smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Communiqué received earlier this morning from Waste:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

Thank you.

160kbps is a bit low for a static bit rate, particularly for an MP3, however if that is a VBR (variable) rate, then all is forgiven. Later today, I hope to be moshing out to IN RAINBOWS.

This is how music should be. We pay a small fee for the music, be it via a pressed plastic-and-silver disc or via an electronic package, that is unfettered by DRM or restriction. It is up to each individual as to how ‘involved’ they wish to be in a bands performance, up to and including merchandise and concert tickets¹.

The music becomes the voice, not the will of an industry that is caught in a 1970’s LSD trip, fearful of change and fearful of losing their grip on all they have accumulated. And whilst the executives rail on about how evil we are, they use us as the reason for their lack of vision and lack of understanding. It is our fault they have not evolved.

Times can change². If more bands take the same road as Radiohead, making music truly inexpensive³ and unrestricted, then we as consumers will prove the point. People are prepared to pay a fair amount for a fair product. We illustrate that every single day.

So lets support bands, main-stream or alternative, that dare to try something new. That dare to free their music. It’s in our best interests.

Make it so.

1. which is where, by far, the most money will ever be made.. bands tour for a reason and it’s not just to see fans (↩)
2. they aren’t yet changing.. there has been no real quantum shift in thinking (↩)
3. or even free (↩)

Or how I stopped being concerned about comments and learned to love the content.
There has been a bit of blogger activity of late, primarily surrounding John Gruber’s decision a while back to roll
comment free and whether it’s actually a darn good move.
Obviously the first pay-off is an immediate cessation of needing to care about […]

I’ve come to a realisation, that was strongly re-enforced recently with the
hyperactive launch of
Safari for the Microsoft Windows platform.
The realisation isn’t that I particularly prefer Mozilla Firefox itself over say Internet Explorer, or even Opera. It’s not that I even like Firefox, because I don’t.. rather it’s the open source communities input into […]

This has been pin-balling around the internets for a few days now - and succinctly put, suggests that we should all adhere to a blogger’s equivalent of the usual politically correct and chemically castrated system commonly referred to as the code of conduct.

The same morally restrictive and constrained concept as used in many places due to the moronic influences of the minority of folks who can’t help but prove that evolution isn’t without it’s flaws.

It all started way back when Tim O’Reilly proposed a knee-jerk peace-love-harmony reaction to a bunch of retarded misfits mouthing off (in part) when Kathy Sierra decided to point out that being an absolute dick-head isn’t cool.

After some careful consideration, it was time to jettison the previous design, in favour of something far more simple, clear and uncluttered.

If the design looks familiar, it’s probably because I covet John Gruber’s daring fireball and have been strongly influenced by his aesthetically pleasing approach.

In order to better track changes to the plugin code, I’ve started a google code project - check it out for more details

From the ashes of sig2feed, comes RSS Signature ((.. insert dramatic music, here.)), which should happily function in Wordpress 2.0.x and above (including the shiny new 2.1.0 release).

I would recommend the update, due in part to some code clean-up ((..not to mention the sexy new plugin name ;) )), combined with the options panel moving under ‘Manage’ in the Wordpress admin interface.

On the topic of habari, I came across an interesting post today.

Seems like there are too many cooks, but no head chef running the project, so everything is a long discussion. I understand the project is getting organized and whatnot, and as new people come in, their visions need to be dealt with, but I fear the project will split into two if someone doesn’t come in and get people organized. ~ D3 Habari

An interesting comment - which on the surface makes immediate sense. After all, how can any project survive without a ‘fearless leader’?

So you’re running a flavour of linux for the AMD 64bit platform - such as Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop ((.. which coincidentally has just won the ‘Best Linux Desktop’ category in Infoworld Technology of the Year Awards )) and you’re about to go visit a frequently used flash powered website, so you launch firefox and.. oh noes, no flash.

So of course one thinks “no worries, I’ll just install it..” and that would be that, right?

Wrong!

Up until recently if one used a 64 bit linux operating system, one was, quite literally, shit out of luck. You see Macromedia Adobe doesn’t ((.. or certainly didn’t up until recently.)) believe 64bit Linux exists, oh no, it’s some nasty rumour spread by Microsoft employee’s as some kind of sick in-joke.

But.. all is not lost - indeed this slipped under the radar and I only happened across it entirely by mistake. Damn fine mistake, indeed the best one I’ve made today.

Due to an unscheduled fault, the smackfoo mySQL db decided to reject connections for the last couple of hours or so.

We are currently experiencing periodic and intermittent issues involving connectivity from customer applicatoins to MySQL. (mt) Media Temple engineers are aware of this issue and are actively working on a resolution.

However, as the (mt) guys rock, we’re back in action. This would be the first unscheduled outage in, err, 5 months? Having come from dreamhost where outages are an almost daily occurrence, this whole not crashing, always available thing (mt) have going, quite frankly rocks!

.. and so it begins.

Round 5 has started with a bang - 100 Sites In 15 Minutes » 9rules Network Official Blog.

Well updates won’t come this fast, but I thought it was cool to say that we got 100 submissions in 15 minutes.

My submission is in, along with, by now, a good deal many more. I think it’s pretty safe to say this will likely be the largest round in 9rules history.. Good luck to those who have submitted and as I’ve mentioned before, I look forward to discovering a great many more diverse and creative voices through the 9.

Tyme over at the 9rules network asks a very good question, namely —
What is your site about?.
I should be able to quickly find this out with categories (tags). Or something on the about page. Or something on the front page. If you have a tag cloud, that’s awesome (I’m putting one on my site) […]