Something I didn’t realize I needed until I saw it implemented so damn well was this slick little Flash mp3 player, perfect for embedding in a blog post. Created by Martin Laine, who like all us programmers looks kind of serious and weird in his photo.

Since I haven’t actually recorded any new content to play in this, I’ll just point it at an old, bad recording of me singing the politically incorrect [not in a proud way, just naive] Dixie, with Dave Winer and a bunch of other bloggers. Just because the player is so simple and nice and looks nothing like Media Player or Quicktime.

dixie-5-plus-1.mp3

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Update: I have switched to using the more standard "enclosure" tags which may be interpreted by aggregators, and place a player at the end of the post when viewed on intepid.com.

… is a well known tongue twister, but it occurred to me that it might be twisting more than just one’s tongue. If you’re like me (and most people) you probably can’t say it much more than twice without screwing up, and if this is the case I invite you to try the following experiment:

Imagine someone speaking to you, someone with perfect enunciation (eg an actor, presenter etc), and imagine them saying that phrase, quickly and clearly, five times in a row. Starting now.

…

Any luck? It turns out this is something I can not do. In my head, even Stephen Fry says "Red leather yellow leather red lella yella lala…" If this tendency is normal (as I kind of hope it is) it seems to me a striking indication of a direct link between speech and thought— it’s almost enough to make me want to go back to university and finish my semiotics degree.

Grizzlefitz [named by Shaun] has a thagomizer! The word was coined by Gary Larson in a Far Side cartoon, and has since become the official term for a spiked dinosaur tail.

(via Accordion Guy)

Sometimes the sickness overcomes me, and I am compelled to start hacking away at my hair. With a snip-snip here and a snip-snip there— followed by several hundred expletives and a rushed purchase of some electric clippers… and it’s back to the good old buzz cut, although even this is a bit dodgy because of my initial hack job with the scissors.

The really sad thing about trying to cut your own hair is that when you stuff it up (and there’s a very high probability of this) you can’t just go ask a hairdresser to fix it up for you, because at some point you will have to explain how you got into this state, and then they will mock you and call upon all their hairdresser friends to mock you as well, and you will feel great shame.

My masochistic DIY streak doesn’t end with my hair— I once made a much more permanent modification. When I was 17 or so I chipped a front tooth, and rather than go get it capped I decided instead to file both my incisors back until the chip was no longer visible. I figured I could spare a millimetre or two (and at the time I was unaware of the complex structure of teeth, so this really wasn’t such a brilliant idea). The most surprising thing about the experience was how little sensation the actual act of filing caused, even for my reasonably sensitive teeth.

before (simulated)

after (now)

Speaking of teeth, The Lake House totally sucked— did I mention that already?

Lost in La Mancha — a great way to cure yourself of ever wanting to be a director. I’m only actually half watching it right now because it is just so damn painful seeing Terry Gilliam grimace in horror as fighter planes and freak hailstorms completely ruin his shoot.

The Lake House — I expected a soppy movie, but this is just flaccid. By now people expect Keanu to be a bit dull, and Sandra Bullock isn’t about to win best actress, but this… it’s just so awful! Even the vaguely interesting supernatural premise is completely wasted— and the letter writing concept isn’t even properly maintained, as the script slides lazily into exchanges which just sound like two people having an extremely boring phone conversation. I walked out after an hour, when I realized it just wasn’t going to improve.

Night Watch (Nochnoy Dozor) — I saw this on DVD and really regretted having missed it at the cinema. Like a Russian (and much better) version of Underworld, with some really nice direction and photography.

Lost (TV) — Why did I get sucked back into watching this? It’s just going to keep dragging on, isn’t it— until it’s so awful and inconsistent that no one bothers to watch it, and then it will just be cancelled. Why can’t season 2 be the last? Why couldn’t the whole island have been blown up? And why the fuck does Charlie just wander back to the beach to sit around a campfire after seeing Lock, Echo and Desmond essentially nuke themselves? (or did they??? etc etc)

I’ve been wanting to try posting one of these YouTube videos— encouraging people to "hotlink" to their content is an excellent way to get people using their site.

Here’s an old one that blows me away (although it’s a shame the quality isn’t a little better).

Read more about parkour

For a possibly limited time only [depending on how many complaints I get about it being confusing ;)] you can download the latest test version of Jujusketch:

NOTE: that it requires WINTAB[32].DLL to be installed— ie you must already have a graphics tablet. Also it has been tested with only two type of tablet so far, Wacom and Genius, and already there are observable differences— tablet drivers seem to date back to the dark ages of Windows :( If anyone knows of another API I should be using please let me know.

Keyboard shortcuts:

P: Toggle pressure sensitivity
S: lasso select mode
D: draw mode
Ctrl+C: copy all or selected (should place meta data on clipboard which can paste into office etc)
Space: toggle stroke or fill mode
W/K: Set color to White/Black
R/G/B: Mix color to Red/Green or Blue
Ctrl + pen: Pan
Shift + pen: Zoom/Rotate
Backspace: delete last shape.
Ctrl+Z/Y: Undo/Redo
Alt-PgDown/PgUp: Move to next/previous picture in sketchbook folder
etc…lots of temp/test stuff in there… if you end up in some weird mode just close and restart :)

You just run the executable (there is no install process and it should be happy to run from any location). It will create a Sketchbook folder in My Documents where it will automatically save your drawings.

All these black and white images are a result of me trying to get into the habit of using my own software again. Jujusketch has potential but still no user interface (unless you count the keyboard as a user interface), and I’m trying to decide what it should look like. Minimal is a word that comes to mind. I don’t want palettes and swatches all over the place, à la Photoshop and Illustrator, and I don’t want a dense heirarchy of menus, à la the execrable Gimp.

Also, I have very little time to spare for this project (or any other right now) so my goal must be: super simple, minimal functionality, non intrusive and somehow very intuitive.

Easy peasy!

Every now and then, like every insecure self-respecting blogger I wonder: How the hell do I find out how many people are actually reading my blog, consarn it!

Yes, this is another blog entry related to blogging

Numbers reported by services like Bloglines don’t seem so helpful since a) they only represent a fraction of readers and b) they only report subscribers, not active readers— I imagine a lot of people stop using such services after a short time, or only log in occasionally.

Aggregated web stats (as provided by internet host) aren’t too helpful either, as the numbers vary wildly depending on what is considered a hit and what is considered a visit (the latter is the number that counts).

I do have a rough idea of how many people visit this site, based on a counter which is fairly pessimistic compared to most because it is based only on background image loads— these are a lower priority for browsers and will tend to generate fewer hits than normal images (often you have to do a "forced" reload to see an updated background image). This counter tells me that I currently get around 120 visitors per day, but still that doesn’t really tell me how many different people visit, say, over the course of a week. Nor does it tell me how many people have read a particular post; it just means they’ve hit a page somewhere on my site.

And so I realize that the only way to get an accurate sampling is to analyze the server logs directly. This is a pain, but it can also be very informative.

Totally anal method for estimating blog readership:

1. Locate and download a recent server log from your web host. I can access mine as monthly gzipped archives, so I downloaded June.
2. Pick an entry containing an image, that was posted two weeks before the end of that log (any longer than that means the post is probably a little stale anyway). I chose this one, an unremarkable post which happens to consist of a single image.
3. Search the log for occurences of the image file name, in this case 555.gif. I count 486, which means an absolute maximum of 486 people viewed that post within two weeks.
4. Note that many of the accesses are in fact [http code] 304’s, which means they are caused by people refreshing their browsers or returning to a page, so ignore those and count only the 200’s. That reduces my number to 323.
5. Note that some of these loads were not complete [this can be checked by looking at the byte count], which means they were probably cancelled or interrupted, so ignore these as well. My total is now 308.
6. Now have a look at the IP addresses, and be dismayed at how many duplicates there are, despite all this culling! Be ruthless and assume that any addresses starting with the same 3 numbers (ie using the same class C address range) are probably from the same person, and ignore those as well. This leaves me with a final tally of 217.

So now I think I can be reasonably confident that around 200 individuals will see a given entry— and furthermore, I can now use these results to work out what proportion of Bloglines subscribers actually saw that post via Bloglines, by checking the referrers. Here’s the referrer breakdown for those remaining 217 accesses:

Referrer (how entry was viewed)
intepid.com	179
Unknown (no referrer info)	21
Bloglines (reports 47 subscribers)	15
Google Reader	2
NewsGator (reports 13 subscribers)	0

What’s surprising here is the large discrepancy between people who read via browsing and those who read via feeds— according to these numbers less than 20% of people who saw that entry were using an aggregator or news reader.

A final note: as painstaking as this process sounds, it doesn’t actually take that long if you’re comfortable with text find & replace operations. Writing this entry took a lot longer than doing the calculations.

… and further, software is the only thing that enables me to draw at all these days. It’s been a very long time since I produced a sketch on paper, but I don’t miss it at all. The texture, the weight, the smell etc of paper just doesn’t grab me. Or perhaps I should say it does grab me but it doesn’t inspire me to permanently mark it. The last time I tried "real-life" drawing I sat down with a book and a pen and scribbled an ugly ugly picture of a bay. It took me a long time, and looked like total crap in my opinion— look, here it is now:

Funnily enough it actually looks better in this context than it does in my sketchbook.

“Please, kill me…”