The city is covered in advertising now for the upcoming release of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV. I, personally, am into the ads. They’re all characters from the game, apparently.
Her expression is significant, from an ad perspective. From this website:
In advertising, art and photography, the direction the subject is looking or the flow of the composition can affect the tone of the image. Left is the past, right is the future, up is positive, down is negative. For example: a subject looking up and to the right is looking positively into the future.
So: the tone of the image says “I’m looking at the future, and it’s as sweet as my lollipop,” or something.
UPDATE 5/5: The game is great! I wish I had more time to play it!
I think the reason why the ads are so thick down here is that Rockstar Games has an office at Broadway and Houston.
Forwarded to me from several friend-sources, I learned that Nine Inch Nails released an album (sans record label) on Sunday Monday. Like Radiohead, it’s available in different formats directly from the site. In a twist however, there’s also an ‘official’ BitTorrent release on the Pirate Bay.
Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.
Ack. In internet time this is old news: WSJ / NYT / LA Times. I will say: it does come with a nice PDF booklet! Support independent music! Spend $5!
Update 3/13: Total sales for the first week: $1.6 million. No word on costs yet, although I think we’re likely to find out. In related news, TVT files for bankruptcy.
Netflix‘s ‘Watch Instantly’ feature is amazing. Supernatural, almost, how quickly it streams video and how sharp that video is. The only disappointment is that it’s for Windows only. Mac users can get around that with Parallels Desktop, among other ways.
Above: Tracy Morgan in the suprisingly-funny Season 1 of 30 Rock.
Also, be my friend on Netflix!
Update 1/13: Now instant viewing limits have been lifted.
Update 1/24: Netflix working on instant viewing for Mac.
Above is a piece called Sea Dragons, by my friend Brian Booker. I just finished his website—check it out!
Also his fiction is amazing. Be sure to read Pennsylvania: A Guide to Lodging.
Wire is a mini revelation for me. I found out about their albums Pink Flag and Chairs Missing in Pitchfork Media’s 100 Best Albums of the 1970s.
Wire – Reuters
Wire – Mannequin
They have a wonderful minimal punk sound. It’s atmospheric but with attitude, not empty. It turns out they wrote The 15th, the Fischerspooner track that I posted about here.
The photographer above has a bunch of fantastic photos on this site, as well as a show at Etherea on Ave A which runs through next week.
I use my mac to develop websites, and I’ve had to do some messing around to get my new Leopard 10.5 operating system to be as good a development environment as Tiger was. Here is what I had to do:
MySQL
Turns out that you have to reinstall MySQL on Leopard. Whoops! I guess I lost my old databases when I upgraded. I should figure out a way to have them save in my user folder. Anyway, go here to get the PKG files. The MySQL preference pane is busted and so is Navicat, so I went and got the official MySQL GUI Tools to set everything up again.
PHP
For these next steps it’s helpful to have Textwrangler to edit your system files.
- Open terminal, and type sudo touch /private/etc/php.ini.
- Then go to TextWrangler, and File > Open Hidden /private/etc/php.ini.default and copy all.
- Open /private/etc/php.ini and paste all into there.
- Remove the semicolon (uncomment) line 625, which should be extension=php_mysql.dll
- On line 760, make it read mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
- Save and close the file.
Apache
To get PHP working on Apache (ht to SiteCrafting for this):
- In TextWrangler, open the hidden file /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
- Remove the poundsign (uncomment) line 114 which should be about the php5_module
- Also I added the following two lines at line 405:
- AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
- AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
Also I use Apache virtual hosts so I can develop multiple sites. I keep these sites in my sites folder. If you’re like me, you’ll want to:
- Still in httpd.conf from above, change the DocumentRoot directory to be “/Users/josh/Sites” (your username instead of Josh, obv)
- Change the directory at line 190 to match what you put above
- Save / close
- Open /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and add your virtual hosts, then save and close. I use variations of:
DocumentRoot “/Users/josh/Sites/joshreisner.com/www/”
ServerName joshreisner.site
ServerAlias www.joshreisner.site
To get those local addresses working, you can’t use the NetInfo Manager like you could in Tiger. Assuming you have installed the command line tools in TextWrangler > preferences, you can
- go to terminal and type edit /etc/hosts
- duplicate the line that says 127.0.0.1 localhost
- replace localhost with your servername, eg joshreisner.site from above
- save and close
Finally, I had trouble setting permissions on my Sites directory using Finder (it crashed every time I tried). Here’s what I did, which I don’t advise as a long-term solution because it’s too generous with the permissions:
- go to terminal and type sudo chmod -R 777 /Users/josh/Sites
Now you can go to System Preferences > Sharing and start web sharing and you should be all set. Good luck!
On the heels of yesterday’s announcement that Gmail is offering IMAP access (finally!) this guy makes a helpful post about how to configure all the advanced features in Apple Mail and on the iPhone. It may seem like a minor thing, but I don’t think I ever would have figured that stuff out on my own. If you’re a mac + gmail user (pretty much everyone I know) this is good information.
Also it’s an inspiration that his site is so well-designed. I think the pink is temporary.
Today I finished a site for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s Sites of Conscience project. Sites of Conscience is a network of museums around the world that educate the public about breaches of human rights. The site’s got a lot of really informative content on it. I learned a lot of history while coding it (I didn’t write the content, though) such as about the Bengali War for Independence which was waged only thirty years ago.
Anyway, I did this initial draft design in ’06. Then another company picked up the project, brightening it up a bit and giving it a WordPress backend. Then in August I was hired back to the project and today it went live!
