Blogdth

Start Awarding Oscars for Previews?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:07:00 -0500

Start Awarding Oscars for Previews?:

A short Tron preview via Daring Fireball.

Cat Mosh Pit

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:44:47 -0500

Cat Mosh Pit:

Via Giles Bowkett

I'm Raising These Kids Right!

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:58:40 -0500

I'm Raising These Kids Right!

In a single line: there will be no change until we change Congress.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:21:26 -0500

In a single line: there will be no change until we change Congress. :

A long piece by Lawrence Lessig on how Congress has brought itself to a standstill because of its addiction to campaign money.

Jobs, What a Salesman

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:03:00 -0500

Jobs, What a Salesman:

I just sent him the kids’ college fund. Obama was great too, though.

Lazy Samberg

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:47:05 -0500

Lazy Samberg:

Still funny though. Via The Awl.

Sinatra with ActiveRecord and MySQL

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:11:23 -0500

I’m working on a little Sinatra project that uses ActiveRecord to access a MySQL database. Funny thing, every fifth request or so would take a long time. I’d just as well sit there and wait; but you wouldn’t, so I figured it out.

Son of a bitch, ActiveRecord’s connection pool. In a Rails app, ActionPack’s request handling life cycle calls ActiveRecord::Base.clear_active_connections! to return connections to the pool. Not so in Sinatra.

Sinatra has before filters but not after filters, so it’ll have to be a Rack solution. So simple, it isn’t even worth a gem. I stuck this at the top of my Sinatra app:

  class Crack
    def initialize(app)
      @app = app
    end

    def call(env)
      response = @app.call(env)
      ActiveRecord::Base.clear_active_connections!
      response
    end
  end

  use Crack

Best Music of 2009

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:50:34 -0500

Best Music of 2009

Pictures: Sky Meadow Park

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:26:14 -0500

Pictures: Sky Meadow Park:

Friend me on Flickr to see the whole set.

97.5 Is My New iTrip Radio Station

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:12:29 -0500

Clear reception in Northern Virginia. Finally.

Vampire Weekend Performs in Juan's Basement

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:51:54 -0500

Vampire Weekend Performs in Juan's Basement:

Don’t know this band from Adam, but I love this venue. I wish all bands posted video of their basement jams.

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:11:33 -0500

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

- Hannah Arendt

Cranky

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:05:10 -0500

Cranky:

Feel like I’m getting somewhere with Ableton.

Sweet, I’ll just get a different phone for now.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:53:41 -0500

Sweet, I’ll just get a different phone for now.

Jam

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:14:00 -0500

Carter, Adam and I jammed last weekend.

I picked up a used TonePort KB37 and am learning Ableton Live (albeit an older Lite version that came with the TonePort). My condenser mic has a bipolar setting which I used on track3, but I had to crank the gain, giving me tons of noise. I ended up editing the tracks down with Audacity; it’s open source, useful and stable. For informal recording like this, recording straight into Audacity is probably easier.

I’m trying out Amazon S3 for hosting these files. S3Fox, a Firefox plugin for managing S3 storage, made it easy to post the files.

Video

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:42:15 -0500

An Analysis of Conservatism

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:21:00 -0500

An Analysis of Conservatism:

Are conservatism and democracy incompatible? It’s hard to say; I may have been programmed by a conservative think tank. A great read nonetheless.

Grandma?

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:43:05 -0500

Grandma?

Looped twice.

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:00:26 -0500

Looped twice.

Frontline: The Warning

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:45:50 -0500

Frontline: The Warning:

I was both fascinated and terrified by this episode of Frontline. It chronicles Brooksley Born, the head of the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration, and her attempt to regulate the dark world of derivative trading on Wall Street.