Archive of October 2008
Rails Rumble Judging Open
Judging for Rails Rumble 2008 opened today. I encourage you to step it up and go rate some applications that were crafted in 48 hours. To rate you’ll need an OpenID (one can be created from the Rails Rumble site) and some free time to test the applications out. As of right now you’ve got 9 days left, so step it into gear.
Visit the Rails Rumble site to register.
And don’t forget to rate RedMinutes ridiculously high.
Chyrp 2.0
I just upgraded, prematurely of course, to Chyrp 2.0 RC2. I still need to fix some things so if you happen to visit and find some links broken, I’ll fix them eventually. Thank you.
Tags are down and there are errors on the audio posts when you view them. Hmmmm.
Just upgraded again and accidently deleted all the comments. Bleh.
October 22 at 10:33 PM Permalink
0 Comments
October 22 at 11:59 AM Permalink
0 CommentsRails Rumble 2008 - RedMinutes
Matt and I made it through Rails Rumble this weekend and actually finished what we planned on finishing.
From the Rails Rumble site:
“The Rails Rumble is a 48 hour web application development competition. As a contestant, you get one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can, using the awesome power of Ruby on Rails.”
I actually really like what we came up with more than I thought I would. Don’t consider this an official introduction, but this weekend Matt and I created RedMinutes, a web app for sharing notes.
Think of it as a Pastie or Writeboard type of service that splits notes up into sections for reading and commenting. It will take plain old text or Textile markup and generate a pretty little rainbow of colorful sections.
I’ve posted this blog entry1 as a RedMinutes demo note so you can see what the functionality is like without having to come up with some text. The password is demo.
Please register to be a judge and vote for us if you like RedMinutes, but be sure to check out all the other great contest entries. The contest just ended and judging starts soon.
I heavily enjoyed developing this with Matt. Of course, he handled all the complicated stuff that actually makes everything work and I just pretended I knew how to design something. My greatest joy in this project was a decision Matt and I made early on — not sweating Internet Explorer support2.
RedMinutes is functional in IE6 and IE7, but the layout gets a bit wonky. The application can be seen in its full glory using Safari 3 and Firefox 3, and in 90% of its glory using Opera3.
Anyway, let us know what you think. There will probably be something on the Relatively Early blog soon once we get all settled in.
1 The full Textile formatting of this post can be seen here.
2 …yet. I’m sure we’ll have to eventually.
3 No border-radius support yet. Rounded corners are used extensively in the design.
Brent, Dustin, and I managed to get a lot done in the five short days he was here. Along with remixing some songs that he had tracked elsewhere, we recorded five new tunes.
Here’s a semi-final version of Growin’ Old by The Awful Truth.
Players
- Brent Colbert: Acoustic Guitar and Vocals (it’s his song, he wrote it.)
- Ross Brown: Drums, Bass, Electric Piano
- Brent Colbert, Dustin Gamble, Alexandria Fortenbery, Ross Brown: Background vocals
Mics
- Acoustic Guitar: Mid-side stereo with AKG C414 — Side (thanks to Ryan and The Punch at Premier Studios) and MXL 991 — Mid.
- Vocals: MXL 992 through Pro VLA
- Bass: DI through Pro VLA
Drums
- Snare: SM57
- Kick: EV RE20
- Overheads: AKG C 460B (with the CK-1 capsule), or maybe they are the 452 EB, I’ll have to check.
- Low Tom: Sennheiser 421 — this track wasn’t even used. I never played it.
- High Tom: Some Nady mic that comes with their cheapest drum mic kit.
Misc
The Pro VLA was used mainly for tonal purposes. Yes, the MXLs are cheap mics, but they have a certain sound that was good for these recordings. I was very pleased with the 992 on Brent’s voice — very concentrated. We tried the C414 but is was too dark, or, if you’d rather, “neutral” for Brent.
The song was tracked in Ableton Live and mixed in Logic Pro. It was all overdubs with pretty much one take on everything.
I’ll probably post more songs from this session. It turned out sounding pretty darn good, I think. I’ll be working a bit more on editing before the whole thing is finished.