maniacal rage

I just watched Enemy of the State for the first time since I saw it when it came out in 1998. Wow. It's amazing what kind of ridiculous crap you can spew about technology and such when no one in the world knows yet how things work. Two choice moments:

• The government computer guys are watching a "surveillance" video from the lingerie store when Will Smith's character is slipped the video player. They freeze the tape and then someone says, "Rotate 70 degrees" and the image rotates—THE STILL IMAGE ROTATES—to a new viewing angle. Once rotated, they still continue to do stuff with it, including having the computer "hypothesize" about how the bag changed shape.
• When Gene Hackman's character is describing what they can do to fight back, he says that combining a cell phone with a laptop is a powerful tool. Then he magically pulls up the ESN number of a congressman's cellphone (without wifi... hmmm) and programs it into his. "What do you get?" Apparently, you immediately start hearing what the congressman is saying into his phone. It's magic.

Honestly, it was fun to watch just for some of the ridiculous lines and situations.

I just bought a few shirts from Design By Hümans, which for some reason I had never seen before today. It's in the same vein as Threadless and such, although I found myself liking more of the designs at DBH.

The interesting thing is that after you buy shirts, you're instantly given a discount code for the next purchase. Even cooler is that it can be used by anyone else as well, which means I can tell you that for the next 10 days you can save 15% on shirts by using the code I was given: QXMPFL.

If you end up buying a shirt I also get $2 off my next purchase, which isn't too shabby. Check them out.

I've just released a maintenance build of xPad to deal with a few Leopard issues. Please download xPad, version 1.2.6. This release solves all but one visual bug, in which document title labels in the drawer become lighter after changing documents a few times. When I have a while to play with it, I hope to fix that bug as well. In the mean time, it's completely usable with this release.

And, of course, it's still free.

As with the previous two designs, I've made iPhone wallpapers from the background image of this one. You can find two versions in my collection.

In the long run I plan to add more photo-based wallpapers, but abstract imagery is so much better for me that I can't help but add new images like these.

Another month, another design. I'm calling this one Techno Tuesday (apologies to the excellent comic strip) because of the font choice—it's AUDimat—and because I started on it last Tuesday night. This iteration plays around with some elements that I used in the Summer Blues design a while back, specifically the fixed column that contains navigation and such (only this time it's on the left).

This is the first design of my site to use sIFR. I tend to dislike sIFR, but I wanted the permalinks to be in AUDimat and that was the only simple way to do it. It should be easier by now, but at least this works for the most part. Implementation wasn't that much fun and I probably won't use it again except for a specific case like this.

This design was inspired by "A Sea of Red", a photo taken by the extremely talented Cindy and posted to Flickr. When I saw the photo last week I immediately wanted to use it as the basis of a design and went to work. Thankfully, Cindy gave me permission to use it and it has been abstracted into the background of this new design.

If you want to view the site in a more simplistic fashion, the "toggle high contrast" option from the previous two designs has been changed to a "toggle background" function in this design. You can find the link in the footer of every page—it will remove the background image. It actually looks pretty nice on plain white too.

Is the plural of hiatus hiatusi or hiatuses? Either way, I took an unplanned one last week. No writing, no podcast work, not much of anything but hanging out with people who were in town. Got to hang out with Blue Flavor on my soil, show a few of them the "New York office" and did plenty of sitting around in bars and walking in the rain late at night.

And now I'm back to work, both for Blue Flavor and the podcast. We've nearly completed shooting for episode three of MRTV and we're hoping to get it out as early as next week.

After delays due to travel and my car being robbed, we've finally released episode 27 of the podcast. The episode is nearly 30 minutes long, covering topics including pizza in the morning, Shawn's dating method, and a lesbian play.

Listen to the episode right now using the built-in player on the site, and subscribe to get future episodes of both the audio and video versions of the show automatically.

Of course, the forums are also a good place to hang out if you want to talk about the show, talk to other listeners or just say strange things that other people might enjoy.

Several people have pointed out that I might be mistaking multiple copies of my iTunes library in Time Machine with hardlinks, which is the Unix magic Time Machine uses to keep references to unchanged data in its backup. In this case, however, I don't think I am.

A hardlink to a file doesn't take any additional space. When I checked the amount of space consumed on my backup drive two days ago, it reported 92GB had been filled. Then, this morning when I woke the iMac up, Time Machine started doing its thing. It was running for longer than normal, so I opened the preference to see what it was doing and it reported it was copying ~50GB to disk. When I used FileMerge to compare the last two backups, the second had a full copy of the library—not hardlinks only—and the space consumed had changed to 142GB.

As far as I understand it, creating hardlinks does not require copying data to disk, and it wouldn't report more space as consumed. So in this case I believe I'm being affected by strange backup behavior, and not a misunderstanding of the underlying technology. Or, possibly, Finder is lying to me about free space.