mileszs

I think http://amiestreet.com might solve a subset of Zed's problems (or, perhaps just the "you can't charge for your music" problem). On AmieStreet, a song starts free or cheap, and rises in cost as its popularity grows (capped at 98 cents per song). AmieStreet has a "REC" system that is similar to PopCuts' fan-revenue-sharing model that "thetable" mentions in these comments, somewhere. On AmieStreet, when a fan recommends (RECs) a song, and from that point on it continues to rise in price (and in popularity), they put money into your AmieStreet account. The site also suggests music based on your previous choices, you can preview everything, it has a player widget built in that will allow you to start previewing one album while browsing to other artists on AmieStreet, etc.

AmieStreet is a really great experience, for the fan. I cannot testify as to the experience for the musician. I could see not being able to set your own price point as annoying. Artists do keep 70% of the proceeds after $5 (so, AmieStreet is still a middle man), paid quarterly.

AmieStreet's Wikipedia entry is short but interesting. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amie_Street#cite_note-ForArtist...)

I have not used PopCuts, but I'm checking it out now.

EDIT: For the record, I have no affiliation with AmieStreet, other than being a user. I do have a bit of an infatuation, though.

Yes, this seems to be fixed. Thanks!

I can't yet report on how useful it is, because I haven't used it for more than 60 seconds yet, but it looks good. I'm looking forward to using it.

That was completely unnecessary. Never did he mention "marketing asshats" exercising some amount of control over any git developer. He mentioned that GitHub acts as free marketing for git. For git users, git getting increased attention is a benefit. More projects using git is a benefit. More hackers hacking on git is a benefit. More tools built around git is a benefit.

Your anger is grossly misplaced, and really lacks any use in this conversation.

As purely a user (and fan) of JS-Kit, I feel the need to mention that JS-Kit comments have had Facebook Connect implemented for a while now. I use them for my blog. It takes a couple seconds to get up and running (like Disqus, from what I gather), and they are quite customizable.

http://js-kit.com/comments/features.html

I wasn't offering a counter point or opinion. I don't "honestly believe" anything. I just wanted you to explain your reasoning, adding some more information to your comment. After first read, it sounded like a conspiracy theory. (I think if someone at Mahalo can call someone at Google and get special treatment, that qualifies as a conspiracy by definition.)

I don't understand why Calacanis or Mahalo are important enough to warrant such special treatment, but I don't think I'm Mahalo's target audience. I've never visited the site. That's why I was interested in more information. Thanks!

That sounds like quite the conspiracy. Do you have any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise?

I don't think you fully understood what this thing is. (I'm not affiliated, I just feel the overwhelming urge to clarify.)

They don't have to follow _you_. They do have to follow @dmpp. (I think this may be what you said. "You" seemed ambiguous. Sorry.)

No, direct messages are not in your timeline, but if you want to direct message someone, the rest of their tweets will have to be in your timeline. Using this service, you could direct message some people without following them, hence their tweets not littering your timeline.

Yes, you do decide who you receive direct messages from already. In context, that sentence meant "now that you've opened yourself up to direct messages from people you are not following, we do actually offer some level of control over what direct messages you receive."

I haven't decided yet whether this is useful to me personally or not. Nonetheless, I find it clever.

Unfortunately, it seems to clash loudly with one of the Ruby or Rails plugins I use (most likely rails.vim, and its RAbbrevs). Being admittedly fairly ignorant when it comes to vimscript, as well as being impatient, I removed snipMate for now. If you have a quick solution for such woes, I'd love to try it.

I'd be willing to maintain a fork on GitHub that avoids clashing with rails.vim (or whatever the issue is), if we can figure it out. Maybe I'll actually properly learn vimscript as a result.

You can do something like this with FriendFeed. We use it for a programming user group. The feature is called 'FriendFeed Rooms' (http://friendfeed.com/rooms/overview). You can create a room for each group (public or private). Use the bookmarklet (http://friendfeed.com/share/bookmarklet) to post links to any room, as well as add your own comments to the link. Users can get their FriendFeed mailed to them, if they wish. Or, you can make the room public, and they can visit it at their leisure, without signing up.

I recommend giving FriendFeed a second chance as an app, in any case. Every once in a while I come across another feature that I wish FriendFeed did that it does, indeed, already do. It does a ton, and it does it well.

EDIT: I missed one of your needs: Yes, one can subscribe to a FriendFeed Room's feed in a feed reader (that reads Atom-formatted feeds). It can also be read via Facebook.

I think the point of the negative votes was to try to get the point across that sarcasm, snarkiness, whatever, adds nothing to the conversation. A better tactic would be to add a negative vote, or simply post something thoughtful that adds to the conversation that began with the posted link, or both, or nothing at all. In my opinion, those are all more worthwhile options than adding to the meaningless comments.

Instead of joking about it, you might find it interesting to actually go browse the available methods, as well as some of the examples. (Link to the examples page: http://www.gop.gov/aboutapi/documentation) Take an honest look at, say, the Perl example. Then browse a few of the methods (on the right hand side) to see what they return.

Although I don't find myself agreeing with the GOP on many issues, I am able to see that this offers real value beyond fodder for programmers who wish to be comedians. If nothing else, I hope to see it driving the momentum to 'open' government.

For an rsync-like solution that also handles the tar-ing and (GnuPG) encryption of whatever directory you want to backup, take a look at duplicity (if you're on some Linux flavor). http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

It is a command-line solution, and simple to throw in cron. In addition, you can use it to back things up to S3 directly. It's great.

You're thinking of the old model, Monty:

"Unlike monty, QA is 100% battery powered, and gets 4-6 hours of runtime on every charge. Monty's pneumatics required it to be tethered at all times. Also, its much lighter at around 35lbs. Monty is too heavy to pick up."

It's not really a new revision, though, is it? It's just a different size of the newest revision that has been out for a while. On top of that, it's a "release" that has been assumed for months. It strikes me as a bug-fix release, instead of a major new release, if you will.

It is noteworthy that this was created by Phusion, the same people who created Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Basically, a company that really enjoys solving high-profile problems related to Ruby. (First, Rails is a pain to deploy. Then, Ruby is a memory hog in web-application applications. Now, Debian hates RubyGems.) From my perspective, their work is high-quality, and increases my confidence in this 'product'.

Here is a thread (and related article) on HN about the problems with RubyGems: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386036

Here is the official position of the Debian/Ruby-Extras team: http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html

It has been a polarizing issue, as you can see.

The closest thing I found (via quick search) was a quote (apparently) by Paul Krugman:

"Meanwhile, how much has our nation's future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?"

Both. They're both Ruby. The learning curve for one over the other changes very little ultimately.

In practice, however, Merb docs, tutorials, articles, howtos, et cetera, are lacking. That is reality. If you're starting from scratch w/ Ruby and her frameworks, you'll probably find Rails more newbie-friendly from a learning-materials standpoint.

There are plenty of people in the Ruby community who avoid Rails (whether their reasons are valid or not). I think you'll find plenty of Rubyists who wish to create things outside of Rails. Whether that means they will be throwing weight behind another framework such as Ramaze, or creating a new one, I can't say. I do believe that there are enough anti-mainstream hackers in the mix now that you don't have to worry about that "scene" dying.

You're one of them, to an extent, and there's nothing wrong with that. Have at it.

I agree that competition is good. There is (was) concern that loud, shallow, infantile arguments of Merb versus Rails were damaging, to an extent. If nothing else, they were really, really annoying, and too frequent. This may be the "splintering" of which john_dahl was speaking.

There are other frameworks, although they get little "press", as they lack an Engine Yard or 37signals hype-machine. In fact, if you visit ramaze.net (one of the more mature frameworks) and scroll down, you can find a listing of all the frameworks of which the ramaze people are aware. Twenty-one, including Merb AND Rails, at last count. (It is likely that not all of them are wholly distinguishable from one another. I can't say, as I haven't tried them.)

There's a story about a site named FaceStat that was linked on the front page of Yahoo! one day, and had to spin up several Slicehost slices, complete with load balancing and all (or most) of the trimmings. Unfortunately, the admin's site is suspended by bluehost (or someone), and I don't remember the details. Here's a post by Slicehost that is related: http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2008/6/4/facestat-scales-f...

It is definitely possible to create a VPS-based system to replace your dedicated servers. In fact, that is the direction a lot of people are going, because it's relatively cheap to spin up a new VPS to scale horizontally, as opposed to purchasing a new server. Without knowing what your needs are in more detail, I couldn't say with any confidence whether Slicehost or Linode would work for you, or something else.

Do note that many traditional datacenters are starting to offer some sort of "cloud" solution, or at least some solution involving virtual machines that they have made sure involves the word "cloud", for the buzz factor. So, you could find a reliable colo facility, and work with them to migrate to a VPS-like solution.

http://nframe.com hosted Monster.com (or part of it), until they chose to open their own facility. Finish Line is a colo customer, ChaCha is a customer, as well as many others. It is located a couple miles north of Indianapolis.

nFrame is owned by Continental Broadband, who also owns Expedient data centers (Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland), as well as DCs in Chicago, and a few others. http://continentalbroadband.com

You don't have to. As jmah said above, :TOhtml is the standard way to do it. First, you can issue the command :let html_use_css = 1. Highlight some code and enter :TOhtml, and you'll have non-font-tag-ified, css-ified HTML that uses your syntax highlighting.

According to the comments, the IRS grants automatic extensions to October 15th (for non-profits). It is (again, according to some commenter) normal for a non-profit to issue financial statements this late in the following year.

Do keep in mind I was unable to vet this reason within a couple minutes of searching.

I like the concept. I would have to agree with the other commenter who mentioned that finding a designer would be a good idea. I was also unable to read parts of the site.

The thing about the name 'mushpot' is that I'm not going to forget what your site is called any time soon.

A friend and I will be car-pooling from the 96th and Township Line area. I have room for a couple more, although I drive a 97 Mercury Tracer, so it will be a tight fit!

Anyvite link, in case someone misses it in the hailstorm of comments that this post has become!

http://anyvite.com/events/home/vtsjcs9uyl

Anyvite created: http://anyvite.com/events/home/vtsjcs9uyl

Let me know if I missed something.

Apologies for the short notice. I wasn't sure of the best way to strike a balance between "Whoa, too short of notice" and "Oh crap, I totally forgot that one guy wanted to have some geek meeting at some bar somewhere last night".

I suppose enough people put things in calendar applications these days, it would have been more beneficial to post this last week. My apologies.

I could be wrong, but I think you might be confusing attentiveness with focus. I don't believe the author is saying that the best ideas are guaranteed to occur when you are at a peak focus on the problem, but rather when your mind is most attentive, in general.

That is simply my interpretation, though.