Joe Crawford
Web developer & user interface engineer
Tinkering with the web since 1996

email: joe@artlung.com · twitter: @artlung
San Diego, California, USA
aka joecrawford.com

February, 2015: 28 posts.

busblog on Andrew Sullivan quitting blogging

Quote of the day from Tony Pierce:

but judging from what i read, bro [Andrew Sullivan] was sad that there isn’t a vibrant blogging community out there any more, and it seemed he was sad there wasnt a bunch of money left in it neither.

to quote the great artie lang: whaaaaaaaaa.

omg boo hoo you cant make a bucketload from writing on the web.

i say good.

when the blogosphere was buzzing, those were some good times, but does no one remember all the scum? all the lame ass blogs trying to teach you how to make money from your crappy crap?

all the blogs that were just echos of the others?

ignorance on top of ignorance sprinkled with annoyance?

all of those ppl are gone now.

now is the time the real bloggers are doing their thing.

read it all: andrew sullivan quit blogging today: good

WORD. There’s a reason I’ve been reading Tony for more than a decade.

The eldritch horror of IKEA.

The 15 minutes we just spent at IKEA… I… words… I have not been in years. It is bigger. Which is… the place is eldritch, Brobdingnagian, terrifying and yet cheerfully pumping Katy Perry songs. I believe it may have inspired the film Cube. Did a certain Mr Lovecraft play a hand in its tone and design? What noxious aethers propel it so? It has existed for decades and I fear we cannot ever be rid of it.

Hold your children tightly tonight, for the night is dark.

But we acquired Produkt.

IMG_9365

Programming Tinder

WOW. Go read: AUTOMATING TINDER WITH EIGENFACES

This is some straightforward, and yet entirely brilliant programming. This person took his prior Tinder choices, made an aggregate of “yes” and “no” swipes, then used the official Tinder APIs to automate his selections. This is kind of Artificial Intelligence, though a better term might be “expert system” (distilling what an expert knows into a piece of software, in this case the expertise is “what a person found attractive on Tinder”) and what it does is execute those decisions.

What’s astonishing is that all of this used off-the shelf and open source technology. Only Tinder is proprietary. All the rest of this are libraries anyone could use.

The modern age is not what I expected, but it most certainly contains artificial intelligence, though it’s less hyperintelligent HAL 9000 and more “personal assistant.”

via waxy.org

Moreover, the programmer made the whole thing available on GitHub. https://github.com/crockpotveggies/tinderbo.

Who doesn’t love code?

Longtime blogger and longtime pal MAS mentioned me over in Make and Host Your Own Soundboard yesterday. I am glad to have contributed to more software. I dig being able to give to code that people use, even if it’s for no money. I love even more that the whole thing is up on GitHub.

It is still astonishing to me that I can read and make improvements to code. Code that at first glance is as peculiar as this:

var ar = <?php echo json_encode($mp3) ?>;
var BASE_AUDIO_PATH = '' + <?php echo json_encode($mp3directory) ?> + '/';
// sort files to be in alphabetical order by title
ar.sort(function (a, b) {
    return a.toLowerCase().localeCompare(b.toLowerCase());
});
// Add <audio> files and buttons to soundboard
// preload set to "none" is optional
ar.map(function(url){
	$('#soundboard').append(function(){
		var thisAudio = $('<audio/>').attr({
			src: BASE_AUDIO_PATH + url,
			preload: "none",
			onplay:"$(this).siblings('button').css('color', 'yellow');",
			onended: "$(this).siblings('button').css('color', 'white');"	
			}) 	
		var buttonText = url.replace(/-/g, ' ').replace('.mp3', '').replace('[Q]','?');			
		var thisButton = $('<button />').addClass('myButton').text(buttonText);			 		
		return $('<span />').addClass('track').append(thisAudio).append(thisButton);
	})
});
$('#soundboard').on( 'click', 'button', function() {			
	$(this).siblings('audio').get(0).play();							
});

And not be driven insane looking at it.

Programming is fun!

14 Years of ArtLung Blog.

The first post to this blog was made on February 19, 2001. Here it is.

In those 14 years I’ve had quite a few different things happen. A divorce. A bankruptcy which I didn’t write about but alluded to the possibility of. A marriage and becoming a stepdad. I lost my Grandfather. Mother. Grandmother. I became a Godfather to Zac. I became an uncle. I became a Godfather to Archer. I became a grandfather myself recently. Stepgrandfather, but the fact remains, I’m grand.

I’ve had innumerable jobs which I’ve been too prudent to gossip about lest I get dooced.

It remains a good life. Sadness and despair and tragedy abound. But there’s also success and happiness and beautiful people and toy robots.

Also drawing, dude. drawing always.

Quote of the Day: coincidence

From the Steve Hulett of TAG (The Animation Guild) Blog:

And funny thing. As the percentage of unionized households has cratered, the middle class’s share of national income has gone down with it:

as-union-membership-rates-decrease-middle-class-incomes-shrink

Weird, huh? I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Read it all in Falling Wages, Falling Marriage Rates

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