Author: Steve

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

Freenet overview

 

I was telling a friend about the Free Network Project the other day, which I’d read about a few years ago. I still haven’t tried it, but after refreshing my knowledge on it, here’s a little overview.

A primer

“Freenet” is basically a completely decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer internet. It has files, websites, hyperlinks, etc. but all content is published and requested truly anonymously; the design of the system puts this above all other issues like delivery speed and latency, so while Freenet is a p2p app, it’s much more effective at disseminating censored information under “evil” governments than, say, getting you “warez”. All Freenet users run a small server (“node”) on the network that helps push data and requests around and holds a cache of data on disk called the “data store”.
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Malmö Gearlust

 

I’m totally spoiled having a big back room dedicated to making and recording music, but sometimes you can still dream.

Check out this amazing pic of the “Mothership”[1] in Sweden’s Gula Studion. Gula was built as a sister studio to the perhaps more famous Tambourine Studios, birthplace of most Cardigans and Eggstone albums. More than the gear; the space, atmosphere, and natural lighting is wonderful. Two more pics of the great room from the Gula site.

Eggstone update! A bit of googling around just unearthed a copy of the ridiculously OOP last Eggstone album on Amazon UK for £7. The order is in, I hope this works out. At least one other seller out there is holding out for $70. I wonder what Josh paid…

[1] pic from an excellent article on the recording of the first Franz Ferdinand album.