tektastic

The campout happened, and it was an enormous success, everyone seemed to have had particularly special time this year, and I have to join the ranks. Check out just the insanely intricate lighting show put up by the Radiant Atmospheres crew. I was involved in two music sets this year - a Friday evening downtempo set by PolyGroovers (with live appearance by Telene and briefly Fabienne ), and then Sunday morning solo live set. The PolyGroovers stuff had many new tracks from the upcoming album, so that set won't be available for download, but the morning set is below: LeftCtrl Live at Friends and Family Music Campout XII @ Willits CA (109Mb, 74min) The above set has two songs composed together with Kem (Filip Jach), and one with Joseph Lee of Progress/SF. Please feel free to download and leave your feedback as comments!

Obama's Potential Presidency There is plenty of excitement around Barack Obama's potential presidency, and I think there's a lot to be excited about. There's is an overwhelming feeling among people I talked to in San Francsisco, how Obama is "Our President" — not a poster boy for old money or a powerful family. The fact that the Internet fund-raising helped Obama to compete and win against the Clinton clan is a testament to the truly new era, a more democratic one, where if someone can fire up a lot of people they can rally up quckly and effectively. This efficiency is something to look forward to, if and when Obama becomes a President. Whether or not all the people behind Obama will continue to support him, is another question. People tend to idealize their heroes way to quickly, and that's also dangerous. The recent backlash of liberal bloggers about Obama's compromise vote — is a great example. Politics is still politics, and nobody ever gets

After announcing to the world that Firefox 3 will be available at 10am PDT today, June 17th, amidst apparent publicity stunt to generate the record number of downloads per day (has anyone been really keeping a tally?) the web site http://getfirefox.com/ returns the pathetic Http/1.1 Service Unavailable Firefox is certainly a decent browser, but it's stability seems to have gone reversely proportional to the self-professed greatness and the size of their publicity stunts. Safari is now by far the best looking, and fastest browser for Windows, and it has been that way for mac for a while. Good luck Fifefox 3 (when we see you), but I for one, am not buying it. Update @ 12:23pm OK, so finally FF3 is available for download, and I have it installed and running. The first thing is that not all plugins are compatible, and if you are using FireBug for web development, you must install the 1.1 version available here.

It finally happened :) I've been working for Infectious.com since about July last year, and it's been a really fun run building a brand new product, from a mere conception to this moment - full public launch. Of course some people may have caught the glimpse of this from TechCrunch article a few weeks ago . Nevertheless, here it is - Car Art For the Masses - available to you from a spanking new website, designed and developed by the Team Infectious and yours truly. The idea of course is simple - everyone's car looks the same! OK, so some are dirtier than others, some stink more, all of this is certainly true, but from an aesthetic point of view, if you and your neighbor accidentally buy the same model of a car, you are screwed! Well, not really, and especially not anymore. Stop wasting time and go get some cool art for your car, make it look like nobody else, even if you drive a stinky dirty '74 Datsun. I'm seriously.

I wrote this post after hours of frustration, trying to fix my broken environment, and losing valuable time on a project that was falling behind. I now realize that the post was overly emotional, and probably not entirely fair to the Aptana team. I'll post updates here as I work through the issues to get my RadRails working again.

Make Model What? If you like me were tasked with loading a database of recent car makes/models/years, you would start by looking on the web and seeing if someone else just has it out there, readily available, hopefully for free, but perhaps for a tiny nominal fee.? If only it was that simple... I looked and looked, and couldn't find anything that would fit the above requirements. So I thought, who would know about US car models better than Kelly Blue Book? So I went on their site, and sure enough they have a javascript file that lists all known to them makes and models of used cars. Since the file is public, I figured it's not really "evil" if I scrape and parse it for my own benefit. Disagree? Have a better source? Then leave a comment. Anyway, to cut the long story short, I'm hoping to save a day or so to someone else who may, like me, be looking for this information. The ruby module shown below retrieves and parses the javascript from KBB site into