The Incredible Hulk, Body Of Lies, etc. And nothing I saw has stuck in my mind as an all-time great.

The viewing experiences I enjoyed most in 2008 were TV shows, consumed in multi-episode nightly blocks, courtesy of DVD box sets. I love pouring myself a glass of single malt, curling up on the sofa, and settling in to watch a couple of episodes of something big – a story that is going to go on for hours and hours. Here’s what I’ve been watching in 2008:


  • The Wire is one of the best TV shows ever made — believe everything you hear about it. Every character is nuanced, every piece of dialogue is textured, and every episode is a treat to savour. I caught up on seasons 3 and 4 this year, and it keeps getting better. I’m about to order season 5, and I can easily see myself going straight back to the first series to watch the whole thing all over again.

  • Richard is a big fan of The Shield, and it was on his recommendation that I started watching it. I was a bit apprehensive at first — The Wire sets a high bar for quality — but The Shield is a very different beast. It’s fast-paced where The Wire takes its time. It runs on a constant knife-edge of conflict where The Wire exists in a flux of uneasy truces. When violence erupts, in The Shield it is ugly, brutal, and personal, whereas in The Wire it is more likely to be “just business.” But in both cases, the characters are more than just the heroes and villains of the story, they are the story. I’m up to season 5 now, and about to order season 6.

  • Spooks had never really been on my radar when we were in the UK, which is odd, because I do like a good spy story. My brother bought me series 1 last Christmas, but I didn’t watch it until June. After that I was hooked, though. The episodes are uneven, and sometimes it feels like the team just stumbles from one terrorist plot to another with nothing much inbetween. It really shines, though, when the characters’ decisions matter, and affect their lives from that point forward. I’m three seasons in, and 4 is ready and waiting.

  • Criminal Minds is the odd one out here. The cast of characters is engaging and watchable, but although each episode takes the opportunity to reveal something more about each member of the BAU team, it has not irrevocably changed any of them — so far, at least*. I’m two episodes into season 2, and it’s still the Serial-Killer-Of-The-Week club. That’s not to say I don’t like it — I do; it’s well-written and very entertaining — but with the exception of a few episodes, it’s popcorn crime compared to the The Wire and The Shield.

The only downside of watching TV series is that it’s way too easy to say, “oh, I’ll just watch one more episode,” and before you know it it’s gone midnight.

* Update: spoke too soon. I should have waited until episode 5+6 of season 2.

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Geeknotes 20081231: The good-riddance-to-2008 edition

(Note: this entry was originally written for the Skyscanner Geeks blog.)

HTML, CSS, JavaScript

  • YQL (Yahoo! Query Language) allows you to easily grab XML or JSON data from Yahoo’s services (Search, Flickr, weather, social, Upcoming, et al.) using a SQL-like query language. Christian Heilmann explains. (Being a massive Yahoo! fanboy, I can’t help but jump up and down excitedly.)
  • Dustin Diaz on using a super-simple skinny doctype. One benefit of using this is that you save bytes. Personalyl, I can never remember the proper syntax and URL for the HTML doctypes, so this is going to save me the hassle of looking it up every time I make a new page. (Templates? Phooey.)
  • Cameron Adams built a drum machine in JavaScript: the JS-909. (Via Dan Cedarholm)
  • Chris Anderson of Sitepoint takes a look at CSS3, and how we can use it to create box shadow and rounded corner effects. (Remember that cross-browser compatible does not have to mean cross-browser identical.
  • The YUI Doc tool is an alternative to JSDoc for generating documentation of JavaScript code.
  • A suite of feature detection tests to use as an alternative to browser sniffing. (Via Ajaxian).
  • A new “Lorem Ipsum” generator: HTML-ipsum.com gives you chunks of lipsumized HTML, instead of just lipsum text. (Via Andy Clarke)
  • Steve Souders looks at the state of web performance in 2008 See.also Douglas Crockford’s talk on Ajax Performance.

Scaling, clouds

Browsers

Software development

  • “They Write the Right Stuff” by Charles Fishman in FastCompany. An article on the software developers who write the code for the Space Shuttle: “The group’s most important creation is not the perfect software they write — it’s the process they invented that writes the perfect software. It’s the process that allows them to live normal lives, to set deadlines they actually meet, to stay on budget, to deliver software that does exactly what it promises. It’s the process that defines what these coders in the flat plains of southeast suburban Houston know that everyone else in the software world is still groping for. It’s the process that offers a template for any creative enterprise that’s looking for a method to produce consistent – and consistently improving — quality.”
  • Daphne Dembo, Engineering Director at Google, describes some of their challenges in developing a fully international search engine.

All the rest