CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

Indie Music Underground

This is an XSPF embed­ded Flash Music Player … hur­rah, who cares.
But here’s the cool part. You can make your own XML-based playlist — yawn, right? No! Because the XML playlist can play tunes by URL … so what? So, I can put MY playlist WITH TUNES up online, you hit it with your player and you just play my tunes with­out down­load­ing them.
So, that’s nice — hur­rah.
Now imag­ine the indie music com­mu­nity doing that. And mak­ing their chan­nels and playlists avail­able at a Site like this one!
It’s a Good Good thing.

For all those who (hahaha) sneer at Macs

Return of the Mac as a major place for all alpha geeks, is a pretty good arti­cle out­lin­ing how the major play­ers, MIT geeks and so forth, all have Macs (like me).

Growl Alerts for iCal

Use a Mac? Use iCal? Have Growl? Growl Noti­fi­ca­tions for iCal is for you!

Minor Geek Rant

I have a per­sonal pet peeve — I never real­ized it before, until I just hap­pened to see one in the wild and real­ize what I was look­ing at.
I per­son­ally loathe “non-helps” online that pose as knowl­edgable help. You see, I tend to go online a LOT to find other people’s notes to oth­er­wise arcane errata. I try to do the same thing if I find some­thing worth­while that’s undoc­u­mented, and get it into the gen­eral “group mind” of google search or some such… so if I’m installing an ancient ver­sion of Send­mail, on a Com­paq, and the CD won’t read the older ver­sion of file archi­tec­ture, I go online to see if someone’s “been there, done that” and wrote the answer down. If I find I’m the FIRST to find this bug (a rare hap­pen­ing, I assure you), I try to get it onto a blog, a wiki, or some­thing… so OTHERS can find it.
That hav­ing been said, dur­ing these “hacker library searches”, I tend to run into a LOT of mean­ing­less dri­vel and noise from stu­pid peo­ple try­ing to look smart and well — it bugs me. Here are a few examples:

The “Empty Observation”

For exam­ple, one of my favorites is the “that’s a prob­lem” obser­va­tion.
Let’s say you’re up a tree, pick­ing apples and your lad­der fell. So you go to Google and search for “lad­der fallen fall tree retrieve prob­lem help error” … which usu­ally returns valu­able data, plus some mean­ing­less gib­ber­ish about buy­ing tree shaped lad­ders and stuff like that. But usu­ally, our friends at Google are pretty good, and they get things up in the first 10 hits with titles like “Re: help, my lad­der fell while pick­ing pears” … usu­ally from mail­ing list archives online or some such.
Now, you’re excited, so you go to read the answer to your prob­lem and you get a mean­ing­less obser­va­tion.
’Oh, your lad­der fell? Well, lad­ders are made to climb, it shouldn’t have fallen to begin with.‘
In a real world exam­ple, you might get “oh, you can’t find that file? Well, if you’re run­ning dum­bOS, it should be installed automatically.”

The “Are you a Fool?”

The next win­ner in my rant-o-thon is the one where some­one who is clearly less expe­ri­enced than you are asks you not only a silly ques­tion, but one that you under­stand from your years of exper­tise as being an assump­tion that you’re a moron.
So, for up in my tree, I might find “hmmm… did you check to see if the lad­der is just pushed over to the side and hang­ing from a branch?“
Which in real life would be:
’Did you pos­si­bly delete the main ker­nel page file? I know that’s an impor­tant file.‘
Idiot. Go home.

The “Tease”

This one is the most painful and most preva­lent barb. You’re up in the tree, some­one GETS it, has the ANSWER, but doesn’t really TELL you.
Tree anal­ogy: “Hmmm… you know, there’s a way to use your prun­ing hook to grab the top of the lad­der, but be sure to get it on the right rung or you might lose your hook too.“
Real life: “Oh, yes, if you have acci­den­tally cor­rupted your device dri­ver, you can rein­stall them using a dri­ver rein­stall appli­ca­tion. Be sure to fig­ure out which dri­ver you want to install before you start.”

The “Hate Gate”

I hate that stu­pid site “Pro­fes­sional Only” or what­ever it’s called. The one that says “click here for the answer”. Die.

The “Mang­lish”

Now, I’m NOT talk­ing about peo­ple who have Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage — those of you who actu­ally go to the trou­ble of answer­ing prob­lems in a for­eign lan­guage — God BLESS you.
No, I’m talk­ing about the peo­ple who clearly speak Eng­lish as a first lan­guage, but didn’t bother to learn it on their way to becom­ing major mas­ters of com­put­ing.
Tree: “When the lad­der doesn’t fit on the floor amke it go to the top of the tree for another try with the pole.“
Real life: “Don’t make the file first t othe home direc­tory because you’re bound to find­ing the one in the other direc­tory first if the path doesn’t change in your file.“
Please — put your com­puter down and go read a book or ten.
and finally…

The “Vic­tory Dance”

Some­one who goes to the trou­ble of POSTING a prob­lem to a list, then comes back to say they fixed it, but DOESN’T SAY HOW!!!!
Tree: “Hi, I’m up a tree, please help, my lad­der fell.“
Tree2: “I just wanted to write back to every­one and say I fig­ured it out, thanks!“
Real Life: “My data­base is still run­ning, but I don’t want to stop it until I do a dump and I can’t get a sec­ond prompt because the OS has been hacked. I know the data is in there, but I don’t know how to gen­er­ate a dump from inside the data­base … can any­one help?“
Real Life2: “Oh, nev­er­mind — I got it. Thanks!“
Please — fol­low the idea that the mil­i­tary teaches — always leave it bet­ter than you found it for the next per­son in line.
In other words — if you FIND an answer, share it — if you HAVE an answer — SHARE it — if you just want us all to see how smart you are — shut up — because you don’t HAVE the answer and thou­sands of peo­ple are just say­ing “stu­pid stu­pid stu­pid — shut up!“
But hey — why are you read­ing this any­way — there’s no answer here.