Matthew Gifford

I took some notes during Rasmus Lerdorf’s excellent talk about scaling web apps during the PDXPHP meeting at OSCON. But rather than take the time to write something up, I’m going to take advantage of the lazyweb by pointing to Niall Kennedy’s post about the same talk Rasmus gave earlier in the day.

Skype 1.5 for Mac OS X allows you to make video calls. It’s about time.

The next Decemberists album will be coming out on October 3rd. They’ll be playing two shows at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom a couple weeks later.

What was it that people were saying about Rocketboom? Something about it not surviving without Amanda? Wrong.

OPB radio ran a story about Portland’s upcoming municipal wi-fi this morning. In the story, a spokeswoman from MetroFi said that users would have to agree to a terms and conditions page and could get to “virtually any website.” What are the terms and conditions? What websites won’t people be able to access? Will VOIP, SSH, and BitTorrent be allowed? What ports are blocked? These are questions that should be answered, especially if MetroFi is receiving money from taxpayers.

I’ll do some digging into this later today.

I’m really digging zefrank lately. From today’s episode:

Ugly when compared to preexisting notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.

It’s so easy to criticize someone else’s creation when you’re judging it in a vacuum. To make a more accurate judgment, it’s important to understand the context in which the thing was created.

Remember when you created your first website, wrote your first song, or baked your first cake? Chances are pretty good that it was ugly. In the case of my first website, very ugly. But the context is that we were learning how to do things. We never claimed that they were great works. To judge them by that criteria would be unfair.

So, give Andrew and Joanne a little space. I’m sure they’re still trying to figure things out.

(I should probably make it clear that I’m not trying to be all relativistic and say that any discussion of beauty is pointless. And there are times when harsh criticism is appropriate, such as when someone wants to build a really ugly skyscraper in the middle of your city. But to call today’s Rocketboom “pathetic” is pathetic. Just say you don’t like it and move along.)

Today’s Rocketboom is brilliant. I think Andrew is doing a great job of handling the transition from Amanda to Joanne.

After reading the comments, it’s clear that there are a lot people who don’t agree. They’re trying to find any reason to proclaim the death of Rocketboom. In this case, it’s the degraded audio and video quality of this episode. Never mind the fact that it was intentional. (I’m guessing these people wouldn’t think much of Guided by Voices or Sebadoh, either. Their loss.)

This reminds me of the howls of the bad old Mac users when OS X first arrived. If it were up to them, we’d still be using that old, decrepit OS rather than the powerful, dependable OS everyone has grown to love. (Let me take this opportunity to blow my own horn. I loved OS X from the beginning. I started using it as my primary OS the day it came out.)

I’ve added a couple scripts to my new Projects page. Regular readers of this site will probably be familiar with them.

For the first time in over a year, Sufjan Stevens is going on tour, bringing with him a talented group of musicians and friends including a small string ensemble and brass section. They will perform a repertoire of familiar songs from Seven Swans, Michigan and Illinois in a new symphonic context.

Awesome. He’ll be playing Portland’s Crystal Ballroom on October 13th. Jenn won’t be able to go to the show, so I’m looking for people to go with me.

While hanging out in the soccer room during the end of the match between England and Portugal, I noticed that one of the attendees was using a notebook with a slick-looking OS that I’d never seen before. I eventually figured out that he was using Ubuntu Linux. I’ve been toying around with the idea of switching to Linux for a couple years, but never really had a machine to experiment with. Then I remembered that I had a somewhat-broken PowerBook G4 down in the garage.

As soon as I got home from Gnomedex on Sunday, I created an Ubuntu LiveCD. Booting from the CD was going fine until, during the splash screen, error dialogs started piling up. Something called Bonobo wasn’t loading properly, which led to significant parts of the UI not being rendered.

I didn’t have much luck finding information that would help me to fix the problem. Eventually, I got frustrated and gave up. I probably could’ve spent more time researching the problem, but I have better things to do than figure out how to make a computer function so I can get real work done.

However, I’m open to giving it another try. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.