A bit of testimony from the murder trial of Hans Reiser:

On cross examination by defense attorney William DuBois, Andrew Conry-Murray said he was a computer technology writer and agreed with DuBois' characterization that computer programmers "are a little bit socially retarded."

"Some are more socially retarded than others?" DuBois asked.

"Yes."

hrm...

Apartment Therapy, a long time client of mine, is looking for a full time programmer. Looking for a great job doing interesting things? Then this is the gig for you.

Inspired by Gina's Better Gmail extension, I hacked up a little greasemonkey script that'll convert urls into TinyUrls right from the gmail compose window.

Gmail TinyUrl

p.s. baby blog my arse...

BuzzFeed launches today. Conceived by Jonah Perreti, designed by Chris Johanesen, edited by Peggy Wang, and a bit of tech by yours truly.

You may have noticed the introduction of tags here at bitterpill.org. I spent a few hours this weekend moving over to a new weblog tool. I know that many will exclaim, "Why have you discarded that crappy piece of software that you piecemealed together and have basically abandoned for the past two years?" Why indeed. Yet, with so many mature software packages out there to allow easy blogging, and me with so little resources (read: no desire) to add any new functionality to the old system, it seemed logical to move on...to let the old system go. It's me blogging software, not you. We've grown apart, and we just don't seem to communicate anymore. Not to mention the sexy little blog software that works at the dry cleaner down the street. She understands me.

With the new wares we get tagging...ain't it a peach. I've been tagging old posts when the mood hits me, and someday soon, or maybe never, I'll have tagged up the whole pill. In light of this new tagging functionality, I hacked up a little add-on code to display all tags in a format I like to describe as a "Tag Smog" (disclaimer, graphing idea stole shamelessly [maybe a bit of shame] from jason).

heh, server side <blink>. (via the Brain).

a heavily-loaded web server may not be able to respond to blink requests efficiently, which will slow down the perceived blink rate. One work-around to this would be to use a high-capacity blink server farm.

I have been searching around for decent gif animation software for, well, ever. There are free ones and shareware ones and commercial ones with trials. Each one has been clunky in its own way, and I have spent way too much time screwing around with these apps just to make an ad image animate. Do I really need anything so cumbersome and unwieldy just to make an animation?

Here's a brief example of an experience with any number of gif animation tools:

1. start app.
2. figure out how to get an image into said app.
3. image in, but the color is all wrong. bright green has become pea soup.
4. find the color settings.
5. screw with color setting to no avail.
6. reimport higher color image, not full on pea soup, but still soupy.
7. try and find the settings to make the animation loop. takes way to long to find loop setting...
8. after finding loop setting, look for frame delay setting...even longer than loop setting.
9. save out gif.
10. gif looks like shit. start over, and screw with color settings again.
11. repeat with another gif app.

Today I found what for I had been looking. A simple gif animation tool. An application designed with so few bells and less whistles, a technology so simple and perfect and common, that I hadn't considered it. Being blinded by the GUI, I had lost touch with my roots.

I stumbled upon Gifsicle, "a UNIX command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations."

Simple, concise and one line:

After a myriad of crappy GUI tools that made me, well, a tool, I was reminded that sometimes the old ways are best.

The entries for the Huffington Post Contagious Festive went live today...

A few that I like, in no particular order:

• jesusaur - Jesus as a Dinosaur.
• Dropping the Ball - dirty, filthy, funny.
• Braindriving with Ms. Olga Suchadolsky - This one is very strange, but its got boobs, so...
• awwwstrich - Ostriches rapping, need I say more.
• Al Qaeda Caller I.D.

A phone conversation about hacking the roomba.

Mark: I could mount a embedded computer with wifi and a camera on it, and control the roomba from my desktop.

Brian: Take the dog for walk...

Mark: heh, I could program it to walk the dog too!

Brian: No, I mean go outside. Take your dog for a walk. The last thing you need to be doing is sitting at home hacking your damn roomba.

With over 100,000 posts, the gawker database is taking a bit to update to MT 3.2.

been running for about 30 minutes now...

update: finished in about 40 minutes. And yes, this is what qualifies as content around here now-a-days