I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Entries for week beginning March 2, 2008

March 8, 2008

The Beauty Of 99¢ iPhone Apps

I hadn’t thought of this: Apple may have said they’ll let you give away apps for free on the iPhone Apps store, but why not charge a couple of bucks? Your apps will still be impulse-downloads, and you might make some serious cash.

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A Question of Programming Ethics

Pretty much inevitable — An app that asked for your GMail username & password was harvesting them. One point to the “Why we need OAuth” party.

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March 7, 2008

“Unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in you hearing very bad music.”

“Unauthorized or improper use of this system may result in you hearing very bad music.”

The results of sshing to the new Slim Devices Controller remote control.

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Swiss-Army-Knife Software Engineer at Bose Corporation, Framingham MA

My group at RhymesWithNose is hiring. I can honestly say that this is the most fun and challenging job I’ve ever had, so if you think you’re hot stuff, or have any questions, let me know. We’re working on some pretty damned cool stuff.

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March 6, 2008

STEWART LEE - ENGLISH HECKLERS IN NEW ZEALAND

Stewart Lee’s essay on only needing, or *wanting*, 7,000 fans.

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Kevin Kelly -- 1,000 True Fans

“Anyone producing works of art needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.” Discussed this over lunch today, and could definitely think of a handful of bands I’d pay $10-a-month to “patronize”.

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David Sedaris delivers a pizza

Pitch-perfect parody. One for the NPR listeners in the crowd.

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AOL "opens" AIM Protocol

That “open” AIM thing announced earlier? Looks to be more of a club to try and force clients like Gaim and Adium to include AOL advertising. Fuckers.

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March 5, 2008

20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection

CD Purchase: Salt-N-Pepa - 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection

The Platinum Collection

CD Purchase: Morcheeba - The Platinum Collection

Shotter’s Nation

CD Purchase: Babyshambles - Shotter’s Nation

My first FireEagle query

My first FireEagle query

About 10 lines of Python can now work out my physical location.

Next task, integrate this info into my blog. Task after that? A cool ambient location-setter idea I'm hatching.

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Fire Eagle

Fire Eagle has launched — a broker for your physical location, which other applications can use to improve user experiences. It’s really just APIs and geekery at the moment, but the applications that use and enable it will start appearing pretty quickly — I’ve already got a couple of ideas.

Open AIM | dev.aol.com

AOL have opened up the AIM protocol for reals, documenting the protocol and encouraging, rather than barely-tolerating, third-party AIM clients. I’d rather deal with XMPP, but this is an interesting step forward.

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March 4, 2008

Airborne Settlement

If you’ve ever paid for the popular placebo “Airborne” (or are willing to pretend to to get some free cash), you can claim your money back, since they now admit they falsely claimed they had ever run a clinical study, although this cannot and should not be taken as an admission that it is not effective in any way, shape or form. Lying, profiteering, anti-science fuckholes.

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John Resig - Unbreaking the Web

The real reason for Microsoft’s switch to web standards in IE8? John thinks he’s found it.

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March 3, 2008

Coding Horror: Actual Performance, Perceived Performance

The way you code a progress bar will do more to “performance” than tweaking the process it’s measuring. “Humans do not perceive the passage of time in a linear way.”

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An hour and a half with Barack Obama

“What’s the picture that emerges from these four impressions?

Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer.

If you were asking me to write a capsule description of what I would look for in the next President of the United States, that would be it.”

Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts

Trent Reznor releases a new NIN album as online download with “premium” collectors offerings. Notable differences to the Radiohead “In Rainbows’ download include a) It’s CC BY-NC-SA licensed, so you can remix it however you like and b) The first part has been “officially” seeded to BitTorrent in a shareware stylee.

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Gratuitous SF tourist shot

Gratuitous SF tourist shot

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Balloons

Balloons

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Mel’s Drive-In

Mel’s Drive-In

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Rock-ola

Rock-ola

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I Has A Hotdog!

Did not know there was a LOLDOG meme spinoff.

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iPhone Stopwatch hits 1,000 hours

What happens when the iPhone stopwatch runs for 41 days and 16 hours.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.