I’m planning to part with a bunch of my tech books I never refer to, either because they’re out of date, not relevant to anything I do or plan to do, I’ve “absorbed” them, or I have a better resource … So, if you want one of these, let me know. You must either pick them up from my apartment, my office in soho, or provide media mail postage:

• Homepage Usability (Jakob Nielsen)
• Agile Web Wev. w/ Rails (Pragmatic, 1st edition)
• HTML & XHTML (O’Reilly, 4th edition)
• DNS & Bind (O’Reilly, 3rd edition, “covers bind 8″)
• CSS Cookbook (O’Reilly, first edition, signed by author)
• CGI Programing for www (O’Reilly, first edition)
• Info. Architecture for www (O’Reilly, first edition)
• CSS (O’Reilly, first edition)
• Apache (O’Reilly, second edition)
• Web Design in a Nutshell (O’Reilly, second edition)
• Perl 5 desktop reference (O’Reilly)

I also have a couple PHP books and a Samba book holding up my displays, if anyone is interested in those, I can swap in others.

So it’s been awhile. I blame Twitter. And getting married (I’m married!). And summer. And work. But I’m back. Going to try to start writing more here. I’ve been writing a lot of email, blog/forum posts and even some tweets that should be here. More soon.

We just stumbled across this this morning at the office. It was posted in November. No idea who created it:

I want to publicly thank a few friends who, in their own ways, inspired me to finally get a bicycle and start riding it as a primary means of transportation around the city. I’ve always been philosophically pro-bike but never much of a bike rider. For a little over a month now I’ve been riding the 4-5 mile ride to work and very much enjoying it. I’ve also found good excuses for loops around Central Park, Prospect Park and rides up and down the west side greenway bike path. So thank you Lizzie, Amanda, Jacob and Chris.

I haven’t registered yet, but I’m hoping to do the upcoming Tour de Brooklyn.

Photo from Jack Jeffries on Flickr.

I’m still recovering from an amazing week at SXSW
(more on that later), but I’m totally stoked that my proposed session on Drupal Installation Profiles made it on the Open Source CMS Summit schedule. I wish I’d known a little earlier, but I’m jumping in head first over the next week to learn the ins-and-outs.

Next month: visiting Michigan for KED’s birthday; then a Michigan party complete with real Coney dogs in my backyard.

The Detroit alternative weekly, the Metro Times named Arbor Vitae, my home of three years, as a Motor City Crib in their “Motor City Rides and Cribs” series.

I started reading the Detroit “alternative weekly” the MetroTimes when I, like many of my friends, discovered it was the best source of live music listings in the region. But, unlike most of my friends, I soon began to pick it up more for the articles than the show listings (”I read it for the articles! Really!”).

In particular, I always looked forward to the lucid analysis of Jack Lessenberry, a veteran journalist always willing to call out absurdity and incompetence where he saw it (and there is sadly a lot of it). Having fled the dismal state of affairs so well documented by Mr. Lessenberry, I’ve not been closely following the continued decline — beyond noticing Pfizer’s ax falling in Ann Arbor and the general condition of Detroit — mostly because the MetroTimes can’t get their act together and publish some RSS feeds, and the state of the print media is Michigan has been on rapid decline since the bitter and ugly newspaper strikes.

This evening, I caught up on Jack’s columns to get a sense for just how bad things are in my home state. It’s even worse than I thought. He got my hopes up in his February 14th column about Gov. Granholm’s State of he State address, where he pretended she actually said something courageous and necessary. She didn’t.

Anyway, on to the Geekery. So I’ve been doing some screen-scraping of web sites lately, mostly for viralvideos.com — and I recently discovered Dapper, a tool designed to make this easier, without writing code. I noticed the MetroTimes had a “search by author” feature, so I decided to try and use Dapper to generate a feed of Lessenberry’s MetroTimes columns that I can receive in my feed reader of choice. It took me about 20 minutes.

Here is the result.

I’m not quite the master of Javascript that I’d like to be. I have a basic grasp of the language and have used the jQuery library lightly for viralvideos.com; I chose it mostly because it is compact and I’d played with it since it is included with Drupal 5.

Recently, I was pointed to Jack Slocum’s blog to check out his comment system. He put together a pretty neat hack on top of Wordpress, using his “Ext” javascript UI library, to allow commenters to essentially annotate any block (block being html-defined blocks like a paragraphs, images, etc.) in any blog post using the generic Wordpress commenting system. I have some concern that the collected comment view (which is still available) may lose some coherence due to a lack of context for some comments, but I could imagine many cases where this kind of comment system would be delightfully appropriate (jumping to mind: a way to integrate the “discuss” tab in a wiki entry to portions of text within the wiki page itself?).

Anyway, this just in from the jQuery blog: jQuery will integrate Slocum’s ext. Sweet. Now I don’t feel like I’m learning two different things.

Phew. I’d been sitting on email from September. I finally got back through my personal mail inbox, replied to outstanding messages, moved some tasks over into my current GTD tool and cleared the rest. If you have been expecting to hear from me but haven’t, now would be a good time to try and grab my attention.

I think GMail gets it wrong. When you have no spam, it cheers “Hooray!” but when your email inbox is empty, it shrugs and suggests you go look at Google News, ya loser. I want to see fireworks and glitter when my inbox is empty because it means I’m keeping on top of things.

Google recently released a couple of tools that make it easy to mount folders over the network with SFTP. They did this by implementing FUSE, which stands for “Filesystem in Userspace.” FUSE supports “plug-ins” that turn various kinds of network connectivity into “mountable” drives. Google went one step further and wrapped a simple app around the “sshfs” plug-in for FUSE to make it even easier to use. To get up and running, download the DMG files (you need the latest “core” and “sshfs”) packages. First install MacFUSE-Core and restart. Then run the included sshfs app, enter your server name, user name and password and, well, that’s it. I’ve been wanting this one for awhile…