Omega Recoil at the Fire Arts Festival

Tonight I went over to West Oakland to see the Fire Arts Festival, and particularly to see Omega Recoil's "Rat Scientists" performance.

It's a really fun bit of absurdist theater, in which giant rats in lab coats conduct experiments on "human" subjects beneath a giant upside-down Tesla coil. That's right, monkey boy: beneath an upside-down Tesla coil!

Beyond that, the amazing thing about the festival is all the fire. Fire looks really good. Really big flames look really good. But I actually didn't see much of anything that I'd call "fire art." Not because the art itself is the typical aesthetically immature Burning-Man-Outsider-Art sort of thing - of course it's that, and more power to it.

The reason is that it's "art with fire" instead of "fire art."

Ooh, what about a giant metal tricycle... WITH FIRE?

How about large-breasted women standing in front of.... FIRE?

Or maybe a big meditating Buddha made out of scrap metal.... WITH FIRE?

Or how about some flying trapeze artists, risking life and limb on a giant scaffolding... WITH FIRE?

To be fair, I did see a couple things that seemed to deserve the name Fire Art. There was one thing that seemed to be just a metal bucket with a flame in it. Assuming it didn't later turn into a whirlygig machine-art dingleberry WITH FIRE, then it's probably in the clear. And there was a guy who had a square column about a meter high, on a pedestal, with a fire in it, melting something on the outside. That probably qualifies too.

In that sense, the Omega Recoil show really stood out. It was fun, it wasn't self-important, it was frankly a whole lot more death-defying than any of the fire games, and it was actually about Electricity and the Tesla coil. (Presumably as a condition of participation, some wooden chairs caught fire while the hu-man subjects were basking in their electroshock mating ritual.)

(Disclosure: I live with John Behrens and Fearghal O'Dea, so I probably would have said something nice about the Rat Scientists even if I didn't like the show.)

The coil at rest.

Art With Fire.

Double your IQ or no money back.

I saw this today on Facebook. I wonder if Mr. Gate is really that smart.

Thao

Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down deserve as many blog posts as there are bloggers to post them, so here's one more.

I bought the two albums available on iTunes and have been listening to them a lot lately, and they continue to grow on me, especially the earlier one. There's no way I could ever stop digging "Big Kid Table" -- in addition to being awesome, it was my introduction to Thao, when I saw her perform it solo at the Utah over a year ago.

But lately I find myself listening to both albums back to back while working, and I think I have a new favorite. But it's a secret, in case I change my mind.

If you're looking for some good new music, and above all smart, witty music, check out Thao. Plus she's smokin' hot, which is always a nice complement to talent.

Printing with TextMate, vim and Friends.

TextMate and vim are my favorite text editors. Unfortunately, TextMate has very little support for printing. It's a nightmare, really, and unlikely to be fixed any time soon. The author simply isn't particularly interested in printing.

Fortunately, vim is really good at printing, at least to PostScript, and does syntax highlighting better than just about anything else. And fortunately, TextMate is designed to let its users easily hack together their own supplementary solutions, called Bundles.

My solution to the printing problem is, in short:

1. Print from vim to PostScript.
2. Convert the PostScript to PDF.
3. Open the PDF in Preview.
4. Do all this with the standard command-P shortcut.

First, here's the bundle item:

    [ -n "$TM_FILEPATH" ] && \
    PDF_FILE=~/Desktop/`basename "$TM_FILEPATH"`.pdf
    PS_FILE=/tmp/`basename "$TM_FILEPATH"`.ps
    vim \
        "+set number" "+syntax on" "+color slate" \
        "+set printoptions=number:y" \
        "+set printfont=courier:h9" \
        "+hardcopy > $PS_FILE" "+q" \
        $TM_FILEPATH &>/dev/null && \
        ps2pdf $PS_FILE $PDF_FILE && \
        rm $PS_FILE && \
        open $PDF_FILE

And here's a screenshot to make it even easier:

To get this working on your own Mac, you need to install the xpdf package from MacPorts, and then find a suitable color scheme for vim printing if you don't like the default. There's a great write-up on that last bit over on the Vim Tips Wiki. Once you've installed/tweaked/tested your scheme, just replace the "slate" reference in the bundle text above.

LIMITATIONS, QUIRKS AND BUGS

1. This prints in 9pt Courier, with line numbers and wrapping, because that's how I think code should be printed.
2. Only saved files are printed; your "buffer" is not. I may change that later.
3. It will probably break if the slate color scheme is not installed. That was the best scheme installed by default on my Mac, hence the choice.
4. The PDF is saved to your Desktop, overwriting any like-named PDF, e.g. MyModule.pm.pdf. I like having the thing on my desktop, but I may make it clobberproof later.
5. YMMV, it's probably buggy, and so on. If you aren't comfortable hacking UNIX, don't try this at home. I actually don't think it's good enough yet to submit to the bundle repository, so don't make any assumptions.

Az a bajom van, hogy majom van, de nem bajor, se baján.

No idea why the monkeys are in my brain tonight. I ate too many bananas, that's why. http://mynameisniki.com/archives/3

I want a Facebook app...

...that aggregates the notifications and "feeds" from the other, crappy, can't-be-bothered-to-try social networks I'm still on. Actually what I really want is for that functionality to be built in to the Facebook iPhone app. Because I still have a bunch of non-technical friends who joined networks like MySpace or iWiW (in Hungary) back before those networks threw their hands up and stopped caring, and I still want to know what they're up to, but I don't want to log on to those train-wreck sites to find out. (I'm lookin' at you, iWiW, selling out your home culture, and I don't mean the sale to T-Mobile. Sajnálom, de ezek a programmozók rossz gyerekek. Az üzletemberek is. You can't just screw your friends when you get a little money.) I still love LinkedIn but mostly because I like the idea of keeping business networking and social networking separate. I'm one of the few people who can see the logic of their recent $1B valuation, but they're still very vulnerable. Their viability as a business essentially depends on Facebook considering that market too small to be worth the distraction. So that's my main wish. Social networks want to be monopolies, and since we know (or think we know) that's bad for the economy we'll settle for a short list of them. My money's on Facebook, LinkedIn, and a revived Orkut (since Google can just spend its way to innovation). Meanwhile, memo to Zuck: let me give you ad feedback. I'll do it for free, just to not see ads I dislike; and I don't need to explain to you how much more valuable it will make your ad space. On behalf of everyone over 30 on Facebook, I swear this will work. Because anyone who knows me knows the following ad was a complete and utter waste, in fact borderline offensive to my sensibility. And yet I spend bushels of money online every year, much of it on random things "gaming pros" would find trivial, like books and clothes and (no, really) tennis racquets. All they need is a "this is stupid" button to motivate me (not a "close" link which is passive and will be ignored) -- and boom, you make more money. Mine is the generation of participatory permission marketing. I know how the game works, I know the technology, I know the business - and I'm willing to spend a little of my time helping you win, because I believe that better ad targeting systems are in my best interest as well. (For the record: I'm not against making a buck on video games, and I have friends who do. I'm against pretending it's something other than a simple entertainment business. Memo to head office: you're not the new Film.)

Welcome to the Clowd

Seth Godin just coined a brilliant new term: "the clowd."
His post is here:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/the-clowd.html
As usual it's pretty insightful, and of course your privacy has been an illusion for a long time now anyway, but there's one thing I disagree with.
The clowd isn't the "crowd-cloud," it's the "clown-cloud."
Don't be afraid. The clown's afraid too.