7fff – think max value

Goodbye, Alex Chilton; 1950-2010

Some time around 1979, I was DJ’s at the college radio station, and someone pointed out to me a scuffed-up album called “Radio City” by a group I’d never heard of called Big Star. The album had come out in 1974. I listened to it, liked it, played it a bit, and forgot about it. About all I really understood at that point was that they sounded a lot like the Raspberries. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends were getting into this guy who had connections to groups like the dB’s. His name was Alex Chilton, and the discovery of the moment was his 1978 “Bangkok” single. About this time, I realized that Chilton had been a co-lead of Big Star, and that he had also sung with the Box Tops, singing the estimable song “The Letter” when he was 16.

After college I started to rediscover that material, and bought everything I could find, including vinyl copies of Big Star’s first two albums, “#1 Record” and “Radio City.” When CDs came out, I didn’t buy any until the release of both of these albums came out on a double-CD on England’s Big Beat label.

It’s a great pair of albums. They were recently remastered — you safely ignore the negative comments on the Amazon page after clicking on the image:

For a good while, Chilton was my favorite songwriter. I listened to those two Big Star albums countless times. I saw Chilton play live in a number of forms, including some really godawful shows in the mid-80s. People complained about his solo material after 1985, but I liked it, and I liked his highly ironic shows.

I read today that Alex Chilton died in a hospital in Memphis of heart problems. What a loss.

Cambridge to South Station

Free bandwidth at the Acela Lounge . . . so I can upload some pics.

The train to Chicago is completely sold out.

Our entire trip is courtesy of Julie’s frequent rider miles on Amtrak — she commutes to/from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, two or three times per week. Had we purchased these tickets (including sleepers and meals the whole way), it would have cost about $4,700.

Julie with tickets

Julie told Caroline not to wear her flip-flops for the walk to the Kendall T; but she insisted. And, sure enough, they started to hurt, so she needed to switch to her sneakers.

Caroline changing shoes

Caroline reading the comics at South Station

I love ULINE

I just received my ULINE catalog. ULINE is the world’s greatest supplier of corrogated boxes. OK, there may be others, but I think ULINE is the best. I used to order fancy boxes to hold vinyl records, and I think that company was acquired by ULINE, and now I get the ULINE catalog. Click below to get your own, and then after the image I’ll say a few things about the catalog.

Now, what’s the big deal? Well, suppose you need a carton for a rifle. ULINE’s got it.

Oh, you need to ship a bottle of champagne? No problem!

“Glamour” mailers for that extra pizzazz? Sure.

A terrorist who’s tired of the boring old box cutters? Try something new.

Opening a Chinese restaurant?

Or maybe you just need to warn people that it needs to stay frozen . . .

The Red Seat gets some Recognition

Nice to see our friends at The Red Seat in BostonNow. They have shirts like this one which is all too appropriate given the recent events in Cleveland:

Making rake package zip on Windows

If you want to do rake package on Windows and specify need_zip = true, it’s a bit of a problem because Windows doesn’t come with a command-line zip program. To be sure, one could always install Cygwin.

I’ve seen blogs talking about hacking rake, but that seems really gross.

Another option is to clone as much of zip as rake needs (not much!) with the rubyzip gem. After doing gem install rubyzip, the following seems to be acceptable for rake (haven’t tested this a lot; feel free to fix my code ). This little bit of code — simulating what command-line zip does — seems to be a sort of missing link in the documentation and tests for rubyzip. It’s easy, but not super-obvious from the docs.

require 'zip/zip'

recursive = false
if ARGV[0] == '-r'
  recursive = true
  ARGV.shift
end

archive = ARGV.shift
ARGV.each do |arg|
  files = recursive ? Dir[ arg + '/**/*.*' ] : [arg]
  files.each do |f|
    Zip::ZipFile.open(archive, Zip::ZipFile::CREATE) do |z|
      z.add( f, f)
      puts "  adding #{f}"
    end
  end
end

And then in your Rakefile.rb, something like:

desc "Zip up project"
Rake::PackageTask.new("#{PROJECT}-#{USER}", "1.0.0") do |p|
  p.need_zip = true
  p.zip_command = 'ruby ../myzip.rb'
  p.package_files.include("./**/*")
  p.package_files.exclude("./**/*.svn")
  p.package_files.exclude("./doc")
  p.package_files.exclude("./pkg")
end

Viva Los Sox Rojos!!

I think I got the Spanish right . . . Click for a fine garment from my friends at The Red Seat:

Google Docs generates yucky HTML

In Google Docs you can create an outline. You know, using our old buddies UL and LI. Hi UL! Hi LI!

But they do something nasty. They close their LI tags, and then if there is a nested list, they put that between the list elements. So you get:

<ul>
  <li>
    Foo
  </li>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Bar
    </li>
  </ul>
  <li>
    Baz
  </li>
</ul>

See that close li right after “Foo”? Wrong! It should be:

<ul>
  <li>
    Foo
    <ul>
      <li>
        Bar
      </li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>
    Baz
  </li>
</ul>

Or the li close tags could be omitted altogether. They’ve tried to be a little bit XHTML, but it’s just not right, because they are putting something that should be contained inside a list element in between list elements.

So now I have to resort to sculduggery to get my stylesheet right, or transform the HTML.

At first Google Docs looked like a good tool, because it seemed to generate clean and simple HTML. But it doesn’t. In addition to this issue, they like to pop in extraneous <br/> tags.

For what it’s worth, the cute little HTML editor in the newest versions of WordPress gets it right.

I suppose that HTML generation code was written by a summer intern at Writely before they were picked up by Google: It just smells bad.