Tag Archives: Hacks

What to do when you get detached from your head, you git.

Dev, Hacks,

I found myself wandering about detached from my head, fully committed. You don’t want to commit when detached from head, but I had.

I didn’t know how it happened, but there I was, headless. What a silly, silly git.

I reached out to a friendly spider and the answer was there in the web.
Before you wander back to your head, it is important to mount yourself to a branch, then you can use that branch to reattach your head quite easily.
Here is how the magic incantations go:

git checkout -b the_wanderer
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge the_wanderer
git commit

I’ve tied the branch to where I am, then grabbed where I was and attached that, then bound everything back together.
Clear as mud? Already done git checkout master? Check the spellbook that inspired me.

My Valentines / Music Hack Day NYC app!

Dev, Django, Music, NYC, Pals, Python, , , ,

-or-
Why I wasn’t around this weekend.

I was at NYC Music Hack Day!

You can try out the idea here in our valentune.es beta. We send love and music over wires and wireless to your special sweetheart.

You put in your sweetheart’s Name & cellphone, a couple of key words about your them and then ask the app to get busy.

It goes out to the MusixMatch lyrics service – finds lyrics that describe your sweetheart and then gives you a list of songs we can find streaming full mp3s online for. You choose what you don’t want in the play list and hit send.

We call your sweetheart up using the Twilio API , give them your sweet message and then play them your custom made mixtape over the phone! Yes, my lovely wife Sam was the first non-developer to get a call from the valentun.es robot.

Getting SongsPick songs on the iPhone!

Don’t have a web browser handy? Surely you jest! If you’ve got an iPhone you can use the iPhone app.

If not, the website is mobile compliant and works great on Android phones. The website uses CSS3 and WebFonts for style, but degrades well to older browsers. How old? IT WORKS ON LYNX!in case you need web 3.0 from a terminal

So all of this was accomplished by 6 talented and dedicated people over the course of 24 hours in NYC. The whole team was positive and awesome. I’m really proud of what we did so quickly. It’s got bugs 1 , but it works. I didn’t sleep the whole 24 hour hack session and I worked on a lot of the bits.

  • The Musixmatch call to find lyrics that talk about your sweetheart.
  • The Skreemr call to find playable songs with those lyrics
  • Adapting Jeff’s web mockups to Django templates
  • Calling into Alex’s Twilio wrapper
  • Pitching the idea and the vision and recruiting the group
  • Helping design the process flow and settling on using Django with Nate
  • Helping coordinate who would do what and figuring out the pitch with Jeff
  • Presenting the whole thing in 2 minutes to over 300 people with Anna and Nate

It was a busy 24 hours!

  1. the Title element has the wrong spelling of valentunes and the message doesn’t always go through and the songs sometimes take a long time to play, etc…   (back)

Police bees will hunt rogue geneticists

Art, Hacks, , , , , ,

GO FORTH MY BUZZING SPIES AND FIND THE HIPPIES

Regine has a lovely interview with Thomas Thwaites 1 about a future where the police hunt growers of hallucinogenic plants via special bees.

How did the pollen forensics researchers react to your project?

In general the reaction was that it was almost believable… which is the reaction you want for a futures project I think. A plant geneticist, (who’s ‘Crash Course in Synthetic Biology’ I later crashed) saw the project and said he’d thought about taking genes from the Marijuana plant and putting them into a tomato plant (being a respected scientist I’m sure he wasn’t saying he’d thought about ‘doing it’, just ‘about it’).

And this gem of what’s actually happening now to translate pollen to crime:

Are the police in the UK already using pollen forensics?

Yes, and its been pretty instrumental in several very high profile cases. There’s this lady called Pat Wiltshire who is the police’s go-to person for pollen forensics. She can look at a sample of pollen from clothes or whatever, and visualise the landscape it’s from – a filed of maze, with a river next to it, and an oak tree in the middle – or something like that. The impression I got about police work when I was interviewing James, and a detective, was that it’s really arduous. Pollen forensics would be one detail in many that would lead to cracking a case, and as importantly, proving it in court.

This high weirdness is definitely part of the adjacent possible, one of those strange futures that hasn’t happened, but should.

  1. He’s the guy who tried to make a toaster out of raw materials, start to finish   (back)

Review: Makers by Cory Doctorow

Books, Reviews, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , ,
I loved this book.
Forget my review and go get it now, it’s wonderful. If you don’t have the scratch right now, that’s ok:  Cory Doctorow walks the talk and has published his book under a creative commons license.  You can get “Makers” for free at his site as a pdf, as html, ePub, or as an audiobook.  Just go get it and read it. Why?
The characters felt right and true and good and wonderful, like people you’ve always wanted to be friends with.  It’s the story of people playing around and doing the creative work that felt right to them, pushing to stay free and work on beautiful things.  Their hard work takes a damn beating from the world around them and they rise up after that beating.

I was sad closing it, because I wanted more from them, more for them, and another thing…

I always wanted to be Perry, but I looked in that book and I’m Sammy.

The NYC Government IT has given up.

Dev, Incentives, Pals, , , ,

My buddy Ian has a great post about his experience trying to find out if he had to move his car. Seems the DOT updates this info on Twitter rather than putting it out on their own website.

Retweet by DOT of 311's tweet that parking rules are suspended

Now that’s just crazy, but I know why. Sam used to work for the city and I’ve heard some stories about trying to get things done there.   The municipal IT department is paid below average wages, there are no negative incentives like being let go, and they are given no positive incentives like promotions or bonuses.  IT at the city seems to be a job that you take and show up for until you collect your pension.

So it isn’t that this is a bad strategy, it’s just that the city is so completely incompetent at IT that they can’t even put in a CMS. Therefore, private sources have built really good communication tools that are actually working. It sucks that the city can’t do IT, but it is good that they are doing what it takes to help people know. Twitter is a single point of failure, it falls over all the time, but at least it has RSS feeds and it’s open for anyone to read. I think the city should do better, I just don’t know that they can.

Better Berkeley Webcasts even better

Browsers, Hacks, User Experience, , , , , , ,

Nate Whitten wrote in with a suggestion for Better Berkeley Webcasts.  He wants to save all of the files to check them out later.  He’s using a download manager like Down Them All 1, but Berkeley’s files are named poorly, so he doesn’t know which one to watch first.

Even better, he sent in the fix for it – he’s numbered the download links.

You should download it from me, or over on the UserScripts.Org page.  As always, you’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey.

  1. my favorite, you should check it out  (back)

Professor Robb Willer and the Golden Apple

Browsers, Dev, Hacks, Pals, Video, , , , ,

Robb WillerThe group of misfits I grew up with has turned out pretty well.
One of them, Robb Willer was my debate partner for a while. He’s gone on to be a professor at Berkeley. Robb won the Golden Apple award for being an awesome teacher. How awesome? Robb’s got intellectual groupies!

Berkeley put up Robb’s lectures under a Creative Commons license, so you can download them if you want and distribute them. Of course, Berkeley hasn’t given people any links to download the lectures. A bit lame if you ask me. Also, the way they’ve presented the lectures is terrible. Clicking anywhere on the page during playback makes the video close! That won’t do. I whipped up a quick fix.

  1. Install the excellent greasemonkey firefox addon.
  2. Install my Better Berkely script to fix  the webcast page.

Done.  Now the video is fixed.  When I get a free moment I’ll update the script to provide download links to all of the lectures, because what use is a creative commons license when you can’t get the media‽ Now the videos are available for download as well.

Congrats Robb!

BangoWhatthehell

Uncategorized, , , ,

I am intrigued by this weird advisory on cryptome, keeper of, if not all, then at least exclusively, things you are not supposed to know. There’s no attribution, no explanation, and no other mention of this on the web.

The very short gist is:

Avoid the treacherous anonymous web browser, bangotango.com. It is harvesting unwary user addresses. It is operated by triumphpc.com as a law enforcement/intelligence sting.

It would be an interesting concept, if only because it has such problems with the idea of entrapment. The idea that the some agency could make the promise of proxied worry free browsing, even going so far as to include the text of the 4th amendment on the website, and then use evidence gathered there in court is boggling.