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Eric Heisserer shares some notes on the adaptation of Story of Your Life into Arrival. Some good notes on adaptation (and: a clarification of why it was such a successful one) in here.
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This all looks really sane: proper, package-managed WordPress deployment. Except: it relies a lot on slightly unofficial packages, which makes me nervous. Hmn. Filed away for reference.
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"Python has one. Ruby has one. Clojure has one. Now PHP has one too. Boris is PHP's missing REPL (read-eval-print loop), allowing developers to experiment with PHP code in the terminal in an interactive manner. If you make a mistake, it doesn't matter, Boris will report the error and stand to attention for further input." I use PHP increasingly little, but the lack of a REPL drives me insane. This looks… useful, at the very least.
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"The template used for a custom post view is decided by the ‘get_single_template()’ function in the wp-includes/theme.php file. And it basically tells locate_template() to look for single-’post_type’.php or single.php. So the simplest way to customise the way a custom post is displayed is to add a template file to your theme with the name single-xxxxxx.php" Oh. That makes life simpler.
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"Here is a memory-friendly function that should be able to split a big file in individual queries without needing to open the whole file at once:" Yep, that'll do.
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"Competitors should take a page from Apple's playbook here and be open about stuff that will give you a competitive advantage and shut the hell up about everything else. Open is not always better." If only because: you get a hell of a launch day. (But also because: you'll never promise things you can't deliver).
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"So much city thinking seems mad keen for a return to city states; autonomous islands, connected to each other through finance and fibre but not to land that surrounds them. It's a little bit collapsist; let's wrap the city around us while we still can. But maybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other. Perhaps all this brilliant city thinking could lift its eyes a little and look beyond the city walls – I'd love to see what we'd come up with then."
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"Stacey is an easier way to create a portfolio site. No database setup or installation files, simply drop the application on a server and it runs. Your content is managed by creating folders and editing text files. No login screens, no ‘cms’." Elegant – perhaps even more so than some of the stripped-down Ruby static-site management tools I've seen.
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There is nothing about this that is not amazing.
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"…halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan. Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first." There is no way this wouldn't be awesome. And: a great write-up from Geoff.
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How to compile APC into the Marc Liyanage PHP5 package (which is clearly the most sensible one to be using on OSX). Though this is for Server, it works fine on desktop, and as such comes recommended.
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"This toaster was built from scratch by Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art, London, as a project in extreme self-sufficiency and to highlight the effects of mass production we take for granted." And this is what it looks like.
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"I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch – beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster." This is clearly amazing, and a timely reminder of, you know, what the age of mass production really means.
An ExceptionNotifier for CodeIgniter
25 June 2009
CodeIgniter really is turning out to be The Little PHP Framework That Could. I’ve now dived pretty deep into it and still have few complaints; as I’ve said before, it makes all the boring stuff easy, has almost no “magic”, and stays out of the way.
As the application moves towards production, though, I began to miss a few things from Rails – notably, its ExceptionNotifier plugin. ExceptionNotifier will send you an email every time there’s an error on the site, which is really very useful with production applications.
So I investigated alternatives for CodeIgniter. I stumbled across this Stack Overflow post, which basically outlines exactly what I was looking for.
Except it doesn’t work.
Never mind! We can fix that, and the end result is MY_Exceptions.php:
(You might want to “view raw” on that – there’s some funky syntax-highlighting going on).
This really does work out-of-the-box with CodeIgniter 1.7.x. You just drop it into system/application/library, call it MY_Exceptions.php, and it’ll extend the existing Exceptions library. Obviously, you’re going to need to change a lot of the obvious details like email addresses you want things sent to, and the name of the production domain you’ve configured in your app’s config.php. You also need to make sure the error log level is set to “1” or higher in that config.php file. But that’s about it; it really does work, and means that in production alone, you’ll get email from your app when a PHP error gets thrown, along with not only the line number and file the error was thrown in, but the URL that the user was accessing to generate the problem.
Not bad for an hour’s work. And, because it’s a Gist, you can either copy and paste, or just clone it straight into your application.
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"BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline." Now that's a classy look.
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"There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar." Will Wright has a good point.
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"What we didn't predict was how cheap storage (and other computer-ish) improvements would change the market. That's called the "X Market"—it's all about how the product you're introducing changes the marketplace you're selling into rather than how much of the existing market you'll be able to capture Had it not been for the X Market, hard drives would be specialty items today… Many consumers feel cramped with 100 GB of storage. Home entertainment systems are available with over 10 TB of storage. A consequence of super-cheap storage, at the same time that it's what makes said storage a viable product."
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Italians getting into rental, rather than ownership. Products become services.
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"The unforgiving streets of public television are no place for weakness: either you fight, or you die. Join the courageous young brawler Large Avian as he embarks on a rampage of revenge against the animatronic gang that killed his family and defiled his nest. Watch as our hero trashes Oswald the Grump, spells out certain doom for the Cracker Beast, and puts their calculating, blood-sucking leader down for the count. New episode every Sunday!" Want this so badly.
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Huge, and a bit baggy, but nontheless interesting account of a trip to the SBO Qualifiers in the US; if anything, makes me sad that there's no way we'll ever see an arcade scene like this in the UK ever again.
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"Some time ago, Simon Schama wrote an article for the Guardian on the perfect bolognese sauce. Like any other enthusiastic cook, I've been finely honing my sauce for years and finally had it nailed down to what I considered to be Very Good. However, I saw the article as an opportunity to challenge myself, rip it up and start again and above all, get one over Schama. So here's my recipe:" Epicly epic bolognese recipe. Should try this some time.
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A rough guide to building your own ExceptionNotifier for CodeIgniter. Might come in handy.
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"So, is it possible to mix segments and querystring?" Sort of, maybe, seems to be the answer.
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"The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you’ve done a couple of presentations, you’re going to want more." Rands drops some Keynote science, and I learn at least one new thing.
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Even if it's got a long way to go, there's so much promise and potential here – and it's interesting to see how refined some of the puzzle ideas are. And: mind-bending in the way the best puzzle games are.
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"I'm looking forward to working with new, clever people and getting my hands dirty again. I'm charged with leading the Open Library into fresh, fun territory; to enlist many hands to make "a page on the web for every book ever published" a great resource. I'm thrilled to be working with Brewster Kahle and his crack team in an important time for books on the web." What a perfect hire. Can't wait to see what George brings to it.
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This is epic and brilliant and has so many jumping-off points I need to read it again, and again, and again.
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"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""
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Pop band from Bristol, made good singles, got a deal, rather than touring recorded an album, album got shelved by label that had wanted them to tour, band broke up, album now sees light of day from SVC, for three quid. Phew!
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"When I'm using the USB, I just leave my finger inside the slot and pick it up after I'm ready." Well, quite.
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"pc_user is a lightweight authentication library for CodeIgniter. It focuses on simplicity and security." Indeed it does.
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"Metalosis Maligna is a fictitious documentary about a spectacular yet chronically disabling disease which affects patients who have been fitted with medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions." If you're squeamish, particularly when it comes to surgery or prosthetics, this is NOT for you. Otherwise, it's a remarkably good piece of animation/effects work, wrapped in a remarkably straight documentary wrapper, that perhaps makes the effects-work even more effective.
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"It’s totally fantastic. It’s like someone’s got totally shitfaced on logistics-booze and then sat down and written an email." I think it all depends on your definition of "best", but Iain gets bonus points for "shitfaced on logistics booze".
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"It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam." Well, of course. Well done, Epic.