Mary Rose Cook

Wow, wow, wow.

Snow Leopard is a cute name for the next release of OS X, but there are two problems with the theory. First, if you are not a Mac fan, it is difficult to discern the relationship between Snow Leopard and Leopard. Which is newer? Do I need one to install the other? Who knows? Second, it has been reported that banners reading “OS X Leopard” are hanging in Moscone West, ready for WWDC. Why tout Leopard when you’re going to announce Snow Leopard?

I have always really liked Des Ark but, for some reason, for the last week, I have not been able to stop watching their videos on YouTube.

They make me want to cry, Aimee’s guitar playing makes me boil with envy, and their two delivery methods (crushing rock and crushing acoustic) leave me lost in admiration.

Michael Mann has always given great attention to detail in his films: getting people to train his actors to behave like convicts, capturing the light of sodium street lamps properly, having his armed characters check chamber.

“We have full-time people who just show customers the code, or look at other specifications, and things of that nature.”

“burn rates, ignition propensities, things of this nature.”

The first quote is from a Bill Gates interview in 1986. The second is one of Jeffrey Wigand’s lines in The Insider.

Both quotes include the phrase, “thing of [this/that] nature.” When I read the interview with Gates, that phrase stuck out as something that only a precise person, an engineer, would say. And precision is Wigand’s defining characteristic.

You can please everyone.

Why does everyone love Radiohead and the iPod, yet no one deride them as philistine? Why did reddit go from being a relatively interesting news site to a politically-leaning version of Digg? Why is Digg populated by moronic stories?

It’s a matter of taste.

Steve Jobs sired the iPod by the force of his refined taste. The masses loved it because almost everyone can find a use for it, and because it is aesthetically pleasing.

Most pop music only has the former quality - we all like to dance, and to replay a melody in our heads. But Radiohead (1) take those nice melodies and spit them out in newish ways. Thus, they win the approval of everyone, including the critics. So, to a lesser extent, do Sonic Youth.

A few times a day, I visit a website called Hacker News. It’s quite like reddit: people post news items, vote and comment on them, and the most popular items get the most exposure. The difference with Hacker News is that all the news items are ostensibly focused on programming. Even in the three months since I joined, I’ve noticed a drop in the overall quality of the news items. But how does this drop in quality manifest itself?

It is often said of universally revered pieces of art that they have been “done very well”. When people say this, their admiration is a proxy for aesthetic pleasure within a well-understood set of rules. Jane Austen (2) took the romance novel, a traditionally trashy form, and wrote books that conformed to the established rules, but achieved great artistic heights. Converge released Jane Doe, a record that toes the metalcore line with its beatdowns and screaming and blast beats and heavy, distorted riffs. But they show such technical excellence and the music sounds so bleak that the record exceeds everything else in the genre.

Converge are a popular hardcore band, but they are not a popular band. I like hardcore, but my Mum does not, she says, because of the screaming. Most people share her view. Thus, Converge will never achieve the critical and mass popularity of Radiohead because, though they are very aesthetically pleasing, most people cannot find a use for them. Cathartic screams are just not their cup of tea.

How do you achieve aesthetic pleasure? There are two ways. One, appeal to a narrowly-defined group of people whose aesthetic judgement is closely aligned. Two, find the superset of the world’s taste and embody it.

This explains what has happened to reddit and Digg, and what is happening to Hacker News. These sites began with a core group of users who all had fairly closely aligned interests and values and so it was easy for the site to give them aesthetic pleasure. Once the user group became more diverse, there were an increasing number of stories posted that only appealed to a subset of the users’ interests and values. Therefore, these items get fewer votes and less attention. What rises to the top is the items that are universally appealing. But wait. Instead of a dictator with impeccable taste in charge, there is a mass of independent people. This universal appeal is based upon a lowest common denominator. We all quite like pictures of cute cats, and Top 10 lists and bold, unsubstantiated headlines. But these things only push our aesthetic pleasure bars up to maybe a four. Thus, mediocrity reigns.

The iPod has a dictator with impeccable taste and everyone can find a use for it. The same is true of Radiohead. Converge fail because of the second condition of universal popularity. reddit, the first.

(1) I don’t actually like Radiohead, but I am an outlier. (2) See Paul Graham’s article, Some Heroes, for more on good writers who chose populist genres.

I’ve been working on a large personal project for the last four months. To keep myself fresh, I’ve also done a couple of little mini projects. The first was Tweviews, tiny reviews on Twitter.

I knocked up the second this weekend: Throw Text, instant text storage and retrieval. I know there a lot of these things on the ‘net, most called Online Notepad. But my goals for Throw Text are a bit different:

1. Identical sign-up, edit and retrieve screens.
2. Text stored as you type.
3. Clean, clean cleanliness.

Some technical notes. Throw Text was written in Ruby on Rails. It is hosted on Slicehost for $20 a month. It is served by Apache 2 and mod_rails (aka Passenger). The data is stored in MySQL. It took longer to set up the hosting than to write the code.

So, give it a whirl: Throw Text.

I need to run a model method on my Slicehost production app every hour. I tried rake+cron, cronedit and a number of nut.crack(sledgehammer) queueing server solutions. Some didn’t work and the rest were unreliable. Therefore, for all you Ruby On Rails On Slicehost people, here is my approach. Treasure it.

1. ssh into your Slicehost account.

2. Switch to your user directory: cd ~/

3. Make a new directory: mkdir cronlogs

4. Make a new cron log file: nano notifications.log

5. Add a space to the file and then save it.

6. The crontab is a text file that holds all your scheduled cron jobs. Edit it: crontab -e

7. We are going to enter a line into this file. It will have the following structure: [timings] [switch to your app directory] && [path to ruby] script/runner -e [environment] [method to run] > [path to cron log]

8. Here is what I entered into my crontab. When you write your own version, make sure that the paths reflect where you have stored ruby and your app, and that you fill in the blank for your app name and set your own timings. 1 1 * * * cd /home/admin/public_html/[your app name]/current && /usr/local/bin/ruby script/runner -e production 'Match.generate_and_save_matches' > ~/cronlogs/notifications.log

8a. It is a good idea to test the command you enter (minus the scheduling information) in your command line. If it doesn’t work there, it won’t work when run by cron, either.

1. If you try and save your crontab and it says you have errors, make sure the whole thing is on one line.

2. If your model method runs OK, you will probably get no feedback. However, if there was an error, you should either get some mail or something should get written to the cron log you created.

The tweet I sent once I got this working.

Practical Common Lisp, Peter Seibel

DMZ: On The Ground, Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli

For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

Collective Intelligence, Toby Segaran

The Best of Technology Writing 2007, Steven Levy, editor

Political Philosphy, David Miller

Hackers And Painters, Paul Graham

Violent Cases, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!, Richard P. Feynman

I am totally in love with Spencer Krug. I adore how he gets so angry when he sings.

Tiny reviews on Twitter.

How artfully can you describe your impression of a song or a movie, a book or an album? There is no space for value judgements, no room for, “this sucks”. Just tell us something interesting. We want to see the inner life of this piece of art. We want you to make us care about it.

• The Wire Series 4 … A satisfying meal and a great, rippling flood of causation.
• For Whom The Bell Tolls, Hemingway … Written close to the ground, to the tongue - at the contact points between man and world.

To get these little gems and others like them, follow tweviews on Twitter.

To post a tweview, send a Twitter update like this: ‘@tweviews item, author … review’.

To find out more, check out the tweviews website.