Borgström

Kill Hollywood

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:43:18 -0500

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?

Photos of Fireflies in Japan

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:16:11 -0500

Photos of Fireflies in Japan:

Really nice exposures of fireflies at dusk in Japan.

Hahaha. Oops!

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:45:05 -0500

Hahaha. Oops!

RobFord.ca pwn’d What a jackass. At least they were...

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:44:00 -0500

[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 ;)

Missed Connector sorts through missed connections and uses your...

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:40:37 -0500

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!

Wow. AMAZING video.

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:43:40 -0500

Wow. AMAZING video.

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use XML.” Now..."

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 10:10:05 -0500

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use XML.” Now they have two problems.”

- PJ Eby (via Jamie Zawinski)

What to do when you lock yourself out of gitolite?

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:16:00 -0500

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.

mkdir /tmp/fix-gitolite
cd /tmp/fix-gitolite
git clone ~/repositories/gitolite-admin.git
cd gitolite-admin
vi conf/gitolite.conf
… fix stupid oversight …
gl-admin-push
cd ~
rm -fr /tmp/fix-gitolite

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

Downgrading back to Snow Leopard

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 16:31:26 -0500

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:

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.
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.
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.
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

Terrifying. Smart.

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 14:11:14 -0500

Terrifying. Smart.

Those darn birds…

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:34:29 -0400

Those darn birds…

Everyday I love Python more and more

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:31:41 -0400

It’s true. It’s weird. I love a programming language, and every day I use it I love it more and more.

As a sys-admin & developer I regularly find myself needing to parse data supplied by clients that’s, uhm how to put it nicely, formatted like it’s supposed to be an email rather than structured data. This means I often find myself munging data; you know, read from STDIN or sometimes open a file, read it line by line, do something with the data. That kind of thing.

Today I was confronted with a rather unruly set of data and went looking for a better way to handle input in Python, and happened upon the fileinput library.

import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input():
    process(line)

Wow. Process STDIN OR a list of files line by line and only needing a single line of code!?

Python, you’re amazing.

Dope beat.

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:32:48 -0400

Dope beat.

Notifications on the iPhone, or the lack there-of, and what I did about it...

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:36:37 -0400

Dear Apple: Are you serious? After 4 major versions of your mobile operating system I STILL can’t set different alert profiles for different email accounts?

In my case I want certain email accounts I have setup to provide different feedback. See, I get a lot of email, most of it is just informative messages coming from automated systems that don’t necessarily require a timely response while others are alerts that I want to be informed of immediately. This seems like such a trivial thing, yet has a huge impact on my workflow productivity.

When Apple first released the 3G I left my Blackberry Curve behind and joined the masses in coming to iPhone. After 8 months I asserted that the iPhone was not a productivity device and returned to Blackberry and the comfort of a physical keyboard and a multitude of configuration options where I happily remained until this week when my BES crashed and I had enough of fighting with it.

I considered going to an Android device, but recently FatBox has started building iPhone apps and while my iPod Touch and the simulator have done me well during this first development cycle it really behoves me to have an iPhone now that we’re getting REALLY close to releasing our first app into the App store (stay tuned for a release announcement that should happen in the next couple weeks!).

I digress. The point is here I am with my shiny new iPhone 4 facing the same problems I was facing back with my 3G. However, this time it’s a little different. This time I can do something about it, so I did…

Photo

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:18:23 -0400

TIP: my GIT+VIM visual commit shortcut

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:52:40 -0400

I just got asked by someone about this so I figured I’d share with everyone :D

Do you write any type of structured text (code, technical documentation, etc)? Do you use GIT? Do you work in VIM in a terminal?

If not, you should really look into it. VIM == life changing editor.

If you do, here’s a great little utility function to view the changes you’re about commit while you’re writing your commit message

commit() {
        git diff $* > /tmp/.git.commit
        EDITOR='vim -c "vsp /tmp/.git.commit"' git commit $*
}

Drop the above snippet in your .bashrc file and then you can simply invoke commit from your shell with the list of items you want to commit as the arguments and you’ll end up with something like the following.

By far the funniest Family Guy thing I’ve seen in awhile.

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 22:54:04 -0400

By far the funniest Family Guy thing I’ve seen in awhile.

Very clever shot. It almost feels like a frame out of a comic...

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:57:39 -0400

Very clever shot. It almost feels like a frame out of a comic book.

Hahahaha. AMAZING!

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:09:36 -0400

Hahahaha. AMAZING!

Megacity? More like Regretcity.

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:06:15 -0400

Does anyone else who lives in downtown Toronto have this odd feeling of regret? Regret for not really being aware of what was going on in the 1998 amalgamation of our city?

Let me make it a little more clear.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and the 2010 election results pretty much sum it.

Different cities, different agendas. While the people in the outer lying areas around downtown Toronto don’t feel stuck with us, I sure feel stuck with them…

Clearly we don’t have the same values. Don’t get me wrong here, I’ve got lots of love for lots of people that live out there, but I definitely don’t gel with general population there (it makes me feel creepy…)

My vote is for a de-amalgamation and return to the way things were from ‘68 to ‘97. Let’s put running “Toronto” (proper.) back in the hands of those that live in Toronto and let our neighbors do their own thing. East York you’re with us but Etobicoke, York, North York & Scarborough I think it’s time we go our separate ways.

Now, to figure out how to make this happen… Anyone know the process for de-amalgamation?