Month: March 2006

WDHV and Maria Taylor

 

WDHV 101.7 is a little FM station in Trenton that plays some great pre-70’s classic country. The other day I caught the tail end of “Talk Back Trembling Lips” from 1963 and the rhythm section and reverb filled the van so nicely–it made my morning. They do slip in later stuff and even up to the awful she-thinks-my-tractor’s-sexy “big hat” country, but it’s in moderation and all played by people who actually seem to remember this stuff.

I mention this because this week I’m helping sabotage statistics by recording my radio listening habits for Arbitron (think Nielsen for radio). Three things are great about this: 1. Per day, I only listen to maybe 45 mins of NPR and 10 minutes (if I’m lucky) of some hodunk out-of-area oldies station. 2. They bribe you with dollar bills in the envelope…$10 so far, and since Arbitron works for the LPFM-hating NAB, I’m happy to take their money. 3. This makes twice that I was randomly selected to do this, first being probably a decade ago.

Tonight I’m going to see Mates of State, Maria Taylor and papercranes at Common Grounds. Maria is/was(?) one half of Azure Ray, who put out a great debut album and some OK follow-ups. It’ll be nice to finally see the Mates outside of Wayward Council, they’re sometimes a little much for casual listening, but a blast live.

Detect a blocked pop-up window

 

Since reliable info doesn’t seem to be out there, this Javascript detects if a pop-up window was blocked at least by IE6/XPsp2’s built-in blocker, FF or Opera 8.

var popWin; // global for easy reference later
function pop(url, name, features, replace) {
    popWin = open(url, name, features, replace);
    if (popWin == null) { // nice blocking browsers return null
        alert('window blocked, redirect or whatever');
    } else {
        setTimeout(function() {
            if (typeof popWin.parent == 'undefined') { // opera
                alert('window blocked, redirect or whatever');
            }
        }, 200);
    }
}

How about Safari?

Spore

 

This game is all about scale. Think “The Sims” from the molecular level to the galactic with everything in between. At least watch long enough to see your animal doin’ it (soft jazz with sax helps set the mood). As a programmer, this thing makes my greatest accomplishments feel like Pong.

Subversioning

 

I’ve been hearing great things about source control for awhile so I dug in and installed Subversion using this new tutorial. While you can interact with the svn server from the command-line, the TortoiseSVN Windows shell extension makes managing imports, updates and commits as simple as a right click.

My first project contains all the files in http://mrclay.org/js/, future home of all my Javascript projects: standalone scripts, bookmarklets and user scripts. I’ve already committed several revisions of click2zap into SVN so I can track changes and rollback to previous versions if need be. SVN is gonna be great for bigger projects.

Build what you see

 

I’m really digging this agile software development idea, which boils down to:

  1. Create the user interface.
  2. Build the code to power it.

Without a UI, you just have a bunch of developers and stakeholders, each having a vague notion of what the app will do and look like, and who it will serve. This leads to:

  • frustration for all parties when the finished product doesn’t match the stakeholders’ vision
  • wasted time on features that no-one will use
  • missed opportunities for features that would’ve been obvious with a UI in hand