For those of you who haven’t heard, Saul Williams has released a new album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust, with the help of Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame – you knew that, right?). Trent Reznor’s influence is very noticeable, especially on tracks like WTF! – which, fittingly, starts off with background vocals from our good friend. Throughout the song you can feel Trent’s influence in the beat and the hard industrial sound, and Saul’s vocals flow so well over top of the myriad of sound Trent and CX KiDTRONiK have created. On the very next track the album switches gears, being fully composed by Saul. Overall the album is a diverse and interesting mix of styles, exactly what you would expect out of a collaboration between Trent and Saul. And it’s just as awesome as you think it would be. So far my favorite tracks are: WTF!, Tr(n)igger, Scared Money, Banged and Blown Through, and I believe Raised to be Lowered – though I must admit it’s hard to pick just a few. Most interesting is the cover of Sunday Bloody Sunday, which I actually found quite enjoyable (I’m not a huge U2 fan, but I suppose this is a “classic”). Skin of a Drum is also an exceptional song, with great percussion driving it’s pounding lyrics, making you feel the frustration in the words.

And now for the good part: You can get it for $5, or free. Yes, Radiohead did this with “In Rainbows” recently, but I think Trent and Saul have been planning this for some time – although people will claim they’re just trying to copy – I doubt it, considering Trent’s recent comments about the recording industry, and NIN’s break from their label. Not to mention, what you get for your $5 is quite amazing. The biggest difference is in the audio: with the $5 paid download, you can choose between 192Kbps MP3’s, 320Kbps, or FLAC Lossless – with the free version, you’re only option is 192Kbps. Both versions come with a nice PDF booklet that includes lyrics and some enjoyable art work. I personally suggest going with the FLAC version – it is the best quality, and if you need it in any other format, it’s somewhat trivial to convert from FLAC to WAV and then encode in your favorite format. I personally used xACT in OS X to convert to WAV, and then simply set up iTunes importing to convert it to my preferred format (Learn).

But enough of my talk, check it yourself – at least grab the free version, and if you like it, chip in the $5 and get one of the better formats. Believe me, it’s worth it.

One of the features I plan to put into geektyme.org will be an RSS aggregator to pull in feeds from “member sites” – i.e. sites I host, SVN repositories, the forum, blogs. At this point I’m trying to decide in what manner I want to implement the aggregator; I can either do it via PHP or AJAX/Javascript, some combination of booth, or use one of the various solutions already available instead of writing it from scratch. First I decided to look into using PHP, and since Dreamhost is good enough to have PHP 5 running on my host system, I went with SimpleXML to attempt to parse the data.

It quickly became obivious that I’d have to find another solution, as trying to open a remote URL via SimplXML’s simplexml_load_file function ended in a configuration issue: Dreamhost doesn’t allow PHP to make load calls on URL’s. If it’s a local file there’s no issue, but since I’m going to be pulling via URL this doesn’t seem to be a viable option. I’m going to keep researching a way to do it with PHP, but in the end I may just end up using something like Google’s AJAX Feed API. Anyone have experience parsing RSS feeds or using the AJAX Feed API?

Work on the design continues unabated, or to some degree. I’ve been using The GIMP to design it out, creating all the images for the elements, backgrounds and so forth. Once I have all the elements done I’m going to pull the layers apart (each element has it’s own layer in the .xcf file) and cut them up – most can be tiled on the X or Y axis, so they will be made into 1px images to decrease the sites load time.

Maybe I’m just a minimalist, but it’s my opinion that you should never use a larger image than is necessary, and always reduce your images to the smallest possible size (dimensions, at least – never sacrifice image quality). I think people have been spoiled by the broadband revolution, causing sites to become large and bloated. In my opinion, web developers/designers should consider speed and design as equals on the priority list – but on that same list, both would be trumped by the need to stick to standards (although, doing so should help speed and design).

But I digress, hopefully I will have another take up shortly for everyone to look at and criticize (please do). I’m on vacation from work the last week in August, so I plan to have the design aspects finished by then so I can spend some time that week coding – seriously coding.

I’ve continued working on the design/layout of geektyme.org and it has been evolving nicely. The first change you’ll notice (that’s a link, click it!) is the removal of the stationary footer (compare to take one). After much pain was poured into finding a suitable way to do this that rendered well on all browsers (mainly, the much-hated IE 6 and prior) I decided the best course of action was to remove it, and go with a more cross-browser-kind design.

There is still some work to be done on take two at this point, but you can see where most of the information is going to be. Originally, I was going to focus on the sites, having them listed down the center, as you can see from the “Generic Geek Unit” in the top block. However, I’m still playing around with this idea. It largely depends on what I want to focus on – the activity/content of a certain site, or the site itself. I’m thinking that focusing on the activity/content of a site will be better. If I go that way, down the center you would see recent posts, commits (for the svn repositories), etc. and on the sides would be a list of the sites that are a part of the geektyme.org network. This is pretty much the reverse of what the design currently implies – and I’m still not sure if that’s the way I want to go. Thoughts, anyone?

Next, I need to work on the sites navigation. This will essentially be a bar across the bottom of the current header where you will select “about”,“blogs”,“repositories”,“sites”, etc. – I need to work on the names, I know – and then possibly be able to select subcategories (i.e. in blogs you’d have divisions like “programming”, “design”, and the like).

Once I get the design completed, I’ll start my work on the actual code. I need to find a good way to pull back the information I want (blog entires, svn commits) – I can use RSS for the blogs, but I’m not sure about the SVN commits, and I’m sure there will be other stuff that will come up. That, however, will be left for another time.

I made a slight modification to my blog theme today. I moved the page links up under the graphic, horizontal with those lines on the right sides (they intentionally go above the top line). If you’d like to see the CSS I used for this, just open up the CSS file for the theme and look for the headerimg ul and li elements. Unfortunately, despite the fact that this is pretty simple (and valid) CSS work, it is not rendering properly in IE6. I don’t personally care to fix this – it’s still usable, and I’m just too cranky right now to try to work around IE6’s inability to follow the standards.

I’m doing some more work on geektyme.org and also setting up tymeillusions.com. It’s slow going, because work tends to tire me out of looking at code for the day. But, it’s coming along none the less :)

I’m a big proponent of DRM-Free content, for reasons that are largely echoed in many articles and research initiatives throughout the web, namely that DRM doesn’t actually protect the content and in the end only hurts the honest consumer, because the dishonest consumer just finds a program to crack the DRM scheme and free their music anyways. Steve Jobs’ recent open letter discussing the future of DRM pretty much sums it all up, and it was nice to hear it come from the company that seems to have the best hold on the digital music market. Well, it seems at least one record label was listening: EMI has decided to freed its music from DRM on iTunes – in the near future you will be able to download music from any EMI artist (save The Beatles – I wonder why?) without any digital rights management. Finally, it’s starting – let’s hope that others follow suit.