Michael Says

Every blog post.

Every article.

Every bit of information added to the internet should have the Date (and possibly even time) stored and presented clearly at the top of the information.

This is so especially true for tech-related info, as that stuff changes monthly.

I was out looking for info on Ruby on Rails scaling, and I found this interesting blog entry:

http://poocs.net/2006/3/27/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-3

Ok, right there in the URL is the date. But I missed that because I clicked in via Google. And on that blog entry it did have the date, but only the Month/Day.

The adventures of scaling, Stage 3

March 27th

Rah rah, how nice of them to give the date! But it wasn’t until I got down to the user comments that I saw the year was 2006!

I searched and searched to find this.  I had a Rails template that I used from several different controllers and actions, and I needed to know which controller/action pair were used to know how to handle special cases in my template.  What I needed was a way in the view to say “What are the names of the controller and action that called me?”

I found the answer here: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4391

To summarize, from the view/template:

<%= controller.controller_name %>

<%= controller.controller_action %>

This is a whine/rant.

Modern CD quality sucks.  It sucks because corporate record company marketing/bean-counting people did research and concluded that “louder = more money”.  They sent a directive to engineers that said “Make all music louder.”

As a result, engineers began compressing and “making louder” all music that gets written to CD.  The real result, if you used (excuse my lack of domain vocabulary) a sound wave analyzer, would show that the amplitudes of the complex sound waves would be mostly very high, near the maximum of possible level.

Worse, they aren’t just nearing the max, they’re full-on hitting the max.  I believe that’s called “clipping”.  Clipping is what you often hear when someone rolls by in a hooptie with their 6×9’s overdriven with a crappy (read, “no amp, just the head unit amp”) amplifier driving them with major distortion.  In other words, it sounds like shit.  Pardon the profanity.

For those of us with particularly sensitive musical ears, this clipping is nearly the worst thing you can do to otherwise-good music.  The worst thing you can do is something that I cannot imagine now, but I allow for the possibility of since I don’t like absolutes :P.

To summarize, modern CD quality is intentionally bad, and it frustrates me.  Dynamic range, the difference between low volume and high volume, is generally good.  Not all sound must be loud to be good, just as not all of a movie must be combat action (or sex) to be interesting.  Besides, there is no “loud” without quiet.

Some readers may now think, “I never noticed this.”  It may not be noticeable without headphones and a CD player.  But for those of us who sometimes use a CD player and headphones, it’s incredibly saddening.  What was a great musical performance has been intentionally ruined by the mandate of marketing people.

Anyway, thus ends my rant on this subject.  Have a good day

Senator Stevens, previously famous for the bridge to nowhere, was immortalized when he gave his lecture on “what is the internet?” (See it below for your entertainment).

Anyway, he claimed the internet wasn’t a truck.  He was right, but he was almost wrong.  The internet actually is a Truck Mostly Full of Stale Bread.

Have you ever Googled something and found some promising results, only to realize (after wasting time reading into some of them) that they were way old?  This is the interweb age!  Tech articles from 2002 are really probably not very useful.  Some are, but most aren’t.  Worse yet, how many articles, papers, and documents fail to even list the date written?  Lots.

Most of the bread on the big truck is stale, and most don’t have a Sell By sticker on them, so you’re left with the prospect of taking a bite of each… unpleasant, and time consuming.