National Novel Writing Month

They say everyone has a book in them. I've never been too sure if that's actually true, but thought I'd attempt to get mine out in national novel writing month, which starts tomorrow.

The idea is that you start writing tomorrow, write an average of 1667 words each day in November and have a 50k word novel at the end of the month! Lovely stuff. The emphasis is on quantity, not quality, and theres to be no editing til December.

It doesn't matter if it's disjointed, nonsensical in places or is just plain arse. The idea is simply to get people writing. I for one am going to give it a bash, if you fancy joining me, head on over to NaNoWriMo.org and sign up.

JOIN ME!

How to compress and decompress tar and gzip files

How to untar a file

A lot of Linux/Unix files you find yourself working with will be compressed using tar and/or gzip. These are files with extensions like .tar and .tar.gz.

Extracting

For.tgz, tar.gz, or tar.z extension use this command:

tar -zxvf {filename}

Eg: tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz

This will extract the file for you in the directory you are currently in. Using the above command will save you from having to redirect the output for gzip or anything else (because the z option automatically decompresses the file for you), otherwise without the z argument, you would have to do the extraction for the gzip first, then do a tar -xvf for the tar archive.

Archiving

To create a gzipped .tar file, use the following command...

tar -cf {filename}

...to create filename.tar
Eg: tar -cf filename

- Then -

gzip {filename.tar}

...to create filename.tar.gz

It's amazing what you can do with a few boxes

OK, This is incredible. This dude, Chris Gilmour makes things out of cardboard - like the car above. How the f*ck? More Here at his site...

TV Links Raided and the operator arrested

A 26yo man from Chelteham in the UK, was arrested yesterday and the web site TV-Links shut down.

Many sites exist hosting and streaming video content across the web, what made TV-links so popular was that it aggregated these videos and allowed users to browse and search them from one place.

Although not actually hosting any of the content, the operator has been arrested for 'facilitation' of copyright infringement. This raises the question of what actually constitutes an offence. If I linked to TV-Links or a similar site from my blog, would I have the long arm of the law knocking at my door tomorrow?

Anyway, at the very least, the movie and TV industry need to realise that the way people want media is changing and there is a huge demand for their programmes, and back-catalogue ( wheres ya Mac iPlayer BBC!?!?), prefereably all in one place. I for one would pay a fiver a month to have access to BBC/C4/American content streamable and maybe pay a quid a time for a movie. They'd make a not so small fortune for sure.

RIP Tv-Links (not that I ever used it myself, you understand).

Code for simple PHP timer script

<?php

// Simple timer script

function timeStamp() {
list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
}

$startTime = timeStamp();

// Do some things here - i'm just sleeping for a bit
usleep(150000);

// get the split time
$splitTime1 = timeStamp();

// round to 4 dec places, unless you want to be crazy accurate
$splitTime = round($splitTime1 - $startTime,4);
echo "Split Time: ".$splitTime." seconds.";

// Do some more things here
usleep(500000);
$endTime = timeStamp();
$totalTime = round($endTime - $startTime,4);
echo "End Time: ".$totalTime." seconds.";

?>

Radiohead

I bought In Rainbows for £2. A bit mean you may think, but I could have had it for nowt, and after all the idea was to pay what you wanted, so thats what i did. I must admit I love it right now. Weird fishes and Jigsaw falling into place particularly do it for me. A throw back to OK Computer for sure, and a very welcome one for me as someone who didn't really go on their unmelodious beepy journey of the last 3 studio albums.

But, what In Rainbows has really done for me is to make me go back and realise what an truely amazing album The Bends was. With The Bends, High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees, Just, My Iron Lung and Street Spirit on ONE album, I'd forgotten just how incredible it is.

Faith in their product - great advertising idea

In a recent marketing campaign in Vancouver, 3M sought a strong image for their security glass.

They modified a bus shelter, fitting it with their security glass and filled it with REAL BANKNOTES!!!

Many have tried to gain access with golf clubs and baseball bats but obviously the glass remains intact!

This is what you call having faith in your own product .... great advertising!

Codeigniter ahoy!

This week I have mostly been loving Codeigniter (not literally, that'd be hideous). Never has the MVC approach made as much practical sense before, and CI has the good sense to let you quite happily just use a VC approach where MVC would be overkill.

No framework is ever going to exactly fit the things you want to do in the way that you want to do them, but what I love about CI is that is doesn't try to do too much, but it's extendable if you want more. The initial setup comes with more or less everything you need for most purposes I would have thought.

CI also has great documentation and community, small overhead/footprint and is a doddle to setup (just copy the dir structure and set a couple of config settings). Plus it works with PHP4, which is a huge bonus to me as my shared hosting STILL have no date for migration to 5.

Is PHP's ROR? Time will tell, but it's like a breath of fresh air to this web monkey.

Note to self...

Cross-browser test EVERYTHING, ALWAYS!

:(

Typeface the facts

Typography is something not a lot of Web Developers gave much of a hoot about a few years ago. How things have changed, and these days a web monkey worth his salt needs to know his points from his serifs and kern with the best of them.

Heres my collection of typography resources...

A Guide to Web Typography
The wonderful webtypography.net is a superb guide to creating beautiful text. A wealth of information drawing on principles from The Elements of Typographic Style - the design industry standard by Robert Bringhurst. This site covers ground from the basics to the advanced levels of web typography. An essential for the serious web designer.

Typographica
The greatest Typography blog out there. Plenty that won't be directly applicable to your day to day work - but hugely inspiring creatively, fascinating and wonderfully written by people with a clear passion. Well worth keeping an eye on.

80 Beautiful Typefaces - compiled by Smashing Magazine
80 of the lovliest typfaces ever made. Pretty much all of the typefaces you'll ever need.

Thinking with type
A whistle stop tour around the finer points of working with type. Really nicely designed site, I got a lot from this one.

The Adobe Type Primer
In depth look at the issues surrounding text and typefaces from the daddies of documents. In PDF form, naturally.