It’s been neat to see these guys popping in to leave their .02:

SvN: Music producer Steve Albini explains his studio and the record business. Then: Steve Albini comments and explains why he dislikes contracts...

I sometimes hear the criticism that bands can mitigate these effects through negotiation (I’ve read such criticism in comments here), but this ignores another point of the article, that the result of negotiation is a contract, and contracts provide no protection for the weaker/poorer party signatory to it.

Contractual protections are only enforceable by the application of money, lawyers, courts and time, and record companies have such an advantage in all these areas that they may simply ignore their obligations to bands, while stringently enforcing the bands’ obligations. Such a contract is essentially worthless to the band that signs it, but remains an important coercive tool for the record company. I’m sure you can see parallels in the software and web worlds, but the disparity was most obvious to me when watching my peers navigate the music scene.

So that’s it. A contract is meaningless unless you have the wherewithal to enforce it, and can endure the time (sometimes years) it takes a dispute to wind its way through the courts (during which time you will be earning nothing).

For this reason I don’t use contracts in any professional dealings, and I am convinced this is the best way to maintain transparent and amicable relationships.

SvN: Lessons from Etsy on building community. Then: Etsy founder Robert Kalin comments on the post...

Thanks for the mention. When designing Etsy, 37signals was one of the sites I looked at for UI guidance.

Shows you how much these guys are “on the case” and want to be in on the conversation.

Now, does this mean Steve Jobs is gonna chime in on our next Apple-related post?

So when I was approached by local Chicago entrepreneur and folk-rocker Al Rose about designing packaging for his upcoming album “My First Posthumous Release” I happily jumped on board. Having free creative reign on a project is always an interesting challenge. Before I could even start brainstorming, however, Al emailed me to say he loved an image I’d posted called Devil’s Own Day which was part of a continuing series of things that were a side effect of watching Ken Burns’ Civil War series too much. But with that, I had a path to pursue.

First thing, I had to find a different model. For my own obsessive reasons I couldn’t directly use my Sherman images, and I didn’t think he worked for what I wanted here anyway, so I went to my favorite source of quality Civil War imagery, Wikipedia, and poked around. Found some candidates but ultimately settled on fallen hero of Gettysburg, General John F. Reynolds. It was really the epaulets that did it.

Steve Albini is a rock producer most widely known for having produced Nirvana’s “In Utero.” The website for his studio, Electrical Audio, goes into impressive detail on the intricacies of the recording process.

This page on the Alcatraz room explains the benefits of a “dead” space and how to make one. There are diagrams, construction details, a 360 image, and more. It’s a great example of promoting by educating.

Clicking “membrane absorber” takes you to an even more in-depth page with hand-drawn diagrams:

Micheal Pettibone writes:

In Getting Real, there is an entire chapter dedicated to the subject of “Meetings are Toxic”.

It seems like you guys use Campfire extensively throughout the day as a replacement for the typical corporate (physical) meeting.

What I’m curious to know is how using Campfire all day is different from that of a typical corporate meeting. They both (chat or a physical meeting) seem to be a type of a “meeting”, which distracts you from your normal daily work load.

Also, as 37signals grows with employees – do you find that using chat (Campfire) becomes ever more difficult/distracting because the number of conversations between various co-workers multiplies?

Campfire differs from a traditional meeting in significant ways:

1. You can pay attention to something other than the meeting without offending or distracting anyone else.

2. You can leave the room and come back later and read everything you’ve missed. You can even search for specific terms in the transcript.

3. Typing forces people to be more economical in what they communicate. There’s a lot less extraneous chatter in a Campfire chat than there is in a typical meeting.

4. You can have a sidebar discussion without interrupting the flow of others. Create a separate room and chat about something you want to keep private or that doesn’t concern the whole team.

5. You don’t have to be there. Want to focus 100% on the task at hand? Just log out of Campfire and get to work.

As for the second part of the question: With our growth, the chat room has gotten somewhat busier. In order to prevent distraction, we have more sidebar conversations in different rooms.

We’ve also tried to cut down on inessential banter. At the same time, we don’t want to put a muzzle on the normal “water cooler” conversations that our remote team only gets via Campfire. It’s a balancing act.

All the 37signals properties were offline for two hours this morning between 10AM and 12PM CST (16:00 to 18:00 GMT) as our load balancer blew out and knocked out the network connection for all our servers. No data was lost and the machines all kept running, but they weren’t accessible from the internet.

We’re very, very sorry for this interruption of service. While we were able to report on the progress of this interruption through our http://status.37signals.com (all the products and 37signals.com pointed to that site during the majority of the outage) that’s a small consolation when you want to access data stored on our services right now. It was just not good enough.

While we don’t have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write [email protected] (and include your application URL) and we’ll get that taken care of.

Naturally, we’re going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They’re supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us, so we in turn failed you. We’ll do everything we can to make sure that something as simple as a load balancer (or firewall or switch or any other network equipment) going bad does not cause two hours of downtime.

Again, we’re truly sorry for this interruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.

Lessons learned from Dreamhost’s billing debacle

“The moral of this story is that ‘flexibility’ is rarely desired in programming! The less a program will accept/the less a program will do/the less options and preferences it has, the more usable it is/the more understandable it is/the more stable it is. Tough Love When designing a program, you’ve got to make some tough decisions .. and when you really can’t decide if this is something your users will need someday, err on the side of leaving it out.”

1960s Braun products hold the secrets to Apple's future

“Some people will probably call these examples a ‘rip-off’ but, in a world where industrial design and art is constantly being recycled into new work, I just see Apple’s products as a great evolution to classic concepts. Now, as I look at Rams’ work I can’t help but to wonder: which of these old Braun designs will Apple revive next?”

Steve Jobs on the Kindle

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Profile of Tumblr’s David Karp

“Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp continued, have a tendency to cash out early. ‘I want to build something I’d be happy to be employed by 10 years out,’ he said. ‘The idea of Tumblr employing 40 people in two years is such an incredible idea.’”

With Fluid you can give your favorite web apps their own contained Safari-powered space on OS X. Once wrapped, the applications get their own icon, their own place in the Dock, and their own lifeline, so crashing your general purpose browser won’t take down your Fluid apps.

It’s neat and free. Check it out.

(If you’re not on OS X, Prism does something similar for Windows and Linux powered by the Mozilla engine).

Update: Here are high res logos for Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and Highrise to use with Fluid. (Click to download).

In this video from the Charlie Rose Show, Chuck Jones, the genius behind many of the best Warner Bros. cartoons, shows how he draws Wile E. Coyote. A little later in the same video, he talks about what he learned in art school: how to have a fancy signature. (Neat thing about Google Video: You can link directly to interesting parts of a video with times like 1:24:30 or 0:55.)

And here’s “High Note,” a great Jones short.

Yahoo! is jumping on the OpenID wagon and is making it possible to use your Yahoo! account as a valid OpenID. That’s another quarter of a billion OpenIDs out there! Put that together with the fact that AOL made their AIM logins work as OpenIDs as well and most everyone in the US at least will already have an OpenID.

At 37signals, we love OpenID. We support it in Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack and have integrated all these applications through OpenID with our OpenBar. Our users seem to love it too. One in ten Highrise users is running with OpenID.

It seems the Yahoo! system is still under development, though. And it does require that systems accept OpenID 2.0, which is the only just-minted new standard (what everyone else in the first rush just implemented was 1.1). So we’ll be making sure that our systems will be ready for OpenID 2.0 and all the new Yahoo!-wielding OpenID users coming on board.

Rock on, OpenID!

When an Apple keynote event is underway, we can’t help but load up the live blog feeds and discuss the spectacle in our internal Campfire chat room as it unfolds. It’s a lot of fun but it usually involves a lot of reloading and copying and pasting too. So when I found out Tuesday morning that Ars Technica would be covering the Macworld keynote live on IRC, I had an idea: why not write a script to do all the hard work for us?

Ten minutes later the Campfire relay bot was born. I hooked up a Ruby IRC library with Marshmallow (an unofficial Campfire library that we use to display Subversion commits) to create a bot that repeats everything from Ars’ #mwsf channel to a room in our Campfire account. If you’re interested you can read the resulting transcript and download the bot (see the campfire_relay_bot.rb file for configuration instructions).