Month: January 2004

Editing HTML

Posted on by david

The choice of HTML Editors his highly personal I know. But at the risk of starting a war, I’d like to recommend HyperEdit.

It offers a two paned view of your document with an HTML edit pane and a live preview (using WebKit). Granted, many text editor will do this now (BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, Taco), and I’ve tried them all, but what I really like is how light weight HyperEdit is. It opens almost instantly, and is snappy, snappy, snappy! It works well with CSS, and since my HTML is usually fairly small (most of the layout is in CSS) it is almost the perfect tool for me.

The latest beta includes a Code Snippet drawer that makes HyperEdit go from cool to the bees knees in my book. It’s nagware (but not annoyingly so) and well worth the US$10 requested.

I give it two nostrils up!

While I’m at it I might as well put in a plug for CSSEdit too. Have I ever mentioned how much I love CSS? I would never profess to be a designer, but from a strictly nuts and bolts perspective, it makes maintaining/changing the look of a web site a breeze

A gift for you…

Posted on by david

An actual quote from a 3 year old:

"Mommy, I have a gift for you."

"Oh, thank you dear, what is it?"

"It’s dirt… From my nose."

"!…"

People have a lot to say, as the proliferation of blogs can attest.

I felt I did too.

Hence this blog.

But the last thing that I wanted to do was to offer up dirt from my nose (DFMN).

I had lunch with friends yesterday, the entire time was spent verbally riffing off one another. A constant spiral (sometimes up, sometimes down) of quotes and references feeding off the mood and content that came before. In that venue, I had a lot to contribute.

It’s different in a static medium like this. Instead of a free flow verbal dance (complete with comedic timing) it’s static, and permanent, and somehow imbibed with importance.

So, I (along with millions) have this amazing venue to freely voice my opinions, but I’m stymied by an overwhelming fear of leaving you with nothing more than snot

My, how things change…

Posted on by david

For about 15 years, from the time I was 15 until I hit 30 or so, I was immersed in electronic music. Early electronic bands like Human League (anybody else remember Empire State Human?) and Ultravox, Gary Numan (the first show I ever saw live), Visage, Kraftwerk, DAF, Freur, Vangelis, Jean Michelle Jare, later followed by Depeche Mode, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails… When I wasn’t listening to it I was making it. I had built an extensive little studio by the end and must of spent close to $35K on music gear all together.

My souped up Mac IIx with it’s original (Rev A) AudioMedia and SampleCell cards look pretty silly now, but they rocked when I bought them… So did the Fostex A8 (later replaced by an Alesis ADAT) and the Roland and Makie mixers I had. Ahh, technical nostalgia…

Kids, a career, house, car, all ate into my time, energy and cash to the point where I could no longer spend the 10 – 12 hours at a stretch that it took to get into the zone to write, and I slowly sold off all my bigger pieces of equipment. It’s been nearly 10 years since I wrote any music.

Well, my birthday was just before Christmas, and I decided to give myself a present. I asked everyone for money instead of gifts this year and bought my self some new toys:

I’ve got to say that Ableton’s Live just rocks. It goes beyond making it easy to work with loops, it makes it trivial. Stuff that used to take me hours of trimming and tweaking and transposing and resampling now are one or two clicks away. It’s too easy… The instant gratification of dropping an existing loop into Live means its harder to make myself go to Reason and build up a sequence from scratch. Oh well, I guess that’s a good problem to have.

But the most stunning thing is the lack of clutter, the Ozone and my PowerBook, that’s it. Amazing.

Now I have to see whether I can get my old DAT player working so I can go through my old demo’s to scratch together some ideas.

Oh, as an aside Kraftwerk is coming to Toronto in April…