Arc Tangent

As part of my duties at SitePoint, I’m implementing a Google Custom Search Engine (Business Edition).

One of the neat features of Google’s CSE is Refinements. You can tag portions of your site – subdirectories, subdomains, or even separate sites that you’ve added to your engine – with labels. You can then create refinements that will either boost results from these tagged regions of your site, list only results from specified tags, or exclude certain tags altogether from the result set.

Unfortunately the means of using these programmatically are not so well documented – the API documentation doesn’t specify how to include or exclude certain labels (as far as I’ve been able to determine).

So! For the record, the solution is to use the strings ‘more:<label>‘ and ‘less:<label>‘ in your query string.

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I want to buy BT’s new album, These Hopeful Machines. BT is a rad dude and his music is excellently sweet. I’ve heard some tracks off this collation of musically arranged bits, and I know that it is something I wish to partake of more deeply. Sadly, despite the album being legally available in some places around the world today, I can’t buy it because I’m in Australia.

Now, Australia is not a large country, but we are fairly technologically advanced. We’re well connected. Sure we’re slipping backwards a bit in the sociopolitical sphere but we’re doing pretty well as denizens of the planet. We contribute. We get stuff done.

So why is it, in the era of the Internet, of cheap copying and digital distribution, a time of wonder and joy – why is it that I have to wait 10 more days than the rest of the world to buy these easily replicated bits? I want to give these people my money and they’re making it hard for me because I live in Australia.

They’re making it difficult for me to give them money.

Let those words sink in for a moment. It’s easy for me to acquire this album. I can go to any number of torrent tracking sites and get instant gratification right now. Today. It’ll take all of an hour, at most, for this album to download, and I’ll have what I want. The effort of doing so is virtually nonexistent.

Or, I can wait another 10 days for iTunes, Amazon and BeatPort to release this album to me in Australia. I can choose not to listen to the music, to be patient, and then hand over my $12 to have a digital copy of the album. In my imagination, I can see myself impatiently eking out my 10 day wait as a bitter second-class citizen, hopping from foot to foot to prevent the cold from setting in. Battered by advertising, I slouch into their digital stores, and weakly hand over my money.

Dear music industry: Do you even WANT my money? Quit your bitching and get with the program.

The podcast that myself, @klepas and @chisa do together has finally got its own web site – so it’s not going to be posted here any longer!

The new site is: http://www.capitalpodcast.com/
The new podcast feed URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ACapitalTechTalk

A 301 redirect has been placed on the previous feed URL, so hopefully your RSS reader / iTunes will update automatically.

It’s been great having the podcast here on arwhite.org but it’s definitely outgrown this little blog. Long live the new site!

The photos below show you where I was for New Years Eve – Sensation White! A dance/trance event of about 40,000 people held at Etihad Stadium in Melbourne.

It was an awesome event. A personal highlight for me was getting a thumbs-up returned by Richard Durand (whose music, if you’re into dance/trance, is brilliant!)

The central stage was enormous and featured water fountains, flamethrowers, fireworks, lasers and dancers in an underwater theme (huge white jellyfish suspended from the roof completed the motif).

Only downside was the presence of a few unsavories who wanted to harass or intimidate others – cripes people, it’s a rave! Peace, Love, Understanding, Respect!

Thanks to my Canberra boys Jonesy, Pedro, Robbie, @klepas, Delbs, Will, Geoff, Truckie, Alex and Sean for a great night; thanks too to Melbournite amigo Elex!

Happy New Year everyone – hope 2010 is fantastic to you. (Yes the post is late, shush.)

EDIT: Cripes, forgot to mention Rohan! THANKS TO YOU TOO ROHAN! :D

The photos below were taken yesterday, as I drove South from Canberra to Melbourne. It’s about a 680km drive – only trance music and caffeine kept me going!

The first is The Dog on the Tuckerbox. Story goes something like: old drover orders his dog to guard his tuckerbox as he goes into town to wet his whistle at the local pub. Being the kind of man he is, he gets into a bit of a biff, and loses his life over something silly. The dog, ever loyal, guards the tuckerbox – howling and pining for her master – until she finally expires.

Gets me all misty eyed every time.

The second is a bloody great submarine in the ground. It’s HMAS Holbrook – which I guess is named after the town – and it’s a weird sight as you drive down the arid NSW stretch of the Hume Highway. The town styles itself ‘the submarine town’ and has a top-notch bakery in it!

So. My story. I’m now working for sitepoint.com, and just to make it clear, my opinions and expressions on this blog are wholly my own and do not reflect upon my employer, etc etc!

I’m in Melbourne. To live. Looking for a place to call home, camped out in some friends’ largely empty flat. It’s weird and exciting to think I’m living here now – not going home at the end of the week like usual.

Depending on the outcome of this week, the next month may end up being completely mad. I have a potential job down in Melbourne – not a bad one, by the seeming of it – and if it all pans out, I may have to be down there for at least a week or two in December (and then moving down there permanently thereafter).

I also have my Uncle Phil’s wedding to go to in a fortnight, so I have to work that in.

Then there’s the usual Christmas-period madness; parties, social engagements, trying to get enough contracting work done to make enough money to survive. It’s getting somewhat stressful already and it hasn’t even started.

Everything could work out magnificently (what a refreshing change that would make) or it could all go rather pear-shaped. I don’t know what to expect, but I’m deeply hopeful that I can make some big and positive changes.

Ruzkin pointed out to me today that I have now been blogging on arcwhite.org for over a year. My updates may have occasionally been patchy and sporadic, but I’ve managed to post something just about every month at least – I consider that a bit of a win.

So – happy birthday, arcwhite.org!

Coming up in the next few months: Some more big posts about grandiose subject matter, more travel retrospectives, big personal news, a change in theme and plenty more waffle.

To everyone who’s been reading, and commenting – and there’s more of you than I ever really hoped there would be – thank you!

We haven’t forgotten the podcast, fear not! We’re in the process of relocating to a new, dedicated blog. We’ll post details here as soon as it’s done, and redirect the iTunes podcast feed appropriately. We’ll also be scheduling podcasts a bit more regularly (we’re looking at a bi-weekly release cycle). There’s some pretty neat interviews coming up – stay tuned!

If you have any questions or comments, or if there’s something specific you’d like to see us discuss, please drop us a line.

A quick post, because I’ve been busy and not updating my blog as well as I should’ve. Only way to get back into the habit is to keep writing, right?

So, a few interesting things I learnt in the Czech Republic:

• You’ve probably heard that Prague is beautiful. The descriptions are not doing it justice.

Old Clock Tower, Old Prague

• Watching Opera (Dvorak’s Rusalka) is much more enjoyable when captions are provided. Goes double if the performance is in Czech and you’re not a native speaker.
• Any country where beer is cheaper than water (~25 krones, or AUD$1.50, give or take)  is fantastic fun – but hard on the liver!
• Czech food is extremely rich and dense (and delicious). I have a theory that this is something to do with the colder months of the year and needing high energy input traditionally to stay warm. Citation needed. If you can find a good, trustworthy restaurant, you MUST try tatarak.
• Many Czech people speak English to some degree or another; most of them are quite nervous about actually using their English.
• Everybody appreciates it when you speak at least a few words of their language. In Czech, this seems doubly so.
• Lots of people (at least in Prague) have dogs, even if they don’t have a back yard. This seems vaguely cruel to me.
• Any pub that’s been around since the 14th century is Doing Something Right.
• Lucerna is a fantastic nightclub full of very friendly, drunk Czech party animals – if you like music from the 80s. And I don’t mean the best of the 80s. I mean 80s music, all of it, even the stuff that wasn’t very good.
• Really good coffee can be hard to find. (I highly recommend Cafe Lamborghini, around the corner from the Lazarska tram stop – the food is a bit expensive but the coffee was solid! Service is great too.)
• A large number of Czech people that I encountered did not seem particularly optimistic about their lot in life. I believe this to be a holdover from Communist oppression, and suspect that the Czech people will become extremely entrepreneurial over the next 10 years and that the rest of Europe should watch out. The folks I met who were optimistic and/or ambitious were powerhouses of hard work and talent.
  

  Statuary atop the State Theatre

• There was a Czech movie a few years ago about a simple-minded young man who wore big headphones around everywhere. Walking around Prague wearing a pair of Technics headphones will earn you strange wry grins from people that will baffle you initially – all because of this movie.
• Everybody smokes, everywhere. Get used to it.
• According to popular legend, the Russian mafia own a significant portion of a significant number of businesses in the Republic. Politics and crime are closely interwoven. Despite this, petty crime on the streets, at least in Prague, seems quite uncommon.
• Tea houses are a fantastic way to unwind if you a) like tea and/or b) like shisha pipes. They’re turkish-style dens of relaxation, usually very quiet and a great place to sit with a friend and talk. Definitely need more of these in Australia!
• Having a higher population density in an area makes a lot of really cool things possible that you just can’t do in a place like Australia (re: public transport, utilities, businesses), where everyone is accustomed to having a back yard and a lot of space. Not having a yard really isn’t that big an impost, in my opinion, and we should be building up rather than building out where possible.

Finally, the key words of the language for a traveller: pivo (beer), prosim (please), dekuji/diky (thank you/thanks), dobre [den|rano|vecer] (good day|morning|night), vyborny (fantastic/delicious). Guaranteed to get a smile if you can use some of these.

Download here!

Welcome to episode 5! Just Teresa and Pascal this week as Andy is overseas. The two discuss alternatives to the Adobe product line for folks working in the web world (so raster and vector image editors and text/code editors) after Teresa has been re-considering her position on Adobe and it’s pricing. Pascal has for while been using the free and open source image editors The GIMP and Inkscape so he’ll be sharing his thoughts on those.

In the second segment Pascal interviews Ian Cairns, the project manager from Development Seed, a communication strategies business based in Washington D.C. who recently released their intranet and project management system as an open source project. Open Atrium, the package, rests nicely on top of the already popular open source content management system Drupal and installs in a breeze.

The interview covers:

* the rundown;
* the licensing of the project;
* the server requirements for running Open Atrium yourself;
* the feature list;
* the story behind Open Atrium;
* cool use cases, including the World Bank;
* the big question: ‘can this replace the almost industry de facto standard project management package BaseCamp from 37 Signals’?;
* translations and multi-lingual support;
* documentation, and helping out.

# Links in order of appearance

1. Teresa’s Twitter profile
2. Pascal’s Twitter profile
3. Aviary software
4. Acorn
5. The GIMP
6. Inkscape
7. Corel Painter
8. Notepad++
9. Coda
10. TextMate
11. Development Seed
12. Open Atrium
13. GitHub — online source revision control with free hosting for open source projects
14. Drupal — open source CMS
15. Open Atrium translations
16. Open Atrium Twitter profile
17. Ian Cairns’ Twitter profile

We’ve decided to switch the show to a when-we-feel-like-it schedule because Andy has buggered off to Europe for a month and Teresa will also head overseas for a while at the end of September. Don’t worry though — we’ll all be back and in the mean time we’ll be bringing in a number of cool peeps to chat with in interviews.

The show as usual is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia license — take, share and be merry. And of course, stay tuned for more shows and interviews.

Finally, we want to pass along another thanks to Dean Klemick for giving us two Singstar USB microphones which we hope you may noticed in some form through the improvement in audio quality. Thanks Dean!

Show run-time: 60 minutes.