BRH.numbera.com

I haven’t been updating this blog too much recently. I never meant for this blog to run on a schedule, but I did intend to post more frequently than this. My original idea was that the blog would serve two major purposes. First, it is a place for me to announce new projects or updates to software and websites I’ve already released. It’s done that quite well, though I haven’t had much to announce recently. My job has been taking the majority of my development time, and most of the projects I’ve been working on at home are either private or haven’t been released in the form I’d like to because my employer hasn’t approved them for release yet.

The second major purpose for my blog is as a place for me to record the solution to problems I run across while developing software, so that others won’t have to spend hours Googling or using trial and error to come to the same conclusion. I didn’t intend to rehash things that were easily found or that had already been discussed - only to post when I felt it was something that added value to the internet that hadn’t been there before. So a lot of the blog posts are not really a narrative or running commentary - they’re not meant to be subscribed to, but found individually. It’s for this reason that my most popular posts tend to include the exact text of error messages. This type of post has suffered both because I haven’t been doing as much development, because I can’t discuss a lot of what I’ve learned due to the nature of the projects I’m working on, and because I’ve been learning new stuff (like Ruby on Rails) and haven’t done enough to have solved problems others haven’t already posted solutions for.

The third reason I have this blog is to occasionally talk about my thoughts on different technical topics, from web development to video games. Again, I don’t like to make a post unless I think I’m adding something new, and most of the topics I’ve wanted to talk about have already been covered. I had a lot of draft posts sitting around about web development, web standards, and the evolution of browsers, but then I discovered Alex Russell’s blog and it turns out he’s already said most of what I wanted to say, and better than I could. Other stuff, like my impressions of Windows Vista, critique of stackoverflow.com and suggestions for the Xbox Live Arcade lineup, have been covered to my satisfaction in plenty of places. Maybe some of them will end up posted, but probably not.

Another part of the reason I haven’t posted much is the sheer weight of unfinished posts I have. Right now I have 64 drafts and only 52 real posts! So I’m going to attempt to clear things out by writing a little about what I haven’t posted. A lot of this stuff wasn’t posted because it fell under that third point above, but some of it I was just too lazy to flesh out into real posts. Some of it’s just random stuff. So here’s what’s been happening in the last year:

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I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog lately, partly because I went on a long vacation and partly because I’ve been too busy with real work to do anything much on at-home projects (at least, at-home code projects). Another reason is that I’ve been working on a couple websites that hadn’t launched until recently. The first project was a website for Butterfly Haptics, which is my parents’ new company. They’re producing a really cool magnetic levitation haptic interface - a sort of super-high-tech 3D mouse that lets you feel virtual objects as if they were solid. I’m really excited about what they’re building, and I’ll be at SIGGRAPH this year manning their booth in the New Tech Demos area.

The other site, which just launched, is my wife’s new art site. She makes wood-fired ceramic sculptures of bizarre, cute creatures, and the new site was hand-drawn by her to reflect their style. It’s implemented as a Wordpress theme, which gives her a much easier way to manage the content of the site, and it also means that she can now blog about her process and other art topics. Check out some of the cool time-lapse videos of her sculpting the critters.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to get back to building more cool things and talking about them, as well as clearing out my backlog of draft blog posts.

One of the advantages of living in Seattle is that I get to see great live concerts from my favorite bands. The last week has been a good one for concerts. Last Saturday I got to see The Presidents of the United States of America, who were fantastic, and on Wednesday I saw The Decemberists, who are one of my top 10 favorite bands.

I went to a lot of shows in college, too, and I was even in my own band, which was at the very least loud. After a couple particularly noisy concerts left me feeling uncomfortable about the idea of hearing damage, I (and the rest of my band) picked up some earplugs.

You may have used earplugs like these, foam pellets that block out all noise. These are great for sleeping through construction or operating loud machinery. But using them at a rock concert completely misses the point. Instead, we went to Guitar Center and picked up some earplugs that are designed for musicians.

I bring my pair with me to every concert I go to. They don’t just block out sound, they actually make concerts sound better. First, they reduce the volume to a comfortable level, not quiet but not painful either. More importantly, they filter out a lot of the “shimmery” noise you get in a big crowd - the random static of the crowd yelling, the echoes of the room, and the highest part of distorted guitars. Once you’ve gotten those out of the way, lyrics become understandable, individual instruments pop out of the noise, and bass becomes richer, without as much rattle. It’s really a better way to listen to concerts. And of course you’re protecting your ears from permanent damage. They are definitely a win all around.

This weekend I came pretty close to losing all my blog posts. My hosting provider moved my site to a different host, and ended up screwing up my MySQL database in the process. I’ve actually got a lot more than just my blog posts in that database, and it was pretty scary for a while there as they restored things from backup. It made me realize that I don’t do nearly a good enough job keeping my own backups. So I revisited my backup strategy, and made a few changes. First, I’m now using automysqlbackup to make a complete backup of my MySQL databases every day. Of course, I’m still using SyncBack to do incremental nightly backups onto an external hard drive, in case my main hard drive crashes. The other new addition is that I’m using S3 Backup to copy all my irreplaceable data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service every month. This little app is still in beta, but it does a good job of putting incremental backups to S3. I was really surprised to find out just how cheap S3 is - I can back up gigabytes of data and have S3 hold it for just 15 cents per gigabyte. At that pricing I have no problem backing up tens of gigabytes of photos, code, and documents, knowing that if my house went up in a fire I’d be able to get back everything my insurance can’t replace.

I’m a die-hard Winamp user, and one of the reasons for that is the fantastic plugins that are available for Winamp. One of my favorites is Toaster, which gives you this cute little popup whenever the song changes. I’ve been enjoying this one for years, but only recently I discovered this cute little app: Album Cover Art Downloader. After an all-night cover downloading spree, I realized that Toaster supported showing album art in the popup. After fiddling with it for a bit, it showed up, but it still didn’t look that great, so I created my own little skin for it.

I already have the whole Mac theme going on my PC, so I thought a clean, simple style reminiscent of Growl would be the best. I think it looks pretty nice, and I love seeing all my album covers come up. You can grab it here if you want to try it out yourself.