Code that makes any song swing
Some dude has developed a Python tool that will apply a swing rhythm to any waveform. Some nifty examples. Crazy talk.
(via Andrew)
My iPad delivery is late
I pre-ordered an iPad a few weeks ago, and delivery was promised by today coincident with the international launch. I received a shipment notification at the start of the week, and everything looked on track until yesterday when I received an e-mail from Apple stating that "FedEx has informed us that, due to a flight delay, your package will not deliver on May 28th as planned" and will instead arrive, perhaps, on Saturday.
In and of itself this is not really a big deal, and it doesn't make much of a difference to me. However, it rankles for two reasons:
- FedEx's own status page, for a full day following this message from Apple, was still advising on-time delivery for May 28 at 12:00 noon. It also detailed a non-sensical and discontiguous itinerary of departures and arrivals between Anchorage, Memphis, and now Mississauga.
- Since today is significant only as a marketing date and the shipments were ostensibly ready to go well before this time, Apple could have erred on the side of customer satisfaction and shipped a few days early.
It seems unusual for Apple to over-promise and under-deliver, although its neurosis of trying to orchestrate a precise and coordinated world-wide reveal is unsurprising.
Record in H.264 and you can never publish your work?
Apparently most all consumer (and even some professional) photo and video cameras embody licensing encumbrances that strive to prevent profitable distribution of your own work: Why Our Civilizations Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA.
Since the posting of that a couple days ago several other analyses (CNET, Engadget) have been presented, including reaction from Lukas Mathis who concludes that H.264 is not viable for long-term use.
This is sort of a rough situation.
Silly trendy web-service names
It seems to be a trend these days for web-based-software business to name themselves or their products using the formula [number] [plural noun]. This might have been clever the first time, but has quickly grown tired and hokey. Offending examples include (in ascending order of the leading scalar quantity) 37 Signals, 43 Folders, 99 Designs, 280 Slides.
Of course, the precedent for this scheme was set earlier by a similar vowel-removal scheme, whose progeny share equally hackneyed and silly-sounding names. Offending examples include Flickr, Tumblr, Modernizr, Flattr.
(June 2010) I've also started to pick up on another trend: the suffix "-ify". Offending examples include Spotify, Shopify.
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Twittage
- Likely going to stop reading twitter now that it's broken via RSS. Workaround suggestions welcome. (Hoping that @nnw_Mac will add support!)
- Praise the l0rd; iOS 4.1 finally restores my iPhone 3G to its reasonably-snappy state of old.
- How do I get an RSS feed of the twitter accounts I'm following? Previously using /statuses/friends_timeline.rss but that broke yesterday.
- Words which irritate me: "price point" (just say "price"); "sign off on" (just say "sign"); "viral video" (just say "trendy tripe").
- Can #Apple not produce a goddamn display anymore without a piece of shit reflective glass in front of it?