Go to your dad’s birthday party and leave small piles of business cards wherever there are nibbles.
Author: chris
Playing the sharing
One of my favourite free music site is 3hive, although these days I rarely get a chance to download much stuff. The problem is I have to download something before I know whether it floats my boat, so to speak. Even with broadband that’s a few seconds per song, which soon adds up.
Not any more. If you’re a user of the greasy monkey for Firefox, you’re in luck. Just download this GreaseMonkey script and you’ll get a little Flash player below each download link. You can preview each track before you download with a mere click of the mouse. The Flash player was written by Jeroen Wijering and he’s kindly giving it away free. In this version of the 3hive player the Flash file is run from my website, but you can easily amend the script to run the file from somewhere else.
Happy listening!
More Performing
There are a couple of new functions I’ve got in development for my unobtrusive JavaScript library. I’ve you’ve not had a look at what Performer does then have a ganders now, I’ll be waiting.
Anyway, new functions. Firstly I’m doing a simple Submitter function that will listen for a form being submitted, intercept the submission and send all the data in the form to the processing page. The response from the processing page is then loaded into a named element on the page. Simple, but I think I’ll be using that a lot, and I hope it will be useful for other people too.
Secondly I’m doing a Popper function which (amazingly enough) pops up content fom a remote page based on passed parameters. So it could be used for an image gallery, or perhaps in-page help. This function, unlike most of the Performer functions, is pretty dependent on some CSS, so I’ll be making the Performer.css file available along with the JavaScript file when those functions are released.
As normal, these additions shouldn’t break anything you’re currently using, but if you do see wierdness please let me know.
Twitter: brain trickery
Kathy Sierra, of the Creating Passionate Users blog, has written about the social networking tool Twitter. In case you’ve not heard of it, Twitter allows you to add updates to things you’re doing right now from email, their website or instant messenger. So if you want to tell people you’re currently having a bowl of soup, or that you’re thinking about Brazil, you can. In fact, that’s the whole point.
Like Kathy I’m not convinced of the usefulness of this service, although I suppose a hundred trillion squillion users can’t be wrong. The hypothesis that Twitter works for many people because it tricks the brain into thinking that there’s some genuine interaction going on is, for me, a potent one. I can’t think of anyone’s mundanities of life I’d like to keep my eye on, and I’m sure no-one is interested in what I’m doing right now. But then again, I write this blog.
Using technology to replace real, human contact is a long way from becoming a viable option. It would take a massive leap forward to be able to get the same kind of vibe or buzz that you get from a bunch of like-minded individuals. Let’s face it, the majority of us like meeting up with people. Pretending we’re "connected" because we know what our friends are thinking 30 seconds ago is like saying we’re master chefs because we know how to stir. It’s part of the picture, sure, but it’s a long way from the whole caboodle.
The need for speed
I have a new computer. The old one was getting a bit long in the tooth, and with an increasing number of people in the house needing internet access it became a nightmare to share. So we’ve now go a total of four computers in the house – 3 desktops and a laptop. My new machine has a pretty fast 3GHz processor with 1GB of RAM, but eventually I’ll add another gigabyte.
The building of the new computer was relatively simple, with high quality parts from some friends and moving about 140Gb of hard drives into a new box. Just in case I’ve organised my drives so that any messup with my OS (Windows at the moment, however shortly it will be dual-booting to Ubuntu) can be easily reformatted and the OS reloaded. I’ve just got to sort out a way to backup my data to one of my spare drives and I’ll be pretty confident.
Those in the know will understand when I say that although things seem to be working OK at the moment, I’m prepared for technological meltdown.