Zed's Technical Blog
2009-06-09 : Lamson At NYLUG Python Workshop Today @ 6:00PM
Just a quick reminder that I’ll be presenting Lamson to the NYLUG Python Workshop today at 6:00PM. The event is at the NY Public Library Hudson Park Branch, 66 Leroy St., NY NY 10014 in NYC and you can find out more here.
I’ll be showing people how to set up Lamson, get it installed, do cool stuff with it, and then just answering questions and helping people work with it.
2009-06-06 : Lamson 0.9.3 Is Out
Quick post to say that I released Lamson 0.9.3 and used it to implement my little side project oneshotblog.com so everyone should go try it out and let me know if it’s broken for them.
OneShotBlog is an experimental little blogging application that I’m writing to prove out Lamson’s features in a small microcosm. It currently supports posting and commenting over email, and I’ll be adding the ability to send pictures, source code, and just making it more complete in general.
2009-06-03-2 : Lamson 0.9.2 Is Out
Before I tell you about all the hotness that is Lamson these days I would like to give you the biggest damn laugh you’ve ever had, even if you despise puke humor:
2009-06-01 : Lamson 0.9 Is Out, Find My Bugs!
I just pushed Lamson 0.9 up to PyPI for everyone to grab and break. This release features a complete redesign of the routing, state handling, templating, and a full set of very complete documentation. Everyone who was using 0.8.x series should be able to migrate to this version with some work, but it won’t be terribly painful (assuming you have unit tests).
Getting 0.9
2009-05-30 : Oh Yeah! Where's Your Patches Zed!?
I admire Guido quite a lot, he’s definitely much more successful than myself at software project management and probably just about everything he does with his life. Yet when I read comments like this:
2009-05-29 : Curing Python's Neglect
I’ve been working hard on the 0.9 release of Lamson and really enjoying myself while I do. Python is a great very complete and solid language with probably the best email handling capabilities I’ve ever seen.
After reading Jesse’s things he hates about Python I decided to do the same, but with a general theme. In general I really like Python, but if there was one thing I would change, it’s the culture of “Neglect” that permeates everything. No, not the neglect you think, but Hemispatial Neglect.
2009-05-20 : Lamson Project Ideas
I really like working on Lamson. It’s a fun project because nobody else is currently doing anything this slick for email. I get the impression that people think it’s either cool (but have no use for it) or that it’s lame because email is lame. Web is hot baby, not email.
Sure, the web might get you laid, but email is a hell of a lot more fun. You don’t have to worry about dipshits complaining about “typography” and “design” because they got a Mac for christmas. There’s no CSS, browser wars, real-time availability, scalability problems, or a billion programming languages and frameworks. With SMTP everything is solidified and in desperate need of a facelift, so you can take your time and enjoy writing something useful.
2009-05-16 : Lamson Project Site Launched
Today I launched the Lamson Project site at lamsonproject.org and started filling in the content. Lamson is really turning into a fun and useful project, and hopefully the site will get other people interested in it and using it.
I took the design from one of the many free web design sites and reused the same Python blog script that I use on my own site so getting this up and running was cake.
2009-05-04 : EuroDjangoConf2009 Keynote All Over Your Twitters
I just finished my EDC2009 keynote. I wrote some python code to show the presentation with curses, and then at the same time I had another script that was streaming the same content out as a series of tweets.
I got about 1/2 way through before I was throttled. It was kinda funny really.
2009-04-03 : Son of Sam is now "Lamson" And On Lp
Well, school has started again, and I have to work at the same time, so I’m not sure really how much time I’ll have to hack for the next few months. I figured I’d take the time after PyCon and just really quickly get Son of Sam renamed to Lamson and put it up on a new Launchpad project.
You can go there to get the latest code (which is just what I had before really), post bugs, record your branches, post up FAQs, and collaborate on the project.
2009-03-20 : One Laptop Battery Later And I'm A Django Fan
I haven’t had much time to do any coding since I’ve been studying music full time, and I’m taking these two weeks to work on all the pent up projects and work I’ve been ignoring. One of those projects is to finally try out Django tonight. I’d been avoiding it because I didn’t want to get sucked into yet another web application framework I didn’t need, but after spending one laptop battery going through the tutorial I just got one thing to say:
Django Fucking Rocks
2009-03-19 : Small Damn World
My friend told me this today on IM:
“So I am teaching this class at the local CC on newtonian physics. Older student trying to chum up to me asks me: “what school did you go to?” When I answered ASU the first thing he asked me was if I knew Zed Shaw. :) When I said yes he couldn’t believe it.”
2009-03-19-2 : Rails Is A Ghetto (redirected)
I rewrote my infamous Rails Is A Ghetto but kept it quiet and just pointed people at it who referred to it in discussions. I figured it’d get wider circulation eventually, but I wanted people to find it on their own without me pimping it.
Now that everyone is posting and talking about it, I’ll mention it here on my blog so that it gets a full link on my site with a bit of a preface:
2009-03-18 : New Fancy Son of Sam Code
I finished up this semester at school and I’ve been dying to sit down and hack some real code for the last month. I want to code and work so bad it’s driving me insane, so I’ve got a light gig during the day and I’m going to be working on my oppugn.us/impugn.us mailing list site idea as the test driver.
The code is still in the works, but I managed to borrow the excellent mailer module from Ryan Ginstrom to implement better crafting of responses.
2009-03-16 : What Happened To The Freehackers Union?
It looks like my Freehackers Union essay got some attention again on Hacker News and I thought it’d be a good time to figure out for myself what I did that made FU die out. It was a hell of a fun attempt at upsetting the status quo, but alas, it failed. Not miserably at least, since that essay and the website still get posted to geek websites sometimes.
The short version of this is basically that the purpose of FU was to fuck with the biz dude who was fucking with my culture, but then the economy fucked up the biz dude and hacker alike so things then seemed kind of pointless. Combine that with me trying to use the group to get a bunch of geeks to do public speaking and performance art as well as my way of dominating things and it just was kind of doomed already.
2009-03-12 : When To Use Dangerous Knowledge
Remember when I switched over my blog and I started going through my thought experiment for a music browser I was thinking about? You know, just me writing and blabbing about ideas, and why companies like tunecore are kind of not quite the right solution.
Well, they took it kind of hard and in fact, they were so proud of that blog post that they put it in their corporate newsletter!
2009-03-11 : An Idea For Discussions on My Blog
I decided long ago that I would not have comments or any user contributed material on my blog. I’ve had good reasons, but mostly it was to prevent idiots from screwing up what I had to say. The reality of the internet is that there really isn’t a conversation going on, just the illusion of a conversation created from hundreds of millions of little micro-marketers all yelling to get attention.
Lately though I’ve been thinking of my reasons for not having comments, and how I might go about bringing good discussions. My two main reasons for not having comments are:
2009-03-06 : I Want A "Metrotone"
Yesterday I was tossing out ideas I’ve had for better guitar pedals because I’ll never have time to implement them, and frankly buying them is just easier. Today I got this message off twitter:
You might have a look at line6’s ToneCore DSP Developer Kit — sevib
2009-03-05 : Ideas I Have For Pedals
I sometimes get ideas for pedals for various instruments, or I run into other musicians who ask me to make one. There’s no way I have the time to hack a pedal anymore, so I figured I’d just lay out some of the ideas, and then if someone does it they can get all the glory. Most of these ideas are implementable with current technology, but some are way more work than I think a casual hacker has the time for these days.
Full Range Bass Pedals and Amps
2009-03-02 : An Album Is A Social Ontology
UPDATE: Looks like the BBC already has a bunch of data just like this and there’s even a mailing list for Music Ontology for people to join. Thanks to danbri for the pointer.
In my last blog post about an idea for a music browser I talked about the album being a document analog to the HTML page in a web browser. If we break down what it means to “browse Zed’s music site” in the same way we say “browse Zed’s web site” we have to invent similar concepts as found on a web server. It’s also important that these same concepts keep up the key elements of the browser and webserver that make for disconnected sites.
2009-03-02-2 : NYC VCs Can't Do Math
They say beggars can’t be choosers, but when it comes to technology and startups, you need some money. Especially in a city like NYC where something as simple as meeting with buddies at a coffee shop is too expensive to fund out-of-pocket.
However, today I read this article in the NYT about a new VC fund called NYC Seed which is great. That is, until you read this gem:
2009-02-28 : Thinking About The "Music Web"
When I write about things like the music business I am generally talking out my ass and trying to make sense of how things currently work, and how artists could be done better. The thing I always try to do when I look at a new area of interest is find out how everyone else thinks about it, and then see if there’s another way to look at it. Right or wrong, that change in perspective at least gives me ideas for something to play with or make. My methods may make me look stupid at first, but frequently these methods also put me way far ahead of the curve.
If you take the state of things in the online music world, they are currently dominated by a few beliefs/events:
2009-02-28-2 : Sorry About The Feed Spam!
Hey everyone, I fucked up my feed last night doing some late night hacking by including all of my essays in the RSS feed. They’re removed now, and my appologies for spamming the hell out of you with essays many of you have probably already read. The essays section won’t show up in your reader anymore unless I do a blog post specifically about a new essay.
Feel free to contact me if more stupidity like this happens.
2009-02-27 : Middle Men, Aggregators, And Apologies
I (and potentially many men) have a problem with posing questions as statements. Rather than say, “How can a musician sell their music online?” I stated, “A musician can’t sell their music online.” Implied in that is a parenthetical “(right? Help me out here.)”. That’s a bad habit when I actually want to know something, but it did get the result of finding out more information.
I also have the vestiges of my ranting days still in my blood so my last blog post had a tinge of “you guys don’t get it”. In this post, I’m gonna clarify some of my view points, but also point out at that many of the players I mentioned seem to actually not get it.
2009-02-26 : Meta-Post About Blog Changes
Hopefully you got the message that I changed my blog format and the new URL at http://zedshaw.com/feed.xml in RSS2 format. The previous feed was at http://zedshaw.com/feed.atom and will be dead soon. I’ve mostly been hacking this little script that generates the site in my spare time, whenever I take a break from music. I kind of like something small like this. Of course it has it’s problems, like I posted this blog entry before it was really ready to be posted.
I’m actually very interested in turning this little chunk of code into a nice simple blog package for musicians. Maybe something that can get them off stupid ass MySpace. So far just having music that I can post and simple video inclusion is really nice. Of course if I did make it generally useful it’d have to have some kind of web interface, probably comments, etc. Maybe instead of a comment system I’ll go with mailing lists, since mailing lists seem to breed fewer one-liners and anonymous jerks.
2009-02-26-2 : Can A Musician Sell Their Music Online?
I recently started working on ideas for a blogging platform specifically for musicians (and maybe other artists). Most musicians I know want to have an independent web site for their works, but have no idea how to go about it. The few that do understand what it takes to make a website know next to nothing about online promotion and getting their message out. Many times musicians rely on MySpace as their web site, since just about every other musician is there. A few use twitter to keep in touch with fans. Yet, despite all that, I haven’t really found an easy piece of technology that provides musicians with specifically what they need.
As I started looking at what I’d need on a site, and hacking up some software to do it, I came to the real question every musician would ask:
2009-02-25 : Atom Feed Now RSS Feed
I’m switching my feed format over to RSS and moving it to http://zedshaw.com/feed.xml.
Please update your blog reader. In the next few days I’ll have this URL be a redirect for the bots to follow.
2009-02-24 : I'm Going To IgniteNYC Tonight
The links in my feed won’t work for you until I fix the dumb little .atom generator I’m making. Just go to the web page on my site to actually read the content. Thanks!
I’m going to the Ignite NYC event tonight and hopefully it’ll be better than that crap I saw last time. For those of you who don’t know, Ignite NYC was the inspiration for the Freehackers Union rant I did. The event was actually more of a founders+groupies circlejerk than anything actually technical. I’m hoping that the depression has changed the event somehow to have a less douchebag quality.
2009-02-23 : The First Music Post
I put up my first music post today using the hacked up webgen.py I’ve been working on. The software is still super rough but you can take a look at what I’ve got going. The only changes over webgen.py is some modernizing of the original code, and then a feature to give a blog index that’s made out of individual pages. It goes through the dir and just cranks out a page with the first few paragraphs given. On the music page though it’s embedding the XSPF player right away so that you can hear it before you go onto the description.
The player seems to work well, but now I need to get the site generator to walk directories of playlists, crank out index pages for them, maybe work up the playlists from the id3 tags, and so on.
2009-02-20 : Blog Redone
I just finished completely revamping the blog. All the old content is gone, but I’ll be slowly adding it back. I also put up all the videos from my conferences, and organized my essays so people can read them in one spot. Finally, the Rails Rant is gone. People need to move on.
