I came up a quick and dirty workaround for this by installing a little utility called s3cmd to move the files for me. Here are the steps I took. I’m using Ubuntu on this server, but this should really work with minor adaptation on any Unix variant.

The basic theory of operation is this. The files in a local directory will get synced to s3, then your site will redirect (via .htaccss) visitors to the s3 files instead of the local files.

1. Have the same setup as me: Apache under Ubuntu.
2. Set up an s3 account.
3. Install s3cmd:

   sudo apt-get install s3cmd

4. Configure s3cmd. It will prompt you for your API keys, which you can get from your account page.

   s3cmd --configure

5. Create a bucket:

   s3cmd mb s3://mah-bucket

6. Create a script somewhere called s3sync.sh (or whatever you like). Be sure to change “mah-bucket” to something more meaningful.
1. #!/bin/sh
2. s3cmd sync –acl-public /path/to/local/content/folder/ s3://mah-bucket
7. Make sure your script is executable:

   chmod 0755 s3sync.sh

8. Run your script. All your images will be copied to your s3 bucket:

   ./wps3sync.sh

9. Make sure apache has mod_rewrite turned on, then edit your .htaccess file so it includes the lines below. Don’t forget to change “mah-bucket” to whatever you called your bucket in step 6. Also change “url/path/to/folder/” to the url path of the foler from step 6. (Note presence of “^” and lack of slash at the beginning.)
1. <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
2. RewriteEngine On
3. RewriteBase /
4. RewriteRule ^url/path/to/folder/(.*) http://mah-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/$1 [R,L]
5. </IfModule>

That’s it! Your site will now redirect requests for the original files to your s3 bucket. The only caveat is that you will need to run your sync script every time you upload new files so they get copied to s3. I run mine manually via ssh, but this could become a pain if there was a lot of new files. One option would be to cron it to run every few minutes, but bear in mind that s3 is billed by the request and it will add up over time. A better way of auto-syncing might be to write a script that polls your uploads folder for changes, then calls your s3 script if it finds something different.

Here’s a modified s3sync.sh that uses md5deep to see if the folder contents have changed. You can cron this as often as you like and it will only talk to s3 if there are actually changes.

And that’s that! I hope someone finds this useful. If you did, let me know!

1. It will always take longer to develop an application than anyone involved thinks it will.
2. No matter when your deadline is, you will always run short on time towards the end.
3. No matter what project management methodology you use, (or what software supports it) at crunch time, people will resort to sticking Post-it notes to your monitor. (…but that’s another show.)
4. No piece of software will ever be perfect, but any “extra time” will generally be eaten by trying to make it such.
5. Deployment (putting the application into production) will always be a rush job done at the last minute.

The first four things are more or less laws of nature as far as I am concerned. No matter how hard everyone works or how on the ball everyone is, software is hard to write and it’s even harder to say how long it will take. What isn’t a constant, though, is that last one, despite the fact that most people do it that way. In general, there is a fair amount of wiggle room in the area of what order things get done in.

Generally, when you’re building an app, the minute you have a loose idea of what’s getting built you want to build something and get it in front of people so they can start picking it apart. This idea, in fact, is at the core of a lot of very well-meaning project management methodologies. (I’m looking at you, Agile.) The sooner you can show something working, the better the people who sign the checks will feel about your project. (At least at the beginning, anyway.)

The flaw in this approach is that it gives everyone a false sense of security about the schedule. Even as work proceeds at a brisk pace, most people ignore that most crucial of steps: getting the thing to work in “real-life”. Deployment is left for the last possible second, when the project isn’t quite done, but must be pushed live. There’s generally a lot of hand-wringing and brow-mopping and a lot of impatient people at this stage. (A good PM might even build in “go live” time for this, but it will always be eaten up by last minute development.) In the worst case, there will be no actual deployment strategy and someone from the development team will end up dragging files from one machine to another, manually. Things that worked perfectly on all the developers machines will break catastrophically on the live servers. Someone will have forgotten to purchase a license for some critical piece of software the app needs to run. The firewall ports that the web server uses to talk to the database server won’t be open, and neither will the help desk of the hosting company. All of this is, of course, terrible. To paraphrase Scott Hanselman, “You get to drag files from your local machine to a server for deployment once. After that, if you’re not typing ‘deploy’ somewhere to push your application, YOU ARE STUPID.”

The second worst case is that an already under-the-gun developer will be pulled off some other very important task (you know, like, finishing the damned thing) to crap out some way of deploying the app to production. It will often end up being a brittle, undocumented kludge that some poor intern will have to sift through later. Everyone will hate it and it will reflect poorly on the team that spent six months developing an otherwise amazing application.

Why is deployment (and the setup therein) such a loathed task? I would say it’s because it’s a necessary but highly unglamorous task. It’s also one that very few people will get. Show your client the cool new feature you just added to the image gallery and they’ll buy you a pizza. Show them your one-button application deployment and they’ll give you a blank stare. For this reason, deployment has always been a last-minute rush job.

I would like to propose a better way. Deploy first. By “first”, I mean that as soon as you have checked in the very skeleton of your application into your version control system, figure out how and where and by what method you will put the thing into a production environment. Then do it. Do it a bunch of times. Get it so that it’s a completely natural, totally painless process that you don’t even have to think about. While it’s my opinion that a deployment-first strategy is good practice for any project, I think it’s absolutely critical to any project using a new or unfamiliar development platform. (Also, as an aside, if you do not have a version control system, please stop reading this. Clean out your desk, leave your ID card with security, walk out of the building and don’t look back. Seriously. Shame on you.)

To deploy your app, you will generally need to take care of all (or most) of the following:

• setup and configuration of production machines (be they real or virtual)
• installation of prerequisite software for your application (web servers, application platforms, RDBMSes, etc.)
• load balancing
• network configuration
• development of a deployment system

If you get this all squared away first, you can merrily write code up until the last possible second, because when you’re done, you push a button and the site goes live. Maybe there will be a speed bump or two in that process, but you won’t be starting from scratch.

Make no mistake. Writing software may be hard, but deployment is always harder. It also (generally) involves coordinating lots of different people, often at different companies, many of whom will not share your sense of urgency. Deploying first exposes a bunch of issues that you can square away long before they become emergencies.

That last item on my list there is often a source of confusion for a lot of people. Why would you “develop” a deployment system? There’s a lot of tools that do this already, right? Well, sure, but you have to set them up and configure them, and in most cases, write scripts that will tell them what to do. This is often a lot less trivial than the makers of those tools would have you believe. Take the time and figure out what you’re going to use and how your going to use it before you even really start developing.

As for how you go about building deployment systems, there are lots and lots of options. The best one for your project will largely depend on what you’re using. In  most cases, you can get your build tool (Ant, Maven, NAnt, Capistrano, etc.) to do it for you. In a lot of cases this can get overly complicated, though. My personal favorite way is to write a short, project-specific shell script (though I recently started using Python for this) with good inline comments. Whatever you use, here’s a loose set of steps for any deployment script:

• Pull a copy of the latest code from the version control system (never deploy off of your current development tree)
• Increment the version number (I like using a text file called VERSION in the root of my project)
• tag (or whatever your VCS calls it) the revision with your version number
• copy required libraries into the build tree
• create compressed archive of your build
• transfer the archive to the production system
• unpack the archive into the right place (via remote, perhaps with passwordless SSH or Powershell. Some build tools have this functionality as well.)
• perform any required administration tasks that a new build would need (update database structure, restart web server, etc.)
• email a notification that a build was pushed out

You may need more steps, you may need fewer. Whatever you can reasonably automate, do it. Every step you make automatic will be one less manual headache at the 11th hour. Also, the more manual steps you remove, the more you reduce the likelihood of human error and dependency on a particular human to do deployment.

I hope this will inspire you to think about incorporating deployment-first development into your next project. I can tell you that doing things this way has greatly improved my life as a developer, especially at crunch time.

Here’s a picture of me taken about a year and a half ago:

The first picture is the heaviest I’ve ever been. 280 pounds. The second picture is the thinnest I’ve been in recent history, probably about 240. I was still overweight, but not nearly as bad as I am now.

Why am I telling you this? Because today is the beginning of a new era for me. One in which I am not fat. One where I do not get exhausted after half an hour of moderate activity. One where my back doesn’t hurt all the time. One where my clothes fit. One where I am not cruising headlong for Type 2 Diabetes and early death. I am telling you this because I am going to use fear of public humiliation as my primary weight-loss tool.

The Hundred Pound Countdown

As previously stated, I weigh almost 300 pounds. I really should weigh more like 200 pounds. That’s a difference of (wait for it) like 100 pounds. Just for the sake of argument, let’s call my goal weight 200 pounds, meaning I’ve got to lose like 80. Okay, so not quite 100, but “eighty pound countdown” doesn’t have the same ring to it. So, inspired by this guy, here’s my plan:

1. I will get down to 200 lbs and stay there.
2. I will weigh myself every Monday and post it on Twitter. (#100lbcountdown)
3. I will take a picture of myself every Monday and post it on Twitter. (#100lbcountdown)
4. I will only snack on fruits and vegetables.
5. I will eat three meals a day, and they will be awesome and delicious.
6. I will not eat after dinner.
7. I will not eat crap in the form of processed food or fast food.
8. I will walk outside for no less than 30 minutes every day.
9. I will take a fiber supplement (because, well, you know.)
10. If I break a rule, I will post the infraction on Twitter. (#100lbcountdown)

Do Me a Favor

Don’t “encourage” me. F@%k encouragement. What I need right now is derision. Tell me what a fat, unhealthy slob I am. Mock me mercilessly when I cock this up (as I inevitably will). This isn’t something fun I’m doing just for the hell of it. I’m fat and sad and I don’t want to live with it or die from it. Here’s hoping my ego is bigger than my paunch.

It’s been a pretty satisfying project so far, mainly because I can draw them quickly and they aren’t “precious”. My earlier attempts at comics failed because it took me more than a week to do each page. I suppose if the outcomes were awesome, I could have justified it (there are those that can) but the results were always sub-par. These comics, on the other hand, are intentionally sub-par, which is somehow psychologically liberating, resulting in more output. This is all to say that I’ve produced quite a few of them in a pretty short period of time. There’s even an accidental guest strip by a totally famous web cartoonist who happened to be getting something out of my fridge.

I really like how these look, if I do say so myself. Some kind of weird cross between Henry Rollins in Johnny Mnemonic and Ray Smuckles in every Achewood strip since 2004. I guess I most closely resemble M.C. Serch, which is pretty rad, considering that he has basically been my hero since middle school. He is, even still. Even after The (White) Rapper.

I suppose that while this is clearly a win for fashion, the really awesome part is that I can actually use a computer without getting a pounding headache.

So thanks for telling me which pair of glasses to buy, Internet! I won’t forget this!

Yes, I know the temple is missing on a few of them. This is a low-budget operation. Use your imagination.

Because it’s the beginning of both a year and a decade, I had the totally original idea of setting some goals for the year to come. To be honest, this is one of those blog posts that’s really more for me than it is for you. I mean, sure, I want you to read it, but that’s mainly so you can make fun of me in 2011 when I don’t actually do half of these things. Despite the timing, this list shouldn’t be considered “New Year’s Resolutions” per se.  The only real criteria for putting things on this list was that I must conceivably be able to check said things off within 2010. So here’s my list, in no particular order.

Lose Like…A Hundred Pounds

I am fat. I’m not kidding. I make jokes about it all the time. The fact of it is that if I keep carrying around all this extra weight I’m putting myself at risk for a bunch of terrible things, say nothing of the fact that it diminishes the quality of my life on a daily basis. No more. I am launching an all out war on fat. Let’s hope it goes better than The War on TerrorTM or The War on DrugsTM.

Be a Better Blogger

Historically, I’ve been kind of half-assed about my website. I keep committing to update it regularly and failing. It needs to be more worthwhile to read so that more people will read it. I’d also like to add some kind of podcast or video blog component to it. (I will not use the word “vlog”. Wait, I just did. Dammit.) I also one to pick a few areas of subject matter to focus on, rather than continuing the mish-mash whatever I’ve been doing so far.

Be a Better Maker

I need to re-reorganize my shop. Then I need to use it to finish a few projects. I’m long on ideas short on finished projects. I also need to do more with my sewing machine, as it is awesome and capable of doing a ton of cool and money-saving things. Making stuff is fun and rewarding. I enjoy doing it. I need to do it more.

Finish My Novel

While I did not succeed in mashing out the requisite fifty thousand words I needed to call NaNoWriMo a success, I actually didn’t fail nearly as hard as I thought. I came up with a story and characters that I’m really excited to develop further. I need to finish writing it, preferably before the next NaNoWriMo.

Make New Some Music

I used to be really into music production. I very much enjoy writing and recording music. I need to get back into it, preferably by producing an album-sized body of work. I really want to pick up guitar again. Now that Propellerhead is making recording software, I’m totally excited about getting into it again.

Take The Next Step in Education

This one is sort of intentionally vague and will likely take several years, but I have to start somewhere. I want to get a masters degree (at least) in something awesome, like astrobiology or evolutionary biology. These areas of study fascinate me, and its maddening that I don’t know more about them.

Create a Financially Viable Web Property

I’ve been talking about and half-assing this goal for a while, but I need to just bang out out. I need to pick one of my many half-finished projects and complete it. I want to do something that can more or less run on its own and cover my basic bills.

So that’s my list. What’s on your list for this year?

It has long been understood that the conservative element in America, for whatever reason, believes (or has a vested financial interest in everyone else believing) that any suggestion that the planet might be warming up is simply a hoax intended to…I don’t really know what they think the intent is. They’re fuzzy on that.

For example, yesterday, Rush Limbaugh (No, I’m not even linking to his ass.) latched on to the fact it snowed in Copenhagen during the climate talks.  If you’ve got a strong stomach, watch the episode. If not, here’s the take away quote:

“So just when [Al] Gore and all these enviro-wacko Commies and phony scientists reach the height of deceit, God dumps a snowstorm on ‘em, all over this manmade fraud. … Denmark has not had a white Christmas for 14 years. All of a sudden, God, with his sense of humor, gives us a blizzard on loan from him, right in the middle of these wackos getting together for their little conference.”

I’m not even going to get into how tenuous a grasp on reality you’d need to suggest that a single snow storm disproves global warming. What I’m interested in is the contradiction that exists both within this very statement and within the right in general. Let’s look at the two generally held (religious) conservative beliefs we’re talking about here:

1. Climate change is a complete scam that has no credible science behind it.
2. There is an invisible, almighty, all-knowing God that directly interacts with people on a daily basis.

The obvious question here is, “When did you guys start caring about having credible science behind your views?”

Seriously, if you want me to take it on faith that Adam and Eve rode to church on dinosaurs six thousand years ago and that there’s a war between religious superheroes in space, you can’t in the same breath talk about anyone else’s scientific credibility. You just can’t.

Steampunk, despite having highly disputed origins, has a very consistent aesthetic involving high technology powered by steam and mechanical means. The dress code is all about brown leather, tweed, brass accents and anything else that looks vaguely Victorian.

While cyberpunk and steampunk have become widely understood, there is, in my mind, a third x-punk aesthetic. While it’s equally as prevalent, codified and overused as its brethren, it has not, until I named it just now, had a name. Its name is “Zombiepunk”. It just is. Because I said so.

Zombiepunk fiction is based on the idea that some event has effectively ended modern civilization, leaving the survivors to fight over the scraps. The name comes from the fact that this event is often the outbreak of a disease which turns most of the population into a horde of murderous zombies. This isn’t always the case, sometimes the event is a nuclear war or an alien invasion. It creates a world where the events of Sex and the City could not take place, or at the very least, they would become watchable televison. As far as design sense goes, it is effectively an a kind of “un-aesthetic”. Its technology is cobbled together from the remains of a dead civilization. As far as fashion goes, there’s a lot of denim, canvas and inexplicably, bondage gear.

In the service of clarity, I have prepared this handy chart:

Just to be thorough, let’s look at some examples. (Mouse over each for alt-text.)

Cyberpunk – Dress Code

Cyberpunk – Vehicles

Steampunk – Dress Code

Steampunk – Vehicles

Zombiepunk – Dress Code

Zombiepunk – Vehicles

You may wonder why I’ve suddenly become obsessed with this, and you would be right to do so. (I even did a pretty major overhaul of my website visuals.) I’m not sure, really, other than I am not-so-secretly planning for a zombie apocalypse. It’s by far the most plausible speculative fiction there is. Sure, you can wait until it actually happens and then figure out what to wear. Me? I’m already stockpiling canned food and ammo and warming up my welding gear.

The problem arises from the fact that my set piece ideas are visual. I can see them clearly in my head. This would be fine, you see, if I were writing this thing just for myself. It would seem, though, that any potential reader needs me to describe that which I see in my head. This has been harder than it initially appeared for me. I had been handling it like I handle all difficult problems, which is to say that I simply avoided them in the hopes that I’d figure something out later. This was going well until last night, when I read the first few paragraphs of my girlfriend Sarah’s NaNoWriMo efforts. Sarah has a degree in English from the prestigious Smith College in western Massachusetts. She is an unqualified genius and an absolute painter when it comes to words. In less than two hundred words, she was able to evoke an utterly compelling sense of place and a whole set of emotional responses to go with it. She’s painting the Sistine Chapel whilst I lay on the floor of the den with a box of crayons, drawing stick figures next to a two-dimensional house with a sun in the sky.

I knew full well what my set pieces and characters made me feel like, but I was having trouble describing them. Then it hit me. What I’m trying to do is paint a picture. What I simply called out places in my text where I wanted to paint those pictures and pasted in a photograph of what I wanted to describe? Once my description matches the picture to my satisfaction, I can simply delete the picture. I tried a test with a road through a forest I wanted to describe, and to my amazement, it worked really well.

I spent the first part of today finding the right pictures of people and places I want to describe and inserting them into my text. I’ve got around twenty right now. If a picture is worth a thousand words, describing these pictures should get me twenty thousand more words! At least I think that’s how the math for that works out. I’ll let you know.

Crap. Here’s 489 words that aren’t in my effing novel. Back to work!

If you’re not familiar with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it has come to be known), it’s an organized effort to get people to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. While it might seem a bit ambitious to try and write 50,000 words in a month and even more ambitious to have those words form something like a story, the organizers (and several friends who’ve done it before) say it’s totally possible.

Speaking of friends, I have conscripted a few to participate in the event with me and write their own terrible novels. I really did conscript them rather than ask them. This is one of those things where you just have to tell people to “get in the car” and don’t really let them worry about the destination. Really, it’s motivation for me, as I’m going to look like quite an idiot if I encourage people to do this and fail to do it myself. Two of these people live in my house, so we’ll be able to “support” (read: mock) each other as we go.

Interestingly, I just noticed that Wordpress here counts words as you type. I just managed to crap out 250 words in a little over fifteen minutes. Considering that one needs to average 1667 words per day to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I really only need to write for around one to three hours a day to make this happen.

Like many people, I’ve started writing several novels. I’ve never finished one, though I did get pretty far along with my last attempt.  My hope is that by tearing through this one in a month, I’ll have a reasonable piece of work (or crap) to start editing.

I’ve also decided to write this novel using only open source software. I was going to use a Mac emulator running System 7 and Word 5 (the best word processor ever written, im my opinion), but once I got it running I felt like the whole setup was a little dodgy, even for me. Instead, I installed a relatively recent laptop I had with Ubuntu 9.10 and AbiWord. I wanted a machine that would be dedicated to this process, so when I sit down at it to write I don’t flail about and do anything else. I’m even going to disable the wireless during designated writing time so I don’t fall into a lolcat pit whilst doing “research”.

I’ll be updating my wordcount on my NaNoWriMo page, but I’ll also be updating it here, in the sidebar. Oh, and please, do me a huge favor: Do NOT encourage me. It has been my experience that encouragement does nothing for me. If you want to help, what I need now is cold, hard derision. Feel free to tell me how much I suck if my daily word count falls below 1667. Tell me I’ll never amount to anything. Ridicule my efforts as much as you can. This is the only effective motivation you can provide. The more you ride me, the more likely I am to defy you and succeed.

This is not to say that I’m in support of dumping my garbage in a river and clubbing baby seals. I just think that environmentalism, is, in general, a lost cause. We should be preparing for the eventualities rather than trying to prevent them. I’d rather invest my energy where it can actually do something productive.

For this reason, I’m a huge supporter of renewable energy, particularly in the form of solar and wind.  Both of these resources, are, for practical purposes, infinite and free. You’d think that would make them absurdly compelling, even if your only motive is greed. It is for this reason that I am continually amazed by the efforts the big energy industry to cast doubt on these technologies.

Yesterday, for example, I came across this article in Power & Energy Magazine on the advantages and disadvantages of wind power. The highlight was the following infographic. (Click to see original.)

Ah, yes. Nothing like the clean lines, good design and extensive use of green to aid you in your straw man argument. I don’t want to accuse the fine folks at Power & Energy Magazine of being industry stooges, but come now. Let’s look at some of their “disadvantages” of wind power, according to the article:

Unreliability

The main issue concerned with power from the wind, is that of its unreliability. Wind strength cannot be controlled and in some areas it is just not a viable source of power.

So, um, here’s a crazy idea: Maybe don’t put wind farms in places where they won’t work. Then you wouldn’t have that problem! Also: Don’t put a hydroelectric power plant in the desert.

Lower Electricity Output

Wind power generates significantly less electricity than its fossil fuel equivalent, meaning more turbines are required to generate the same amount of power. Wind turbines are also highly inefficient in terms of output capacity.

This would be a really good point, if it weren’t the fact that energy efficiency concerns kind of don’t matter when your fuel source is free and nearly infinite.

Costly to surrounding wildlife

With demand for renewable and cleaner energy sources growing it is likely that the need for land for wind farms will increase, which will potentially damage a high percentage of local wildlife In the process. It is also estimated that each wind turbine kills over 4 birds a year.

Really?  Really? Compare wind farms to say…coal mining. I’m just guessing here, but I’m guessing coal mining probably kills more than four birds a year. Hell, Thanksgiving kills a hell of a lot more birds than that.

Noise Pollution

The noise produced from a singular wind turbine is similar to that of a small jet engine and can be a cause of major concern for those living near a wind farm.

Again, let’s compare this to the relative concerns of living near a coal-fired power plant. Coal plants are known to expose people living near them to elevated levels of radiation, airborne toxins and smog. Granted, you probably wouldn’t want a wind turbine in your back yard, but I can’t imagine this is any different than living near an airport. Even so, airports tend to be in populated areas, whereas wind farms tend to be in very rural areas.

So it’s probably fair to say the “disadvantages” listed in this article don’t stand up to even casual scrutiny. Just to put things into perspective, I’ve prepared my own infographic for you, breaking down the advantages and disadvantages of another energy source: coal. Click for the larger version.

Such has been the problem with my garage since I’ve had a garage. My tools have traditionally been stored in a pile next to the last thing I worked on. At best, they were all jumbled up in a toolbox. After seeing how Jaime Hyneman keeps his tools organized, I was kind of inspired. So long as everything has a place and you know where that place is, the amount of time you spend looking for something in particular can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.

I started by declaring a number of functional areas for the space. I would have one bench for small projects, like electronics and another for larger stuff, like woodworking. Bike repair would have its own area. Tool storage would be centrally located.

I decided that I what I really wanted was a way to have my tools all out and accessible at all times, but not all jumbled up. I’ve seen this done effectively with peg boards, but those get pricey by the time you’ve got a hook for every tool. I also don’t love how much actual wall space pegboards take up. I decided I wanted something that would come out from the wall a bit that had a horizontal surface with holes in it. This could be used to store all manner of commonly used hand tools, like screwdrivers, hammers, pliers and so on. I was just about to make something when I saw this milk crate in the corner of the garage. It was an older one that had this heavy metal band around the top. I turned it upside down, bolted it to the wall and started putting tools in the holes in the bottom. If a tool wouldn’t fit, I cut some of the plastic bars to accomodate it. I probably fit two pegboards worth of tools in a quarter of the space. Here’s a picture of it:

For things that wouldn’t fit in the rack, I just put a finishing nail in the wall and hung it. Another thing I’m kind of proud of is this quick but useful drill bit holder I made:

It has hooks so it can hang on the wall but can also be moved where it needs to go.

Now that everything has a spot, I waste no time looking for stuff. I can spend the hour or two at a time I might have for projects actually working on projects instead of looking for my sh*t. Yay! Here’s more pictures of the finished reorganization.

Pharrell did a nice little piece on Current a few days ago, talking about the inspiration behind artst.com (formerly known as Heywire.) The site has been blowing up this month, a huge flood of new members and artwork and always inspiring stuff to check out. If you haven’t yet, get in on that!

Here’s an easy way to get rid of them. From the command line (in any Unix variant, including OSX) and cd to the working directory in question. Then paste in the following:

Then commit, and you’re done.

In semi-related news, I found out that Rhapsody allows you to get your playlist via RSS, complete with album art and links to listen to the tracks on the free (web-based) version of the service. Pretty neat! I thought it would be fun to publish that, so one quick and dirty Wordpress plugin later and here it is. I’m sure it will be used against me at some point in the future when T-Pain puts out a new record and I play it continuously for three weeks straight.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Currently, the most recent Kanye West record, 808s & Heartbreaks has been in heavy rotation on Radio Jaybill. Now granted, I liked Golddigger as much as the next thirty-something uncool white guy, but this record couldn’t be less like Late Registration. I’ve decided that this record is basically to pop music what Pirates of the Caribbean is to movies. That is that it’s such a stupid idea that it shouldn’t have worked, so one has very low expectations. Then it actually turns out to be good and you’re that much more surprised. Seriously, this should have been a formula for disaster: rapper turned R&B singer makes record with little more than sparse drum machines and Auto-Tune about why he is sad. On the surface, it’s far less plausible than a pirate movie based on a theme park ride.

Somehow, though, it works. I think the most striking thing about it is how utterly sincere it sounds. Granted, Mr. West has had a pretty rough year and has plenty to be upset about. I mean, nothing worse than your average country songwriter must endure in a typical year, but still. That’s probably got something to do with why this record succeeds, actually. If someone had made a country record out of this subject matter, it would have been totally boring. The choice of medium really helps the final product.

I thought it would be difficult to feel bad for someone who makes more money in twenty minutes than I’ll make this year, and yet, I kind of did. His apparent honesty is utterly disarming. He makes no apologies for being rich, famous and powerful. If he had, it probably would have cheapened it somehow. If art is about finding a unique perspective, I put forth West has done nothing if not that. This is a record about someone who seemingly has everything and is suddenly forced to reckon with the utter vacuousness of his existence. This is combined with his realization that he’s worked so hard on his career that he’s left no room for his personal life. It’s a heady mix of inner torment that would make Trent Reznor proud.

Aside from a slew of guest appearances (including Lil Wayne and the ever forgettable Young Jeezy) it lacks most of the trite trappings of typical hip hop record. (including, for the most part, actual hip hop) While overall a pretty great record, it’s not without a few duds. The final track, Pinocchio Story, for example, shows what happens when he turns off Auto-Tune. It’s not pretty.

Overall, though, it’s a very solid record and I highly recommend it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a sport called chinlone. It’s sort of a cross between sport and dance and people that are good at it are amazing to watch. I imagine if you’re a fan of this and go to events, you probably don’t want to sit too close to the action unless a really good team is playing, or you are so taking a foot to the teeth.