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  • Twitter

    I logged in the first time soon after it started in 2007. I did my ten years and then mostly logged off by 2017. I’m not likely to start using it again regularly although I still use it occasionally as a people bookmarking service of sorts. I logged in last week to get an ‘archive’ of all of my data and publish it elsewhere1,2.  I tweeted 828 times and based on the IDs in the data, I’m guessing that I was the 950,535th person to ever tweet. The process felt achingly familiar3. I’ve had some discussions with others about it recently and it reminds me to think about how I use the web. Per the course… I like to flush it out, write it down, and publish it so I can send a link instead of hashing it out in an email or text thread.

    Twitter was built as a MicroBlogging service. Microblogging as a type of broadcast medium was the forerunner to social networking platforms. Social networking existed from the moment the first network computer connections were made. Twitter had a good name and was the best breed of something not unique amongst the landscape at the time. The fundamentals of Twitter already existed elsewhere. The Twitter idea originated from Odeo4,5, a podcasting company. It was just a means of having an SMS group chat.  Evan Williams created Blogger which was sold to Google and was the basis of the ideas behind both podcasting and blogging. Before Twitter, social media meant connecting with others online primarily through email and RSS, both of which could be read from the same client and in a browser. Some folks worked out unique ways to notify others via email for pingbacks and trackbacks6. I was a fan of Friendfeed because it supported pulling feeds from various sources. Facebook acquired it for $15 million and shut it down7.  Similarly, Pump.io, StatusNet, and identi.ca were using the open-source Activity Streams format which was a precursor to the ‘Fediverse’ or federated social network terms tossed around today. 

    Inter-Net-work….the web was inherently social long before the media part. In Silicon Valley’s race to capitalize, proprietary methodologies were created because open standards hinder income potential. Even the data archive I got from Twitter last week isn’t exactly portable. The WC3, who sets the standards has recommended Web Mentions, Activity Streams, and Activity Pub9 standards which is the protocol that makes Mastodon federated. I migrated most of my Twitter follows over to Mastadon while I was at it last week. Watching the other platforms pivot to gain new users is amusing. Substack has added ‘mentions’, ’cross-posts’, and ‘best seller’ badges10. Tumblr rolled out a $7 badge and the owner insisted they would be implementing the activitypub specification which I noted appropriately11. I’m sure folks will figure out a way to spam those protocols too as long as there is a way to profit from them. Twitter turned to bots after it gained popularity and the account APIs were introduced. The bot, spam, link farms, etc were online long before Twitter too.

    Elon Musk recently tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” likely in reference to his surveys on reinstating previously banned accounts. It translates to the “Voice of the People is the Voice of God”,  but the full context of the most cited reference to that term is:

    Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.  “ And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. 

    ~ Alcuin in his letters to Charlamagne Epistle 127 in 760AD12.

    The riotousness of the crowd is Twitter. And Twitter is just a bellwether for the internet as a whole as we adapt to new communications mediums. Those first couple of years were just techie types tweeting because those were most of the same folks with websites.  Then came the journalists, media, celebrities, publishers, and internet celebrities. Then everyone’s uncle had it installed on their phone.  When those other folks started rambling on about their other interests, I lost interest. And then they started to monetize it all with adverts, tracking users across the web, and rewriting shared URLs so they could track those too.  The most retweeted thing ever was a pyramid scheme offering a reward for retweets. The web was already decentralized and will likely always be outside some platforms’ walled gardens. I just hope that the efforts to improve the open standards aren’t sabotaged by private interests.

    I’m sure in the coming year we’ll end up hearing a lot more on free speech and social media. I have a very simple minded approach to it which I wrote about pretty extensively in my article on Section 23013. I think that you’re welcome to espouse your opinions, ideas, or theories however you’d like but not entirely without consequence if they are damanging to others. I think that the main product of social media platforms, aside from usability, is sorting and moderating that information so that it’s vaulable to it’s end users. A platform like Twitter is a private company and can make itself reponsible for moderation however it best see’s fit to it’s own business model. And likewise, I can excersize my own liberty to not pay it any attention.

    I’d use social media again if I had something to promote and I suppose I’m lucky not to have the need. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams apologized saying he was “wrong to think that an open platform where people could speak freely would make the world a better place”.  I wouldn’t completely agree with him on that because I believe there have been some good things gained through social networking platforms.  I read an essay recently fed to me, not via social media but my handy dandy good ole’ fashion hosted RSS reader…  entitled A Tweet Before Dying that said “What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh.”13. Other than echoing my sentiments here, whatever happens with Twitter means very little to me because I choose to rely not on the platform itself but on the interoperable standards of the internet which were social from the get go. 

    2022/12/03 Update:

    Right on Cue… Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist published a series of tweets he’s calling the Twitter Files15 yesterday afternoon looking into the content moderation efforts of Twitter during the last election. Main takeaway for me was the fact that, imagine this… people are sending emails around requesting removals and questioning various policies. Sometimes just having an audience has it’s own consequences.

    2025/11/15 Update:

    The thing is… all this new reporting on foreign spam accounts seems so obvious to me, I can’t even really understand how it’s news other than the fact that they added the ‘about this account’ features showing country of origin16. The new reporting did kinda touch on something I hinted at here and that America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle17. Perhaps I’ll log in again and leave this as my only ‘tweet’ since I previously deleted all of the others… na, ole Space Karen isn’t getting any eyeballs from me.

    1. @windhamdavid tweets – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/tweets 
    2. @windhamdavid follows – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/people#i-follow-on-twitter
    3. Windham, D. 2020. Dirty Algorithm – https://davidwindham.com/dirty-algorithm/
    4. Odeo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeo
    5. Twitter History – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History 
    6. Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
    7. FriendFeed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed 
    8. Silicon Valley – S3E10 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
    9. W3C Social Web Protocols- https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ 
    10. Substack – https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-mentions-and-cross-posts
    11. Tumblr –https://windhamdavid.tumblr.com/
    12. Alcuin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcuin
    13. Windham, D. 2021. Section 230 – https://davidwindham.com/section-230/
    14. Ford, P. 2022. A Tweet Before Dying – https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/
    15. Taibbi, M. 2022. The Twitter Files – https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
    16. Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-account/685042/
    17. America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle – https://www.404media.co/americas-polarization-has-become-the-worlds-side-hustle

  • David Byrne

    I went to see David Byrne in Asheville a couple weeks ago. We were in the first rows and the audience started following the performers dance moves. It was like being in some sorta intimate line dance with the band. It was stellar. Watching him perform is more akin to watching a preacher than a rock musician. I’ve had a long held fascination with David Byrne and I think it began in August of 1981 when MTV first went on the air and I saw this video.

    I would have been just under 10 years old the first time I saw the video, but I remember quite vividly the debut of MTV on our console television in the living room. MTV aired a bunch of the same videos1 over and over, but none of them grabbed my attention the way Once In A Lifetime by the Talking Heads2 did. In retrospect, I believe the innovative use of film editing was just the product of the art school background of the Talking Heads band members. At that age, I didn’t really understand the meaning of the lyrics and it was only the motion that intrigued me. Regardless, the song reappeared in a 1989 film entitled Down and Out In Beverly Hills3, which gave me a bit of insight into the meaning of it. The theme of the film kinda nailed the existential crisis of the song lyrics. About that same time (1989) I owned exactly two concert films on VHS: The Song Remains the Same by Led Zepplin and Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads4. Both of which are two of my all time favorite concert films. I bought up about every Talking Heads and David Byrne CDs I could get my hands on. And I played them non-stop. I had a couple friends who also enjoyed them, but they were few and far between.

    Skip ahead fifteen years or so, when I met my wife in college. Two things really stood out about our first date from my other gal pals. The first is that she had a really good sense of humor, not just the giggle type, but the dark and cynical gut rolling humor I like. The second thing is that she really liked the David Byrne and Talking Heads. It wasn’t just the ‘oh yeah, they’re cool’ type of like. She knew all of the lyrics to most of the songs and understood them. The first birthday gift I ever bought her was a talking heads CD box set. We played that thing out on every trip we took. I’ve since read How Music Works6 and followed about every recording project, film, or book he’s been involved with. I’m also particularly fond of his internet radio station7 because of the way he curates the playlists. I can’t say there is anything he’s created that I don’t like. I am particularly fond of a couple though… the film True Stories, Look Into the Eyeball, and Uh-Oh. I also really like the soundtrack to The Last Emperor and it was nice seeing him play himself on the Simpsons Dude, Where’s My Ranch? and in This Must Be the Place.

    Neither of us have ever seen David Byrne in concert. I bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale and put us in the second row. As with what has been noted the style of that original video in that he studied archive footage of “preachers, evangelists, people in trances, African tribes, Japanese religious sects” to see how he could incorporate them into his performance… the live performance we watched wasn’t too far off. The way he engaged the audience wasn’t that of a rock star, but of an evangelist. Because the set design was so simple and the accompanying band members engaged in a rehearsed synchronized dance routine, the first ten rows of the auditorium were completely engaged in the performance. Him and his crew were working hard breaking a sweat, and had obviously spent countless hours rehearsing the material and choreography. Like I said… it was top notch. We already knew the lyrics to the new album so we listened to the Imelda Marcos inspired musical Here Lies Love5 written by Byrne on the way up, while Ginny researched the Marcos’ real life. On the way back we listened to Brian Eno. I’d give the American Utopia concert a 10/10. And I give David a 10/10 on being an artist and a decent human being.

    Here’s the setlist for the show (Asheville, NC – May 8th, 2018):
    Here – Lazy- I Zimbra (Talking Heads) – Slippery People (Talking Heads) – I Should Watch TV (David Byrne & St. Vincent) – Dog’s Mind – Everybody’s Coming to My House – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) (Talking Heads) – Once In a Lifetime (Talking Heads) – Doing the Right Thing – Toe Jam (Brighton Port Authority) – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)(Talking Heads) – I Dance Like This – Bullet – Every Day Is a Miracle – Like Humans Do – Blind (Talking Heads) – Burning Down the House (Talking Heads) – Encore: Dancing Together – The Great Curve (Talking Heads) – Hell You Talmbout (Janelle Monáe)

    25/12/04 Update: We saw David again last night in Atlanta for the Who Is the Sky? tour8. The thing is I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my lifetime and it’s definitely different. David takes a bunch of highly trained dancers, musicians, and vocalists and puts em through their paces in a thematic visually stunning choreographed set. He gave em what they wanted on this tour, yet the set list of songs somehow still felt like a tightly planned concept album. It’s really about him as an artist. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s like he’s floating up above it to steal a line from his song. He’s not rooted in any physical place or timeline even though several of the songs have very physical references. The lyricism is timeless and abstract – he blended a setlist that spans almost fifty years. Here’s the setlist:

    • Heaven ( Fear of Music )
    • Everybody Laughs ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • And She Was ( Little Creatures )
    • Strange Overtones (Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today )
    • Houses in Motion ( Remain in Light )
    • T Shirt ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • (Nothing but) Flowers ( Naked )
    • This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • What Is the Reason for It? ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Like Humans Do ( Look into the Eyeball )
    • Don’t Be Like That ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Independence Day ( Rei Momo )
    • Slippery People ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • My Apartment Is My Friend ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Hard Times ( Paramore cover )
    • Psycho Killer ( Talking Heads: 77 )
    • Life During Wartime ( Fear of Music )
    • Once in a Lifetime ( Remain in Light )
    • Everybody’s Coming to My House ( American Utopia )
    • Burning Down the House ( Speaking in Tongues )

    Anyway, you can go find the tour show reviews out there so I’m not going to sum it up. The Fox in Atlanta is wild with its mosque design. All I’ll say is if you haven’t seen a performance – it’s good – definitely worth the effort. Seeing the show is just a reminder of possibilities.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_music_videos_aired_on_MTV
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_in_a_Lifetime_(Talking_Heads_song)
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Beverly_Hills
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Lies_Love
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Works
    7. http://davidbyrne.com/radio
    8. Who Is the Sky? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_the_Sky%3F

  • Man from Plains

    All this talk of politics has affected my netflix lineup. Last night we watched the documentary “Man from Plains“2 about Jimmy Carter3 and his most recent book. I’ve got to say that Jonathan Demme4 is one of the better filmmakers of our time. Ever since Stop Making Sense5, a video concert of the Talking Heads was released I’ve been a fan. What I like about Demme is the unbiased and personal approach. I’ve always said of good photographers and painters whom work with portraiture that the best approach is to be as transparent as possible so as to not influence the subject in any manner. This film does just that as it documents Carter’s travels to promote his most recent and controversial book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid6.

    The film gives an honest perspective on the man and his principles as Demme was obviously given good access the former president during the filming and what impressed me most was exactly how candid and emotional Carter was during the filming. He is obviously a very intelligent man in the way he handles conversation and which may also explain why he is a physicist by trade. What is controversial about the book is that Carter is trying to explain that perhaps the Palastinians have been wronged which is very bold and politically incorrect these days. But Carter does it with eloquence and good rhetoric in the face of staunch adversaries.

    After the film, I followed up with some research on Carter and his policies. What amazed me is how strong his opinions about peace and energy conservation. He actually reduced the dependence on foreign oil by half during tenure as president. He installed solar panels (which were later removed) on the white house! It’s amazing how we continue to repeat ourselves in history as I think my third grade teacher began the first history lesson i remember with that exact phrase. President Carter had some interesting approaches to energy policy that may hold in todays atmosphere.

    Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a political or economic expert, but I can tell you a good deal about the Laffer Curve7 and supply side, trickle down Reaganomics including the fact that Author Laffer and Wanninski, credited with coining the term did so over a meeting in 1974 with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld present…so I’ll let you do your own research8. But I am a good with the study of human character and I can tell you that I am compelled to believe that Jimmy Carter is a good man with honest motives or at least the film did an excellent job of concealing anything otherwise.

    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library
    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library [1]

    I can whole heartedly recommend that you see the film for yourself. The photo above is of Carter fishing when a swimming rabbit “attacked” his boat.. lucky the secret service was there to capture it on film.

    23/12/06 – The rabbit incident came up in a conversation likely due to conflict in Gaza9. I replaced the missing photo and added the references. I didn’t replace any of the original links, correct any of the grammatical, or fix the spelling errors.

    25/01/09 – I referenced this essay in a recent conversation with friends since he passed away at age 100. He was the longest-lived president in U.S. history. I read quite a bit about him recently and I watched the service on C-Span 10 this morning. The Carter Center published a tribute site 11 that’s worth your time. I left a condolence message. The more I learn… the more I like.

    Jimmy Carter is an inspiration for a life well lived. I told my friends I’m gonna pick up some tools in his honor and to handle some carpentry work for myself and I might even go so far as start working on the solar thing. I’ve referenced the Crisis of Confidence speech12 a number of times recently and I suggest a revisit. I first picked up on it in the film 20th Century Women and rewatching it had profound affect. I sympathize with Jimmy Carter’s tough mind, soft heart mentality and I hope that his work to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering is an inspiration for generations to come14.

    1. Jimmy Carter rabbit incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
    2. Man From Plains – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Plains
    3. Jimmy Carter – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
    4. Jonathan Demme – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Demme
    5. Stop Making Sense – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    6. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
    7. Laffer Curve – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
    8. Reaganomics – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
    9. Israel – Hamas War – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel–Hamas_war
    10. President Jimmy Carter Funeral Service at National Cathedral – https://www.c-span.org/event/public-affairs-event/president-jimmy-carter-funeral-service-at-national-cathedral/429876
    11. Jimmy Carter Tribute – https://www.jimmycartertribute.org
    12. President Carter Address on Crisis of Confidence – https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/president-carter-address-on-crisis-of-confidence/154404
    13. 20th Century Women – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Women
    14. Carter Center – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center

  • iphone gps, where am i? and $40/hr?

    Ginny and i found ourselves amused with the “where the hell am i” (as we call it) on the iphone..
    ginny
    what a nice feature in google maps… which speaking of.. Google anounced an update to Android.. fit with a media player and a geocoding api… mobile computing is going to be big stuff if you campare the number of laptop owners worldwide vs the number of cell phone users…so after tinkering around a bit.. i found a way to ssh into the phone using jailbreak.. (note…the method may prevent installation of official third-party applications that will be created by the forthcoming iPhone SDK (software development kit) from Apple)…and now i want to install the knowitall tool of the century since this is the information age after all… wikipedia at my fingertips all the time.

  • New Orleans – Fat Tuesday

    New Orleans.. it’s a strange mix of poverty, destruction, history, and culture… the things that stick out most are the dichotomy of upper echelon galleries, restaurants, hotels, antiques, attorneys, bankers, catholics..vs the seedy strip clubs, casino, bars, hustlers, vampire punks (as we call them..you know the type.. beyond heroin sheik. grungy, tatooed, and pierced) and Missippi ghetto gangster kids from the upper ninth ward.. it seems like a weird purgetory of fried/buttery foods, intellectualism, mysticism, ritualism, catholicism, liquour, and exploitism. Dolled up socialites, bankers and the dirty homeless on the same street corner adjacent to a french bistro and the 24hr immigrant run junk/liqour store. The history is rich and so are about 10% of the people. The other 90% are students (Tulane), tourist, and the mostly poor.. real New Orleans folk. The influence of the port of the Missisppi is dominant. I noticed that the city water taste good (we decided it was from an overhaul of the water system after Katrina) I’ve noticed that the nappy head ghetto boy look and sound of the urban culture is alive and kicking here. I’ve noticed that coffee is everywhere here.. brokers, traders.. cafes.. the food is as rich as the culture.. the homeless and crime rate is horrible but the people are charming. the re-construction opportunities seem to have gone south of the border in construction and services and the real estate market is wide open where it seems that every other building is for sale.. with large areas of the city still under construction. Trump is building a new tower downtown.. the NBA Allstar game is coming up this week.. the convention business seems to be good…
    If i was to compare it. Charleston is much smaller..more British and new orleans is more expansive, Spanish and French.. simple as that.. New Orleans is more ecentric with a wider sphere of influence, Charleston is more confined to the (hugenot/brit) republican and moderate at the same time (ie.. episcopal-esque) and our eastside is a 20th of the size of the upper ninth ward. We saw a piece by Jim Leher on how far behind the public schools are here… New Orleans has quite a bit more New York and las Vegas in it than does Charleston.. I think this is good.. Let’s be glad there are open container laws in Charleston and that we don’t have to round our benches off in order to keep the homeless from sleeping on them. New Orleans has awesome culture though.. the galleries, food and music is more varied (better) than Charleston. The people are louder and fatter but in some ways more charming. The African American population is far more urban (seemingly African ..in a way… big earrings excessive makeup, exotic garb) in there traditions… the creole, and cajun landscape of the outlying areas can best be described as slow, muddy and down to earth.. like the delta itself..but this is also what makes up the unique artistic, musical, and cultural makeup of New Orleans and it’s certainly still a classic american city that is indicative of what all of the entire Missippi is about from Chicago, St. Louis to Muscle Shoals Alabama.. New Orleans is like the melting pot at the end of the missippi with a foggy immigrant culture dominated by the Spanish and French..
    …today we’re headed over to the garden district for lunch at Casamentos a tour of Tulane, the Audubon Nature Institute and the Museum..
    …Galatoires was completely awesome, especially our waiter John Fontenot (this excerpt from NPR features john in an interview) who has waited tables there for 30 years… we woke up from a nap last night after our extra long lunch with a bottle of wine at did some research on craps and then went to dinner at Dickie Brennans place… i think the gulf coast oysters are more plump and mild and have nothing on McClellanville Oysters as our oysters seem to have a more salty and ‘buttery’ flavor to them.
    and we made it to Friday… it was a late night at Vaughns with another couple, started on bourbon at Lafite’s with a candlelit round of drinks to a piano player and then caught a cab across town to Vaughns….we had red beans and rice just after midnight.. couldn’t have been a more ecentric or electric crowd of thirtysome.. half East Village NY and half Upper ninth ward… and at 3am we found ourselves on the street corner having a great chat with Kermit and the band.. his bassist for the night was leaving in the morning for Chicago to play with Allan Toussaint and Dianne Reeves and sure enough kermit was toting his grill in the back of his truck..
    … we’re heading off to a four hour lunch now at Galatoires and even though we just woke up. we’ve been giving strict instructions to order a bottle of wine, sit downstairs and let the waiter order for us from Louis. follow up… we were wiped from Tuesday and we were asleep early… it was nice seeing the city at a bit more of a leisurely pace and the ritual seemed to move on to Ash Wednesday as it seemed half of the city was catholic with the number of ashy foreheads on the street… there a good share of art and galleries in the city including Noma and CAC
    …. tonight we are going to see Kermit Ruffins Play at a place called Vaughns (Every Thursday for the last 15 years Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers have played a weekly show at Vaughan’s bar in the Bywater neighborhood) on a tip from photographer Jerry Moran who had some great photography of local musicians….we’ll try to go early to catch some of Ruffin’s BBQ.
    Here’s a video:
    vaughns new orleans

    View Larger Map
    it just happened that Ginny’s National Association of School Psychologist Conference fell on the end of Mardi Gras… which is absolute craziness.. we had bloody marys po-boys and muffulettas for an early lunch.. we saw the zulu today and we’re headed out for some voodoo and music. We’ve got a long week planned..here’s a video from a parade and some photos:
    zulu
    fat
    tues
    new orleans
    orleans
    …and on another note… we had the most interesting drive in through Gulfport and Biloxi.. the aftermath of Katrina is still a mess two years later. I could only imagine what a thirty foot wall of water could do to Charleston after seeing that.

    The last thing i’ve noticed is that the swirling chaos that is New Orleans sucked me in and wore me out so i say Adieu.. as we head back to our own wonderful little hurricane ravaged town (McClellanville. St James Santee Parish).. Charleston SC.

  • slideshowpro and actionscript

    It always seems that when i’m working on a problem or task in computer programming that the answer usually comes to me when i’m not in front of a computer screen. I think this is because i am able to use better visual logic when i’m daydreaming in the car listening to music. This particular case involved using Slide Show Pro Director to control a custom gallery and I was listening to Van Morrison’s ‘Live in San Fran’. Trick was making the thumbnails customizable while using a set of custom variables and actions to format the thumbs as external navigation. Press the third largest button a couple times to get them off track and then hit one of the top two buttons to line them back up.
    [kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/blog/ssp.swf” height=”550″ width=”800″ /]

  • magento

    so i installed a couple local versions… and then put one on a server to test. Varien has done it right for anyone who wants all of the bells and whistles in ecommerce because they’ve certainly done their research. Reports, Inventory, Paypal Api, Import/export excel spreadsheets… and a forum has been started for syncing it to quickbooks. But I’ll say this to those folks used to ZenCart or OsCommerce.. it’s quite a departure and expect some more difficult hurdles to install, use, and design. I’ll let you know how it goes when i put it to the test.
    magento ecommerce
    magento

  • nginx

    nginx
    nginx (i’m guessing it’s pronounced “engine x”) usage on websites worldwide went up 800% from 07 as compared to January 08 according to netcraft.. apache still dominates in hosting, but i’m convinced that microsoft’s portion will go down (even though the usage seems to still be trending up)… and lighttpd and nginx usage will increase.. as will google hosted because i must have recieved three different emails yesterday informing me as an admin as a user etc about the new google sites feature for apps.
    netcraft
    netcraft nginx
    net
    there might be something to that..
    this will get you started
    curl -O http://sysoev.ru/nginx/nginx-0.3.60.tar.gz
    tar -xzvf nginx-0.3.60.tar.gz
    cd nginx-0.3.60
    ./configure –sbin-path=/usr/local/sbin –with-http_ssl_module
    make
    sudo make install
    sudo chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/nginx
    That will put the executable at /usr/local/sbin/nginx
    read on…

  • Pear and pdo_mysql in Apache2 on Leopard

    pdo_mysql
    seems to be a common issue with leopard’s php install..folks are looking to add the modules for pdo_mysql and the pear libraries… before you go reinstalling apache and rebuilding php5 from source.. and getting lost in Leopards symbolic links to the php.ini and httpd.conf files..like I did here.. using this PHP Apache Module and it gets especially tricky if you are on a G5 with 64bit architecture… see this post or this one or this one.
    php
    apache errors

  • Sun Micro aquires MySQL… SunSQL?

    Sun MySQL
    I think it’s a good think for the continued use and development of MySQL.
    And i’ve noticed the ever adapting ability to use XML with MySQL.

  • back to my mac remote desktop

    remote desktop
    say goodbye to the static ip problems.. the router configuration and your possible denial of service from your ISP… I am doing a great deal of work from an office and (not wanting to give up my old days of working in my pajamas and not showering for days) i needed a way to control a network of several computers, drives and databases from other places as to free up some gasoline and driving time since i live in a very remote location… yes.. ssh, ftp, vnc, telnet etc work but you don’t have a free simple gui to control applications on the other machine.. So… try this from Melvin Rivera.. and now you have the best gui ever.. the other desktop be it mac or pc without the associated costs of .mac or remote desktop from apple or microsoft.. and as for security.. use a dedicated google account not aim or bonjour for it since they use SSL for securing google talk and the file sharing is quick. Now you just have to decide when you’ll need to access the computers or network and use ibeez to manage power modes, so i don’t have to leave the computers on all night.. and Ginny will be happy to know that I can’t wake them back up after 11PM
    ibeez
    ibeeze

  • Blue Ridge Fest

    I wrapped up a project for another agency and the Blue Ridge Electric Co-op. The website is for their annual Blue Ridge Festival and was done through an advertising agency in Chapel Hill, NC. They did the design and brought me in to turn it into a website. I like the colorful design and I’m big on classic cars, so it was pretty fun working with the images. Visit the site at www.blueridgefest.com

  • mod ssl and open ssl for https

    ssl
    Installing an ssl certificate on a local machine is pretty straightfoward. OpenSSL provides certificates for development. I found this tutorial the only one you need..
    I also found a great way to make calls to Google Apps (like this)
    zend
    using the Zend framework and these in particular.
    and for those folks who have gotten accustomed to the drag and drop nature of some applications.. Magento is going to require a bit more, but it’s worth it compared to any other e-commerce application out there..
    magento