Monday 24 May 2010

Most Overproduced Record of All Time Award

I hereby nominate and vote for Pat Benetar's Love is a Battlefield from 1983. More like the production is a minefield. Strange chunking guitars, melancholy synths swooshing and swarming through the mix. Echoing vocals, And the Wikipedia page is hilarious: "We asked these guys to write us a hit song and they did". Wow, it's that easy? Just ask someone and you sell millions of records? If this story is true, then anyone can have a hit. Just ask some guy.

Michael Jackson's Beat It comes 2nd in this award. There is no 3rd place.

Tuesday 18 May 2010

WebDiff

I haven't Googled this yet, but here's the thought while it's still in my head.

A server sends a user a HTML webpage. The user reloads it later, and only a tiny bit has changed - say, a text advert.

With WebDiff, it only sends the difference between the last page and the new one, so saving 100's of kilobytes in big documents.

The Diff is calculated using the Unix tool diff.

This only works because HTML is raw text.

Cute, huh?