We’ve had more snow in Berlin this year than since I moved to Germany in 2002. I’ve been a wanna-be-amateur photographer for a few years now, so this morning after the heaviest snow of the year — the good sticky kind of snow — I set out to Görlitzer Park with my Olympus E-500. The last shot is now my desktop background. Kind of creeps me out with its tunnel-of-snow look.
Really looking forward to the Berlinale this year. So much, in fact, that I’m going to see 5 of the competition films:
I’m an armchair enthusiast in film and have quite a few friends involved in film production. In the past I’ve always been too slow in sorting out tickets to see the films that I really wanted to, so this year I was glad to get a couple days with several films in a row that I wanted to see. Since weekends have all but evaporated since co-founding Directed Edge, it’ll be a welcome break. It almost feels like a short vacation on the horizon. One of the things that I enjoy most about living in Berlin is its status as an arts and culture mecca, so it’s wonderful getting to take advantage of having one of the world’s largest film festivals a short bus ride away.
Yesterday, in a rare display of lack-of-guilt-for-not-working, I pulled out the bass for a bit and started improvising into the sequencer. Pretty soon it needed a second line. Then I ripped the G-string in half on my bass and decided to round out the ending on guitar, which I never did, hence the track still ending abruptly, but I did a little guitar ditty in the middle. Then it needed organ. You get the idea.
Even though my musical efforts have been mostly focused on electronica for the last many years, every once in a while it’s fun to lay down some stuff from good old stringed instruments. Not for really any other reason than posterity, since this is a rough mix that I’m likely to never cleanup, and a structure that doesn’t really work, but well, these are the interwebs, this is a personal blog, so indulge me. It’s under two minutes of bass wankery, in a moderately funky, semi-fusiony, way.
I’ve become quite a Twitter junkie. I don’t use one of them new-fandangled Twitter clients; I read the RSS in Thunderbird. Twitter’s RSS feeds are, however, well, shite. The biggest annoyance is that links aren’t linked.
I’d also heard a lot of good things about Yahoo! Pipes, so today I decided to put two-and-two together and give the tubes a run for their money.
Here’s a list of things that are better about this version of the RSS feed:
- Links are expanded out to their titles, italicized and linked
- User names at the beginning of the update are linked
- @nicks are linked
- #tags are linked to the appropriate search
Now, for instance, instead of this:
mbites: The FT on the @andyburnham story http://tinyurl.com/73hpcw
I get this:
mbites: The FT on the @andyburnham story FT.com | Tech Blog | UK culture minister “kidnapped” in online protest at net ratings plan
This makes the world a better place for those of us reading Twitter via RSS.
As for Pipes? Well, naturally a bit of well-placed Perl would have done the task more quickly, but this did give me a chance to play with, you know A Cloud Solution. I’m supposed to be into that now. Pipes is mostly really groovy. It has a couple of limitations in logical flow, mostly in the interplay between text and items in a feed, that make things a bit clunky. And there’s a bug in the regular expression implementation that means that only one URL, or tag, or reply gets expanded properly (you can set it to do global substitution, but then it only replaces the value with the first, rather than the appropriate captured value). Any ambitious reader who cares to find a work-around will have praise heaped upon them in an update.
For now, the rest of you can get the goods here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/scotchi
I’d somehow outgrown my other collection of blogs. I’ve got the one for KDE, which isn’t really appropriate to spam with my born-again-web-iness and startup ramblings, the Directed Edge blog, which seems should at least tentatively be related to work. There are a couple of other ancient feeds that I’d used for personal friends, but alas, there’s been a gap for rants intended for public consumption that aren’t quite work and aren’t quite open source and aren’t quite private. So, friends, here we go.
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