Blog
SPIonic Conversion
SPIonic is a public domain font that represents ASCII characters as Greek letters and diacritics. It is widely used to represent polytonic Greek, that is, ancient Greek, which has other tone marks in addition to the acute (´) found in modern Greek. It uses a scheme based on Beta Code with a few variations, the most significant of which is that uppercase letters are represented by uppercase letters and lowercase by lowercase (whereas Beta Code uses *A for uppercase alpha and A for lowercase alpha, etc.). I’ve created a simple tool that will convert Greek written using this scheme into proper Unicode Greek. For example, in Unicode the letter alpha is represented, not by typing the character a, but by an α character at a separate code point in the font. Though I’m sure something like this is not in high demand, I hope somebody out there finds it useful.
Formula for Styling Web Forms
Web forms are ubiquitous, and in my line of work I find myself building plenty of them, each time from scratch. That’s why I’ve recently put together a little style sheet to serve as a starting point for styling my HTML forms that includes the selectors and styles I find myself using most often. Take a look at the demo page for formula.css.
Like Bells’ Palma
I recently saw Like Bells on tour at The Loft at Tommy Doyle’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like Bells is a progressive post-rock band featuring cymbal-heavy percussion, violin, guitar, bass and sparse electronic accompaniment. Their energetic performance featured new material from their second and latest album, Palma, yet to be officially released. It is a departure from their debut album in that it tends toward being more upbeat and utilizes vocals to a higher degree, though they remain sparse. Check them out at www.likebells.com and www.myspace.com/likebells.
Virtual Hosts in Apache
I usually find it convenient to develop my websites and Web applications locally before pushing them to a staging server. Mac OS X conveniently comes with the Apache Web server pre-installed. In fact, all you really need to do to start using it is to check the “Web Sharing” checkbox in System Preferences... > Sharing. You can then use your Web browser to navigate to http://localhost/, and you should see whatever files are in your Web root. The default Web root (root directory from which Apache serves files) is /Library/WebServer/Documents on Mac OS X. However, it’s useful, especially if you are working on more than one project at a time, to be able to host multiple sites on your Mac. To do this, you need to set up virtual hosts in Apache. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on setting up virtual hosts:
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Yeasayer @ Pitchfork 2009
I attended Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival this year for the first time. I was only able to attend one of three days, Saturday, which had an attractive lineup including most notably (in order of appearance) Yeasayer, MF Doom, Beirut, and The National. After securing a good position in front of stage C after The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s set, Yeasayer started setting up (what I knew of them came from listening to their first and only album, All Hour Cymbals [2007], and their contribution to Dark Was the Night). The Brooklyn-based band, which describes its music as Middle Eastern-psych-pop-snap-gospel,
did all of their own sound checking, and extensively too. It was like getting an extra 30 minutes or so of play time from them.
With their first LP as my only reference to their music, I was surprised to see how electronically based their performance was. Performing with three permanent members of the band were two additional members who perform with them and are reported to appear on their upcoming album. Yeasayer opened with a song that I didn’t recognize and followed it up with material from All Hour Cymbals including their singles "Sunrise" and "2080," and "Tightrope" from Dark Was the Night. I was slow to recognize much of what they played since their performance was not a direct translation of their recorded music but in some cases a total reworking, often incorporating harsher, electronic sounds not present on their album. To my delight they performed all of their electronic beats on the spot with drum pads alongside (two) traditional drum sets.
They ended their set with a new song (the only one they announced as being new), which had a sound strangely similar to that of Animal Collective. All in all, the show was energetic and crowd-pleasing, thanks to the upbeat energy of their music and their stage presence, despite the sudden downpour which lasted the duration of their performance. I look forward to their new album to be released sometime this year.
Update (8/25/09): Pitchfork has posted a video of Yeasayer’s live performance of "Wait for the Summer" at the festival.