echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

Well, apparently, when you're a woman, you have to be amazing just to get past all of the old-boys-club and macho chauvinism that pervades the entire Open Source culture.

Women in Open Source - Notes In The Margin

Rich Bowen makes an astute observation about the calibre of women in open source.

A bunch of the (astoundingly awesome) electro freaks are based in Vancouver, where I was sinfully not playing shows.

Bankai kills Vancouver

What was the solution to this conundrum? It's the crowdsource age, so work out a budget and ask for donations. Well, not strictly donations, if you give money you become a shareholder and if there are profits, you profit proportionally to your stake.

I think this is so fantastic, and love the fact that thesixtyone has made it easier for Bankai to get something like this off the ground, because he's talking directly to people who love his music. This is the first time I've heard of anything like this. Does anyone know of other instances where fans have paid an artist directly to tour?

Go to the site and become a shareholder.

I'm sitting in the back seat of a taxi in Nicaragua with my beloved beside me. There are five other people in the taxi with us, three of them squashing us, holding us down in the back. A man is reaching around Rachel, jabbing me in the neck with a knife, not hard enough to break the skin but enough to leave a mark and let us know they're willing to hurt us. They're shouting, "solo money", only money, slapping us, pushing our heads back into the seat. They are managing to frighten us.

About half an hour beforehand we jumped on a bus in Granada, heading north to Masaya Market. We only had a couple of days left in Central America, and we planned to buy gifts for family and friends. The local buses have been great so far, friendly people, cheap fares, and a view of what might count as real life in Nicaragua.

A guy behind us tried to make conversation. I'll call him Limpy, since later we see he has a limp. His English is probably worse than our Spanish, which is hard to imagine, but adding in some sign language we managed to communicate a little. He told us that this bus doesn't go straight to the market, but he's going there so he'll show us the way. We were actually on a smaller "Express" bus, a big minivan, a kind we haven't taken before, so this seemed plausible.

The bus dropped us by the side of the road and we caught another, this time one of the more familiar chicken buses. This is a local bus, Limpy said, that will take us close to the market. A big, friendly woman who was already on the bus confirms it, and says she's going as well. The ticket guy couldn't change our 200 cordoba note, and Limpy paid the 5 cordoba fare for each of us. It's very little money but a kind gesture. I had the same thing happen to me when I was in Iran.

Eventually, Limpy asked the driver to stop, and Rachel and I got off with him and Friendly Woman, and a couple of other people. Apparently it's now just a short walk to the market. As we walked, Rachel had a chat with a woman who introduced herself as Helena. They walked ahead of me, and Limpy walked slightly behind me, silently. I tried to listen to Rachel and Helena's conversation.

After a short time, Limpy started excitedly saying that the four of us could share a taxi right to the market for just 5 cordobas each. We'd found some change, and tried to repay him for the bus, but he indicated he'd be happy if we just take the taxi with him. It didn't sound like a terrible idea, so he flagged down a passing taxi and the four of us got in. Driving down the road a bit further, we stopped and Friendly Woman and Knife Guy jumped on top of us and the world erupted in sound and fury.

Anyone who's done much travel would have been shaking their head for at least a couple of paragraphs. Why did we get off the buses? Why didn't we ask a bus driver or ticket guy if this was the right way to the market? Why did we trust these complete strangers? All good questions, and I've asked myself many times since. Besides the fact that there always seemed to be someone else with Limpy confirming what he said, I think we'd been lulled into a false sense of security by a safe couple of weeks in Costa Rica, and the few stops we'd had in Nicaragua; relatively safe places, San Juan del Sur, Ometepe, Granada. We simply let our guard down.

They drove up and down the highway, turning around at what felt like roundabouts, going through our stuff. Shouting, slapping, jabbing with the knife, forcing our eyes shut, a bit more shouting and slapping. Once they found our credit cards the game changed to shouting demands for our PINs. They seemed to believe me when I told them Rachel's card didn't have a PIN, it was just a credit card, so they concentrated on mine. Say it, write it, say it in Spanish, type it into a mobile phone, I suppose to make sure it was the same every time, that I wasn't lying.

Rachel was even more squashed in than me, with Helena sitting on top of her, and Limpy holding a knife at her hand, threatening to cut her if we didn't cooperate. The windows were all wound up, and it was hot. Confined spaces are never great for Rachel and, unsurprisingly, she had a panic attack. They could see something was wrong, and thankfully we knew to word for drugs from warning posters in airports, and we managed to find Rachel's drugs in her bag.

Satisfied I'd told them the right PIN, they dropped Helena off at an ATM and continued driving up and down the road. I actually hoped she'd be able to get money out, as I thought that would increase the chances of them releasing us, but when they picked her up again the shouting and slapping started again in earnest. No money. I suspect the problem was that the card was a MasterCard, which only works in one bank's ATMs, but I didn't think of that at the time. I was saying in English things along the lines of, "I swear that's the right PIN, and there's money in there." Of course, they couldn't understand me at all, but I think they believed I was earnest.

Then things quietened down. They'd given up, time up. We'd been driving up and down for less than half an hour, but it seemed much longer. Not so much slapping and shouting, but still making us close our eyes, they started to drive us down a small dirt road. We were both thinking, either they're going to let us go now, or they're going to kill us. Rachel was convinced it was the latter, I was pretty sure it was the former, and was trying to find out from Friendly Woman what was going on. I caught some of what she was saying. "Camina," I think she said, you walk. "Salida Nicaragua," leave Nicaragua. "Disculpe, nino infirme," sorry, sick baby. She then slipped Rachel enough money to get a bus back to Granada. Maybe Rachel's panic attack had helped.

They stopped the taxi and dumped us out. Of course, they took our cameras and cash, and anything else of real value. Bizarrely, in addition to the cash, they gave us back our bags and Rachel's credit card, but they kept her art materials and a bracelet made of bone Mahjong tiles that we'd bought in Shanghai.

The further away from the incident I get, the more it just seems bizarre. It's good to be alive, and when we have bad travel experiences in the future we can say, "It's not as bad as the Nicaragua Incident."

Recently, Disqus users have been victims to blackhat spammers who spend some time to leave legitimate comments, only to sign off with a suspicious link hawking designer sunglasses.

Disqus Blog » Two issues worth pointing out

They say "recently" but this is exactly the type of thing I wrote about almost eight months ago.

Now that I'm a disgruntled ex-eMusic customer, I've been playing around with other music sites. Via the enigmatic Bankai, I was introduced to thesixtyone, and it provides some of the things I dream of in a music economy. Most notably, artists actually get most of the money.

On thesixtyone, artists sell their music directly to their fans. Unlike a record or distribution deal where they only make $1-2 per album (if they ever get paid, that is), artists on thesixtyone make at least $7 per album and are paid every 30 days -- no wait for recoupment and no complex royalty schemes!

The site is attractive, relatively easy to use, under active development, and slightly buggy. They seem very responsive to bug reports, so I'm confident things will get better and better.

As individual artists rather than labels upload music, the music selection is nowhere near as wide as what was available at eMusic (I spits on the Sony deal). But I've still managed to find quite a bit of stuff to enjoy, my current favourite being thecitylights. You can "heart" music you enjoy, and if the song becomes popular (hearted by others) you get reputation. They've also got a clever "Quests" system, things like "listen to recently uploaded music", that earns you hearts and reputation. I'm finding it slightly addictive, though I'm not really sure what you do with reputation.

thesixtyone has a Flash music player, and lets you navigate around the site and the music keeps playing, which is great. Unfortunately, it does this by intercepting clicks, so that the URL doesn't reflect where you are in the site, so you can't bookmark things directly.

Music can be bought with a credit system. I haven't bought any yet, and I'm not sure what the pricing is, so we'll see how that compares to other sites when I do.

Overall, I'm hopeful thesixtyone will be meeting at least some of my music needs for a while to come. Go and sign up and play around, and tell them michaeltwofish sent you.

If the Times and/or Post were to erect a pay wall, I see things playing out as follows: they lose most of their readers; ad revenue declines accordingly; the revenue they make from readers who do pay won’t even make up for the lost ad revenue; and so by switching from free to paid access they’d actually sink further into the red.

Daring Fireball: Pay Walls

This seems so obviously true to me, I find it surprising that it keeps coming up. I wish they'd just do it, and collapse, so that something sensible can take the place of the broken old media. Oh, and if you wouldn't mind taking down the music and film industries while you're there, that would be great, thanks.

If you've got something to say, say it. It just smacks of cheap link-baiting when you call your post "9 things you can do to increase your traffic" or "12 ways you can last longer in bed".

A random collection of things I've learnt while playing with HTML 5, mostly from errors thrown by the HTML 5 validator trying to validate this blog. There is absolutely nothing groundbreaking here, and it's stuff I should have already known (or more likely and frightening not forgotten that I did know). In fact, most of it has nothing to do with HTML 5 at all.

• If you have valid HTML 4 and you change the DOCTYPE declaration to <!DOCTYPE html> things will mostly just work and your page will be valid HTML 5.
• &#151; is an invalid character, not an em dash, and shouldn't be used. Use &#8212; instead. See the article on A List Apart about dashes. Of course, this has nothing to do with HTML 5.
• When the href of an anchor has a query string that contains an ampersand, the ampersand should be escaped. So http://example.com?id=1&colour=red should be http://example.com?id=1&amp;colour=red. Again, that's not about HTML 5. This is actually my most common error, and I can't seem to fix it. Changing to an entity still ends with a raw ampersand in source. I'll have to investigate sometime.
• The tt element is obsolete.
• I use a lot of em dashes.
• Spaces in hrefs work but are not valid.
• Habari's autop function looks like it could still do with some work.
• I can sleep under my desk and no-one will notice.

I've been a vi and Vim user for a long time. As such, my most productive writing comes when I'm using my beloved modal editor. I'm also a long-time Mutt user, the main attraction being that I can edit my mail with Vim. Recently, I've started using GMail for my non-academic mail, so I can more cleanly drop into academic mode without distraction.

GMail is much better than Mutt at a couple of important things, the most obvious being search. Searching all your mail is a pain to set up in Mutt, but the simplest thing in GMail. Mutt is also quite slow opening large mailboxes, and it's impossible to save the same message in multiple 'places', as you can with GMail's labels.

But I really missed being able to write email in Vim. Good email communication requires chopping out stuff that's irrelevant to your reply, and snipping that stuff and keeping it readable is infinitely easier in Vim than in the pointy clicky world of a browser's textarea¹.

While editing a long and involved email today, I pined on identica for Vim editing in GMail. I wasn't really expecting anyone to be able to suggest how I might achieve that but I quickly got a couple of useful leads. penryu suggested vimperator, which was supported by notjosh. Vimperator is an extension that makes Firefox behave in a kind of Vim-like way. I gave it a try but I couldn't work out how to use it as an editor for textareas², and it seemed to have a bug (or possibly a conflict with the diigo toolbar) that meant I couldn't see anything I entered in Normal mode. So I ditched vimperator.

I had a small side journey looking at jsvi, a JavaScript reimplementation of vi, which I might revisit later to make a jQuery plugin, and extend that into a Habari plugin, but decided that was more than I wanted to do for the moment.

Next, screwtape and gavincarr suggested the It's All Text extension for Firefox. I managed to get that hooked up to MacVim (I couldn't get gvim to work) using the full path to the MacVim binary, in my case /Applications/MacPorts/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/MacVim. It seemed a little flaky in that it would only send the textarea to the buffer, and save edited content back, if MacVim wasn't open beforehand. That was okay because I use console Vim for everything else, and I can set MacVim to quit when the last window closes.

So, I was almost completely happy. The one down side was that I had been using Fluid to make a site-specific browser for GMail, which keeps my mail separate from my browser and seems to help keep Firefox's memory usage under control. But then, as I poked around MacVim's preferences I saw this.

I'm willing to risk it for the moment. Enabling the external editor means I can have Fluid + GMail + Vim. Using the It's All Text Firefox extension means I can use Vim to edit wiki pages or write blog posts, like I'm doing with this one right now. And all that means I'm pretty happy.

[Update: I'm _sure_ using MacVim as an external editor did work, but a day later edited text is no longer sent back to GMail. Sigh, perhaps I was imagining it. Now the closest I can get is cmd+A to select all the text in MacVim, close it, cmd+A to select all the text in GMail, then cmd+V to overwrite it with the edited text.]

1. This is not your opportunity to say that it's even easier in emacs or textmate or notepad or whatever, because it's my blog and I like Vim, so there. ↩
2. Later, frt told me that you can achieve this with :set guioptions+=mT. I didn't try it, but I may revisit Vimperator in the future. ↩

When I was in primary school, every kid in my school did an Ishihara test. It was a one-off thing, and I don't know who carried it out or what the purpose was, but it showed there were three colour blind pupils; my younger brother and I were two of them.

I can't remember when or how I found out I was colour blind, but I already knew before I took the test, and while the identity of the three wasn't announced everyone seemed to know it was me. Kids ask a million questions.

If you're going to have a disability, colour blindness is probably the one you'd choose. It's had very little effect on my life. I can't see the numbers in the dots. I'm more likely to talk about things in terms of their shape or position than their colour, even if it's not a colour I have trouble with, so if someone says, "You see the blue car?" I might respond, "You mean the third one along?" And when people find out I'm colour blind they often say, "What colour is my jumper? What colour is that book?" That kind of misses the point, because the problem is distinguishing colours from each other.

Apparently there are different kinds of colour blind. I don't know what kind I am because none of the descriptions and tests ever seem to match up for me, but I must admit I've never really taken the effort to find out. Like I say, it doesn't effect me that much.

In the left-hand image, I see nothing at all, just a textured background. That suggests I have Deuteranopia (also known as Daltonism), but the description sounds somewhat more severe than my experience. I can see the numbers in the other two images (Protanopia and Tritanopia). They're both very vague, especially the middle image, but maybe that's the way they are for people with normal vision. Are they all clear to you? Hover over the images to see what the numbers are.

Just out of interest, I did a hue senstitivity test recently. Normal vision would show no bars.

So, long story short, that's why my blog theme is predominantly red¹.

1. Yes, that's a joke ↩