You’ve been at it again – getting together, sharing a drink, a smile, cowgirl hats and a silly dog (?) costume.

This week, the good folk of KC hosted a Kiteup and donated a big bunch of food to the Harvesters Community Food Network in the process. Please give a big Brightkite hand to everyone that came out to play, but especially the organizers: @srndur, @mshonhall @belpers, @sallymander and @ChuckFranks – we know you all put a lot of time and effort into making it a great night.

Meanwhile, 8 times zones to the West, crazy things were happening at a Tokyo kiteup. As the saying goes – a picture tells a thousand words. We wish we could have been with you – it looks like a blast!

What’s the difference between honey from Montana, Washington, and Hawaii?

Come visit us in the Tasting Pavailion at the Metreon to find out! Plus experience the unique flavors of jams, confections, and more from producers around the U.S.!

And have your first freshly made Æbleskiver from Chad, owner of Aunt Else, direct from Minnesota. Learn how to make these delightful popover / beignet like treats from Chad who’ll be cooking them up with his Minnesota-made cast iron Æbleskiver pan, pairing with Lucille’s Kitchen Garden jams and other Foodzie producer jams.

Looking forward to feeding you!

Review Helpfulness

Users are now able to provide some feedback as to whether a review was helpful to them. By simply clicking yes or no for a particular review you will not only be helping to surface the best reviews but you will also be helping improve the oneforty experience for others by helping improve the content. Reviews are now sorted by how helpful the community feels they are by default, but if you enjoy the classic experience you are free to toggle back to sorting by date.

Spam!

As some people may have noticed spam is everywhere! Unfortunately oneforty is no exception. This week we rolled out several measures to help mitigate spam and other offensive material. While fighting spam will no doubt be an ongoing battle we hope these incremental improvements begin to help. Please let us know if you see spam and/or offensive material getting though by flagging them.

Application Pages

We made some significant improvements behind the scenes with regard to the how application data is stored. While many of the changes are not noticeable to the typical user they will make the overall experience better. One user facing improvement is platforms an application run on work the same way as tags and categories. Users are able to see what platforms an application runs on as well a drill into a particular platform to see what other applications are out there for that platform. On the developer side we made implements to how we capture data about your application, including allowing you to specify the platforms and categories apply to your application.

The Road Ahead

This is only a taste of the improvements we have made so far and there is much, much more to come! While the list of things to come is nearly infinite here are some things on the horizon: refining how people can browse apps, including allowing users to combine categories, tags, and platforms to help find applications. Allow users to specify platforms, categories, etc that they are interested in to allow us to tailor a more customized experience and continue to improve the user experience.

While we certainly do not have a shortage of ideas please do not hesitate to give us some feedback. Let us know if you feel something is not working well. Let us know what you would love to see us do next.

To all the developers out there, we want to talk to you! If you are interested in helping us pilot some new features please let us know.

With visitors to the flea in search of last minute additions for the perfect Halloween costume, we came across “The Next Big Brand Contest” — a permanent costume of sorts to design the branding for one lucky food start-up. Sponsored by the The Rooster Group, it’s open to any producers in the tri-state area. Check out details here, and enter by November 30th!

The team at The Rooster Design Group are the creatives behind Early Bird’s granola whose samples appealed to the more health conscious at the flea. Our favorite nibble was Jubilee, cherry and pistachio granola. For the straight up sweet tooth, there were two great chocolatiers showcasing their treats, both with roots in South Africa. Our next stop was Nunu Chocolates where we tried a raspberry ganache, and looked longingly at the Jasmine and Early Grey varieties. Named for the South African term, ‘Nunu’ is an affectionate nickname for little children in Africa where Justine, the Chief Chocolate Officer, spent her childhood. Nunu was followed by Fine and Raw where we sampled the 78% chocolate bar, a combination of pure raw chocolate with a touch of blue agave. The low heat cooking technique maintains the chocolate’s original flavor.

Next, we explored the baked goods. We waved at Liz and Jen of Liddabit Sweets, and chatted with Wanna Hava Cookie whose whoopie pies transition flavors and colors with each season — the orange and black en vogue in October. On the other side of the table was a new twist on an old favorite–blondies. They are the signature item produced by Hot Blondies who opened at Candylicious, the largest candy store in the world spanning over 10,000 square feet in Dubai this September. Finally, we were dazzled by the swirls of frosting atop the $1 each bites at Kumquat Cupcakery — not quite adventurous enough to try the quite popular Maple Bacon, a maple cinnamon cake topped with vanilla frosting and a thick cut of bacon.

If you were in the mood for more meat, Salvatore Brooklyn was featuring pancetta on a baguette with some of its famous cheese. Of course, with dessert on our mind, we would have gone straight for their incredible canolis, if we had any room left. We were mesmerized by the chefs as they constructed the dessert before us.

All of our goodies could be washed down by a home made beer from the Brooklyn Brew Shop. Assembly at home required and appears worth the wait time.

Check our our trick or treating route here.

canolis from Savatore Brooklyn

First, here’s how she describes the ice packs:

“The filling is just water and a superabsorbent polymer (the same stuff that’s inside diapers and lady products) which also has an application as a water saver in your garden. If you were to buy the powder on your own, you could mix a small amount in with garden soil and it would hold the water longer than soil alone. I think Miracle Grow also makes a potting soil that already contains it.

So, if you don’t want to use the ice packs that ship with Luca Chocolate as an ice pack, just cut them open and stir them into your garden or house plant soil. I imagine you could also spread it out on a baking sheet and let the water evaporate (no idea how long that would take) and then stir it into the soil dry.”

Along with these eco ice packs, corn-based peanuts that can also melt down are another great earth friendly packing material, used by Liz Lovely and others.

Do you have creative earth friendly ways of creating ice packs?

The ingredients

water
superabsorbent polymer
powder
plastic bag

Instructions:

Add the powder into water
5 minutes later it will have gelled.
Put the gel into bag
Completed ice pack
Freeze it. Here’s what the frozen ice pack will look like!

We don’t feature products very often here on DailyBurn (BTW, do you want us to?), but every once in a while something comes along that is really cool and we have to share it. And you have to admit it, the Steelcase Walkstation is pretty sweet.

I have been interested in “treadputers” ever since I saw the one that Brad Feld built for his daily training. The thought of walking while doing computer work is very appealing – burning calories while working could make a huge difference for many people trying to lose weight. The Walkstation tops out 2MPH, so you could effectively walk 16 miles while working a normal 8 hour shift.

So, I just ordered a Steelcase Walkstation. I am interested to see how it will help me reach my weight goals, and I will be posting a review on the site after I have used it for a while. I know they are pretty expensive, but can you put a price on your health?

And, Steelcase is having a current charity give away where you could actually win a Walkstation. You can find full details on how you can win a Steelcase Walkstation here.

FULL DISCLOSURE – We just put an affiliate relationship in place with Steelcase. So, if you buy a Walkstation we will get some commission. If you like the Walkstation, we hope you will buy one by using this link. That said, we aren’t featuring this product just because we get a commission. We actually think this is pretty cool and could make a real difference for a lot of people.

At first blush, it might seem to be as simple as looking at a list of Twitter client popularity and mimicking that. But that breaks down as a measure for those apps that don’t publish to Twitter or contain a source tag. Apps tend to fall into one of four classes, which directly affect our ability to measure popularity:

• clients – those apps that act directly on someone’s behalf to update their status, show their stream, send direct messages, etc. These apps almost always include a “source” in the tweet to identify where it came from, and are the easiest to discover. (One complication arises when different apps within a “family” share a single source parameter, like Tweetdeck’s desktop and iPhone clients, making it difficult to properly differentiate them.)
• integrations – apps that connect another service to Twitter. For example, FriendFeed allows people to share content & comments directly to Twitter, or twitterfeed will publish an RSS feed to Twitter.
• sharing – the set of tools used to share content like links, photos, videos and songs through Twitter’s text-only status updates. Often these apps produce just a link within the tweet, and are not the client itself.
• services – those tools that are primarily reading Twitter data streams instead of publishing. Sites like TweetStats or Listorious provide interesting aggregation and analysis of your tweeting patterns and useful directory of Twitter Lists, respectively. Many of these services might have a “Tweet This!”-type link, but they are not primarily clients. (Theoretically Twitter knows which OAuth-based apps have been approved most often, and which tokens are being used in requests, which might shed more light on the popularity of some read-only apps.)

Only looking at the number of updates from a specific source would unfairly favor clients over other types of apps and says nothing about what people think of the app, and if they would recommend it to others.

All ranking systems involve making difficult judgments about what the most important factors are. While disclosing the exact details of the algorithm can encourage gaming, we can say that we look at a combination of both external and internal data sources (such as the rating of the app, and number of users) to determine popularity and quality.

We definitely will continue to add data sources, refine how we calculate rank and slice the data in other (hopefully) interesting ways. What are other factors you think we should be looking at to rank apps? We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments or by contacting us.

We have fixed the issue on our main database server, and access has been restored. There are still fixes that need to be implemented, and we are working through all of the forums to ensure the data is intact. If you find that your forum was corrupted in some way by this shutdown, please contact us at support [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

What inspired you to start the market?

I had been working as a planner for the city for a local time. I was interested in local food issues. I left my job with the city government and volunteered with Slow Food and that’s where I learned about what was going on in this food movement and met many key people such as Alice Waters who have been supportive of this project. I was looking for a way to bring together my various interests and at one point I thought I might want to have a shop, but realized it would be interesting to find a way to bring together all the shop owners in one place. I learned that New York City has such a deep tradition of markets. And this sight [South Street Seaport] was a succession of markets for four centuries. We lost that thread , almost, but we don’t have to lose that all together, we can bring that back together.

Why did you locate it at South Street Seaport?

South Street is a really interesting place in terms of the history of New York. It began with a ferry boat coming back and forth from Brooklyn to bringing farmers and farmed goods. And since that time, there has been a continual progression of markets. The last of which was the Fulton Fish Market which was here for almost 200 years and four years ago was moved to the Bronx and left behind this old market site. Our feeling is since this is such a rich place we shouldn’t lose that continuity, and we could this empty space to grow a new market – what better place to put one than in such a historic location in markets for the city.

How did the market get its start?

New Amsterdam market is looking at how can we tap into this need for other sources of local food, and how can we support local farmers and businesses who are selling food and for whom a market is a good way to start and incubate their business in an affordable space. And how to bring back a sense of food culture that was once very prevalent in this city where public markets were very much an institution and a part of daily life. As people have come to re-appreciate what food is, they appreciate all the different ways where you can experience different foods and public markets are one of those settings

What merchants are featured at the market?

One core group of vendors who are here from market to market are the purveyors the small mostly NYC businesses who are in the business of sourcing and selling local foods. They purchase what they sell from local farms and for us those are the vendors we want to cultivate because that ishow the markets used to be. The main criteria for them is in a region roughly 500 miles from New York because we are hoping to support a regional economy –this region produces a tremendous amount of food and it could have a home in a market this like. This could become a center for that understanding

What has been your proudest moment thus far?

It’s always a really wonderful moment when we’ve been here since 5 or 6 in the morning and then the vendors all arrive and you wonder if it’s all going to get done and then suddenly the people start coming in and it gets very crowded and you know it all worked out….and then you wait for a while before cleaning up.

On Sunday, October 25, nearly sixty food merchants sampled and sold their products to thousands of customers at the second New Amsterdam Market, featuring food which might have been at the market at the time of Hudson’s landing to more nouveau flavors such as Mama O’s Kimchee and Kombucha Brooklyn’s beverages.

The theme of this month’s market centered on meat—you could sample Marlow and Daughters grass-fed chili for $3 a bowl or take home Hudson Valley Duck Farm who sold out of their 1,600 portions of duck shortly into the day.

To check out more photos from the day, click here.

Navigating through the crowds, I found Foodzie merchant Rick’s Picks featuring their famous phat beets and others I dreamed of joining so that my friends in San Francisco can sample Narragnsett Creamery’s renaissance ricotta. You had quite the selection of breads to spread the cheese onto, including Balthazar Bakery’s baguettes and Fairway’s bagels.

Liddabit Sweets who are also at the top of our dream list to join Foodzie were at the market (keep your eyes out in early 2010 when they start making enough to sell online). Their heavenly selections of sea salt caramels were ”flying off the shelves.” The PB&J bar I purchased was a new spin on an old favorite. This version of the PB&J combined quince paste with peanut butter and milk chocolate. It disappeared on the subway ride home, and I can not wait to sample additional flavors at the next Brooklyn Flea.

The market wouldn’t have been complete without fish from the sea. Luke’s Lobster was one of the most popular vendors, and once you finished that wait in line you could go for dessert at the equally long, but incredibly delicious The Bent Spoon which featured ice cream flavors including rosemary chocolate.

One thing when looking at code metrics to keep in mind is that a single metric may not be as interesting. If you look at a metric trends over time it might help give you more meaningful information. Showing this trending information is one of our goals with Caliper. Metrics can be your friend watching over the project and like having a second set of eyes on how the code is progressing, alerting you to problem areas before they get out of control. Working with code over time, it can be hard to keep everything in your head (I know I can't). As the size of the code base increases it can be difficult to keep track of all the places where duplication or complexity is building up in the code. Addressing the problem areas as they are revealed by code metrics can keep them from getting out of hand, making future additions to the code easier.

I want to show how metrics can drive changes and improve the code base by working on a real project. I figured there was no better place to look than pointing metric_fu at our own devver.net website source and fixing up some of the most notable problem areas. We have had our backend code under metric_fu for awhile, but hadn't been following the metrics on our Merb code. This, along with some spiked features that ended up turning into Caliper, led to some areas getting a little out of control.

When going through metric_fu the first thing I wanted to start to work on was making the code a bit more DRY. The team and I were starting to notice a bit more duplication in the code than we liked. I brought up the Flay results for code duplication and found that four databases models shared some of the same methods.

Flay highlighted the duplication. Since we are planning on making some changes to how we handle timestamps soon, it seemed like a good place to start cleaning up. Below are the methods that existed in all four models. A third method 'update_time' existed in two of the four models.

 def self.pad_num(number, max_digits = 15) "%%0%di" % max_digits % number.to_i end def get_time Time.at(self.time.to_i) end

Nearly all of our DB tables store time in a way that can be sorted with SimpleDB queries. We wanted to change our time to be stored as UTC in the ISO 8601 format. Before changing to the ISO format, it was easy to pull these methods into a helper module and include it in all the database models.

module TimeHelper module ClassMethods def pad_num(number, max_digits = 15) "%%0%di" % max_digits % number.to_i end end def get_time Time.at(self.time.to_i) end def update_time self.time = self.class.pad_num(Time.now.to_i) end end

Besides reducing the duplication across the DB models, it also made it much easier to include another time method update_time, which was in two of the DB models. This consolidated all the DB time logic into one file, so changing the time format to UTC ISO 8601 will be a snap. While this is a trivial example of a obvious refactoring it is easy to see how helper methods can often end up duplicated across classes. Flay can come in really handy at pointing out duplication that over time that can occur.

Flog gives a score showing how complex the measured code is. The higher the score the greater the complexity. The more complex code is the harder it is to read and it likely contains higher defect density. After removing some duplication from the DB models I found our worst database model based on Flog scores was our MetricsData model. It included an incredibly bad high flog score of 149 for a single method.

The method in question was extract_data_from_yaml, and after a little refactoring it was easy to make extract_data_from_yaml drop from a score of 149 to a series of smaller methods with the largest score being extract_flog_data! (33.6). The method was doing too much work and was frequently being changed. The method was extracting the data from 6 different metric tools and creating summary of the data.

The method went from a sprawling 42 lines of code to a cleaner and smaller method of 10 lines and a collection of helper methods that look something like the below code:

 def self.extract_data_from_yaml(yml_metrics_data) metrics_data = Hash.new {|hash, key| hash[key] = {}} extract_flog_data!(metrics_data, yml_metrics_data) extract_flay_data!(metrics_data, yml_metrics_data) extract_reek_data!(metrics_data, yml_metrics_data) extract_roodi_data!(metrics_data, yml_metrics_data) extract_saikuro_data!(metrics_data, yml_metrics_data) extract_churn_data!(metrics_data, yml_metrics_data) metrics_data end def self.extract_flog_data!(metrics_data, yml_metrics_data) metrics_data[:flog][:description] = 'measures code complexity' metrics_data[:flog]["average method score"] = Devver::Maybe(yml_metrics_data)[:flog][:average].value(N_A) metrics_data[:flog]["total score"] = Devver::Maybe(yml_metrics_data)[:flog][:total].value(N_A) metrics_data[:flog]["worst file"] = Devver::Maybe(yml_metrics_data)[:flog][:pages].first[:path].fmap {|x| Pathname.new(x)}.value(N_A) end

Churn gives you an idea of files that might be in need of a refactoring. Often if a file is changing a lot it means that the code is doing too much, and would be more stable and reliable if broken up into smaller components. Looking through our churn results, it looks like we might need another layout to accommodate some of the different styles on the site. Another thing that jumps out is that both the TestStats and Caliper controller have fairly high churn. The Caliper controller has been growing fairly large as it has been doing double duty for user facing features and admin features, which should be split up. TestStats is admin controller code that also has been growing in size and should be split up into more isolated cases.

Churn gave me an idea of where might be worth focusing my effort. Diving in to the other metrics made it clear that the Caliper controller needed some attention.

The Flog, Reek, and Roodi Scores for Caliper Controller:

Roodi Report
app/controllers/caliper.rb:34 - Method name "index" has a cyclomatic complexity is 14. It should be 8 or less.
app/controllers/caliper.rb:38 - Rescue block should not be empty.
app/controllers/caliper.rb:51 - Rescue block should not be empty.
app/controllers/caliper.rb:77 - Rescue block should not be empty.
app/controllers/caliper.rb:113 - Rescue block should not be empty.
app/controllers/caliper.rb:149 - Rescue block should not be empty.
app/controllers/caliper.rb:34 - Method name "index" has 36 lines. It should have 20 or less. Found 7 errors.

Roodi and Reek both tell you about design and readability problems in your code. The screenshot of our Reek 'code smells' in the Caliper controller should show how it had gotten out of hand. The code smells filled an entire browser page! Roodi similarly had many complaints about the Caliper controller. Flog was also showing the file was getting a bit more complex than it should be. After picking off some of the worst Roodi and Reek complaints and splitting up methods with high Flog scores, the code had become easily readable and understandable at a glance. In fact I nearly cut the Reek complaints in half for the controller.

Refactoring one controller, which had been quickly hacked together and growing out of control, brought it from a dizzying 203 LOC to 138 LOC. The metrics drove me to refactor long methods (52 LOC => 3 methods the largest being 23 LOC), rename unclear variable names (s => stat, p => project), move some helpers methods out of the controller into the helper class where they belong. Yes, all these refactorings and good code designs can be done without metrics, but it can be easy to overlook bad code smells when they start small, metrics can give you an early warning that a section of code is becoming unmanageable and likely prone to higher defect rates. The smaller file was a huge improvement in terms of cyclomatic complexity, LOC, code duplication, and more importantly, readability.

Obviously I think code metrics are cool, and that your projects can be improved by paying attention to them as part of the development lifecycle. I wrote about metric_fu so that anyone can try these metrics out on their projects. I think metric_fu is awesome, and my interest in Ruby tools is part of what drove us to build Caliper, which is really the easiest way try out metrics for your project. Currently, you can think of it as hosted metric_fu, but we are hoping to go even further and make the metrics clearly actionable to users.

In the end, yep, this is a bit of a plug for a product I helped build, but it is really because I think code metrics can be a great tool to help anyone with their development. So submit your repo in and give Caliper hosted Ruby metrics a shot. We are trying to make metrics more actionable and useful for all Ruby developers out, so we would love to here from you with any ideas about how to improve Caliper, please contact us.

Our first scout, Julia Levy, is in NYC, as we have a growing group of food producers (brownies, pickles, rugelach, tea..) in the city as well as many Foodzie customers that call the big apple home. We’re excited to have Julia in NYC in the food trenches helping to bring awesome NYC producers to the Foodzie community. Here’s photo of Julia at the recent pickle fest where she hung with the awesomest Ricks Picks and Katchkie Farms. You’ll be seeing more of Julia here on the blog.

Here’s a quick intro from Julia!

A frequent visitor to farmer’s markets, festivals, and unique specialty stores around the NYC area, I am in search of the most delicious tastes to share with the foodzie community.

Initially, I contemplated partnering with my Grandma to sell the famous family rugelach on Foodzie, but the long distance kitchen relationship proved a bit too tricky to manage.

Originally from Atlanta, I love discovering the flavors of NYC. My favorite foods are Persian and pizza (I’m is in the middle of a roving pizza tour to the greatest pizzerias in the NYC area with friends).

Previously, I was a contributor for gothamist.com. I also work in fundraising for a non-profit in New York City and aspire to write a cookbook someday.

You can send me tips about your favorite NYC producers or events to julia@foodzie.com!

This update brings the 2.0 feature set to your iPhone. Download the update here.

So what’s new in the 2.0-ized iPhone app?

Choose your audience, each time you post
Similar to the web, we’ve redesigned the sharing options to offer more freedom around the simple yet powerful privacy model. With one tap you can share with friends or everyone and, if you choose, syndicate to Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Additionally we’ve added the ability to post with no location at all.

Home view dashboard
The new home view allows you to see what’s going on at a glance. It displays your current status, what your friends are up to, and allows you to quickly post or check in. Keep an eye on this section of the app over the next few weeks.

New friend model & filters
We’ve updated the app’s UI to accomodate the 2.0 friend/fans model already live on the web. You can easily see activity from your friends, your fans, or everyone.

“Much like in the real world, “friends” are two people who mutually follow each other, while “fans” are people who follow you, but for whatever reason, you do not (yet?) follow back. With this straightforward and more realistic system, you can either share your location check-in activity with the world (including fans), or only with friends, which will prevent both the public, non-Brightkite users, as well as Brightkite users who are fans, from seeing anything.” – Macworld

Snazzy design updates
In addition to the changes above, we’ve updated the design to give you simple-yet-powerful control over your activity and privacy.

Let us know what you think of the updates.

I grabbed a book, scanned its barcode, put it in the box, then confirmed the search results matched. … Once I filled a box, I numbered it, emailed the list to my work email, and cleared the list for the next box.

Check out the imagery. The only thing that could be better than the super RedLaser arrow with drop shadow would be a timelapse video showing the the whole process.

Messy -> RedLaser + Boxes -> Organized

What I really like about this is that this is exactly the organization system I’d like to use for all sorts of physical items, like massive (print) photo collections, and souvenirs that you don’t want to throw away but also really don’t want to waste shelf space for. The challenge is speeding up the electronic cataloging process so that it’s easy to do this. Thanks for showing us how RedLaser can help with that!

We are back in Boulder after roughly three weeks on the road meeting with labels, managers, bands, agents, and music tech companies in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. We are more excited about what we are building and where we are headed than ever before.

We want to take a quick minute to highlight The Founders series shot this summer by Megan Sweeney. Here is a trailer of the series Megan posted this morning.

Megan’s artful encapsulation of the Techstars experience was elevated by the excellent music used throughout the video series. While the episodes profiled the entrepreneurial and business side of our lives, it did not capture the concerts we went to all summer, the music that is constantly blaring in our office, or the constant conversations we have around the future of the music industry and our favorite up and coming artists. A couple of the bands whose music was used in the series we’ve had the pleasure of seeing live and meeting in person.

The music really made the series unique and we want to highlight the artists themselves (that we are, of course, tracking in our system). If you are writing original music and looking for exposure you should contact Megan at Alpine Light Pictures.

Pete & J, The Sexies, Calvin Locklear, The Autumn Film, Baxter House, Paper Bird, The Poppies, Movement of the Sun, Ben Suchy, Candypants, Blue Canyon Boys, Reason2Rhyme and Todd Corcoran.

So one last thanks to the Techstars teams and mentors for an incredible 3 months, thanks to Megan for capturing and presenting it to the world, and thanks to the bands for providing the soundtrack for the summer!

(photo of The Autumn Film via Andrew Hyde)

I won't go into the details of how we discovered the issue, except to say that it manifested when using the Main and Servolux gems (both of which I highly recommend) together to start daemon processes. The problem can be boiled down to this brief snippet, distilled by Tim Pease:

ruby -e 'IO.popen("ruby -e \"STDOUT.dup; STDOUT.close; sleep\"").read

If you try to execute that line, the #read will hang indefinitely, even though STDOUT was closed in the child process. Why? Tim explains:

"...the parent script will block waiting for pipe to close in the child process. However, because there is a duplicate of the STDOUT file descriptor in the child, both must be closed or the parent will never unblock from the read. [...] ALL file descriptors have to be closed before an EOF is sent through the pipe to the parent. Hence, the read will never return."

The moral of this story: don't try to read from a subprocess which duplicates STDOUT or STDERR handles. Or if you do, take precautions by using calls which don't wait for an EOF - such as #readpartial - instead of #read.

I can take no credit for solving this one. All the honor goes to Ara T. Howard, who expended much mental energy and beer to get to the bottom of the problem; and Tim Pease, who neatly summarised the issue and explained it in terms that even I could understand. I'm documenting it here in case anyone else runs into it.

Ingredients
-1/2 ciabbatta loaf
-drizzle of Terrace Hill extra virgin olive oil (or any other tasty olive oil you have on hand)
-2 original bratwurst, from Pork on a Fork
-a few heaping tablespoons of Sweet Onion Mustard from Up the Creek Mustards
-a few heaping tablespoons of Wayne’s Hot Green Tomato Relish

Directions
-Slice bread, drizzle with olive oil and toast.
-Grill brats and slice.
-Place brats on bread, and top with mustard and relish.
-Dig in!!

The other week we launched Verified Accounts and a discussion forum alongside a handful of minor tweaks to Next Big Sound. Read on to find out more!

Verified Accounts
Verified accounts are for artists and industry professionals representing artists. After verifying your account you will receive early access to new features, exclusive control over your artist profile URLs, and the verified badge on the artist pages you’ve verified.

It takes about a week to confirm verification requests and you’ll get an email as soon as your request is approved. Check out the directory of verified accounts at nextbigsound.com/verify/directory

Forum
Since launching Next Big Sound we’ve noticed similar recurring questions and email discussions that we thought could become more interesting and valuable if they were public. Our friends over at Vanilla make great open-source forum software that’s easily customizable so we created a custom Next Big Sound discussion forum. Check out the forum at nextbigsound.com/forum

We’re Hiring
We’re growing our small team by hiring two engineers. Know someone that you think would be great? Send them our way! Check out the jobs page at nextbigsound.com/jobs

Speed
From time-to-time the graphs and artist details are slower to load than we would like. We’re working on major infrastructure upgrades and other tweaks to the system to speed things up.

Thanks for using Next Big Sound!

Filtrbox G2 now monitors public Facebook Groups/Fan Pages, over a million forums (threaded conversation pages), YouTube, Flickr and more. This expanded source coverage will ensure you never miss a conversation regardless of where it starts. All of the relevant conversations are visible in your dashboard providing a single consolidated view for monitoring, alerting and engagement.

The system now classifies mentions into 7 content types to make it easy to see where the conversations are happening and search just the sources that are important to you. We have also added domain traffic data for relevant articles to help you gauge the distribution of each post.

The 7 content types are:

* News - mainstream news and editorial outlets.
* Blogs - weblogs, blogs, the blogosphere, etc. Filtrbox monitors over 25 million of them.
* Social - sometimes known as microblogs. This includes Facebook public data, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
* Forums - online groups and forums. These are sites that provide threaded discussion groups and are extremely popular with online communities and organized groups. We now monitor over a million of them!
* Comments - All mentions found in blog comments are put into this category, and tend to have COMMENT in the title to clearly identify them.
* Video - Filtrbox now monitors YouTube, and classifies mentions and comments that match Filtrs from known online video sites.
* Images - Flickr and other popular online image sites.

Here is a brief video overview of the new dashboard:

 

These have been busy times for us, as we’ve wrapped up the summer in TechStars Boston, expanded the team and launched oneforty on September 23rd! We’re grateful for the early interest, and for the helpful feedback we’ve received about how we can make it better. We’re excited about the opportunity to create a new way for people to find all of the great apps being developed on top of Twitter.

We’re launching this blog as a place to post news and notes along the way. You can get more updates by following us on Twitter, but if it doesn’t fit “in 140″, it will go here. This is also where we’ll announce new features and services as we roll them out.

By “we” of course, I mean the four of us (team pic): Laura founded oneforty this past spring, and has been working like crazy from coast to coast to bring it to life. She recruited Mike to lead development. Michael and I joined the team about six weeks ago to assist with the engineering effort.

Please subscribe to our RSS feed if you’re interested in being the first to know what’s new @oneforty.

P.S. in case you missed it, here are some of the pieces that were written about the site at launch:

• TechCrunch: Twitter Needs an App Store, oneforty Provides One
• LA Times: oneforty: a Directory of Twitter Apps
• ReadWriteWeb: @Pistachio Launches oneforty, Twitter’s App Store
• Xconomy: How Twitter Got an App Store