Zed's Technical Blog
2010-01-29 : Maxipads Are Better Than iPads
I am about as interested in the iPad as I am in Maxipads. I’m not against them, I’m actually quite for them. I understand that a large majority of the population probably prefers Maxipads. Another group probably hates them. There’s probably discussions about the benefits of Maxipads vs. Minipad vs. Tampons. I don’t think about them. I don’t plan on buying any unless someone asks real nicely. I just really don’t need any Maxipads or even think about them since, you know, I have a penis and shit.
But you know why Maxipads are better than iPads? Because the people who buy Maxipads don’t fucking talk about them all day!
2010-01-24 : My Latest Project SongBe.At
UPDATE: Looks like I broke something since it seems the actual player on each page only works in Firefox so far. I’ll debug it tomorrow.
UPDATE2: Alright, it’s working in Firefox and Safari now, probably everywhere else. It was a load order problem with the flash vs. javascript.
2010-01-19 : Yeah, Don't Move To NYC To Do Your Startup (Yet)
Let me tell you a little story my people. I had a friend of a friend get me in contact with a guy who ran a small NYC hedge fund. This guy was very nice and very professional and had an interesting idea he’d already implemented and which was making his fund fairly wealthy. What he wanted me to do was recreate the web site in Ruby on Rails.
He eventually went with a programmer he knew and trusted, which was probably a good thing since I didn’t want to do a site in Ruby on Rails. During the course of our meetings I asked him how much his “small” hedge fund was worth.
2010-01-18 : My Fret War Round 8 Submission
Over at Fret War we’re doing a concept album that’s fairly ridiculous. It’s a horrible rip off of several obnoxious D&D themed stories and mixed them up while simultaneously ripping off a few well known rock operas.
It shall be delicious when done, and I’m already envisioning a final “album” of epic proportions.
2010-01-16 : Fret War Embed This Player
I’m now working on letting people pimp their Fret War submissions so that after they play they can post their submission to their blog.
First step in that is a simple 'embed this’ setup. It’s still early, but every place we currently have a media player there’s a link to get at the cut-paste code you need to do an embed.
2010-01-12 : I'd Like Thomas Ptacek To Apologize Please
At about 1:04 in this talk by Thomas Ptacek he says:
“Zed Shaw will kill your company before security kills your company.”
2010-01-11 : A Few Interesting Ratings System Observations
I’m currently crunching some preliminary numbers from the Fret War rating system experiment. If you haven’t read it, here’s the blog post about how I’m doing Fret War’s ratings. It covers mostly the stats and code behind it, not really the social impact.
Today I was collecting a bit of preliminary information to see how it’s working out. I’ve also been participating in a few forums and comment sites to see how they operate. I don’t have any hard numbers yet, but there’s a few observations I’ve made which I might try to turn into some sort of survey or secondary analysis.
2010-01-09 : If You Hate How I Write, Why Comment Like Me?
Recently an old essay of mine Programmers Must Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All hit a few of the nerd hangouts. As per usual, the commenters on the site can’t string together more than a few comments but feel they can critique my writing. I apparently have to work on my presentation because nobody is going to read my rant and it will never change how they think about statistics. Nope, I write like a retarded teenager who’s an arrogant prick and an asshole so obviously nobody is going to read my essay on statistics.
Yet, they all read it, and then their comments are just as arrogant and “retardedly teenager” as my writing:
2009-12-29 : The Barometer of Hacker News Knowledge Half-life
I never submit my articles to Hacker News or pretty much any news aggregation site. To me it’s more valuable to see if something I’ve worked on is worthy of HN, whether my intent is to educate or just piss off whiny shit-talking trolls. To me, the value of a natural feedback system is greater than any promotional value I would get out of submitting things myself.
The interesting effect of this is that many of my essays and blog posts get re-posted numerous times during the year. Yesterday my essay The Master, The Expert, The Programmer was re-posted and people had generally positive comments, even on reddit, which is kind of nice.
2009-12-27 : FretWar.com Out Of The Beta It Wasn't Really In
I just put the finishing touches on the last few features I wanted for fretwar.com and now I’m looking for people to come play and give me feedback on it. Even if you don’t play guitar you can still come and participate as a listener.
The site works pretty well and is stable. It also has most of the features I want, but still needs to be tightened up and cleaned more. It’s had about 20 players with 10 active, and has about 120 registered users.
2009-12-23 : Music Browser, Not "Music Service Client"
I’m still having a hard time explaining the concept of a music browser to people. Maybe it’s because they think of their Firefox as a “google service client”, but I keep running into people who should know better and don’t. To me the concept is simple:
- Start it up.
- Type zedshaw.com.
- Browse and listen to music I’ve created.
2009-12-21 : What I Been Up To Lately
I haven’t blogged much lately since I’ve been busy hacking and working like mad on some projects I’ve taken on. I just finished a few really big milestones in them so I figured I’d talk about them a bit. Mostly just unfascinating documenting of my work so far. Nothing fancy.
Librelist
2009-12-05 : Proposals For Librelist Moderation Strategies
This is a real short blog post to propose two or three ways that librelist could do its initial list “moderation”. Actually, moderation isn’t the right word, but rather “list quality control” is probably better. The state goal of these three strategies is simply to allow for people to reduce spam and griefers while at the same time not giving list Nazis air to breathe. These are also just proposals, so read it and then if you have comments join the meta@librelist.com mailing list to hash it out.
Administrivia Business
2009-12-03 : Opening Up Librelist.com Code, Looking For Volunteers
This is a quick announcement that I’m looking to turn librelist.com into a free competitor to google’s groups mailing lists. I’ve created a completely open bug tracker, RCS, and wiki site at support.librelist.com and put the most recent code in it. The goal is to make it a donation supported mailing list system that caters specifically to open source projects, in much the same way that freenode.net operates. To get there though, I’m going to need help.
Why?
2009-11-6 : Rubrics And The Bimodality Of 1-5 Ratings
I’m working on a fun new project called Fret War these days as a way to merge my love for playing guitar with my love of writing software. The concept is simple: Guitarists learn to play a difficult piece of music based on a theme, players and fans rate the quality of their submissions. In order for Fret War to work though, I needed to create a rating system that fought the bimodal trend of most other 1-5 rating systems out there using some different statistics.
In this blog post I’d like to lay out the mathematics and theories I’m using to create a rating system that combats the “1 or 5” tendency. I’ll have code you can use in your own system and encourage comments on the method in order to improve it.
2009-08-22 : Tons Of Lamson Docs Done, Lamson 1.0pre4 Out
Well, I spent all day working on tons of Lamson Documentation and fixing a few bugs so I can release Lamson 1.0pre4 for everyone.
The big things in the release are that I got the coverage to 100%, implemented a nice confirmation API and documented the hell out of it. There’s docs for:
2009-08-21 : Bringing Back EaRing With Super GC Powers
A while back I played this joke on Ruby people. It was an elaborate joke, where I wrote a fully dynamic assembler in a couple weeks, and then did an entire presentation at RubyEnRails (Amsterdam) basically showing how my “literal machine” beat the pants of all the Ruby virtual machines. I touted EaRing as the perfect accessory to every Ruby company, because now every Ruby company can claim to be making a VM for Ruby.
I loved that joke, but I didn’t really understand how cool EaRing actually was. I kind of wrote it, and then tossed it on my server since I’d done it already and the problem wasn’t interesting anymore.
2009-08-19 : The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff
Well, looks like Jonathan aka _why erased everything he’d worked on with absolutely no notice. My first reaction was that he got hurt or was in trouble, so I contacted a couple folks who might know him and asked. Nobody knew.
Then it became clear he just jettisoned all that was his online _why persona in one quick move. He got rid of hacketyhack, his call to help kids code. He got rid of Shoes, his call to make Ruby more fun to code with. He got rid of his books, and his art and everything he’d built.
2009-08-17 : Moving To San Francisco September 1st For Reals
It’s official, I will be moving to San Francisco on September 1st. I spent four days there and managed to get a job and a place to stay in the first two days I was there. I also explored the city and checked out all the neighborhoods, food, and anything that might put me off if I didn’t like them.
Overall, it was a great trip and I’m looking forward to living there and experiencing the new laid back startup vibe. Here’s a few short things I experienced while I was there for a few days, and my perspective on the place so far.
2009-08-05 : I'm Moving To San Francisco, I Need A Job
I’ve recently decided to move from NYC to San Francisco. I love New York, and still think it’s the greatest city in the world, but I’ve been living here way too long already and I feel the itch to live in the valley for a while. I really want my next five years to be an immersion in all things technology, engineering, and startups, and NYC just doesn’t have that.
With that in mind, I’m going to come to San Francisco for four days next week. I’ll be there from August 12th to the 16th to interview with companies and scope out apartments. I’d like to interview at least one company a day, and I already have one lined up for Saturday, possibly a second one. My goal is to be living in SF by September 1st with a job and a place to live.
2009-08-03 : Announcing Lamson Advertising Marketing Email Synergy
Today I’m proud to announce a revolution in email marketing: The Lamson Advertising Marketing Email System. Lamson AMES is a revolutionary innovative award-winning disruptive technology bringing bleeding edge next-generation email marketing synergy to the advertising world. Lamson (a leader in cutting edge email delivery systems) has joined with Lamson AMES in a strategic partnership to produce the next generation email client.
Lamson AMES is so important, I can’t wait to finish the product demo before telling people about it. The entire economy, and especially the advertising industry desperately needs Lamson AMES now, before another major economic collapse destroys the world.
2009-07-19 : Librelist.com, Lamson 1.0pre1 Soon
That microturfing.com was fun, but that’s not code. That’s just a tiny little diversion from my usual hacking activities. And since it’s not code, it doesn’t deserve being on any code related sites. Shame on you guys. Well, you also posted the original marketroid site that had nothing to do with code, so I’m not sure why people are bitching.
Anyway, about code now.
2009-07-18 : Microturfing.com Is Live!
You know what’s great about the Internet? When you see something like this obviously astroturfed bullshit ad from Microsoft you can easily parody the hell out of it.
So I did and I’m pretty sure that will set the internets on fire. Again.
2009-07-15 : Is BSD The New GPL?
It seemed people who support the BSD license assumed that I was saying the BSD license was bad because I said I use the GPL these days. I never said BSD was bad, I just said I use the GPL now when I release my software. The BSD license is just fine, if that’s what you want to use.
But as the comments continued on about Lamson using projects like Django which uses a BSD license, I noticed a very weird double standard. The general complaint was the following:
2009-07-13 : Why I (A/L)GPL
In the Python world the GPL is frequently frowned on, with most people preferring to use a more permissive license such as BSD, MIT, or Python’s. It’s understandable then when people get angry because I’ve licensed Lamson under the GPL. Many people just hate the license, since they feel it goes contrary to the spirit of Python.
However, I’d like to explain why I use the GPL after decades of writing open source software and after a couple of “successful” projects. These are my reasons for using it, and only apply to me and what I want to do with my software from now on. You are free to your own opinions and choices, and I hope you’ll respect mine.
2009-07-03 : Article In The Reg About Lamson (By Ted Dziuba)
Just a quick update to point people at an article in The Register by Ted Dziuba entitled Lamson – email app coding without the palm sweat: Doing what Java never did. He interviewed me about Lamson, things I think you can use it for, and other fun stuffs.
A snippet from the article: “As a development platform, e-mail has gone neglected for decades. Its esoteric implementation details and specifications are regarded by many in the IT business as voodoo, best left to old-granddad programs like Sendmail or Postfix. Zed Shaw hopes to change that with his new project, Lamson. (The name Lamson is a throwback to the early 20th century pneumatic tubes used to shuttle messages between offices. It was originally called Son of Sam, but Zed’s dog convinced him to change it).”
2009-06-09 : Lamson At NYLUG Python Workshop Today @ 6:00PM
Just a quick reminder that I’ll be presenting Lamson to the NYLUG Python Workshop today at 6:00PM. The event is at the NY Public Library Hudson Park Branch, 66 Leroy St., NY NY 10014 in NYC and you can find out more here.
I’ll be showing people how to set up Lamson, get it installed, do cool stuff with it, and then just answering questions and helping people work with it.
2009-06-06 : Lamson 0.9.3 Is Out
Quick post to say that I released Lamson 0.9.3 and used it to implement my little side project oneshotblog.com so everyone should go try it out and let me know if it’s broken for them.
OneShotBlog is an experimental little blogging application that I’m writing to prove out Lamson’s features in a small microcosm. It currently supports posting and commenting over email, and I’ll be adding the ability to send pictures, source code, and just making it more complete in general.
2009-06-03-2 : Lamson 0.9.2 Is Out
Before I tell you about all the hotness that is Lamson these days I would like to give you the biggest damn laugh you’ve ever had, even if you despise puke humor:
2009-06-01 : Lamson 0.9 Is Out, Find My Bugs!
I just pushed Lamson 0.9 up to PyPI for everyone to grab and break. This release features a complete redesign of the routing, state handling, templating, and a full set of very complete documentation. Everyone who was using 0.8.x series should be able to migrate to this version with some work, but it won’t be terribly painful (assuming you have unit tests).
Getting 0.9
2009-05-30 : Oh Yeah! Where's Your Patches Zed!?
I admire Guido quite a lot, he’s definitely much more successful than myself at software project management and probably just about everything he does with his life. Yet when I read comments like this:
2009-05-29 : Curing Python's Neglect
I’ve been working hard on the 0.9 release of Lamson and really enjoying myself while I do. Python is a great very complete and solid language with probably the best email handling capabilities I’ve ever seen.
After reading Jesse’s things he hates about Python I decided to do the same, but with a general theme. In general I really like Python, but if there was one thing I would change, it’s the culture of “Neglect” that permeates everything. No, not the neglect you think, but Hemispatial Neglect.
2009-05-20 : Lamson Project Ideas
I really like working on Lamson. It’s a fun project because nobody else is currently doing anything this slick for email. I get the impression that people think it’s either cool (but have no use for it) or that it’s lame because email is lame. Web is hot baby, not email.
Sure, the web might get you laid, but email is a hell of a lot more fun. You don’t have to worry about dipshits complaining about “typography” and “design” because they got a Mac for christmas. There’s no CSS, browser wars, real-time availability, scalability problems, or a billion programming languages and frameworks. With SMTP everything is solidified and in desperate need of a facelift, so you can take your time and enjoy writing something useful.
2009-05-16 : Lamson Project Site Launched
Today I launched the Lamson Project site at lamsonproject.org and started filling in the content. Lamson is really turning into a fun and useful project, and hopefully the site will get other people interested in it and using it.
I took the design from one of the many free web design sites and reused the same Python blog script that I use on my own site so getting this up and running was cake.
2009-05-04 : EuroDjangoConf2009 Keynote All Over Your Twitters
I just finished my EDC2009 keynote. I wrote some python code to show the presentation with curses, and then at the same time I had another script that was streaming the same content out as a series of tweets.
I got about 1/2 way through before I was throttled. It was kinda funny really.
2009-04-03 : Son of Sam is now "Lamson" And On Lp
Well, school has started again, and I have to work at the same time, so I’m not sure really how much time I’ll have to hack for the next few months. I figured I’d take the time after PyCon and just really quickly get Son of Sam renamed to Lamson and put it up on a new Launchpad project.
You can go there to get the latest code (which is just what I had before really), post bugs, record your branches, post up FAQs, and collaborate on the project.
2009-03-20 : One Laptop Battery Later And I'm A Django Fan
I haven’t had much time to do any coding since I’ve been studying music full time, and I’m taking these two weeks to work on all the pent up projects and work I’ve been ignoring. One of those projects is to finally try out Django tonight. I’d been avoiding it because I didn’t want to get sucked into yet another web application framework I didn’t need, but after spending one laptop battery going through the tutorial I just got one thing to say:
Django Fucking Rocks
2009-03-19 : Small Damn World
My friend told me this today on IM:
“So I am teaching this class at the local CC on newtonian physics. Older student trying to chum up to me asks me: “what school did you go to?” When I answered ASU the first thing he asked me was if I knew Zed Shaw. :) When I said yes he couldn’t believe it.”
2009-03-19-2 : Rails Is A Ghetto (redirected)
I rewrote my infamous Rails Is A Ghetto but kept it quiet and just pointed people at it who referred to it in discussions. I figured it’d get wider circulation eventually, but I wanted people to find it on their own without me pimping it.
Now that everyone is posting and talking about it, I’ll mention it here on my blog so that it gets a full link on my site with a bit of a preface:
2009-03-18 : New Fancy Son of Sam Code
I finished up this semester at school and I’ve been dying to sit down and hack some real code for the last month. I want to code and work so bad it’s driving me insane, so I’ve got a light gig during the day and I’m going to be working on my oppugn.us/impugn.us mailing list site idea as the test driver.
The code is still in the works, but I managed to borrow the excellent mailer module from Ryan Ginstrom to implement better crafting of responses.
2009-03-16 : What Happened To The Freehackers Union?
It looks like my Freehackers Union essay got some attention again on Hacker News and I thought it’d be a good time to figure out for myself what I did that made FU die out. It was a hell of a fun attempt at upsetting the status quo, but alas, it failed. Not miserably at least, since that essay and the website still get posted to geek websites sometimes.
The short version of this is basically that the purpose of FU was to fuck with the biz dude who was fucking with my culture, but then the economy fucked up the biz dude and hacker alike so things then seemed kind of pointless. Combine that with me trying to use the group to get a bunch of geeks to do public speaking and performance art as well as my way of dominating things and it just was kind of doomed already.
2009-03-12 : When To Use Dangerous Knowledge
Remember when I switched over my blog and I started going through my thought experiment for a music browser I was thinking about? You know, just me writing and blabbing about ideas, and why companies like tunecore are kind of not quite the right solution.
Well, they took it kind of hard and in fact, they were so proud of that blog post that they put it in their corporate newsletter!
2009-03-11 : An Idea For Discussions on My Blog
I decided long ago that I would not have comments or any user contributed material on my blog. I’ve had good reasons, but mostly it was to prevent idiots from screwing up what I had to say. The reality of the internet is that there really isn’t a conversation going on, just the illusion of a conversation created from hundreds of millions of little micro-marketers all yelling to get attention.
Lately though I’ve been thinking of my reasons for not having comments, and how I might go about bringing good discussions. My two main reasons for not having comments are:
2009-03-06 : I Want A "Metrotone"
Yesterday I was tossing out ideas I’ve had for better guitar pedals because I’ll never have time to implement them, and frankly buying them is just easier. Today I got this message off twitter:
You might have a look at line6’s ToneCore DSP Developer Kit — sevib
2009-03-05 : Ideas I Have For Pedals
I sometimes get ideas for pedals for various instruments, or I run into other musicians who ask me to make one. There’s no way I have the time to hack a pedal anymore, so I figured I’d just lay out some of the ideas, and then if someone does it they can get all the glory. Most of these ideas are implementable with current technology, but some are way more work than I think a casual hacker has the time for these days.
Full Range Bass Pedals and Amps
2009-03-02 : An Album Is A Social Ontology
UPDATE: Looks like the BBC already has a bunch of data just like this and there’s even a mailing list for Music Ontology for people to join. Thanks to danbri for the pointer.
In my last blog post about an idea for a music browser I talked about the album being a document analog to the HTML page in a web browser. If we break down what it means to “browse Zed’s music site” in the same way we say “browse Zed’s web site” we have to invent similar concepts as found on a web server. It’s also important that these same concepts keep up the key elements of the browser and webserver that make for disconnected sites.
2009-03-02-2 : NYC VCs Can't Do Math
They say beggars can’t be choosers, but when it comes to technology and startups, you need some money. Especially in a city like NYC where something as simple as meeting with buddies at a coffee shop is too expensive to fund out-of-pocket.
However, today I read this article in the NYT about a new VC fund called NYC Seed which is great. That is, until you read this gem:
2009-02-28 : Thinking About The "Music Web"
When I write about things like the music business I am generally talking out my ass and trying to make sense of how things currently work, and how artists could be done better. The thing I always try to do when I look at a new area of interest is find out how everyone else thinks about it, and then see if there’s another way to look at it. Right or wrong, that change in perspective at least gives me ideas for something to play with or make. My methods may make me look stupid at first, but frequently these methods also put me way far ahead of the curve.
If you take the state of things in the online music world, they are currently dominated by a few beliefs/events:
2009-02-28-2 : Sorry About The Feed Spam!
Hey everyone, I fucked up my feed last night doing some late night hacking by including all of my essays in the RSS feed. They’re removed now, and my appologies for spamming the hell out of you with essays many of you have probably already read. The essays section won’t show up in your reader anymore unless I do a blog post specifically about a new essay.
Feel free to contact me if more stupidity like this happens.
2009-02-27 : Middle Men, Aggregators, And Apologies
I (and potentially many men) have a problem with posing questions as statements. Rather than say, “How can a musician sell their music online?” I stated, “A musician can’t sell their music online.” Implied in that is a parenthetical “(right? Help me out here.)”. That’s a bad habit when I actually want to know something, but it did get the result of finding out more information.
I also have the vestiges of my ranting days still in my blood so my last blog post had a tinge of “you guys don’t get it”. In this post, I’m gonna clarify some of my view points, but also point out at that many of the players I mentioned seem to actually not get it.
2009-02-26 : Meta-Post About Blog Changes
Hopefully you got the message that I changed my blog format and the new URL at http://zedshaw.com/feed.xml in RSS2 format. The previous feed was at http://zedshaw.com/feed.atom and will be dead soon. I’ve mostly been hacking this little script that generates the site in my spare time, whenever I take a break from music. I kind of like something small like this. Of course it has it’s problems, like I posted this blog entry before it was really ready to be posted.
I’m actually very interested in turning this little chunk of code into a nice simple blog package for musicians. Maybe something that can get them off stupid ass MySpace. So far just having music that I can post and simple video inclusion is really nice. Of course if I did make it generally useful it’d have to have some kind of web interface, probably comments, etc. Maybe instead of a comment system I’ll go with mailing lists, since mailing lists seem to breed fewer one-liners and anonymous jerks.
2009-02-26-2 : Can A Musician Sell Their Music Online?
I recently started working on ideas for a blogging platform specifically for musicians (and maybe other artists). Most musicians I know want to have an independent web site for their works, but have no idea how to go about it. The few that do understand what it takes to make a website know next to nothing about online promotion and getting their message out. Many times musicians rely on MySpace as their web site, since just about every other musician is there. A few use twitter to keep in touch with fans. Yet, despite all that, I haven’t really found an easy piece of technology that provides musicians with specifically what they need.
As I started looking at what I’d need on a site, and hacking up some software to do it, I came to the real question every musician would ask:
2009-02-25 : Atom Feed Now RSS Feed
I’m switching my feed format over to RSS and moving it to http://zedshaw.com/feed.xml.
Please update your blog reader. In the next few days I’ll have this URL be a redirect for the bots to follow.
2009-02-24 : I'm Going To IgniteNYC Tonight
The links in my feed won’t work for you until I fix the dumb little .atom generator I’m making. Just go to the web page on my site to actually read the content. Thanks!
I’m going to the Ignite NYC event tonight and hopefully it’ll be better than that crap I saw last time. For those of you who don’t know, Ignite NYC was the inspiration for the Freehackers Union rant I did. The event was actually more of a founders+groupies circlejerk than anything actually technical. I’m hoping that the depression has changed the event somehow to have a less douchebag quality.
2009-02-23 : The First Music Post
I put up my first music post today using the hacked up webgen.py I’ve been working on. The software is still super rough but you can take a look at what I’ve got going. The only changes over webgen.py is some modernizing of the original code, and then a feature to give a blog index that’s made out of individual pages. It goes through the dir and just cranks out a page with the first few paragraphs given. On the music page though it’s embedding the XSPF player right away so that you can hear it before you go onto the description.
The player seems to work well, but now I need to get the site generator to walk directories of playlists, crank out index pages for them, maybe work up the playlists from the id3 tags, and so on.
2009-02-20 : Blog Redone
I just finished completely revamping the blog. All the old content is gone, but I’ll be slowly adding it back. I also put up all the videos from my conferences, and organized my essays so people can read them in one spot. Finally, the Rails Rant is gone. People need to move on.
