Feross.org

I’ve long believed that modern hip-hop and R&B suffers from too much post-production. Average singers can wail away in front of the microphone yet sound amazing on the radio, after the post-production techs have fixed all the mistakes. This is why all the music on the radio sounds so similar — it’s all pitch-perfect.

Today, I discovered just how little talent it requires to make a modern pop song.

MacBook Pro + Built-in Mic + GarageBand + AutoTune + 1 hour =

Feross Aboukhadijeh - Amazing

VS.

Kanye West (ft. Young Jeezy) - Amazing

Go ahead and click PLAY above to give my cover song a listen.

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Why is Google called Google? Apparently Google thinks I know the answer.

Google loves me. Don’t believe me?

Google loves me so much that they want me to explain why they call themselves Google. Out of over 32 million pages, Feross.org is the #1 result for the query “Why is this website called Google?” (click here to see for yourself!).

See!… they love ME! I told you! And Google chose my April Fools day prank to be #1, because they love my sense of humor, too! (or because the phrase “website called google” appears prominently in the title, but I bet its mostly the first reason).

Ahh… the mysteries of The Google.

Prediction

I want to make a prediction here. That this post that you are reading right now will become #1 for the same query “Why is this website called Google?” within ONE WEEK. If Google liked my off-topic April fools post so much, then they will surely love this post, perfectly titled and targeted for this query.

I will check back in one week and report on this prediction!

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I just read an interesting opinion column about technology illiteracy over at TidBITS. The author, Adam Engst, argues that as technology becomes easier to use and hence more transparent, society has lost the ability to converse about technology.

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The Free Software Foundation’s latest free software campaign is hilarious and awesome!

In case you’re unfamiliar with the FSF, they’re a nonprofit corporation founded by free software activist and GNU hacker Richard Stallman. Their goal is to promote free and open source software. Their tactics often include comical publicity stunts to bash proprietary software.

This is the email I received this morning from the Free Software Supporter mailing list:

Hi everyone,

This Wednesday, August 26 at 11am, the Free Software Foundation will be launching its Windows7sins.org public awareness campaign, drawing attention to the threats posed by the adoption of Microsoft’s proprietary operating system. We have a launch event here in Boston on the Boston Commons from noon until 3pm, and we need everyone in the area to come along and help out and join in the ceremony as we conduct a ceremonial trashing of proprietary software.

**We’ll be launching our Windows 7 campaign with pomp and fanfare, with a giant 12 foot trashcan being filled with boxes of proprietary software.**

The event promises to be lots of fun, and with thousands of people passing through the Boston Commons every day we hope you will help us connect with the public by handing out information and explaining the benefits of free software. There will be camera crews and photographers capturing the event and we will be getting these images up online as soon as possible on the day.

Let us know you’re coming and bring along your friends and work colleagues – mail campaigns@fsf.org if you have time to help us set up, or just turn up at the Boston Commons near the entrance to the Public Gardens from noon.

If you’re not in the Boston area, there will be plenty for you to do to help us launch the campaign and get the message out. Stay tuned for upcoming instructions…

Thanks for your support!

–
Peter T. Brown
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org

I think I’d go to the event — if not to dump my proprietary software, then to witness an event unlike any other I’ve heard of. Too bad I’m not in the Boston area.

Last week, I posted about how Google lost search market share, but overall US searches increased by 5%.

Now I have some more interesting news to report about those same statistics. When I first looked at the data, one of the figures struck me as a bit odd when I first saw it, but I didn’t post about it …until now.

The search engine with the largest growth in US search market share last month was Comcast. Say what?

Yup, you read that correctly. In fact, Comcast’s month-over-month search market share increased by 41%. Granted, they never had much of the search market to begin with, but still — 41% seemed like way too much for Comcast to ethically gain in a single month.

After some investigation, I discovered that Comcast has been up to something fishy.

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I remember checking the search engine rank for my first website FreeTheFlash.com in a whole bunch of now-dead search engines like Altavista, Excite, Gigablast, Hotbot, Lycos, and a whole bunch of others I’ve probably forgotten. Today, of course, I only bother to check my sites’ rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live Search/Bing (I wonder what Microsoft will call their search engine next?).

Now that Yahoo Search is officially dead, replaced by Bing, I thought it would be nice to post a couple of videos about the good ‘ol days of The Big Three: MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

MSN vs. Yahoo

Google vs. Yahoo

MSN vs. Google

Try it out! It works on Feross.org! Really…. you should try it out right now!

Remember to add ENTER at the very end!

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please get edumacated, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The Konami Code, known in Japan as the Konami Command (コナミコマンド, Konami Komando), is a cheat code that appears in many Konami video games, although the code also appears in some non-Konami games. The code was first used in the 1986 release of Gradius for the Nintendo Entertainment System but was made famous in North America in the NES version of Contra, for which it was also dubbed the “30 Lives Code”.

Update: The code also works on the iPhone, using gestures. Just replace the final B, A, and Enter keys with taps and it’ll work! AWESOME!

As I cave in to using yet another Google service, Google gets one step closer to becoming a hive mind.

I recently decided to ditch NetNewsWire and use Google Reader as my main RSS reader. Google Reader helps me keep up on the latest tech news and important internet trends.  I’ve been really happy with it so far, except for one thing.

Google allows you to post articles that you’re reading to various social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg. But, Google’s built in “Post to Twitter” feature opens up a new window (or tab in Firefox’s case) at Twitter.com just to post a new tweet. Lame!

I already use an amazing Twitter client for Mac, called Tweetie. I’ve gotten used to it’s slick interface that opens a tiny little tweet window when you want to write a new tweet. It’s so much better than opening a whole new tab!

I wanted this functionality to be available to me in Google Reader. What was I to do?

Well, the company behind Tweetie, AteBits, offers up a handy bookmarklet to help users easily tweet stuff while surfing the web. You just create a new bookmark and set the URL to be:

javascript:window.location='tweetie:'+window.location

But, we can improve this by adding the title of the website to the Javscript code, which looks like this:

javascript:window.location='tweetie:'+document.title+'%20'+window.location

Then when you click on this bookmark, a new tweet pops up that looks likes this:

Awesome, right? Now, I just need to add this custom Javscript URL to Google Reader’s “Send To…” section, right?

This is the Google Reader interface for adding custom "Send To..." buttons

But, it’s not that easy! Google blocks Javascript URLs (probably for security reasons or else it’s just an oversight on their part) and you get presented with this sad error mesage:

No Javascript URLs!

But, I want Tweetie in Google Reader, darn it! So, I whipped up a little PHP/Javascript workaround. I’ll post it here, because I imagine that others have had this same problem.

<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
        <script type="text/javascript">
        <!--
        window.location='tweetie:'+'<?php echo $_GET["title"]; ?>'+'%20'+'<?php echo $_GET["url"]; ?>';
        window.close();
        //-->
        </script>
    </body>
</html>

This is the final result!

This trivial script just looks for a title and URL passed in via GET parameters, redirects the browser there, and then closes itself to get out of the way. All that remains is your new tweet window in Tweetie and Google Reader in the background.

This is what it looks like in action!

Then, I just uploaded this file to my server (It’s located here: http://feross.org/tweetie.php in case you want to use it).

Then, I just filled out the Google Reader settings window like this:

Set up your settings like this! Remember, in Google Reader, ${title} and ${short-url} stand for the article title and URL.

Feel free to copy these settings if you’d like to set up the same functionality for yourself!

Now, I can tweet any/all the interesting stories I read from Google Reader super easily. If you follow me on Twitter, then get ready for a firestorm of tweets!

Hopefully someone finds this useful!

Total US searches increased 5% from June 2009 to July 2009, though Google’s (GOOG) share of the total search market decreased from 66.1% to 64.8%, according to search-share rankings from The Nielsen Company – compiled using a new methodology.

via Searches Climb 5% in July; Google Loses Share — Seeking Alpha.

About time we start to see some serious competition and a challenge to Google! Don’t get me wrong… I think Google is awesome, but more competition is better for consumers and will force Google to do even better.

These are exciting times!

This is awesomeness in concentrated form. Seriously, kids 15 years from now are going to be SO spoiled.