it's my (old) blog

by simon baird

Monday, November 22, 2010

A fork appears in the road...

This blog is closing down.

[Pause for gasps and murmurs].

Dry your eyes internet. I would not leave you out in the cold like that!

I am splitting this blog into two blogs. Like a primordial amoeba. What was one is now two.

Blog #1:
Bookmark or subscribe to this for my pointless photos, sporadic musings and occasional half-hearted music review.

Blog #2:
Bookmark or subscribe to this for posts about programming, code snippets and other geek stuff.
(Ps, sorry about the recycled content. Just needed something to kick start things over there).

Now you must choose. The left path or the right. Or you could follow both, like some kind of bad Harry Potter plot device. (Or you could find a bus and get the hell out of here).

Now, if you please, I would like to take a moment to fondly remember...

"it's my blog"
http://glosoli.blogspot.com/
13 Sep, 2005 - 22 Nov, 2010

And don't forget, you can come back any time to browse the archives and relive some of those sweet memories. (I know that's what I will be doing).

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Thursday, November 18, 2010

do you guys know about die antwoord?

kind of like a next level south african ali-g

perhaps boing boing get credit for introducing them to the world. at that point no-one really knew they were "fake"

here is an awesome yolandi halloween costume...

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

hamrbl - a cute haml hack to let you write ruby with python-esque whitespace

Did you ever wish your code looked more like your haml?

Did you ever wonder what ruby would be like with python style significant whitespace?

Without further ado, I present hamrbl.rb

Surprisingly the syntax highlighting works fine in vim and github. :)

Disclaimer: just for fun... this is (almost certainly) a gross misuse of the wonderful haml

include_and_extend method for ruby, experiments with modules

As a followup to this post and inspired again by this wycats post, here is some more experimentation with extend and include in ruby, culminating in an include_and_extend method, (which I'm not suggesting is a particularly good idea), but it does work...

Monday, November 15, 2010

video test

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sPJvyQWSIc&t=2m15s

(it's kyu. i skipped you ahead to the part where they start rocking out on the floor tom)

dawn

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

...in which i live blog the joanna newsom tour date announcement on triple j

  • 4th march tivoli, brisbane
  • 9th march, sydney
  • 15th march, melbourne
(on sale friday morning)

Update:
More details here.


Sunday, November 07, 2010

Saturday, November 06, 2010

Kyü update

Well after listening to the album and seeing them live at the Old Museum, here is my update. Moments of genius. Not quite as good overall as I might have imagined after hearing Pixiphony for the first time. Live, there was some magic. The girls have some undeniable talent and a unique sound. It will be great to see what they are doing in five years as their songwriting matures.

Some links:

my new world is breathtaking

the first two locations are quite close to home. in the third shot i was completely lost, nearly dead, trudging through snow, miles from home. i survived one night on the ice. i did not survive a second...

the texture pack is brown and bloom.

some minecraft links:
Conways' Game of Life in Minecraft (video)
Towards Dawn - A Minecraft Travel Blog

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

save 3. kind of ruined...

went exploring and found this. the pre-biome and post-biome generated terrain doesn't fit together as you can see. i'm probably going to delete it and start a fresh world. :( also i concur the mob spawn rates are way too high now. (i think notch agrees with this and an update will be forthcoming).

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

cave where i died and lost stuff


save 3 (pre-biome)


mad scheme

currently i pay 6.64% interest on my mortgage. it's going up 25 points any second now, so let's say it's 6.9%. suncorp are currently offering 1.9% on balance transfers for 15 months (when you sign up for a new credit card). suppose i "balance transfer" $10,000 from my two current cards and put the proceeds on my mortgage. i'd pay 5% less interest on $10,000 for 15 months, which is a saving of $625 or $42 a month. but, the annual card fee is $120 which brings it down to $500 or $33 a month. of course, after 15 months i'd pay off the new card and cut it up. worth it? this is tax free btw. what if i repeat this scheme with a few other low introductory rate cards?

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

nooooo...! #minecraft

(warning, boring story follows).

so i have a little single player world. i haven't been there there
long. i found an amazing cave a few minutes walk away from my base. i
explored it for a while and loaded up on iron and coal, carefully
marking my path so i could find my way back up. (there was some gold
there too but i hadn't made an iron pick yet).

it was getting late (irl) so I decided to go back home. got almost
to the surface when i was ambushed by a skeleton! i noobishly
had no bacon or other means to restore health and i ended up full of
arrows and dead. when i respawned it was daylight (thankfully) so i
bolted as quick as i could back to the spot to get my loot before it
disappeared.

but i couldn't find the entrance! it was kind of hard to see; just a
flat hole in grass and i hadn't had the sense to mark it. eventually i
found it but it was too late and all my stuff was gone. this includes
a heap of glass that i had made and all my torches, my tools, my wood,
some flint. everything. :(

(the end)

holy crap (kyü)

Watch KYU and other great gigs on Moshcam.

Monday, October 25, 2010

this could be an amazing new band: kyü

listen to pixiphony on their myspace. kind of
bat-for-lashes-vs-animal-collective-y:
http://www.myspace.com/kyusounds
friday show in brisbane:
http://tickets.oztix.com.au/?Event=17821
itunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/au/album/kyu/id391988362
(i will let you know if the hype is justified)

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924 - 2010)

ob mandelbrot video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGxbhdr3w2I
the photo parts are a little tacky LAME but i like the way there is zooming, panning and rotation (instead of just the traditional endless zoom)

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

minecraft

i might try to explain to you how amazing this game is. but not now. now it's just these links, (which don't really explain it either):

a fan's attempt at a trailer:
crafting guide

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

fremnet manor by night


my first ever diamond

fremnet help me shore it up so i could mine it without the diamond falling into lava

beginning_of_fortnight method for Ruby on Rails

You might know that Rails provides a bunch of useful extensions to the Time class with methods like beginning_of_week, beginning_of_month, etc.

For my application (a thing with fortnightly billing periods) I wanted to define a beginning of fortnight method to consistently calculate the beginning (and end) of a fortnight. Here's how it ended up (both short and sweet):

(Note that there's no special reason to use epoch. Any other day would work just as well probably).

Does it work?

Put beginning_of_fortnight.rb in config/initializers.

Note that there is already a Numeric#fortnights method in ActiveSupport so we can use things like 2.fortnights without needing any extentions.

sleigh bells!

tell 'em (track 1)
never has a song intro more effectively communicated the message "WAKE THE EFF UP AND LISTEN TO THIS! :)"

riot rhythm (track 3)
mad chromatic gee-tar riff ftw

rill rill (track 7)
delicious summery chill-out without even trying

and the rest of it is as good

check it out

Sleigh Bells
Treats (2010)
(Content owner: Liberation Music)

Monday, October 04, 2010

Saturday, October 02, 2010