experiments and essays

Suppress “The application ___ quit unexpectedly” Dialog in OS X

kortina — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:04:43 +0000

This annoying dialog pops up in OS X whenever an application crashes:

“The application ___ quit unexpectedly”

For some reason I couldn’t figure out how to suppress message from my own Google searching, but I asked @jennykortina and she pointed me to the solution here: http://bit.ly/ueEIR:

Open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none

Back on Wordpress

kortina — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:20:28 +0000

I recently got a notice from Amazon that my kortina.net server (read: playground) was on failing hardware. I needed to move everything off the server and onto a new instance before July 10.

This proved quite easy on Amazon, and I took the opportunity to make a few upgrades. I upped to a newer version of Ubuntu. I mounted an EBS volume (which I first mounted on the old server and copied all of my data onto, then removed and mounted onto the new server). And I setup Wordpress MU, with a few tweaks so that I can have a single codebase and database for the various Wordpress blogs I host here.

I also am using the migration as an impetus to get back blogging on Wordpress more. I’ve complained much about the poor SEO of Tumblr. I’m not too concerned with driving search traffic to my blog, but it’s very annoying when I myself am searching for something I know I’ve authored and cannot find it.

So I’ve consolidated a bunch of stuff. essays.kortina.net and kortina.net now just point to the Wordpress instance labs.kortina.net . I’m just using the Hemingway theme, cause it’s simple and pretty. And blog.kortina.net will be less active, but I’ll import headlines from this blog over there for those who care to follow on their Tumblr dashboards.

It was a long day of sysadmin work, but things are much cleaner now and better setup for further expansion as I can now more easily add new blogs for side projects and just create static pages on labs.kortina.net for different experiments.

Expect to see some new little goodies soon. I’ve been working on some big things and some small things. I’ll post them when they’re fit for public.

Desultory Musings on Content, Conversation, TV

kortina — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:06:23 +0000

Charlie O’Donnell just blogged that his rss reader is full of feeds published by people he knows, and I have noticed that more and more I find myself subscribing to less content produced by “foreign” writers and more content produced by my social network. An important point Charlie neglects in his recent post is the distinction between subscription and consumption: though I myself am subscribing and discovering more through twitter and feeds published my my friends, content often originates from a foreign source such as mainstream political news, bands signed by labels (often 30 years ago!), big pictures/films. Certainly the amount of indy-content I consume is on the rise, but the bigger trend I see is not indy-content, but indy-distribution of mainstream content via social context and conversation tools.

Another somewhat controversial point Charlie makes in his post is that it’s not worth reading blogs that you’re not commenting on. Granted this is a bit extreme, but to a large extent, Charlie is exactly right. Almost all of the media we consume derives a majority of its value not innately, but from the social acts of discussing and sharing the content.

I was recently sharing with @JoshAuerbach my new opinions on TV. Throughout high school and college, I rejected TV as an utter waste of time. Given my context, this was exactly true: I was reading great literature, learning about science and math, discussing these topics every day at school with other students. My community was totally immersed in the same content I was consuming, we were studying similar things, playing sports together, and sharing the same acreage. We had plenty of fodder for day to day conversations, social interactions, and icebreakers.

What I’ve realized since leaving university is the fragmentation of modern society and the perfect timing of the invention of the television. Today, our occupations our so diverse and our geographic sprawl so vast that we literally have no topics for day to day conversation: how can a doctor talk to a farmer, a chemical engineer to a lawyer? With specialization comes fragmentation. We’re no longer all hunters or farmers knowledgeable about herd migrations or seasonal crops. Furthermore, we all live half an hour’s drive from each other, visit different barbers, and shop in supermarkets and walmarts.

As automobiles and greater occupational specialization made possible by technological advances made it more difficult for us to connect with our neighbors, TV, radio, spectator sports, and other mass media gave us common topics of conversation.

Now that I’m no longer in school where I met a new person everyday with whom I could immediately connect, I can see the true value of mass media and understand why social media via the internet is so important.

( It seems I’ve digressed a bit. If I were a professor, 5 minutes of class would be course work, 55 would be tangents. To bring it back )

I acknowledge Charlie’s trend of more subscriptions to social distribution channels, but I don’t think the majority of content will every be indy. The reason people consume media is to connect with others, so they will gravitate toward topics of conversation that connect them with more people. Social distribution channels simply result from people doing what they naturally do with media–discussing it–and other smart people using technology to magnify these conversations, elminating the need for traditional mass distribution paths like cable TV or mainstream newspapers.

Though I argue that most content will derive from a mainstream source, I still think we need much more indy publishing. Friends who are not publishing, do so! At the least publish / reblog interesting stuff you find elswehere and get soem conversations started. Good tools for sharing: tumblr and twitter

* Update: just found another response to Charlie’s post on Bijan’s blog

Quickerly Just Got Better

kortina — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:30:02 +0000

Thanks to some help from CC of labs.laan.com, I was able to throw together a swf that checks to see if each of the search results on quickerly points to a valid mp3. If the mp3 is a dead link, I remove it from the search results. I know it was frustrating to click on songs and see the “Error opening file” messages, and I should have done this long ago.

Enjoy the improved search results and let me know if you have any other problems or annoyances: @kortina

More todos include: allow only 1 song to play at once, pull in from other sources than seeqpod.

Ask Smart People to Share

kortina — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:24:17 +0000

I find my self asking many of my friends these days to start blogging or at least posting commentary on interesting web content. My motivations are partly selfish and partly altruistic. The thought process:

I like to befriend smart people. They have good ideas. Conversations about good ideas lead to better ideas. Geographic constraints should not prevent good ideation. The internet allows us to discuss ideas in a way without geographic or even temporal constraints (our conversation need not be at a time when we are both free).

I suppose if I were living in the pre-internet era I would be a letter writer, exchanging ideas with old colleagues from University on pen and paper. Email would be a similar mechanism to letters, but it seems like a waste to not share conversations that others may find valuable. Hence, blogging satisfies my selfish desire to learn from my friends and also achieves the good of perhaps inspiring others or encouraging them to think.

A few weeks ago, I convinced my friend Vishal to start blogging. He has made up for lack of frequent posting with some pretty lengthy and technical essays. Vishal is MD/PhD candidate and his blog is A Tough Pill to Swallow.

Today, I’m very excited that another old friend, Vincent, has started publishing. I cannot help reblog his sentiments on the Odyssey:

The human condition - Last person standing thought experiment

In The Odyssey, the author or redactor implies that he who lives alone must be either beast or God.

I agree. I contend that people, whether or not they identify themselves as misanthropes, in fact live only because other people live. Ask yourself, after all.. If you were the last person alive, would you want to keep living? For how long? Only if you had a dog? That’s what I thought.

First, let’s deal with an objection:

Of course, I am very willing to listen to those would live on, but I don’t think there are many. Those who do defiantly assert they’d be happy without people (even if they could survive easily, which they couldn’t) may suffer from a lack of imagination.

There are, however, recluses, who choose even without a sort of postapocalyptic impetus choose to live lives mostly or almost entirely devoid of human contact. But the very fact that these people are considered to be strange highlights that they are different than most humans..which brings us back to where we started. Also, many recluses only stay recluses for a certain period of time (psychoses like schizophrenia are likewise of varying but often short duration), after which they once again seek out human contact.

Last, even to a recluse the knowledge that he / she could NEVER meet anyone again would probably seem more depressing than uplifting (if it were all of a sudden compulsory rather than voluntary).

So? So what Vince? You call that vInsight?

So this: the above entails that the purpose of life lies in our relationships to other people. It also implies that the other things we seek are sought merely as means to the end of relationships with people. In the case of money this is pretty obvious (because money is never an end in itself but only a medium of exchange to get other things), love is of course impossible without other people..but there are other things sought that are quite surprisingly not ends in themselves. Hell, some are even subversively not ends in themselves. What about I myself? That’s an interesting one. Is it possible that I love myself only because my fellow humans exist? I think the answer is yes. And I need to start living like that.

via http://www.freewebs.com/vinsight/thoughts.htm - Vince’s interpretation is spot on and the author’s insight is brilliant. Pretty much every difficult question in life, you can find an answer to in the Iliad and the Odyssey. I happen to like this answer quite a bit.

Keep publishing, friends. I am listening.

Delicious Thoughts

kortina — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:02:49 +0000

It’s quite a shame how stagnant the delicious UI has been since acquisition. According to a recent post on the delicious blog, we’re finally supposed to see some changes, but honestly, I’ve lost just about all the excitement I’ve ever had for delcious.

What used to be my favorite web service, something that I used daily and in which I saw massive potential, just got complacent and stagnant after the Yahoo acquisition. I see new competition in the “sharing” internet space all the time–this is a huge part of Tumblr, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, and almost every other popular site. All of these competitors fall somewhere a little bit more toward the “publishing” than “sharing” end of the spectrum, but the 255 character delicious “notes” field that is optional with each bookmark could easily have put delicious in the same category wih all these other platforms.

I suppose I use delicious now more for personal bookmarking, and my social bookmarking or sharing activity happens on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, because that’s where all my friends are. I kind of wish I had a more unified sharing / bookmarking process, but I seem to just post haphazardly across all of these networks, sometimes cross posting, sometimes not. I guess this system is bound to be fragmented.

I wasn’t super excited when I looked at the preview of the new delicious.com, but hopefully they’ve been working hard and have something interesting coming in this next release.

How do you use delicious (if at all)? Do you use it for personal or social bookmarking? How do you share links with your friends–email, facebook, twitter, or some combination of these?

Umair Haque on Facebook, His Blog, & Other Stuff

kortina — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:51:54 +0000

Facebook guys say: “We are not going to help you close a deal, but Facebook is a social utility that is relevant in many contexts, including business…As you get older, there is this huge tapestry of your life, with many inflection points from where you went to school and the jobs you had, and as more and more people connect with you, it rapidly increases the utility.”

Ummm….let me translate. Facebook has no purpose: the more doublespeak you have to engage in, the less purpose you have (and the less facelifts matter).

–hahaha, pwnage. I don’t know if I agree completely with Facebook being purposeless (it’s certainly not without value), but I like Umair’s style.

Also worthy of note:

So I’ve decided to use this blog to open-source my daily notes a little bit. The point is for us all to be able to make better sense of the discontinuities that confront us.

As time permits - hopefully every couple of days - I’ll be posting the articles, essays, and blog posts that have made me think the most, and try and draw out the themes that emerge from them. I hope you enjoy it - please fire away in the comments and let me know what you think.

This is good news because Umair is a smart guy and we can learn from him. I’m looking forward to seeing more posts like this one.

I liked stuff lately too

kortina — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:45:09 +0000

I thought this post on Andy’s blog was a good idea, and it got me thinking about some of the things I’ve liked lately, so I decided to follow suit and share.

First, I have to agree with tipjoy and bit.ly. Tipjoy is tackling the micropayments problem from a totally innovative angle by recognizing the true pain of micropayments–I don’t care so much about paying $.25 for something; rather, I don’t want to take the time to enter my credit card info or sign up with some 3rd party that will supposedly manage this for me. All tipjoy asks for when I want to make a micropayment/donation is my email address. Their user acquisition UI is awesome, and you should check it out if you’re into that sort of thing. Whether or not they will be successful and convince people to actually pay out these tips remains to be seen, but I have high hopes and think they’re on the right track.

bit.ly I of course love because (1) it’s smart and (2) I’ve been thinking about the tiny-url-on-steroids space a bit myself (tinydb.org).

Other on my list of things I have recently liked are:

laserlike

whoisi

snaptalent

Google Protocol Buffers

python

disqus

Of all of these, disqus is by far my favorite. I now actually get angry when blogs don’t have this: “The audacity! How will I know if someone responds to my comment? Do I have to check back here every few hours?” They have really made blog conversation what it always should have been. I would guess my commenting is up 800% since disqus has become popular on blogs that I read.

Disqus also has a lot of other cool benefits, like giving me a comment history. It’s fun to look back and see what I’ve been reading and what I’ve been thinking about what I read. As a blogger myself (as opposed to a commenter), I’ve found that disqus is very good at spam prevention, and provides a little more accountability. People are less likely to leave stupid comments if those comments are attached to their comment-record. I also think it helps encourage comments by reducing usual 4 comment fields (Name, Email, URL, Comment) down to 1, just comment.

Love disqus! Check out some of that other stuff, too, and hit me with a link to the list of things you’ve liked lately.

On Meditation

kortina — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:56:35 +0000

It’s hard to doubt a grown man’s sincerity when you see tears running down his cheeks. These men were hardened criminals, most of them serving life sentences for murder, who rediscovered perspective and humanity simply by spending focused time with themselves.

Meditation is a powerful tool. There are two types of knowledge: intellectual and visceral. You can read books until you’re cross-eyed and you will never connect with the fundamental, animal, visceral side of living. We like to think of ourselves as rational, conscious beings. It’s reassuring to us. We’re in control of our minds and therefore our lives. But that’s more illusion than reality.

via Whole Health Source: The Dhamma Brothers

New Shiz! Quickerly.com

kortina — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:50:28 +0000

About two weeks ago I threw together a quick prototype of the kind of thing you can build with tinydb.org. I was going to wait and polish it a bit more before letting people use it, but I kept wanting to send people songs so I just had to start using it myself and put it out there. Guess I need to pay more attention to my own “release early, release often” mantra.

The app is called quickerly.com and it’s just a quick way to send someone a song that you want them to listen to. I use it to tweet about songs that I’m enjoying. What’s cool about the app is not really the app itself, but the way it uses tinydb. The entire app is written in javascript. It’s served off a plain html page and uses a little swf to play mp3s. Quickerly uses the seeqpod API to search for tracks and yahoo pipes as a proxy. When you click the share button, javascript writes song data and handling instructions to tinydb. Tinydb holds data about the song location, artist and track names, and instructions on where to redirect and what javascript method to call after redirecting.

Since tinydb uses json and circumvents crossdomain, quickerly can both read and write to the datastore without having to proxy or open new windows. I’ve already found quickerly pretty useful, but by no means is it a great app. I just hope people can take a look at the source code and realize the kinds of cool stuff you can do with tinydb, without having to worry about deploying any server side code. You can literally host a tinydb app on tumblr or blogger. I hope to see way cooler things built on tinydb in the future.

If you encounter any bugs (IE, ahem..), or have comments or suggestions, please put them in the comments of this post. Enjoy. As always, props to my colleagues at labs.laan.com with whom I built tinydb.

Here are a few jams:

http://tinydb.org/1bZ - Stevie Wonder - Master Blaster (Jammin’) (partial, but badass)

http://tinydb.org/1c1 - Oasis - Married With Children

http://tinydb.org/1c2 - Al Green - Love And Happiness

http://tinydb.org/1c3 - Bob Marley - Redemption Song

http://tinydb.org/1c5 - The Jackson Five - ABC

That last one always makes me smile.