Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

Just a week before the FCC holds a vote on whether to apply fairness rules to some of the nation's internet service providers, two companies that sell their services to the country's largest cellular companies showed off a different vision of the future: one where you'll have to pay extra to watch YouTube or use Facebook.

~From a Wired article earlier this week. READ IT

Now here's why this matters...

It's not about Facebook or YouTube. Those seem on the surface like silly trifles and why shouldn't we have to pay more for silly trifles, right? Because those silly, time-sucking trifles represent present-day American innovation. Our physical manufacturing sector has been almost completely moved offshore. This was done over a period of a couple of decades between Reagan and Bush II and was done for the sole reason of increasing corporate profits. If it's cheaper to manufacture stuff somewhere they don't have a minimum wage, and the prices here stay the same, the company makes more money for it's shareholders. This seems like a good thing, unless you're looking further than one fiscal quarter ahead.

Now we have a situation where large Telecommunications companies have found a giant, largely unregulated loophole in the fastest growing sector of their business. They'd like for their share of the wireless spectrum to remain largely unregulated so that they can carve it up how they want and charge for it what they want. Seems fair, right? But remember this is our fucking AIR they're charging us to access. They rightly realize that they majority of future internet use is going to take place over the airwaves, so best to get that sucker divvied up now and get the “best practices” in place for making as much money as they possibly can going forward. (Makes me think of this article from the Onion.)

Best practices would include making damn sure they charge more money for popular web services once their customers come to depend on them. I depend on Facebook to keep me in touch with most of the people I know on this planet. It's surpassed “social network” status and become a utility.

This utility and others like it have become the center of American innovation, and the brightest hope for the future American economy. Perhaps we won't be able to manufacture our way out of a recession, but maybe we can innovate ourselves out.

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But Chile is trying a radical new experiment. ... It is importing entrepreneurs from all over the world, by offering them $40,000 to bootstrap in Chile. They get a visa; free office space; assistance with networking, mentoring, fundraising, and connecting to potential customers and partners. All the entrepreneurs have to do, in return, is commit to working hard and live in one of the most beautiful places on this planet.

~From a Techcrunch article a few days ago.

Here's why you should be worried about Net Neutrality.

If you think for a second that America's place in this world as the center of creative innovation and hard working people making something from nothing is granted by the grace of God, you might be right. But Verizon and the FCC may just make it impossible for even the will of God to overcome the long-term economic effects of giving these TelCom idiots what they want. What they want is to milk as much money out of you and I as they possibly can, and they plan to do this by charging more for “better, faster” access to large internet companies that can supposedly afford it (while totally ignorant to the fact that the oldest and largest of any of these companies is barely 10 years old).

Where does this lead?

1. If the biggest internet companies pay more for their content to be delivered faster, then smaller companies and startups will have to use the “plain old” internet, which is what the entire internet is today.
2. If big TelCom gets a pass to charge for faster access over a premium network, they most certainly won't have any incentive whatsoever to improve the “plain old” network.
3. If countries like Chile are not just begging but paying smart entrepreneurial types to move to their country and start businesses, they most certainly will.
4. Oh yeah, vastly higher bills for all of us.

Ergo, if technological innovation and brainpower have been this country's advantage over the rest of the world and you deliberately cripple technological innovation in the name of a few years of higher corporate profits, you can rest assured that the brainpower will flee this country to some place where it's more highly valued.

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I'll leave you with a few words from Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

I was brought up being told that one of the main purposes of our government is to help people who need help. When I was very young, this made me prouder than anything else of my government. [...] We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it's probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.

#life #business

I was having this conversation on Saturday...

I'm hanging with my new musical buddy George Kilby. He's decided to upgrade his website so we're doing a consult to get a feel for what direction we're going to move him in (pardon my grammar). He said something at one point about a friend of his who'd decided to totally forgo having their own website in favor of just managing their presence through Facebook and a couple of other social sites.

I'm kicking myself for not having a canned response as to why I think that's a bad idea, but I guess i hadn't really thought about it too much in a while.

In my humble opinion...

I can totally understand why an artist would do that. It's a hassle to manage your own website. There's tons of traffic already happening for free over on Facebook, they already have most of the goodies that a band website needs to have built for you, and you've got to spend half your life posting all this crap there again anyway. Why not just skip the middle man?

To me it's two things – branding and informational liberty.

Branding

If you fold up your own website and just manage your presence through mySpace or Facebook or Reverb Nation, you're effectively subordinating your brand to theirs. I don't mean to suggest that you are bigger than Facebook, but to me it almost implies that Facebook or MySpace owns you if you send your potential fans there instead of a property of your own. Would a “normal” business send people to MySpace instead of having their own site? No! They want to make money...

Informational liberty

I have some friends in a band. They've moved their main website onto a platform called Ning. Ning is a well funded company that aims to make the process of building a “social network” something that anyone can do. It's sort of like the old days of having your own message board on your site, except with the features one would expect of a modern social network. They have a pretty decent system for listing their tour dates, and maintaining the info is pretty easy. It doesn't cost that much and it works well, so what's the problem?

What if they every want to do something different? What happens when the day comes that they want to do something that Ning won't let them do (or won't let them do at a price they can afford), like maybe host and sell their own digital downloads or build a design template that's outside the parameters of what Ning allows?

They're faced with a tough decision. On the one hand they don't have access to tools that they'd like to use to promote their band. On the other hand they shutter a social network that they've asked their fans to join and be a part of, one that has been a definite success so far. Maybe it's not an issue right now and maybe it won't be that big of one ever, but by inviting their fans to create a community around them using proprietary software that they'll never fully control they're rolling the dice that Ning (or whoever ultimately buys Ning) will continue to do them and their fans right.

In summary

Better to build your own site and use that as the hub around which you organize the rest of your social accessories.

#theidea #music #business

#4 – John Digweed

So this one's might need a little explaining. I've said it here before, but it's likely that you weren't here for that – I went through a phase in college where I traveled all over the southeast going to see shows. I didn't go to Phish shows except for a few times, and String Cheese was a bit after my time. I and my buddies went to go see DJs. This was the golden age of Keoki, Rabbit in the Moon, Simply Jeff, the Dubtribe Soundsystem, Scott Hardkiss.. My first party was to go see the Dubtribe at some club in Raleigh. I couldn't figure out where the music was coming from the whole time, but it didn't matter because I danced my ass off all night long. It was awesome.

After a year or two of this and getting more established in the Boone music scene as a bassist, it occurred to me one night that perhaps I should pick up a pair of decks and figure out how to rock the crowd like these guys do. It was DJ Icey running the show at that particular time. From another post -

I still remember this one record he played that night – the vocal hook was “can you feel the BASS”, and when the record said ‘bass' there was this note that came out of the subs that can't be related verbally. It shook the world. It made my hair stand up. It made the entire party, all 5000 of us, stop dancing and look around at each other.

So anyway, pretty much like this whole software quest but somewhat more informed, I began groping about for a style and a sound.

Local influences

I had two good buddies in Boone at the time that really helped inform my direction and encourage me to go for it. Most of these style of music probably don't really exist anymore or have come to be called by different names, but Matty”) was into the breakbeats (careful, that link is pretty hard). My other buddy Breckenridge was more into downtempo and deep house. Those two areas being covered, I began to search around for something that wasn't already being done. There was quite a lively DJ scene in the the NC high country in the late 90s, and there were lots of drum and bass DJs around, so I turned the tempo down a bit. I still wanted to rock the house, but in a smoother more subtle way. Wasn't long before I found a mix CD by John Digweed.

The build

I'd attribute most of my love for music that “jams” to the crop of progressive house DJ/producers that England was churning out 10 years ago. The main thing with that style of music is to lull your crowd into a trance (not like that circuit-housey gay bar trance, but an actual state of hypnosis). After about an hour or so of playing with them and giving them alternate chances to rest and whatnot, you start building over the course of a few records to a HUGE record. This is where you kill them with your best bass line.

I learned two things from DJing – how to build a set over the course of a night and a metronomic sense of time and tempo. The whole idea of mixing two records together without anyone else even noticing it's happening is something that really appealed to me, and requires a hell of a lot of skill to do well. Your sense of time has to be perfect, you have to listen harder than almost any live musician has to (just realized that while writing this) in order to achieve the right blend and keep your records together, and you have a to have a good ear for pitch so that you don't clash two records together that are a minor second apart. There's also quite a lot of acoustic theory to delve into on your mixer so that your two kick drums don't cancel each other out. Good times. So help me, some day I'm going to get back over that way musically.

Other notable prog house influences – Steve Lawler, Dave Seaman, Danny Tenaglia, G Pal, Gui Boratto, Deep Dish, Sasha of course...

God, this blogging shit takes forever. No wonder I've been so off this year. Later y'all. Thanks for reading...

#music

Reasons for leaving Drupal, a preamble

I'd had this website on Drupal since some time in July. If you look through the archives, you'll notice a relative dearth of posts from this time period. Drupal just has a way of sucking all the fun out of blogging. It's very, very slow for one thing. I had a lot of trouble integrating the site with the Disqus comment system that handled all of my Wordpress comments before I made the move so I was forced to use Drupal's comment system. I'd written a couple of posts in the “didn't find much in Google about it, so I decided to become the authoritative voice on it” vein, and had a ton of comments on one of them. Those comments appear to be gone now, even though I devoted an entire day to exporting them out of Drupal into Disqus with a solution that someone came up with.

Basically, Drupal is a beast. If you have a project that you are trying to build that involves users with accounts, and different levels of access to the content based on those roles, go with Drupal. For anything else, anything simpler, stay away. Drupal gives the impression of being somehow more user friendly since you can configure these massively complex sites without actually coding much of anything, but is that really a good thing?? Drupal's inherent dependence on stashing so much configuration in the database will be the death of the project if it's not figured out, and I personally don't think anything short of a MAJOR rewrite is going to sort it out. The major Drupal rewrite that's about to drop on the world some time has taken 2 years to get even close to the door, and a rewrite that would effectively fix this particular issue would also effectively rewrite the entire philosophy of being able to build a site in the browser, arguably the whole reason for Drupal existence in the first place.

I haven't even gotten to the part about moving Drupal to Git. Why not put the whole thing up in GitHub? Have you heard of Rails? It's doing pretty well, and I'd wager that a large part of the reason for that is how easy it is to dive in and contribute to open source on GitHub. I've never once seen it even mentioned to move Drupal to GitHub.

anyway...

Reasons for migrating to Jekyll, regular ramble

First off, it really wasn't that hard, so skip ahead if you wish. I spent a good several hours on Github researching other sites that people had going on the platform out there. I've been studying a whole lot of Ruby lately, so it was down to Jekyll or a few other simple solutions. I started building a solution out of Sinatra, but decided that deployment was probably going to be more of a headache than I felt like dealing with.

I loved the idea of a static HTML site since one of my main gripes about Drupal was how many times I could count the little page load indicator going around on Chrome. This site is blazing fast now, so yay for that.

I love the idea that there are no security updates, no databases to backup, no crufty markup that comes from where exactly? Basically, there's very little tradeoff. It's mostly win. So, on to the show.

##Migrating from Drupal to Jekyll, the meat

One of the things that I didn't understand about Jekyll was that it doesn't really generate a site template for you (you get used to that when dealing with Ruby). You have to build that part or Jekyll won't do anything at all. It's easy enough to get started though, just Google or borrow from other GitHubbers. The tricky part was liberating my posts from Drupal, which was made vastly easier by this fellow having written a Drupal migrator only a few weeks ago.

I followed all of the instructions on this page for getting the migrators to work, but kept getting an error message that ruby couldn't find the specified file or something like that. So an hour or two of fiddling around with the migrator file in my Jekyll directory and finally changing the command to something like this -

ruby -r '~/PLAY/jekyll/_import/drupal' -e 'Jekyll::Drupal.process( "#{ENV["DB"]}", "#{ENV["USER"]}", "#{ENV["PASS"]}")'

where ~/PLAY/jekyll is the root of my jekyll install in order to get ruby to read the migrator file that was there instead of trying to find one that wasn't. I'm sure the instructions will work fine for someone who knows more than me, but hey it worked.

edit: it now occurs to me that if I wanted this to really work the correct way, I should've forked Matt Dipasquale's version of Jekyll and built my site that way, but I'm not sure how that plays with the RubyGem system and in any event I made it work. YMMV.

to give back unto the community...

TODO – add a bit into the Drupal migrator that also liberates the URL aliases from the DB, as the author of the current migrator apparently used the stock Drupal URL scheme (node/*). Jekyll has an easy facility for setting the permalinks for your posts, but going through every post to make sure they were right was needlessly tedious in hindsight.

#drupal #ruby

Well, here we are. It was a tortuous migration, but IgnoredByDinosaurs (the blog) has reached version 5. I think it's version 5, let's see there was Blogger, then WP, then Drupal, then back to WP, then back to Drupal, and now this bad boy, so I guess you would call this one 6.0.

This blog is now run by a system called Jekyll, a “site generator” that's written in Ruby. What it does is take a bunch of text posts and runs them through a couple of different templates and spits out a full site of static HTML, since that's mostly what a blog is anyway. It's a compiler for your website. No webforms, no databases, no security updates. Just plain old HTML, like back in the good old days, but less hassle and more fun! I would have stayed with Drupal but honestly, it was just way too slow. This being just HMTL, without 119 database tables being joined by 200 different queries to display a blog post will be about a thousand times faster (literally).

So anyway...

Bass influences

I've been reading Kyle Hollingsworth's recent blog posts with great interest. It's always fun to see if who you think was an influence was truly such, but nobody ever posts these kinds of lists about themselves. Now that I'm on the verge of no longer being a defunct bassist, but rather a funct bassist, I thought I take a look back and see if I could boil it down to five bassists who pretty much wrote my play book.

Long story short, I can't. There's a few non-bassists who have given me more ideas than many of the bassists I've grown up with. So here goes.

#5 Cliff Burton

I know, it's pretty fashionable to say Cliff instead of Jason, especially in light of the fact that it was Jason who actually inspired me to start playing the bass in the first place. After years and years of begging my folks to let me be Lars and buy me a drum set, and years and years of begging the band director to let me be Lars and play percussion instead of trombone, I finally gave up. I guess I figured the bass line on “The God That Failed” was pretty cool too, and strangely my folks were immediately agreeable to a bass in the house. So I sat in the basement and played along with every early 90's grunge and metal record that I had.

However, it wasn't until a lot later that I realized the depth of the influence that I had absorbed many years before I even began playing. “...And Justice For All” was the first tape I ever bought and the first CD I ever bought a few years after that. It was literally almost all I listened to for a four year period between 5th and 8th grade. I didn't know anything about music or it's place in my future life, but in hindsight I learned everything I ever needed to know about harmony from that record. Most of it was written either by Cliff when he was alive or in his memory shortly after his death and his highly educated, dramatic, baroque influence is all over it. “To Live is To Die”, “The Frayed Ends of Sanity”, and “Eye of the Beholder” are all masterpieces. When the black album came out and there was neither a double bass drum nor a multi-movement epic to be found on it anywhere, somewhere in my 8th grade brain I was deeply let down. It wasn't Cliff's bass style that sunk in so much as the style of composition.

It's so nice to write. Thanks for reading.

#music #life

May I suggest you download this book — Learn Python the Hard Way? It's got instructions in the very first bit about getting a decent, free text editor installed. TextEdit that comes with the Mac leaves quite a bit to be desired, and though I haven't personally checked out GEdit, I'm sure it's a step up. Of course if you think you might want to get serious about this, or if you get serious about this down the line, may I suggest dropping $60 on TextMate? I know it's kind of a lot of money, but if you get into this stuff, it's worth it.

May I also suggest that you go through the first few exercises? It's fun to make your computer do things, however rudimentary, and doing them in the babystep fashion that this has you do eases you into programming geekery like the command line. It trains your fingers, it trains your eyes. It's like that part in Rocky 4 where he goes to Siberia to toughen up against Drago.

Back soon. Cheers.

#generaldevelopment

Does anybody here want to build something? My buddy Jimmy of This Blog fame laid an idea on me the other night. He's a teacher, and a fairly progressive, observant one at that. I believe him when he says that there's nothing out there like this kinda simple, cool idea that he had. I think it must exist somewhere but it's not being properly promoted if it does. So, I thought maybe it'd be a cool idea to try and teach him a little something about web development, and teach myself a lot in the process. There's no way that this idea of his is currently within my grasp since a big part of the concept is an iOS app, but I don't think the overall idea is really that far outside the realm of possibility. It's going to need a web backend to it, anyway. So let's see. Where to start?

I think we'll build it in Rails since I've learned enough about programming to know that I prefer Ruby as a language to PHP. I think this idea could easily be done in Drupal (a large, flexible content management system that's built in PHP) as well, but for some reason the aesthetic of building the solution you need and no more is really appealing to me. Drupal takes care of a LOT of the stuff that we're going to need to do upfront, things like user authentication (accounts) and interacting with a variety of different protocols – essential if the app phase is ever going to work. Drupal and Rails are both just pieces of software that run databases for you, but the difference is sorta like the difference between buying a really good loaf of bread and baking a really good loaf of bread. It doesn't make you any less of a chef to serve the store bought loaf to your guests, but if you have the time and you know how to bake a good loaf (or if it's just something you want to get good at), you're going to prefer that route.

Step one is getting Rails installed on your computer which, if you bought a Mac is made significantly easier. We'll do that next.

#generaldevelopment

Welcome back to another installment of the newby web developer series. This morning's entry comes once again from our buddy Jimmy, who the two of you reading might know as the highly technically inclined CT robo-teacher. He'll probably be reforming the state of education in your state soon.

What's up fool.

My friend wants me to build him a simple site using wordpress. He already owns the domain name.

My question is, once I build the site using MAMP, and get everything upload to our host, how does the domain name get transferred? Is that something we have to handle or the host handles.

Thanks, Jimmy

Calling me a fool is his way of showing affection. So, the answer is that “it depends”. If your buddy went the “get your domain free with a year's webhosting” route that many larger webhosts encourage you to do, then you don't have to do anything. If your buddy bought the domain on the open market through a registrar such as GoDaddy, you have to dive into the scary, subterranean world of DNS.

DNS stands for Domain Name System. A perhaps less-than-100%-accurate description —

When you buy a domain name, it's sort of like buying a spot in the world's internet phone book. That is to say that the address http://johnnygrubb.com is actually an “abstraction” of the information that a computer needs to complete your browser's request to get my webpage to come up. What my computer needs to know is the IP address of the server where http://johnnygrubb.com lives. The Domain Name System does that for you.

If you need to look up the phone number of Newtown Chinese Restaurant in Newton, you go to the phone book, look for Newtown Chinese Restaurant and move your eye to the right to get the phone number. If you want to go to any website, you enter the address in your browser, which takes the request and hits the nearest DNS server to find the actual IP address of the webhost so the requested page can be grabbed. It's the job of the owner of the domain name to make sure that the “phone number” or IP address is correct.

If you've bought your domain name as part of a package, then you don't need to do anything. The webhost actually owns the domain name and is letting you use it. This has pros and cons obviously, the pros being that they handle all of this DNS stuff for you.

If you've bought the domain name separately, you need to give that name a “phone number” so that DNS knows who to call when you request a page from that site. That's done by getting deep into your Domain Control Panel (or something like depending on the registrar) and and finding the “Nameserver” controls. This is where you give your domain name an address. It's usually in an english readable form, for instance, one of the nameservers for my hosting account is ns1.mediatemple.com. That means that when a request is made for a page on this site, DNS says “don't look at me, go talk to Media Temple's nameservers. They know where to find that page.” Once the request gets to Media Temple, their nameservers say “the page you seek is at 64.207.129.18”, which is the IP address of the actual server on which this site is plopped.

So, to extend the analogy a little further, a DNS lookup is actually more like that movie where the kids are trying to find the super-cool party, only to get to the party they have to drive all over town from one destination to the next before they are finally given the actual address. For real fun, type this is your Terminal —

traceroute http://ignoredbydinosaurs.com This command will show you all of the different “nodes” out there on the web that your request hits before it actually arrives at it's destination, my webhost.

So, the tl;dr is that if he bought the domain name through a webhost as part of a hosting package, you don't need to do anything. If he bought the domain name on it's own, you need to go to the Domain Control Panel or the Domain Manager or whatever it's called where it was registered. In there somewhere is a setting for the nameservers. On the webhost's end, you'll find what their nameservers are (usually something like ns1.awesomewebhost.com and ns2.awesomewebhost.com) and put that information into the proper fields on the registrar end. There's always at least 2 nameservers at every host because like all servers, they can go down and if they both go down your site will be unavailable. It happens.

Changing nameserver information is like firing an MX missile. There is no “undo”. There is no recalling the missile. Once you push the button to change the nameservers, that change of address starts filtering out to the rest of the world's DNS servers so that the request can be sent to the proper IP address. This filtering-out process can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending. Once it's done, the whole world will be pointed to the party on your server.

#generaldevelopment

My vet just recently joined the 21st century and moved all of their records from big, brown paper files to a computer system. Her husband is an IT guy so he did the research and picked out all the computers, networked them together and set up this software system for the office. It looked like a pretty big job to migrate all of their client records to a computer system, but hey, the avoided it long enough, right?

I don't know why I just thought of this, but about a web app that manages all of that stuff? Clients, their pets, their pets' histories, etc. Then I thought, well, that's kinda ballsy for a vet's office to let a web service store data like that, and what if you want to move, etc. Well, okay, how about some kind of export API etc. Then I thought, well what about hosting the database at the client end...

Would this be a case for something like CouchDB or MongoDB? A local datastore, and I would provide the processing and the upkeep? I dunno. I'm gonna sleep on it. Sounds like a fun little project in any case...

#random

I am having a blast. I found a nice photo gallery Gen Next – has lots of cool features; still working on it.

I do need some help:

1) how do I keep the 'home' page of the WP site clear of posts? I just want to put some html text and links. It seems to always show the latest posts. I need to understand what is going on with that page.

2) How can I order the posts within a category. example: For Lyrics I have category per album with a post for each song. I need to order them in track order, it seems to always put the newest post first. Ordering by permalink would work since I put the track number as the 1st part of the name.

3) Gotta turn off the right nav stuff – not needed.

I tried creating a category called Lyrics and then adding sub-categories for each album. That created the Lyrics page with all songs listed, I wanted just links to the sub-categories; plus it made the menu real ugly with all the albums listed below main menu. I resolved this by making Lyrics a page and putting links to the 'album' categories in the html. It seems to work fine but I am not sure if I could have done this another way.

also: where do I comment out the 'add comments' stuff?

Alright, in order —

1. Go to Settings –> Reading and set the top option to display a static page as the home page. You'll have a list of options for which static page you want.
2. As with almost any programming challenge, there are a couple of ways to go about it. I'm not exactly sure how you want them to display in every situation, but I'll take a beginning guess.
   1. The easiest, and in this case probably best way to go is to just make sure you enter the lyrics for the songs in the reverse order than how you want them to appear. If you've already entered some of them in, you can alter the “published date” on the edit screen of each lyric page. I'd just edit that have them line up in the order that you want.
   2. The more stylish option would be to write a function in your theme's functions.php file. To make this work correctly you'd have to make use of the “custom fields” feature. I'm a tiny bit rusty on the exact way to go about this, but basically “custom fields” are extra bits of metadata that you can add to any page or post in WP. For instance, you could create one custom field with a key called “track number” and use the value of that field to define the track number. You'd then figure out the correct function to call with the correct arguments to make it show up in the right order when someone came to the lyrics section of the site.
   3. Doing the same thing from the theme template would also be an option, and probably a little more realistic since you'd be able to have the correct template called by following the naming convention for a given category. This page will tell you how.
   4. Slightly off-topic, but there's also the option of creating a blanket “Lyrics” category, and then creating a post for each album that simply lists the songs in the running order, and then links the song titles to another post that contains the lyrics for that song. This option might give you the most control for the least effort.
3. So you don't need a right sidebar at all?
4. Right, yeah I would ditch the sub-categories for the albums, and probably go with option 4 above.
5. If you look at line 29 on the page.php file and line 39 on the single.php file, you'll see the comment function. I'd just comment it out so it reads -

<?php //comments_template( '', true ); ?>

and your comments will be gone.

#generaldevelopment