Day: February 1, 2012

Neil Young: Piracy is the new radio

Neil Young was working with Apple on super high-def music format:

Young spoke at length about the lack of quality in today’s mainstream digital music formats, arguing that the “low-res world” of MP3s provide just 5% of the data present in the original studio recordings, paling in comparison to the quality of vinyl records back in the 70’s.

[If you watch the video, Neil Young said “Piracy is the new radio”. Interesting to hear from someone like him. I’ve long felt the same way since must of us toil in obscurity, and care more about being heard at all than the nonexistent lost sales. The fidelity thang has been long time issue for him, he’ cared about this as long as I can recall. I hope Apple doesn’t drop work on this altogether.]

SRAM Red 2012

SRAM Red 2012 – Full Details – BikeRadar:

SRAM have bucked the trend of 11-speed cassettes and electronic shifting for their wholly revamped 2012 Red group, preferring instead to stick with 10 rear cogs and conventional cable actuation. The new 1,739g claimed weight lops about 150g off of what was already a superlight package and major improvements to the brakes, derailleurs and drivetrain provide better stopping power, smoother front shifts and quieter running to accompany the updated ergonomics.

[Outside of the front der, which seems like a nice improvement, I’m impatiently waiting for the hydro stuff.]

[Update: It seems that the front der. is not compatible with the previous shifters. These companies think they’ve created a gravy train by obsoleting designs every few years, but considering the cost of a gruppo in the aftermarket, changes like this just make me feel burned.]

Missing refactoring…

Crazy, Heretical, and Awesome: The Way I Write Rails Apps | James on Software:

To decouple the logging from the creation of the database record, we’re going to use something called a service object. A service object is typically used to coordinate two or more objects; usually, the service object doesn’t have any logic of its own (simplified definition). We’re also going to use Dependency Injection so that we can mock everything out and make our tests awesomely fast (seconds not minutes).

[Again, a missing refactoring from the last major project…]

Source: @brynary

Say hello to Bootstrap 2.0

Say hello to Bootstrap 2.0:

Bootstrap 2 brings a plethora of changes and new features to the toolkit, many added as a result feedback from the community. In addition, much of our work was guided by our experiences of working on Twitter.com’s latest redesign where we created a flexible and durable design system. We took the same approach to Bootstrap 2 and came away with more features, better documentation, smarter default styling, and more.

[Allez!]

‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’

‘The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center’:

Starting in the mid-1930s, when he made his first field recordings in the South,  Lomax was the foremost music folklorist in the United States. He was the first to record Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, and much of what Americans have learned about folk and traditional music stems from his efforts, which were also directly responsible for the folk music and skiffle booms in the United States and Britain that shaped the pop-music revolution of the 1960s and beyond.

Lomax worked both in academic and popular circles, and increased awareness of traditional music by doing radio and television programs, organizing concerts and festivals, and writing books, articles and essays prodigiously. At a time when there was a strict divide between high and low in American culture, and Afro-American and hillbilly music were especially scorned, Lomax argued that such vernacular styles were America’s greatest contribution to music.

[Listen to a few cuts here. Great that all this material will be made available.]