I’ve got a post at Websites and Beer talking about adding vinegar to beer. Blasphemy? Maybe not…read on.
I’m reposting this here, because it’s sort of a follow up to my post about cheap versus expensive wines. Hooray for food. Hooray for science. And hooray for food & science together!
I love Science. I don’t just love Science, I *fucking* love it. Maybe I’ll do a post on the Science sticks someday.
There’s a webcomic I particularly like, called XKCD. It’s Science-y, Math-y, geek humor. Perfect for me.
One of the best is the following comic, good old #397. I love it because Feynman (one of the most significant scientific figures of the 20th century) shows up *as a zombie*, to defend the Mythbusters (who are awesome). On top of it, he makes a great point about Science, and Science in culture.
That, and I love the phrase “drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness”. Science!
Here’s a neat trick, if you’re working with Ruby. Ever wondered how to get a list of all installed gems?
At the command prompt, type
sudo gem server
Once you’ve done this, go to http://localhost:8808, and you can see all the Ruby Gems installed, along with info and documentation about them. Awesome!
Hat tip to Matt
I’m sharing the link love today. This is a link to Futility Closet, a blog run by a very nice (and presumably well-educated) guy named Greg Ross. He updates often with lots of odd bits of trivia.
He had a post the other day, discussing the price that was paid to the Native Americans for the island of Manhattan. Maybe they didn’t get ripped off, after all.
My coworker Jacob shared a neat cell phone tip with me. If you often get solicitations from a particular phone number (especially those annoying automated ones), you might find this useful.
Next time you get a call from a number you’d rather not hear from again, add them to your phone book — maybe with the name of “Ignore” — and assign a silent ringtone to that contact.
Win!
One hugely important thing in coding is debugging. Unfortunately, a lot of Javascript debugging gets done via alert() calls. This gets awkward quickly, with the alerts affecting timing, and just being annoying if you have to dump large amounts of data out.
Firebug is a great development tool, and has a really handy logging interface that you can dump debugging info to. Just calling console.log(whatever) will dump it to the main Firebug interface as text that you can copy/paste, scroll through, etc.
If you’re developing a Firefox extension, this debugging capability is really useful. Except, calling console.log() doesn’t work, console isn’t defined for the browser, only for each window.
The trick? Call it directly from the Firebug extension object.
Firebug.Console.log()
Be sure to capitalize both Firebug and Console, and you’ll be good to go. In addition to having great capabilities for logging, the console will prevent your debugging messages from popping up to your users, in case you leave some code where it shouldn’t be.
By the way — if you found this helpful, check back here in a few days. I’ve submitted a presentation proposal to SXSW for Firefox extension development, where I’ve got tons of info for creating extensions for web applications. They collect votes from the community, and I’d like your support. Plus, if the presentation goes through, I’ll be collecting lots of my best tips and putting them online as a resource for the attendees. That means you’ll get all of them too, and you don’t have to go anywhere! 
Edit (2008-08-21: Added link for SXSW voting panel)
My blog has a new theme. Classic Tim flavor, new box.
This might affect you if you were subscribed to an RSS feed. I think the themes have their own RSS URL structure. But, if you were subscribed to http://www.timrosenblatt.com/blog/, then you should be okay. Of course, if you were subscribed to the old one, you wouldn’t be seeing this anyways.
I’ve been practicing my drums lately. I’m better now, more than before.
Before I start the links, here’s an article I found discussing how serious drummers can be more physically fit than top athletes. So um, I’m not making noise, I’m exercising!
There’s some links that I wanted to have handy, and I figured I’d share them on here so that others could see them.
Dr Beat Metronome — I’ve heard that Dr Beat are the best. This one seems nicely priced, and has lots of good features. I’ll probably order it soon, since the metronome on my iPhone just isn’t good enough anymore.
Drum Practice Cheat Sheet — lots of good info in here. If I ran throught his full practice schedule consistently, I’d be really good.
MySpace announced they’ll be creating OpenIDs for their users. Although, it’s not full support for OpenID — users can only use their MySpace logins for other sites, but not for signing into MySpace. I’m not sure why they do this, I doubt it’s for any technical or spam-prevention reasons. It seems like a business decision, one that might change in the future.
This might be the tipping point for OpenID. Average MySpace users might not know what OpenID is, but when sites start saying “Sign in with your MySpace account,” people might start noticing. Granted, this might make phishing for MySpace accounts easier, but that was already as easy as catching fish in the frozen food section at the grocery store.
Zombie Feynman got me reading about Feynman, and I came across a great page discussing Feynman’s involvement with the textbook industry. Although it’s funny at times, it’s fairly sad that this is actually the back end of our education system.