Hot Web Matter

The Feelies at the Met Café — second set

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 22:47:00 -0400

The Feelies at the Met Café — second set

The Feelies’ set list

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 22:46:20 -0400

The Feelies’ set list

The Feelies at the Met Café

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 21:33:52 -0400

The Feelies at the Met Café

Blackmail made easy using Python counters

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 12:01:44 -0500

Blackmail made easy using Python counters:

The evolution of multisets in Python

Via dc401-l

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:10:21 -0500

Via dc401-l

Google AdWords Destination URLs

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:58:00 -0500

I’m working on an elaborate site redesign for a client who makes extensive use of Google AdWords for targeted web ads. The client has dozens of AdWords campaigns, each of which contains dozens of ads; clickthroughs are directed to several landing pages on the client’s site.

I need to tread lightly when making changes to the site structure, because if a “Destination URL” becomes invalid, all of the client’s Google AdWords campaigns will be suspended until the situation is rectified.

A suspended AdWords account can be restored by restoring the appropriate URL for the landing page, by implementing an HTTP redirect (either via RewriteRule in .htaccess (Apache mod_rewrite), or in a scripting language like PHP or JavaScript), or by changing the destination URL for any affected ads.

Unfortunately, the Google AdWords Campaign Management console does not offer an easy way to sort out a list of destination URLs for active landing pages. Google support directed me to download a program called AdWords Editor, available for Windows and Mac OS X platforms.

After dealing with the momentary frustration of shutting down my Linux-based development environment and rebooting into Windows (along with a few lost hours spent patching the OS and updating software) I got AdWords Editor up and running.

Now I understand why the AdWords AJAX interface does not offer this functionality — it generated a CSV file almost 30,000 lines long!

$ wc -l Client\ Name+2013-01-21.csv 29254 Client Name+2013-01-21.csv

But luckily, I only needed to know the base URL for each unique landing page, and now that I had the data in CSV format, extracting what I needed was relatively trivial:

$ cut -f36 -s Client\ Name+2013-01-21.csv |cut -f1 -d? |sort |uniq |wc -l 46

At last, I have the manageable amount of data (less than 50 base URLs) needed to make sensible decisions while proceeding with my redesign of the client’s site.

Feature Request: Please, Google — can the AdWords web interface be extended to return this data? (Not the entire 30,000 lines, just the base URLs.) I think it would help many site designers — not just myself — to avoid invalidating any AdWords destination URLs when altering a client site’s existing URL paths.

Lookmark Blog: The Most Engaging Sites on Hacker News

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:08:02 -0500

Lookmark Blog: The Most Engaging Sites on Hacker News:

lookmarkit:

Most social news sites like Hacker News measure the popularity of an item by the number of votes it receives. Digg augments their own vote count with social sharing data from Facebook and Twitter.

A problem these sites face is that votes and shares tend to favor short-form content, because people…

— Ag3nt5 (via dc401-l)

To the Wayback Machine!

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 19:30:00 -0500

This is just too awesome not to share.

Earlier today, I posted three links which represent the sum total of all known webpages referring to the late, great Coat of Arms. There’s not much to see on their MySpace page (although you can hear some of their songs there, I already have their 2004 retrospective CD Ancients and Terribles and all the original cassettes from their heyday) and I had already read Andrea Feldman’s fantastic article on the Warped Reality blog.

The only other link pointed to drummer Dean “Clean” Sabatino’s “18 years ago … A tour story blog based on old unearthed tour diaries by Dean Clean of the Dead Milkmen.” On my initial glance, I had chuckled at the familiar names: “the Living Room, Coat of Arms, What Now, Neutral Nation, Rash of Stabbings, heh heh,” and moved along. Luckily, while I was writing about my findings, I decided to return to that page for a closer reading.

Now, here’s the really great part: on that whole page of Dean Clean’s September 15, 1986 Dead Milkmen tour diary, there are only two outbound links to off-site content.

“Neutral Nation” is linked to an article by Bob Gulla from the November 21, 2003 issue of the Providence Phoenix, which is pretty cool. And “short history of the Providence club scene” is linked to … ahh, never mind, that’s a dead link:

http://www.providenceri.com/as220/clubhistory.html

Chalk that one up to another casualty of “link rot” — a common enough occurrence, especially on web pages that are older than a few years (the comments on Dean’s tour blog date back to mid-2004). Nothing to be done about it.

Still, something about the linked text and the dead URL nudged at me with an odd tingle of familiarity. If I wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery, I knew what I had to do …

“Sherman, set the WABAC machine to June 4, 2004!”

This will be old news for the geeks in the audience, but just in case you’re not familiar with the Internet Archive (archive.org), it’s a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with headquarters in San Francisco, which was founded in 1996 to create an Internet library.

It’s an incredible project, really — you can read more about it here. Their comprehensive collections include texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages, and they provide specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Wait, what — archived web pages? Yep, you heard that right!

The Internet Archive’s “About the Wayback Machine” says:

Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.

And so, thanks to the utterly amazing Wayback Machine, here’s a June 6, 2004 snapshot of the original article that Dean Clean linked to from his tour blog, which I wrote back in 1999.

It hung around on the City of Providence’s official website (which, in hindsight, was not a good choice for its permanent home) until just about six months after Dean linked to it.

The Wayback Machine’s snapshot from August 21, 2004 shows that the page was still online, but someone had hacked a clumsy “Meta Refresh” tag into the header to redirect visitors to the site for the new Providence Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism” like so:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://web.archive.org/web/20040821150551/http://www.providenceri.com/ArtCultureTourism/">

Obviously, whoever did this was not a seasoned web design pro, because the old “client pull” method of redirection was unpleasantly like being led around a website by the nose.¹

If you really want to get technical about it (and let’s face it, if you’re among my peers, the odds are that you probably do) it’s pretty obvious that the Internet Archive altered the headers, because the refresh is pointed toward their snapshot of the Arts, Cuture and Tourism page — but I do recall trying to link to the article back in 2004 and finding myself annoyed by the meta refresh.

Anyway, I’ve never tried to calculate my Internet “degrees of Kevin Bacon”, but I’m pleased as punch to learn that Dean Clean linked directly to one of my articles. The mind boggles.

By the way, Neutral Nation’s amazing Tom Buckland has recently returned to Rhode Island, which means that this unkillable band has more reunion shows coming up next month — one on Saturday, December 1, 2012 at Fête in Olneyville, and another one on Saturday, December 29 opening up for the Neighborhoods (!!!) at the Met Café.

¹Meta Refresh has been deprecated by the World Wide Web Consortium since November 6, 2000: “[content developers] should not redirect users with this markup since it is non-standard, it disorients users, and it can disrupt a browser’s history of visited pages.”

The archived snapshot from October 10, 2004 shows some improvement. The Meta Refresh has been replaced by an HTTP 302 Found “temporary redirect”, which indicates that the resource has been temporarily moved to another place, as per RFC 2616. But that wasn’t quite right either, because they weren’t using the 302 to redirect to my article — they were sending people elsewhere.

Nowadays, the city’s website handles the request in a much more elegant manner: when the server receives an invalid URI, it parses the string and passes the tokens as input to the City of Providence website’s Search form.

Naturally, since the article is long gone, searching for “AS220 clubhistory” yields no results, but the whole process is a lot less irritating to users. They can stare at the search form for as long as they want, thinking about how they got there and deciding what to do next. Whether they want to submit the search query, click elsewhere, or just leave the website entirely, they can do so on their own steam and at their own pace.

Coat of Arms (band, Providence RI)

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:00:00 -0500

Lately, I’ve re-connected with a dear friend from the early ’90s who shares with me many fond memories of that era. We’ve discovered that we share at least one mutual obsession — we were both fanatical devotees of the Providence, RI band Coat of Arms.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Providence underground rock scene seemed to have a sudden flood of bands with three words in their names: Rash of Stabbings, Courage to Be, On We Go, and the like.

Coat of Arms was one of the best. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to find information about them on the Internet, due to the preponderance of websites related to heraldic insignia and blazonry.

I managed to find a few webpages by crafting careful search queries. It’s helpful to include the bizarre nicknames of band members “Pip” and “Rudu,” although these search terms on their own tend to return pages of results in Urdu for some reason.

If you add “Kelly” and “Cole” to the mix, the top hit is their MySpace page from way back in 2006 — when MySpace was still a thing, before it became one of the weird haunted ruins of the web.

I would be careful about visiting MySpace at all unless you make sure that you have really good anti-virus / anti-malware software installed, especially if you are on Windows. MySpace’s evil ad servers are known to allow malicious javascript, and it’s no joke. I really don’t think anybody works for MySpace anymore, anyway — it just kind of lurches along on auto-pilot. (If you use Firefox, get the Adblock Plus and NoScript extensions and you should be safe.)

With that caveat, here’s the link:

http://www.myspace.com/coatofarmsband

These other web pages are probably a lot safer to browse without a prophylactic.

Andrea Feldman’s fantastic article on the Warped Reality blog:
http://www.warpedrealitymagazine.com/2006/08/a_kitchen_is_a_place_where_you.html

Dean Clean’s September 15, 1986 Dead Milkmen tour diary:
http://www.deadmilkmen.com/tourstories/archives/000110.html

Here’s “Myra Eels, Librarian” — an old...

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:06:00 -0500

Here’s “Myra Eels, Librarian” — an old four-track recording of my own invention (previously released on “The Library Album” — a fundraising effort for the Providence Community Library, organized by Not About The Buildings back in 2007) which I used as the audio source for my Ogg Vorbis to MP3 transcoding adventure last night.

Bonus points if you know who Myra Eels was — besides (duh, obviously) a librarian.

Aside: Encoded with Ogg Vorbis, the same song has a smaller file size, and it sounds better — but Tumblr wouldn’t let me upload that file, because it’s not an MP3. How fortunate that the point of the whole exercise last night was figuring out how to transcode the track to a Tumblr-accepted format!

Triumphant Transcoding With MPlayer

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 07:55:00 -0500

A good friend (I’ll call her “rad” because she is) contacted me last night with a seemingly simple question.

As usual with tech questions, there were a few curves on the road to the optimal solution — starting with the fact that she was using Ubuntu and my main workstation runs Fedora, so I had to run Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS “Precise Pangolin” off a LiveUSB (allocating storage for persistent data) in order to duplicate her bugs for troubleshooting purposes.

If you grinned at that last paragraph, you’ll probably enjoy the rest of this entry. Others — you know who you are — might want to skip it entirely!

Anyway, here’s a lengthy, albeit much-abbreviated, chat log:

rad: I’m creating an offboard jukebox on a spare laptop drive in an enclosure. I’m just putting a huge music library there. My question has to do with formats.

me: Oh, OK — that’s probably easy.

rad: Ideally, I’d like it to work with a variety of platfoms. That means picking a disk format that’s widely usable, and a file format that is also. Ideas?

me: Unless you are planning to re-master stuff, stay away from lossless codecs like the proprietary WAV and the free FLAC — the file size will add up quickly.

rad: Good idea. I think I’ve got about 80 GB (nominal) to play with here.

me: If you want to maximize cross-platform compatibility, I hate to admit it but stick with MP3. OGG is a better codec, but poorly-supported outside of Linux platforms.

rad: Right. What about disk format?

me: Huh, that’s a good question. Best cross-platform filesystem choice (plug & play without installing special software) is still FAT32, hands-down. It does have file size limitations, but luckily, you shouldn’t get near that ceiling if you stick with a compressed audio format. Just pick your MP3 encoding bitrate carefully — here’s a good (and kind of humorous) guide. LAME encoding defaults to ~192kbps, variable bitrate — but the article’s author recommends the “medium” preset, which averages ~160kbps. It’ll save a lot of space for more tracks.

rad: Thanks! Last question: Some of my onboard music files are ‘unique’ — difficult to re-source. Many of those are in ogg vorbis, naturally. Is there a way to convert them while copying them over? I’m using Rhythmbox to do the CD imports, but could use anything.

me: Re: transcoding your old OGG tracks, gimme a minute …
me: Badass bash “for […]; do […]; done” loops get the job done quicker every time without needing a GUI, but beware: “Please keep in mind that you will lose audio quality when you transform one lossy audio format to another.”

rad: OK, excellent!

me: Glad as ever to help.

rad: Confession: I’m unsure what exact parts of the sample command are the parts to replace.

me: Re: sample command — I think you can use it as-is:

for file in *.ogg; do oggdec -o - "$file" | lame -h -V 4 –-vbr-new - "$(basename "$file" .ogg).mp3"; done

The *.ogg will match any file ending in “.ogg” and pipe the output to lame for re-encoding. Each foo.ogg file will be transcoded and output as foo.mp3 — just be sure to run it on files in the current working directory!

rad: Gotcha!

me: You might need to apt-get install vorbis-tools to get the oggdec utility. I’m assuming you’ve already got LAME or else Rhythmbox wouldn’t be able to play MP3 files. But if you’re missing LAME for some reason, just Google “ubuntu lame codec” (I included the word “codec” to cut down on search results where people complain that Ubuntu is lame!)

rad: booo. need to install oggdec first, and don’t know ppa. I can look it up, though.

me: Just apt-cache search oggdec and it will tell you if you can get vorbis-tools — I’m almost 100% certain it will be in default Ubuntu repos, not in a special PPA. Use which oggdec first to see if it’s already installed!

rad: crap, nope.

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

me: Is Ubuntu Software Store or Synaptic running? That could lock the dpkg admin directory.

rad: Yep, that was it. Need lame now.

me: Assuming that LAME is available in one of the repositories listed in /etc/apt/sources.list, you can install LAME with the following command:

sudo apt-get install lame libmp3lame0

With Ubuntu at least, LAME is in the multiverse repository — no PPA needed. You could edit the sources file from the terminal:

sudoedit /etc/apt/sources.list

And then uncomment the multiverse sections of the following lines:

#deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse
#deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse

me: Or just open Ubuntu Software Center, then on the top system bar select Edit and then select Software Sources. Next tick the boxes next to universe & multiverse, enter your password and click OK.

rad: Got it. Now it’s complaining about an “excess arg” - The files are not being converted. Maybe if I could figure out what “excess arg(ument)” it’s complaining about…

me: OK, I have installed the packages and duplicated the bug:

hotwebmatter@ubuntu-liveUSB:~/Music$ which lame
/usr/bin/lame
hotwebmatter@ubuntu-liveUSB:~/Music$ which oggdec
/usr/bin/oggdec
hotwebmatter@ubuntu-liveUSB:~/Music$ for file in *.ogg; do oggdec -o - "$file" | lame -h -V 4 –-vbr-new - "$(basename "$file" .ogg).mp3"; done
lame: excess arg Myra_Eels_Librarian.mp3
Decoding "Myra_Eels_Librarian.ogg" to "standard output"
[ 0.0%]hotwebmatter@ubuntu-liveUSB:~/Music$

rad: I feel like I’m in a weird dream, where I press buttons, stuff seems to happen and no errors come back, but nothing useful actually happens.

me: I often feel like that with computer crap — you’ve got to inure yourself to it or you’ll never get anything done. I did find a new stupid reason why this might be failing, though. Check out this new error message (slightly modified command line):

hotwebmatter@ubuntu-liveUSB:~/Music$ for f in *.ogg; do lame --vbr-new -V 3 "$f" "${f%.wav}.mp3"; done
sorry, vorbis support in LAME is deprecated.

me: Looks like mplayer will do it from the command line so you can batch-convert a whole directory with a bash for loop. I’m running sudo apt-get install mplayer right now …

rad: I installed mplayer and ran the command, using a wildcard (*). Not working, but does play the music.

me: I’ve almost got it — it’s re-encoding as MP3 using the following command line:

for fname in *.ogg; do mplayer "$fname" -ao pcm:waveheader -ao pcm:file=>(lame - "`basename "$fname" .ogg` .mp3"); done

The only problem is that it’s adding a space to the output filename, so I ended up with Myra_Eels_Librarian .mp3

rad: Looks like it’s doing something. The space is in the command - can be edited out. But — WORKED!! Well, sort of. It created NEW files in mp3 format, but left the oggs there. Would be useful if it either overwrote or deleted the oggs, or created the mp3’s in a different target area.

me: You can add ; rm $fname right before ; done but I’d be very careful that you know it works correctly before you nuke the source oggs. Besides, how hard is it to type rm *.ogg after you’re sure it worked? Also, you can mkdir mp3s; mv *.mp3 mp3s/

rad: Deleted ” .mp3” files. Re-running without the space worked perfectly.

me: Paste your command line plz!

rad: for fname in *.ogg; do mplayer "$fname" -ao pcm:waveheader -ao pcm:file=>(lame - "`basename "$fname" .ogg`.mp3"); done

I just edited out the space before “.mp3”. My plan: Run command on all Music files. (done) Copy all to jukebox disk. (doing now) Delete *.ogg files in jukebox. (will figure out)

me: That will be easy — just rm *.ogg when you are sure you’ve converted everything properly.

So there you have it — the old oggdec [...] | lame [...] method exited with errors — partially because Ogg Vorbis support in LAME is deprecated, and partially because of the “excess arg” problem (which may be related, or completely unrelated, but at least we solved our specific problem without getting distracted debugging that particular issue).

But good old reliable mplayer did the trick without much fuss. It’s the bomb. I used to use it — from the command line — as my default music (and video) player all the time back in the ’90s.

Before any audiophiles object that my advice above is clueless, I’m quite aware that MP3 compression has well-documented drawbacks compared to Ogg Vorbis (no gapless playback, so there are noticeable glitches between tracks even on seamless psychedelic concept albums; flanging at high volumes; smearing of rapid percussion sounds due to low time resolution; all sorts of horrible compression artifacts; I’m not even including the Fraunhofer Institute’s onerous patent-licensing restrictions, which are generally of more concern to developers than end-users) and I honestly believe that a lossless codec like FLAC is the best choice for archival purposes. But, on the other hand, my friend had a huge collection of tunes to store on an 80GB drive, and her primary concern was universal portability, so I recommended MP3 for her specific scenario with only a twinge of guilt.

P.S.: Paying it forward, I even went back to the blog post where I found the soultion and posted a comment, amending the command line to remove the pesky whitespace in the output filename.

JEWEL DARLING YOU ARE MY COVETOUS INFATUATION.. MY...

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 07:00:00 -0400

Dr. David Link Wins Tony Sale Award for "LoveLetters_1.0"

"LoveLetters_1.0" by Dr. David Link (detail)

JEWEL DARLING
       YOU ARE MY COVETOUS INFATUATION.. MY LOVELY INFATUATION
. YOU ARE MY PRECIOUS SYMPATHY. MY PRECIOUS DESIRE IMPATIENTLY
ADORES YOUR FANCY. YOU ARE MY AVID FANCY.
                            YOURS ARDENTLY
MUC

LoveLetters Wins Tony Sale Award

This interactive multimedia computer art installation sends sparks across the synapse gaps between hacking, making, wordplay, programming, engineering, visual art, and historic conservation. So, yeah — it pretty much lights up my whole brain.

More Information:

Computer Conservation Society

David Link’s webite: LoveLetters_1.0

corruptela: The Actually Ugly Duckling, by pictures for sad...

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 10:37:00 -0400

corruptela:

The Actually Ugly Duckling, by pictures for sad children

Print available at TopatoCo.

Thanks, Adam Bradley, for showing me this comic.

h2sta: fortune cookies

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 23:33:02 -0400

h2sta:

fortune cookies

sampledtelevision: ll: NASA just landed a rover on Mars, this...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:53:00 -0400

sampledtelevision:

ll:

NASA just landed a rover on Mars, this is the very first picture. This JUST happened minutes ago.

1:42am EST 8/6/2012

Welcome to Mars, NASA rover.

White Mystery (Shonen Knife “Pop Tune” tourmates)...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:55:09 -0400

White Mystery (Shonen Knife “Pop Tune” tourmates) live at PVD Social Club on July 24, 2012.

Yes, there is already another male-female drum-guitar duo with a similar two-word name. But unlike the White Stripes (a divorced couple who pretended to be brother and sister and adopted the stage name “White”), White Mystery are actually siblings — and their last name is actually White.

Shonen Knife live at PVD Social Club on July 24, 2012 —...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:41:26 -0400

Shonen Knife live at PVD Social Club on July 24, 2012 — this time from stage left, with Naoko in the foreground instead of Ritsuko.

Here’s another photo I took of Shonen Knife live at PVD...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 17:33:39 -0400

Here’s another photo I took of Shonen Knife live at PVD Social Club on July 24, 2012.

People seemed to like the last image I posted from this show; at any rate, it’s been tumbling around the reblogosphere.

Once again, the eerie glow and hypersaturated colors in this pic are not the result of digital post-processing; they’re just a by-product of the intensity of the stage lights and the limitations of my phone camera.

cubestep: hotwebmatter: A cube in a cube in a cube. … in a...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:56:50 -0400

cubestep:

hotwebmatter:

A cube in a cube in a cube.

…

in a cube

You are correct, cubestep.

It is a cube-in-a-cube-in-a-cube-in-a-cube.

I apologize for my error.

Quotes from Marc Klasfeld (Director): 0:34 — “The...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 11:45:00 -0400

Quotes from Marc Klasfeld (Director):

0:34 —

“The idea for this video is that it is a sort of slow motion bar-fight / riot as the band performs.”

2:26 —

“I really wanted to do something all on slow motion for this video, and there’s always amazing YouTube videos with people getting slapped in the face, things exploding, people getting punched — and I wanted this video to be the end-all be-all of that kind of slow motion thing that people like on YouTube, so that was kind of the inspiration for it.”

That actually helps — before I heard the director’s explanation, I found the video extremely unsettling on several levels. Now that I know he was just pandering to the tastes of the YouTube riff-raff, I can at least try to factor out the slapstick violence, even if I can’t really enjoy it. (I’m a big fan of Failblog-style posts highlighting outrageous grammatical errors, but I’m seldom amused by the ones featuring skateboard wipeouts or testicular injuries.)