Google Buzz is another whiff. I don’t really care about the privacy issues, because I don’t regard GMail as being private. Like any other part of society outside of sitting in the dark in a Faraday cage, it isn’t private unless no one cares.

What bothers me about it is that it looks clumsy. It tells me I have new stuff and if I look at the buzz list, I can’t actually see what’s new. It also tries to aggregate things like Twitter and Google Reader, but provides a vastly inferior presentation. So I end up going back to Twitter or Google Reader to see what’s up. Which means Buzz is just redundant.

At this point, Google has a significant percentage of the smartest programmers and designers on the planet working for them, and lately they’ve been turning out clumsy crap. What’s up with that? I’m so into GMail and Google Reader to organize my online life — they’re pretty much exactly what I need and nothing more. Google Docs means I don’t even have to screw with installing a word processor on my machines.

But when Google fucks up, they put both feet in. Remember before Google Personalized Home Pages started to suck? I’d give them my constructive feedback and criticism, but I’ve never gotten any acknowledgement from them when I’ve tried to contact them about anything, so they might as well be inside a black hole. A black hole that spews internet applications.

Which made me curious. Is there tragedy clip art for the busy editor on the go? Is there, for example, genocide clip art? Turns out there are stock photos from various genocides, but what came up as the top Google Search result was just so bad I had to share:

This is obviously one of those sites who play tricks to show up at the top of Google search results, but maybe they should rethink this strategy.

Thank Jebus for the Internets — googling the error message turned up the forum discussion linked above and these
instructions on building a bootable Windows 7 Installation Disk.

I ran into another problem then — it might have been my issue, selecting the wrong install option from the menu, but I tried installs onto an existing Windows XP partition, and both ended up in an unbootable disk. Finally I punted — in XP, I deleted the partition on my new Windows 7 boot hard disk, and told it to do a full install. I was concerned this wouldn’t work, since I had the Upgrade and not the Full version, but apparently having a bootable XP disk elsewhere in the system let it do a clean install on an unformatted disk. Huzzah.

So I’ve spent several hours installing hardware drivers and my working set of software. Windows 7 feels faster than XP on the same hardware, but I’m not sure how much is actual performance improvements, and how much is having my main hard drive be a newer, faster hard drive.

The one big boo-hiss goes to M-Audio, who don’t have drivers for the Midisport 2×2 for 64 bit Vista or 7. WTF guys? Everything else seems to work great!

Maybe it’s rude of me to be irked, but messages that have information other than that seem kind of pointless.  They are, in effect, like the ‘ACK’ in communications protocol, whose only content is ‘message received.’

Case in point, I’ve achieved some sort of critical mass on facebook where I received nearly 50 messages on my birthday.  On the one hand, awesome that you all noticed. On the other hand, as email programs will tell you sometimes, “message has no body.”

My tendency is to follow these guidelines 1) No blog post unless I have something to say I don’t hear anyone else saying 2) No two word e-mails, unless I’m answering a direct question. 3) No e-mailing someone to see why they didn’t answer my e-mail.

Does this make me seem uncommunicative? Maybe.  But I’m a computer programmer, I’m a big fan of the ‘no news is good news’ theory: the nominal behavior of any system is to be silent unless it has a problem or news.  I think what people are trying to do is to convey a one bit message — I acknowledge you.  I enjoy being acknowledged but somehow wish for more.

So hey, for all y’all. If you don’t hear from me, assume I still love you and think you’re the most. Except for you, and you, and you. You know who you are.

PS I was actually kind of touched by the person who e-mailed me yesterday and apologized for not sending me a facebook ‘Happy Birthday!!!’  Somehow,  apologizing for not doing something that I’m not sure I wanted him to do in the first place feels better than if he’d gone and done it.  Confused? Me too!

Well, to paraphrase Robbie Burns, the best-laid algorithms o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley.

Cette vidéo n'est pas sur les chats.

Actually, the thing I was concerned about is that the page looked fucked up in IE8, and presumably other browsers. Haven’t rechecked it yet, since I’m on a Mac at work. But at a minimum it found a bunch of small coding errors. No doubt I wouldn’t have had these problems if I’d been using an HTML editor more capable than emacs, but I haven’t yet found a WYSIWYG editor that’s free and doesn’t screw you somehow…

Anyway I learned some stuff, like XHTML transitional wants ‘self contained’ tags to self terminate, e.g. <br> should be <br />, and attribute values should always be in quotes. I’m not sure the permissive nature of web browsers’ HTML parsers has done us any favors.

I also (DUH) am a big believer in standards compliance. Yeah I’m looking at you Microsoft.

First off, this is the audio player:
Download audio file (quicktime-vs-the-upsetter.mp3)
and you can read up on it at the AudioPlayer website. It’s very easy to integrate in WordPress, and putting a player in a post looks like this:

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/quicktime-vs-the-upsetter.mp3]

Second off, my ‘easy’ way to integrate it outside WordPress:
0. Make sure you can use PHP with your web server. This is pretty standard anymore; you’d probably have to install your own build of Apache to avoid having PHP.

1. First put this php function in a file. My version is here:http://www.cornwarning.com/php-includes/audioplayer.php

<?php
function audioplayer($audioURL,$playerIndex )
{
echo "<script language=\"JavaScript\"
src=\"http://YOURPATH/audio-player.js\">
</script>
<object type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\"
data=\"http://YOURPATH/player.swf\"
id=\"audioplayer1\" height=\"24\" width=\"150\">
<param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://YOURPATH/player.swf\">
<param name=\"FlashVars\"
value=\"playerID=$playerIndex&soundFile=$audioURL\">
<param name=\"quality\" value=\"high\">
<param name=\"menu\" value=\"false\">
<param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\">
</object>";
}
?>

2. You will need two files to make the player work: audio-player.js, and player.swf. In a WordPress install these will be in wp-content/plugins/audio-player/assets. Copy these someplace in your web directory — maybe the same place you put audioplayer.php. Then replace YOURPATH with the URL for that directory.

3. To use the audioplayer PHP function in an html page:

<?php include("http://YOURPATH/audioplayer.php"); ?>
<?php audioplayer("YourMP3URL",1); ?>


There you have it. Now I realize, not everyone writes their own web pages and most of the above might be pretty forbidding, but I hope that if you can write a simple web page and manage the files in your public_html, this is enough information to get you going.

While we’re on the subject, Squarespace seems to be appealing to some people. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me — $8/month for hosting, and I think if you want to point your own domain at your site, you pay more. My current plan at Midphase is $6.95/month if you prepay for 3 years, and you get unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. Sure, Squarespace does more handholding, and I guess that’s worth something, but the economics of it don’t add up.

On another note Amie Street is an interesting MP3 sale site. They don’t have everything — and I can’t figure out what determines what they get and what they don’t — but they have a crazy pricing structure, that starts out at free and tops out at $.98/song. Basically the more popular something is, the more it costs. That’s great for me because I’m not that interested in what’s popuar most of the time.

The other cool thing about Amie Street is that you can pre-pay and get a discount — e.g. I pre-paid $40 and had $50 to spend. Like I said, they aren’t Amazon, and crowdsourcing their editorial content is hit or miss, but they are cheap, and I found some stuff cheap that I really liked.

I thought if you threw a rock you hit a web developer these days, why me? Anyone with moderate Google skills and a not-completely-fucktarded web host can figure out setting up a WordPress blog.

Maybe it’s that I’m a nice guy and don’t charge people.

Apparently people are setting up automated twitter feeds, that will add you if they see keywords they deem relevant in your tweets. Presumably, someone would e.g. want to see every time someone posts about ‘Dubstep’ to Twitter, so they’d start following that automated feed. Or something like that.

Which has led me to this conclusion: Twitter is for people too ADD to handle RSS aggregators as Internet Timewasters.

I will say this, it seems like 2 or 3 people a day start following me on twitter, even though all I do is post links to this blog as tweets.

And what actual adult ever aspired to ‘tweeting’ as a serious endeavor? And if you really want to get down to serious WTF, according to the Internets, Jennifer Aniston broke up with John Mayer, because he tweets too much! It’s not WTF, why did she dump him, it’s WTF, you’d rather tweet then hit that? Jebus!

And while I’m ranting — if you’re crossposting your tweets to Livejournal, you’re just annoying me. Some of my dear internet friends do that, and no offense intended, but the last thing I want from any of y’all is your out-of-context replies to @pathetic_shutin.

And when people start doing that @reply bullshit it turns me off to Twitter even more. It’s like listening to half a cell phone conversation, only when people talk on the phone, they usually give you some fucking clues in their half of the conversation as to what’s being discussed.

They don't call him Tweety for nothing