Jared W. Smith

I’ve made the charlestonwx.com source code available for the moment as I transition the site to a new codebase. Rest assured there is nothing remotely special about it beyond how I present the data (and slice up the Weather Underground feed, before their API was solid).

Big changes are coming for this site soon thanks in no small part to help from my @chswx data partners at Weather Data. I’m very excited, to say the least.

As the silence on this blog indicates, I’m working my butt off — Steph and I have just moved back to Charleston where I’ve started my new job at BoomTown — it’s almost been a month already and it has flown. Everything there is as advertised and then some. BoomTown is a fast-growing place, too — since I joined up late last month, three new employees have come in. Very impressive stuff.

I also have some particularly exciting things coming down the weather pipeline…stay tuned for more details on that.

In the meantime, this post is more of an icebreaker but also a quick test of my switch to nginx and Varnish for forward caching. Let’s see how well this works…

For the first time in a couple years, I’m not doing SXSW Interactive. Between my impending move to Charleston and transitioning out of ReadWriteWeb, life is fairly chaotic at the moment (but it’s a positive type of chaos). I will most certainly miss seeing a lot of really good friends and colleagues there. What I won’t miss is the SXSARS and other inevitable conference maladies afterward. :) I hope everybody has a safe and fun time. Austin is a great city.

I successfully updated to Mac OS X 10.7.3 the other day via Software Update, but there were a lot of people who didn’t. Looks like Apple is now pushing the entire 1.3GB Combo Update package at least temporarily until they find and fix the delta update.

For what it’s worth, 10.7.3 has been great so far. Wi-Fi after wake is much faster and I’m not quite seeing the discoloration issues I once was switching to my external monitor. Fingers crossed…

Looks like Mac OS X 10.7.3 is close. I’m hoping that’s the case, because I’ve suffered from an incredibly annoying bug where portions of the user interface are discolored when I attach or detach from an external monitor (a configuration I switch between a couple times a day). It’s not just me, so here’s hoping that a fix will be along sooner rather than later. 10.7.2 was a pretty rough build of Lion in general so it will be good to get an update.

ProPublica has a nicely designed interactive list of likely SOPA and PIPA supporters in both chambers of Congress. Current TV has a cool explanation about how ProPublica’s app, dubbed SOPA Opera, determines who is a supporter and who is an opponent — pretty fantastic stuff (especially if you’re into sentiment analysis).

If you’re curious as to why there is such an uproar about the Stop Online Piracy Act and its companion in the Senate, the PROTECT IP Act, read Mat Howie’s post at MetaFilter, in which he describes a situation where he was targeted by a mistaken takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and nearly lost his site completely (which comes up very rosy in comparison with SOPA and PIPA).

The DMCA is imperfect law. SOPA and PIPA are downright dangerous and unnecessarily broad. Jam your representative’s and Senators’ phone lines today!

A common thread through the SOPA drama is that Congress is legislating from a position of ignorance on how the Internet works. In a column for the Guardian today, Dan Gillmor argues the opposite:

[...] What we’re seeing does not derive from any misunderstanding. Rather, I’m convinced, this concerted push to censor the internet, through measures that would fundamentally break it, stems from a very clear understanding of what’s at stake. Indeed, legislation like Sopa, or its US Senate companion, the Protect IP Act (Pipa) – and a host of activities around the world – share a common goal. These “fixes” are designed to wrest control of these tools from the masses and recentralize what has promised to be the most open means of communication and collaboration ever invented.

I’d take this one step further and posit the question: Do you think WikiLeaks could exist in a SOPA-fied world? Not a chance.

(Also: Interesting that Gillmor frames it as an attempt to recentralize the Internet. Seems like we are doing a pretty good job of that ourselves with the current generation of social networks.)

Update 1/17 @ 4:21PM EST: SOPA markup will resume in February. It’s not dead yet.

SOPA has been tabled for now (though the Protect IP Act, SOPA’s contemporary, lives on in the Senate).

Pardon my cynicism, but I’m fairly sure that in an election year, no member of the House would want to be saddled with passing a bill that the public believes would censor the Internet. Something tells me this will be back (especially if PIPA presses on in the Senate) — let’s just hope there is some actual technical consultation in the next go-around (though I have yet to be convinced we need something beyond the DMCA).

I’ve been exploring LESS this weekend as a way to make writing CSS a much more efficient affair. So far, so very good! I’m using LESS.app for Mac OS X to compile my .less files down to CSS with each save. There are Ruby scripts and JavaScript available for interpreting LESS on the fly, but I far prefer to serve up already-baked CSS with the app, which gets bonus points for spitting out minified files. Be careful with the minifier, though, if you’re writing CSS with LESS for WordPress (try saying that three times fast) — it will strip the comment block WordPress needs to identify your theme from the CSS file. There are a couple workarounds for this; the easiest way is probably just to use a minifying WordPress plugin (I use W3 Total Cache’s minifying facility myself), or if you want your server to have one less thing to do, you can spit the minified files out to a different location, reference that location in your HTML, and just use style.css as a way to identify the theme and for nothing else. (WordPress doesn’t require you to store your styles there, but it is generally more consistent to do so.)

Using the app has another great side benefit as its compiler flags errors it finds in the code and tosses up a Growl notification with a brief explanation of the problem — so not only am I writing CSS more efficiently, I’m also writing much more error-free CSS as a result. Win-win.

Who else is using LESS (or its contemporary SASS) to write and simplify CSS?