musical obsession (a week ago)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJjHCZN46U
maps, yeah yeah yeahs

assateague pony

assateague pony, april 2009 ocean city, maryland foal looking for her mother, on a wild barrier island on the eastern shore of maryland, USA

I forgot to mention...

Two of them (the fly and the sand buggy) were taken by a colleague of mine, Shaun. Here is his flickr page.

Please enjoy my wallpaper collection

My Wallpaper Collection

(If you want to download one you click the photo then find the little save icon under the photo and click it)

Brought to you by Dropbox (2 GB of disk in the cloud, automatically synced, version control, with clients for mac, windows, linux).

I only just got it but it seems pretty good.

Get Dropbox

php stupidity

~> cat ~/stupid.php 
<?php

$foo = "hello";

if (isset($foo['somekey'])) {
        echo "php is stupid\n";
}
~> php stupid.php 
php is stupid

Look, I know it's probably doing a $foo[(int)'somekey'] which becomes $foo[0] which does exist. And I now know I should have done is_array($foo) &&... But I don't care right now. This has caused me pain! Boo and :P!!

Beware, my php coding friends.

The Middle East to support Okkervil River

http://www.last.fm/event/943586

3rd of May at the Zoo.

ubuntu

soon as in later today

The Rise of Casual Gaming, An Essay

Casual gaming was a term invented or at least favoured by so called 'hard core' gamers to disparagingly describe Wii Sports. A "casual gamer" was your like your middle aged Aunty. She probably wore Mom Jeans and enjoyed the 4:30pm buffet special and certainly had no idea who Link or Gordon Freeman were. Casual gaming was touted as a dire threat the future of "proper" games, games with a long, steep learning curve or a 300 page walk-through. Nintendo were making shed loads of money selling Wii Bowling to pensioners, so why would they bother investing the large amounts required to create the next Zelda. The idea has some merit perhaps but lets draw some comparisons to YouTube and the movie industry. Cinema fans aren't afraid that the rising popularity of YouTube will threaten the movie industry (at least not that I know of), so lets be optimistic that casual gaming won't wipe out non-casual gaming. In other words don't panic my gamer friends. And be open to the joys of casual gaming. Casual games and gamers are worthy of respect. Play Flight Control if you aren't convinced. Enjoy the fact that it cost you a dollar. Cheaper than a can of coke. Or try your favourite tower defense game on any platform or kill some zombies in Boxhead 2. And what about games like Katamari Damacy, Crazy Taxi? Are they not casual games? Pacman? Tetris? Nobi Nobi Boy? Casual gaming is on the rise. It's coming via Xbox Arcade, Playstion Network, Steam, AppStore, and flash gaming sites. And it doesn't even know where to buy Mom Jeans.

Flight Control for iPhone

I fall to pieces once the jumbos start coming. My top score is 42. There are people scoring 800+. Respect! They say over 200 it doesn't get harder. And they say you can multi-touch to direct more than one plane at a time.

Awesome game. AU$1.19. And it wouldn't work without a touch interface.

rsync grr...

From man rsync:

In particular, when transferring to Windows FAT filesystems which cannot
 represent times with a 1 second resolution --modify-window=1 is useful.

So in summary, rsync is pretty close to COMPLETELY USELESS when the destination is a FAT filesystem... UNLESS you find this little note hidden in the man page and do --modify-window=1.

Well at least it's working now. And I'm not copying 180G to my poor usb drive each time I run rsync. So anyway, here is my solution for backing up my Macbook with rsync...

#!/bin/sh

START=`date`
SOURCE=/Users/Simon
DEST=/Volumes/SEAGATE/Backup/Users

rsync -av \
    --delete \
    --delete-excluded \
    --modify-window=1 \
    --exclude '.Trash/*' \
    --exclude 'Downloads/*' \
    --exclude 'Torrents/*' \
    --exclude 'Library/Caches/*' \
    $SOURCE $DEST

END=`date`

echo Started $START
echo Ended $END

Disclaimer: This is very basic and I don't know much about rsync or Mac OS X. Please Google rsync backup for more expert advice.

To the rsync developers, I get it, I'm a big fat luser for using FAT. But do you think just maybe rsync could just possibly notice this condition and deal with it automatically? Perhaps even with a big warning, "WARNING, destination filesystem is FAT, automatically enabling --modify-window=1, please see man page". Maybe then I would have been asleep two hours ago which would have been very, very nice.

headphones essential

http://riceboysleeps.com/video/video1.html

http://riceboysleeps.com/video/video2.html

nice mac screensavers

http://www.whiteknightlogic.net/code.php

shannon finds the problem in his javascript

it was those darn bunnies! pesky little critters...

joanna news

new material coming...

http://naturalismo.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/joanna-newsom-played-upcoming-third-album-live-in-full-in-big-sur/

One of the good things about my new job

It's not quite as good as coffee from the shop. But it's almost as
good, it's free and it's help yourself. One button grinds, packs,
gives you coffee. Milk is harder: push button, turn knob on side, wait
a few seconds for steamer to be ready, dip tube in a milk. It sucks it
up and steamed milk comes out. When you have enough, push the button
again and it flushes the milk straw with hot water to rinse it. And
you're done.

photography

if you're like me at all you might enjoy this

http://lightboner.tumblr.com/

it's a photo blog. don't worry, it is sfw.

and I think he will play solo material too...

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/simon-and-garfunkel-reunite-in-new-york-1003941750.story

AHAHAH. Sorry. I am a little incoherent. Gibber. I am excited.

Event: Simon & Garfunkel
Date: Wed 17 Jun 2009 8:00PM
Venue: Brisbane Entertainment Centre
        Melaleuca Drive
        Boondall QLD 4034

it's all happening at the zoo

do believe it, I do believe it's true

!!!

well if they are even half as good as leonard cohen was then it will be amazing. and he is seventy something.

have you seen team america?

"satellite launch vewy successful. oh yes. satellite up there wight now. i can see it. listen... [beep... beep... beep...] ...see? that was satellite. a vewy clear signal. big splash in ocean was whale i think. maybe couple of sharks."

well i guess it wasn't christopher walken after all

http://www.thewrap.com/ind-column/2097