Author: Leon

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Best Music of 2011

Here’s a rundown on the best music that came out this year.

Atlas Losing Grip – State of Unrest

State of Unrest album cover

This is my favorite album of the year. The band’s name, an obvious homage to Rand’s classic novel, caught my eye. A description of their music as being melodic hardcore made me take a chance. The music is energetic, but clear enough to sing along with. The lyrics are smart and include unique phrasings that I hypothesize come from a Swede writing in English. At least, it reminds me of Hellacopter, another Swedish band. Aside from name-dropping Nietzsche, the lead track includes a nice little wish.

Let our logic dictate our morality.
It’s a privilege, our responsibility,
’cause in the end we are all held accountable.

They also released an EP recently that includes an acoustic version of Logic.

I really love this band, and I wish they’d come to the Bay Area some day.

The Fucking Cops – Fuck You Up with Some Truth

Another great melodic hardcore band, The Fucking Cops released their second CD this year, a followup to You Have The Right To Shut The Fuck Up.

Tony Sly – Sad Bear

Tony Sly is the lead singer of No Use For A Name, and he’s been putting out solo acoustic CDs, sometimes with Joey Cape from Lagwagon. I’ve been playing this newest album a lot, and it inspired me to go back and get the older stuff.

Saves the Day – Daybreak

Saves the Day is pop punk outfit who really should have a number in their name (like Blink 182 or Sum 41). I hadn’t heard of them until I noticed Daybreak. I found it very strange and couldn’t quit playing it. Vocalist Chris Conley sings so high, I thought the band was fronted by a woman…but all the lyrics is pretty obviously sung from the point of view of a man, which was a puzzle at for me at first. The first track on the album is nearly eleven minutes and has at least five different melodies. It reminds me of recent Green Day stuff, catchy and easy to sing along with.

Cake – Showroom of Compassion

Cake is probably the biggest act to come out of Sacramento. Everything they do is solid, including this album from January.

Nothington – Borrowed Time

Nothington is another Bay Area band. They sound a lot like Lucero.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTrauZJsZ1o

The Devil Makes Three – Stomp And Smash

I saw The Devil Makes Three open for Social Distortion a while back. They are from Santa Cruz. I’ve been delving in to this realm of punk rockers doing folk styled music, and they are closer to bluegrass than Tony Sly’s straight folk. Stomp and Smash is a live album of older material. I can’t get enough of “Old Number 7”.

Scott H. Biram – Bad Ingredients

Along the same lines, Scott H. Birum plays foot-stomping blues like he’s John Lee Hooker, but with a punk sensibility.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4b-sOZ1q-0

Puscifer – Conditions of My Parole

Conditions of My Parole is another solid release from Maynard’s other other band, Puscifer.

Flogging Molly – Speed of Darkness

Flogging Molly never fails to satisfy. Their live shows are phenomenal.

Dropkick Murphys – Going Out In Style

Another solid release from the Dropkicks.

Paddy and the Rats – Hymns for Bastards

If you like Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys, check out Paddy and the Rats. They have

Dead Milkmen – King in Yellow

After a long, long time, Dead Milkmen finally released a new album.

Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes – Social Distortion

I love Social Distortion. I’ve seen them live many times. Compared to other bands, this is a fine album. Compared everything else they’ve done, it’s weak. I am looking forward to the next album that Mike Ness has said he’s been writing on the road this year.

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Parenting

Cinnamon Bear Time

Jerrel McQueen and Timothy Holmes illustrated ...
Image via Wikipedia

It’s nearly December, which means it’s time to start listening to The Cinnamon Bear with my sons. I discovered this old radio show several years ago on the Get Rich Slowly blog. It’s a 26-part story first broadcast in 1937. Each part is about 15 minutes long, and it was designed to be heard six days a week. We tend to listen to it seven nights a week at bed time, sometimes listening to two episodes to catch up. The idea is to finish up the story on xmas eve.

The style of the story is similar to The Wizard of Oz. A brother and sister are transported to a magical land, led by their animated teddy bear, Paddy O’Cinnamon. And in the end, it all seems to be a dream. The sense of life of this story is unmatched in modern fiction. It doesn’t merely lack cynicism, it portrays the world as benevolent and all people as good by nature.

Since the content is public domain, it’s easy to get a copy. Of course, you can pay a small fee to get a physical CD, but you likely have a way to play MP3s out loud for your kids. There are links to the episodes on the GRS blog, or on RadioLovers.com. There’s even a site dedicated to The Cinnamon Bear.

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Rand-o-Matic

Last week, I built a little widget for MindPosts.com that generates random quotes as if from Ayn Rand characters.

The generator uses pretty CSS3 styles in modern browsers.

My good friend, Rick Marazzani, put together the phrases and the template for combining them. I built the framework that allows anyone to embed the quotes in any Web site. Rick explained the philosophical ideas behind the RAND-o-matic. I want to discuss the technology.

To place the widget in an HTML document, you make a div element and you fetch a remote javascript file.

<div id="randomatic"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[
//Set width in pixels to 150-600
var randomaticWidth = 300;
(function() {
  var rom = document.createElement('script');
  rom.type = 'text/javascript';
  rom.async = true;
  rom.src = 'http://labs.18int.com/randomatic/randomatic.js';
  var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
  s.parentNode.insertBefore(rom, s);
})();
//]]></script>

Rather than include the javascript straight away, I used javascript to generate a script tag. This ensures that rendering of the page does not block while the remote file is fetched. The remote script in turn creates new DOM elements and pulls in styles. This makes it easy for anyone wanting to use the widget, while also saving all of the control of functionality and design for me.

Look at the bottom of the right navbar to see the widget in action. It will generate a new quote every 20 seconds, or you can click the box to make a new one. In addition to the CSS3 styles I used for rounded corners and shadows, I also added little icons for posting the current quote to Facebook or Twitter. There really isn’t much magic to that–only making the right URL and sending the browser there.

One interesting hurdle was getting Facebook to take the recommended title text for wall posts. When you post a link to your news stream, Facebook pulls the remote URL and looks for Open Graph tags. The quotes are made in javascript, so I pass the whole quote back to the home page of the widget so that the PHP script there can set tags to match. I can even tell Facebook which icon to use along with the news item.

With the new Atlas Shrugged film opening in a couple of weeks, this can be a whimsical way to celebrate Rand’s greatest work. I also hope it generates attention for MindPosts and 18INT.

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Facebook Apps Still Not Serving SSL

Almost two months ago, Facebook added a setting for browsing with an SSL connection. So far, most app developers have not yet caught up.

It’s simple. Go to Account->Account Settings->Account Security->Secure Browsing and click a checkbox.

 

Option for using https "whenever possible"

 

After saving, your Facebook experience will all flow over SSL, every byte encrypted with a 128-bit key. But fire up your favorite game, and you will probably see a request to turn this setting off.

Dialog displayed by apps that don't support SSL

If you click the continue button, you might expect that you’d be temporarily allowing an unencrypted connection. Instead, your setting is turned off. When you’re done with CityVille, you will have to switch it back on again. I’m sure Facebook will improve this user experience over time.

When Facebook rolled out this feature, they added a new setting for app developers that asks for the URL to the secure version of their app. It starts out blank, and when it is blank, the dialog above shows up. Naturally, I wanted to get things right, so I began experimenting. Unfortunately, once you have a valid value, you can’t return to having it be blank. Now I was forced to solve this somehow.

Time for a short diversion into how HTTPS works.

You know how you can have one server hosting multiple domains, each with their own site content? It’s called virtual hosting, and it’s a standard feature of Apache. The way it works in the HTTP protocol is that when your browser connects to the server, it uses the IP address (e.g.192.168.1.1) and in addition to asking for the document to view (e.g. GET /index.html) it also specifies the domain name (e.g. www.18int.com). Apache’s configuration knows where the files on the server are for that domain, and away we go.

In the case of a secure connection, your browser and Apache must exchange keys to be used for encrypting data. Your browser will also ask for proof of identity from the server. The proof is in a small file called a certificate. It’s only good for one IP address and one domain. You can make multiple certificates work if you have multiple IPs. A certificate signed by an authority is a few hundred dollars, but IPs are scarce. It’s a gigantic pain in the neck for a small developer.

If you have multiple apps running on Facebook, you could reorganize them on the server to use subdirectories instead of subdomains. For both canvas apps and iframe apps, the user is hardly exposed to your backend URLs anyway. In the short term, I’ve made a single page that says the following.

We’re sorry! This app does not function when requested via ssl. To access this app, please change your facebook settings under Account->Account Settings->Account Security->Secure Browsing.

Then I pointed all of my SSL URLs at it. Note that I this page is served up using a self-signed certificate. It’s interested that Facebook doesn’t care to enforce the identity check but they do care that the data is send via SSL end to end. That’s reasonable.

Instead of reorganizing all of my files on the backend, I plan to rebuild my apps so that they work outside of the Facebook canvas, using the Facebook Connect feature instead. Facebook seems to be doing what they can to push everyone off of the canvas, anyway.

It’s also interesting that most of the games I’ve tried still show the request to switch off SSL. The popular Zynga games do. I found that Golden Nugget Vegas Casino, run by one of my clients (AltEgo), does serve up with SSL. Smart.

Recently, Twitter added a similar feature to always use HTTPS, but I wouldn’t expect any issues like we have with Facebook because Twitter never got into the business of piping content from apps through their own servers.

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Study Philosophy, Be Powerful

Cory Doctorow linked to a list of famously successful people who studied philosophy.

Bust of Aristotle. Marble, Roman copy after a ...
Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a giant list of famous and accomplished people with philosophy degrees, just the thing to show the parental units when you choose your major. I want the comparable list of successful underwater basket-weaving majors. (via JoHo)

Check out the list and you’ll find one of your heroes and perhaps a villain or two. That suggests to me that studying philosophy helps you become powerful. You will learn fundamental truths, levers to move the world. While I too studied philosophy in college, intensely but outside of university classes, I passionately wish I’d focussed on it earlier. Philosophy should be a core subject of education from the beginning.

Are you interested in learning about philosophy right now? Try Stefan Molyneux’s An Introduction to Philosophy videos.

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