Control Option Command

Indeed. Why does this ordinarily quite burlesque and colorful blog suddenly look like the works of Jacob Nielsen?

If you are new to this blog; move along, but if you’ve come to expect bright colors and swirly shit all over the place, take a while and harken.

I need a project to get back to my former glory, and I need to deliver myself a prompt, swift kick in the rear to get going. The best way to do this is to just publish this new design for the blog while it’s still butt-ugly so that I’ll have an incentive to fix it the fuck up as soon as humanly possible.

If you really miss the old design go visit Kajas blog.

That is all.

Every so often I stumble across something that really just leaves me dumbfounded. The only valid response seems to be “… Fascinating!”

The latest is this clever JAPH consisting solely of keywords.

In short; The Perl community has a meme going where you are supposed to write a snippet returning the String “just another perl hacker” in the most convoluted and obfuscated way possible.

This gem does exactly that. It’s beautiful in that there are no Strings in there, only valid Perl keywords, and it’s perfectly justified. For some reason this kind of useless stuff really appeals to me at a deep level. I fear a couple of hours may be lost to trying to create a clever JAAH.

When Iceland went bust and started selling .is domains I grabbed martin.is. Of course I did. That’s the kind of guy I am. Even as I swiped that credit card (and by “swipe” I mean “typed in all my info into the appropriate boxes.”) I knew I had no idea what I was going to use it for, but what the hey; I’ve done plenty of even stupider domain purchases that never led to anything¹.

So finally, the other day I decided to set up a “lifestream”. An aggregate feed of all the highly interesting stuff I do on the web. Not because I think anyone particularly needs or wants to know. It just seemed like the kind of thing that goes on a domain called “martin is”.
I really didn’t want to spend loads of time on this. I have a job, a daughter and a blog that are all already wailing for my attention, so tried plugging all my stuffs into a WordPress install using FeedWordPress and a couple of other similar plugins, but I found the results to be (unreliable | explosive | bewildering)².

Alrighty then. What services do I know of that aggregate information like this? FriendFeed! I headed over to FF, and sure enough; Within half a minute I had managed to plug all the crap I generate into one massive hunka’data. In addition to supporting a bunch of services Friendfeed actually does pretty well parsing feeds from other sources and cutting the entries into little blurbs. Now only to get it out of there and onto my domain.

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I’ve been a Solid Grey Desktop man for ten or twelve years, but GeekTool; a tool that lets you add all sorts of more or less useful info to your desktop, made me spring a pretty colorful theme today (click the image…). Not in the least because it requires some fiddlin’ around in the terminal and such to set up right, which means that I get to feel special, which I’m all about.

I’m not really satisfied with the actual desktop picture (apologies to the artist. Just too much…) but it does the job for now. I’ve been searching for hours on end for wallpapers and I’m frankly amazed at how difficult it is to find good stuff.

GeekTool itself warrants a post, but I can’t be arsed right now. Here’s some links to get you by:

Theme My Mac.
Smoking Apples.
Gallery of GeekTool desktops.

Have fun!

If you have been around on the web for ten years or more you will remember (or maybe even filled the role) of the mythical “WebMaster”. The WebMaster would design and program your site. He (or she… but lets be honest girls. Mostly he) would publish your articles and fix your site when broken. He’d do some voodoo behind the scene and something very close to what you wanted would happen. He’d tell you what would work on the net and what wouldn’t. He would not be questioned. He was The WebMaster.

Ok, so usually the WebMaster was someone’s cousin who knew HTML, where to cut’n paste JavaScript snippets from and generally no marvel to behold, but it was a title not to be taken lightly and godsdamnit we held it in high regard.

But I’m not here to wax poetic about the lost title of The WebMaster. I’m here to talk about how the position, once highly esteemed, as a “Jack of all trades” ¹ in, well, WebMastery; fits into the calculation nowadays.

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