2005 January

Song of the Week - Smelling Cigarettes

This Song of the Week was a difficult one to choose, not amongst different artists, but amongst the many great songs by The Fiery Furnaces. I finally settled on Smelling Cigarettes, because it emphasized their great songwriting, which can be both sharply witty to starkly whimsical at the same time, and great rhythm. The best way to describe their sound is a bit of White Stripes on keyboards and guitar, but their style is all their own. Unlike the White Stripes, there really is a brother and sister fronting the band, and they really do have a sibling rivalry going on.

Their musicianship is stellar, and they have no trouble coming out with good songs. Smelling Cigarettes comes off of their EP (title of the album) which are a collection of B-sides and songs that didn’t make the cut for a main album.

Which would lead you to assume these songs weren’t good enough for a regular album, but you’d be sorely mistaken. I could listen to EP over, and over again without tiring of it, and I have been doing just that.

The Growth of Wikipes

When I had bought the domain for Wikipes.com, I was really excited and felt it was a really good idea. The name fitted well, the idea of an open-source recipe database is natural, and the design I had pictured in my head was just right. As I was putting the site together, my excitement grew to nervousness. What if it didn’t take off? What if people couldn’t grasp the concept? What if it wasn’t easy enough to enjoy?

These questions helped form Wikipes into what it is now, a completed project where a lot of thoughts and effort was made to ensure it was easy to use, enjoyable, and is nice to look at.

To be quite frank, I’m surprised at how fast the site is spreading. A link on Metafilter is the extent of any kind of promotion that took place. A mistake was made at first, where Erik had posted the link on Metafilter, shortly before discovering that this kind of linking is frowned upon, as he was involved with the project because he helped give me advice and created the logo for the site. If he had known before he posted, it never would’ve happened. However, Wikipes was popular enough for someone else to post a second link on Metafilter, someone certainly not involved with the project (although he may have posted a recipe, would that be involved?)

Besides that, Wikipes has been spread via word-of-mouth on the internet, with countless blogs and news sites talking about it. Some examples are MSNBC.com, at the top of del.icio.us popular for a while, listed on Ron Gilbert’s Grumpy Gamer, and Forever Geek to name a few. The nervousness is gone now, replaced again by excitement about the future of Wikipes.

Tuner2 - Quality Internet Stations

A great site for anyone that likes internet radio is Tuner 2, which filters out the cream from the crap, and give you the best stations to listen to. Using the AACplus codec (available in the latest Winamp), you get CD quality music at half the bandwidth.

One of the stations that is a big favorite of mine is the top one on Tuner2, SomaFM’s Indie Pop station, which has been playing some really superb music as of late. From The Arcade Fire, Say Hi To Your Mom, Weakerthans, Elliot Smith, and more. It doesn’t get any better.

Brian The Geek

He claims he’s a geek, but he now owns a bright-red minivan, so he’ll have to hand over his Geek card now. Brian is a long-time friend who works with me on 3DGPU.com, and is finally getting into blogging. So head on over and visit his newly dusted blog at BrianTheGeek.com.

What About Opera?

Wired News talk with the Norwegian guys behind the “other” browser, Opera, and provide some interesting details on the browser (namely upcoming features.) The founder at Opera whines that Firefox stole their thunder, and wonders why Opera never took off. Well I’m here to help out:

• The only popular browser that requires you to pay to use it, otherwise you’re stuck with ads.
• Weird rendering decisions, such as text sizes.
• Sites that work fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer don’t work right in Opera.
• Due to above, most web designers don’t try to fix the problem with hacks because Opera represents a steady 1% of the browsing demographics.
• Suffers from feature-creep, with ~70% of the features implemented not used by most people that download Opera.
• Not open-source like Firefox.
• Due to above reason, not as many extensions to extend the functionality of the browser, and allow people to “add their own flavor”.

That’s just off the top of my head, as I’m sure I could come up with a few more reasons. The general gist is that Opera needs to stop with the gimmicks, make their browser free, stop trying to follow in Microsoft’s footstep with IE quirks, and get rid of some of the bloat in the current browser.

Wikipes and The Host

The worst feeling for any website developer/designer/whatever is to be working on the site, and then it suddenly goes down. Now you’re sitting there, stuck, not able to do anything but wait for the site come up. Imagine that it is late in the night, in fact it’s very early in the morning, and you need to get some sleep. When you wake up, will you remember where you left off, what will be broken, will people see a site that won’t work and never come back?

That’s what happened last night, so here I am, up early to make sure Wikipes is okay and finish what I was doing - updating the site with better code. However, the site isn’t up, and I got an email from my host that said this:

Unfortunately, I’ve had to disable your domain’s web services. It was causing the web server it’s on to crash. Unfortunately, we cannot provide a quality product to the rest of our users when this happens. I’ll re-enable the domain in a few hours and see if that helps.

No explanation as to what caused the crash (too much traffic, maybe?) It has been beyond a few hours, it’s been over 4 hours now. Suffice to say, I’m not a happy camper right now.

Update: Got a response from the host, which clarifies the situation a bit:

I’m reenabling your domain name. I’m not sure what it was, but your site would spawn and open several hundred apache instances, until apache reached it’s child process limit of 256. Once that happens, no new websites can be served. That then kills the server. I also noticed that several php scripts you were running were using a fair amount of CPU. That usually means the code you’re using isn’t as efficient as it could be. Unfortunately, we can’t really help with that at all.

Song of the Week - Taper Jean Girl

There’s a new song of the week up in the site player. The Kings of Leon have been a mainstay in my musical diet since their first album, Youth and Young Manhood, which was about growing up. Now they are grown up, and their second album, Aha Shake Heartbreak, is about being grown up; they sing about fighting, loving, and yes, just fucking. That would be a rocker’s main diet.

However, don’t take Kings of Leon for the typical rock outfit, because they just aren’t. They’re unique, in sound, lyrics, and style. This is evident when you hear Taper Jean Girl, a catchy blend of rock and hick attitude that is addictive as you listen, even if the lyrics may catch you by surprise. Don’t be mistaken, this is a band singing from the male point of view, and they sing for men who understands that.