monkeys on typewriters

Knowledge reminds us that since our society has chosen to increment our year counter shortly after the winter solstice, we place arbitrary value on that date. The people and establishments of our society tend to use the date to reflect on the outgoing year and make plans for the new one. Reflections on the past year tend to focus on the bad stuff and hence we make plans for a better year the next time around. These plans are often expressed as “resolutions”, which usually constitute empty promises we make to ourselves or others to make us and/or them feel better. Over the first few days/weeks/months of the new year these resolutions are gradually forgotten or ignored by us.

Then, ~365.25 days later, we do it all over again.

Hopefully, in that time, we can actually improve ourselves and our society, even if we’re too focused on the negative to notice.

Happy new year. We’re looking forward to it too.

Yes, influenced by The Show with Ze Frank. Who isn’t?

In Rainbows will be released as a digital download available only via [Radiohead]’s web site, Radiohead.com. There’s no label or distribution partner to cut into the band’s profits — but then there may not be any profits. Drop In Rainbows’ 15 songs into the on-line checkout basket and a question mark pops up where the price would normally be. Click it, and the prompt “It’s Up To You” appears. Click again and it refreshes with the words “It’s Really Up To You” — and really, it is. It’s the first major album whose price is determined by what individual consumers want to pay for it. And it’s perfectly acceptable to pay nothing at all.

Via Time.

I have to say, I really like this revenue model. The other think I like is the fact that it’s giving the record labels the finger. I hope they’ll tell us how it works out for them.

E is a just-out-of-beta text editor for Windows. (Also, it’s worth noting that a Linux version will be forthcoming.) Now, the astute reader would at this point be wondering why I would like it, since I am most decidedly a Mac user. Well, E is admittedly a Windows clone port version of the popular (and award winning) TextMate. A good one. And why is that a good thing for developers? I’m glad you asked.

Platform Independence. Now that E exists it means that a developer writing a platform independent piece of software (i.e. web app) can be platform independent when writing it. All of those little things you use to get the job done (syntax highlighting, hotkeys, TM bundles, etc.) will be exactly the same when you move from operating system to operating system. The mental adjustments you will have to make will be far smaller with E and TextMate.

Stronger Community. TextMate and E use the same formats for their “bundles”, which specify everything from the syntax highlighting to the tab triggers. These bundles are open source, and many have been contributed to TextMate since it was first created in 2004. With a Windows and soon a Linux version, there will be even more people contributing to make and improve bundles. Since the bundles are platform independent, a developer’s work on one platform will benefit those on all of them.

I actually like the approach of the E/TextMate pair better than the idea of porting apps from one platform to another. Since the resources of these smaller developers are limited, the end result will be that one of both versions are significantly deficient. (If you have hundreds of engineers to throw at the problem and your company’s name happens to be Apple, Adobe, or Microsoft, feel free to ignore this paragraph.) Plus, since you have two teams working on the collective project, you have twice the number of bright people working independently to better it.

Some quick stats about tacowidgets.com from this year so far:

• Ratio of Firefox users to IE users: 2.85. There are almost three times as many Firefox uses as IE users on this site. (Hooray.)
• Breaking IE down, ratio of IE 7 users to IE 6 users: 0.45. Not surprising, but still a little disappointing.
• Almost exactly 4 times the number of Camino users as Netscape users.
• 73 hits from Firefox 3 (yay early adopters!), and 3 hits from … MSIE 2.0. That is not a typo.
• More hits from NetNewsWire than OmniWeb and Opera combined (sorry Omni).
• 1 hit from iTunes. WTF?

I think that explains more about our site than I could ever hope to do on my own.

In an article from Coding Horror:

That’s the other problem with the Mac vs. PC debate: it completely misses the point. Computers aren’t couture, they’re screwdrivers. Your screwdriver rocks, and our screwdriver sucks. So what? They’re screwdrivers. If you really want to convince us, stop talking about your screwdriver, and show us what you’ve created with it.

So tonight I’m going to be under a Winter Storm Warning.

REMEMBER…A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS HAZARDOUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE IMMINENT OR HIGHLY LIKELY. SIGNIFICANT SNOW
ACCUMULATIONS ARE OCCURRING OR EXPECTED. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO
POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE.

Yep. Winter Storm Warning. We usually get about two of these a year. One in January, and the other in March. (March is actually the snowiest month around here.) So what’s this doing in October?

Hi. My name is Galen. I’m the lead widget developer here at Taco Widgets. This is my blog. This is not the official Taco Widgets blog. If you’re looking for that head over to the Taco Widgets Blog. This is the place where I’ll talk about some insider development stuff, and the like. Yeah.

I suppose I should say something profound, but I can’t think of anything right now.