Jan
21

Kill Hollywood

I’ve been saying it for years. Hollywood is dying. It’s a bunch of old men & women who are far too stuck in their ways to grasp the slightest bit of what’s happened to the world around them and instead of trying to embrace it they decided to fight it by suing the pants off of the consumers they’re trying to retain.

Their latest attempt at holding onto their dying monopoly was the SOPA bill that has, for at least the time being, been shelved — but it serves to illuminate the levels at which they will try to use their influence to hold on for dear life.

y-combinator (an early stage startup accelerator) says it the best way I’ve heard in a long time:

The people who run [Hollywood] are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.

They also go on to challenge us to come up with the best, most disruptive idea we can to hasten their demise.

So, what is the most entertaining thing you can build?

Jan
02

Dec
07

Dec
06

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

RobFord.ca pwn’d

What a jackass. At least they were somewhat polite. I probably wouldn’t have been ;)

Dec
04

Missed Connector sorts through missed connections and uses your preferences and location to rank which ones are more likely about you.

It’s an iPhone app that works hand in hand with a custom backend that uses natural language text parsing to geo-code craigslist missed connection posts in your city. It then rates them against where you’ve been to show a list of connections that may be you.

This has been a long labor of love. I’ll write more about it in a little bit.

For now, check www.missedconnector.com for more info!

Nov
22

Nov
12

Nov
08

What to do when you lock yourself out of gitolite?

Today, during some reorganization of my ‘keydir’, I accidentally locked myself out of RW access on the ‘gitolite-admin’ repository.

Doh!

Here was my general steps for recovery, with gl-admin-push being the secret sauce. These need to be run as the user that gitolite is running as.

  1. mkdir /tmp/fix-gitolite
  2. cd /tmp/fix-gitolite
  3. git clone ~/repositories/gitolite-admin.git
  4. cd gitolite-admin
  5. vi conf/gitolite.conf
  6. … fix stupid oversight …
  7. gl-admin-push
  8. cd ~
  9. rm -fr /tmp/fix-gitolite

And now I can read & write to the gitolite-admin checked out on my workstation.

Nov
06

Downgrading back to Snow Leopard

Dear Apple,

WHAT THE HELL!

Like always, your marketing led me to believe that Lion was going to be greatest version of OS X yet. I was SO looking forward to the new version of mail.

Like always, I waiting until 10.7.2 was released before I upgraded. You know, to make sure you’ve smoothed out all the little kinks.

However, unlike always, I’ve now made my mind up and have my Snow Leopard DVD sitting next to me waiting to wipe & re-install my laptop. Writing this is the last thing I do in Lion before I dump it and hope that whatever 10.8 is addresses the grave oversights & mistakes you’ve made.

Here’s the short version of my gripe list:

  1. Why on earth does the new window animation take 1.5 seconds by default now. 1.5 seconds for a window transition is such bad interface design! It literally adds up to minutes per day (hours per year!) of lost usability. Granted this can be turned off with a hidden preference, but you shouldn’t need to in the first place.

  2. Natural scrolling. PUH-LEASE. The reason it works on a mobile device is because the orientation is different and you’re not dealing with decades of computing precedence. This is not NATURAL, my mouse is not my finger.

  3. Where did spaces go!? Why couldn’t you have kept it and still added mission control? You took away all the nice little things about spaces (wrap around, multi-rows, etc) and made it SO slow because of the awful slide animation. Maybe if windows received focus early on in the slide it would be somewhat OK, but since you have to wait for the slide to finish it’s just unacceptable.

  4. I think the thing that I’m most disappointed about is Mail. It looks like its going to be awesome, but now after a week of splitting my time between Lion’s mail and Snow Leopard’s mail it’s definitely not. Again, what’s with the awful animations when composing emails? (Again, you can turn it off but you shouldn’t have to.) The new threading view has the potential to be great, but it’s way too early in its life. There are so many problems with long threads and it causes the app to lock up for seconds at a time when switching between them.

Please Apple. Don’t try to cram things from the iPhone into the Desktop. Just because they work in one place doesn’t mean they work in the other.

Sincerely Disappointed.

-E