Month: January 2007

New mix: the difficult listening hour 2: chichester and other

New at Art of the MIx: the difficult listening hour 2: chichester and other. As a favor to my mom, I put together some modern and contemporary choral music selections. I’ve sung the Chichester and In the Beginning several times, have read through the Beatitudes, and just missed the chance to perform El Niño. They’re all pretty spectacular pieces. I just wish I could have found a better recording of the Aaron Copland piece.

Cool: viewing composer information in iTunes Music Store

This is one of those “well, of course” things, but the capability to view composer data in the iTunes Music Store wasn’t obvious to me. But it’s so necessary if you’re looking at classical recordings. I was curious as to whether any of Yo Yo Ma’s work with contemporary composers was on his new Appassionata album, but couldn’t be sure from the displayed track names. So on a hunch, I used the View Options to turn on the composer column and there was the information I was looking for right in the store display.

Of course, the ability to browse by composers in the column browser is still missing, and you have to use the Power Search feature to search by composers. But the information is there.

This is what frustrates me about having more than 20,000 tracks in iTunes. Even though the options to store tons of metadata are present, you can’t do a text search by composer, or comment field, or whatever. But you can display the data!

The iPhone is the Newspad

Watching yesterday’s keynote and particularly the demo of the iPhone’s web browser surfing the New York Times, one thought kept recurring to me: It’s a Newspad.

The Newspad was the name given by Arthur C. Clarke in the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the small handheld devices that the crew carry with them around the ship. The description:

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

Hmm. How about making it the size of a cell phone, doing away with codes, and putting the whole thing in a touchscreen interface?

iPhone: Holy crap

Well. If the keynote coverage on Engadget is anything to go by, I may have bought my 30Gb iPod too soon. Also, all the naysayers may go and hang, apparently, because the iPhone aka touch-screen iPod aka mobile Internet device looks like it’s hit the ball out of the park. And really, the naysayers are looking pretty damned stupid right now. I’d love to read the reaction to the iPhone by Michael Kanellos, the CNet analyst who claimed that the phone companies had such a big lead in phone design. Especially nice: it runs Mac OS X natively, no “mobile edition”. The question, of course, is whether the pricing is too much of a premium for the market to bear. $499 is a lot for a phone, even if it is also an iPod.

Other keynote reaction: I’m still trying to figure out if the new Apple TV obviates my need for a Mac Mini to play back my music—can I just attach a pair of hard drives to it and access my library directly?

Finally: The Apple (just Apple, no A, B, Computer, or bloody D) website is slow, but I finally found the product pages for the iPhone and the Apple TV.

Friday Random 10: No longer random edition

I have my new 30 GB iPod loaded up with a bunch of my favorite mix tapes cum playlists in addition to the purely random playlists that I used to keep on the old model. So this week’s playlist will be random samplings from songs I like a lot as well as stuff that I haven’t really listened to yet.

  1. Mint Royale, “Show Me” (Dancehall Places)
  2. Morrissey, “Alsatian Cousin” (Viva Hate)
  3. Morrissey, “Late Night, Maudlin Street” (Viva Hate)
  4. Morrissey, “I Don’t Mind If You Forget Me” (Viva Hate)
  5. Pixies, “Born in Chicago” (Rubáiyát)
  6. Frank Black, “Whatever Happened to Pong?” (Teenager of the Year)
  7. Frank Black, “(I Want to Live On An) Abstract Plain” (Teenager of the Year)
  8. Frank Black, “Calistan” (Teenager of the Year)
  9. Frank Black, “Freedom Rock” (Teenager of the Year)
  10. Hilliard Ensemble, “Credo” (The Old Hall Manuscript)

Oops. I keep forgetting that the “shuffle by album” setting applies to the master Shuffle Songs menu item as well as regular play. So here’s a bonus random 10 that is a little more random… even though it begins and ends with a Tom Waits track from Orphans:

  1. Tom Waits, “What Keeps Mankind Alive” (Orphans)
  2. Youssou N’Dour, “Fakastulu” (Set)
  3. Last Exit, “Every Day’s Just The Same” (Last Exit Demos)
  4. Above the Law, “Freedom of Speech” (Pump Up the Volume)
  5. Robert Johnson, “Malted Milk” (The Complete Recordings)
  6. Beck, “Rowboat” (Stereopathetic Soul Manure)
  7. The Rolling Stones, “Get Off My Cloud” (Singles 1965-1967)
  8. The Corn Sisters, “She’s Leaving Town” (The Other Women)
  9. Melissa Etheridge, “Similar Features” (Melissa Etheridge)
  10. Tom Waits, “First Kiss” (Orphans)

Top 90.3 Albums of 2006

I look forward each year to KEXP’s Top 90.3 Albums list, not only to see how my own favorites from the year fared (and, really, stack-ranking spectacular albums against each other has limited appeal. What does it mean to say that Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is better than Supernature? Each is a kick-ass album in its own way), but also to catch items that I may have missed. Yesterday I found the 2006 list on KEXP’s website and created a copy on Lists of Bests. So now you can use the List of Best version of the KEXP Top 90.3 Albums of 2006 to track your listening progress against some of the best music that was released in 2006.

I’ve actually done this with past Top 90.3 lists as well (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and (created by someone else) 2005), and it’s interesting that I always hover between 25 and 30% coverage on these lists.

I’m also creating a list in eMusic which tags albums I haven’t heard yet that are on the KEXP lists and available in eMusic. —Yes, I am a music geek.

Number 5 with a bullet

New post at the Boycott Sony blog, regarding Sony BMG’s position in PC World’s list of the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. I find interesting just how many “consumer” products are on this list—including such wonderful POSes as the CueCat, the Comet Cursor, the Lion King CD-ROM, and Microsoft BOB. The other theme, interestingly, is Apple products, with the Mac Portable and the Apple Pippin (the barely shipped Apple/Bandai game console) in the top 25 and the Newton, the Apple Puck Mouse that shipped with the original iMac, and the 20th Anniverary Mac in the (Dis)Honorable Mention category.

Let’s be careful out there

The month of Mac exploits has kicked off, with yesterday’s publication of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the latest version of QuickTime. I for one welcome the discussion of possible vulnerabilities on Mac OS X. As a long time user and computer software professional, you can only secure things through design up to a point and the more that Apple and the industry openly investigate and fix these security vulnerabilities, the better off everyone will be. More discussion on Slashdot, including an interesting disputation of the findings—is it possible that the exploit is not as general as claimed?

Update: within 24 hours a fix for the vulnerability has been posted. Interestingly, the fix comes from a former Apple developer and uses Application Enhancer to fix the vulnerability at runtime.

Yes, I know…

…quite a few meme posts recently. Forgive me: after a long downtime, I still have my blog training wheels back on, and any writing is better than no writing.

So I was tagged by Isis with this book meme:

  1. Find the nearest book.
  2. Name the book & the author.
  3. Turn to page 123.
  4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
  5. Tag three more folks.

And boy, you’re going to regret asking me this, because I’m at work and the nearest book is … well, it could have been worse:

Book: The Tipping Point (Back Bay Books, 2002)
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

p. 123, 5th sentence and ff.:

“Something that stuck in my mind was when Kermit would hold his finger to the screen and draw an animated letter, you’d see kids holding their fingers up and drawing a letter along with him. Or occasionally, when a Sesame Street character would ask a question, you’d hear kids answer out loud. But Sesame Street just somehow never took that idea and ran with it.”

Now in my defense: this is a serious book about what makes innovations and products “sticky” – keeping customers interested in the product offering. But still a kind of random connection…

Tagging: Chris, Zalm, Tin Man.

New year, new project

Happy 2007! Everyone in the Jarrett House is waving or wagging at you, hoping you will have a wonderful and prosperous New Year.

And it was only 12 hours into the new year that I broke out a house project. Specifically: completing the media wiring that is installed under the wine cabinet in the kitchen. Today’s task was getting the phone jack working, and I learned a few lessons along the way.

While the new wall was open during the construction of the new opening between the dining room and the kitchen, I insisted that we spend a little extra money and get the electrician to run phone, network, and coax to an outlet over the little desk—because, after all, it would be much harder to make that run afterwards. The electrician ran two lengths of Cat-5 and coax up through the wall and connected it to jacks in an outlet, but didn’t connect it to the structured media wiring panel—not that I asked him to. I figured that doing so would be a pretty straightforward task. Heh.

The project as I saw it would take two steps for each cable:

  1. Finish running the cable from its current drop location in the garage to the structured media panel in the utility room.
  2. Tie each cable into the appropriate part of the panel.

Step 1, however, took a lot longer than I anticipated. Snaking the wires along the existing infrastructure took a long time, fighting every step of the way to keep the cables from tangling or binding. Then came Step 2. I confidently hooked the phone line into the block in the structured media panel, hooked in a test phone… and nothing. No dial tone.

Aside: We activated a second phone line to the house last month, and decided that this would be what we would use at the new kitchen desk. This information becomes relevant shortly.

With no dial tone, I knew I had to check a few things. So I pulled the outlet cover off to verify the colors of the wires that were connected to the jack, then double checked how I had wired it at the block. Because I wanted to make the second line primary on this unit, I had tied the blue and white pair from the Cat 5 to the second block on the phone jumper unit in the box. This was tied to the yellow and black pair coming in from the outside (Cat 3) wire and should have connected the primary line for that jack to the second line coming in from the street. But it still wasn’t working.

Everything looked correct inside the house, so I stepped outside in the freezing rain to check the outside wires. And I discovered that back in 2004, I had only hooked up one pair of wires in my hurry to get the phone working. Aha! So I returned with a wire stripper and connected the second yellow and black pair to the terminal for the second phone line…

And it still didn’t work. Now I was getting mad. So I checked a few things and realized that inside I had connected the yellow black pair with yellow first, but I had switched them outside. So I corrected the error outside and tried again… still no love.

And then I had an aha-erlebnis. I ran back upstairs and plugged the phone into the network jack instead of the phone jack… and got a dial tone. The Cat 5 line for the network jack was the one that I thought was the phone line, and vice versa. Not having done that initial wiring myself cost me a good hour of confusion and frustration—and I’ll still have more work to do to finish the job because the other cat 5 line isn’t long enough to reach the structured wiring box. But the second phone line is working, and there was no bloodshed. Hey, I’ll take it.