cygweb

Thanks to STG I've got my ears all around the excellent-sounding audience boot of the opening night of Rush's 30th anniversary tour. Cool stuff. I especially like the nugget they dug up from the 80's; I won't be more specific as to not spoil it for those who want to be surprised!

This is going to be a great show - too bad I have to wait until August 7th to see them!

It's odd that I remember anything about my dreams, but I figured I'd share my cloudy memory of this one since we're in the middle of the Stanley Cup Finals.

For some reason, I imagined that free agency had run so rampant in the NHL that a team in the finals was able to sign Martin Brodeur for the duration of their run. When he showed up for duty, he had a grizzly beard, sort of like McCoy did when he arrived in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Weird.

Yep, that's it. Go Calgary!

I'm about to throw the switch on a few changes on ICYG. To this point, most of the content has been mine, with member submissions every few songs. Over the last few months, I've more frequently tapped into the submissions pool. Well, there's so many member submissions that I'm about to "memberize" myself and start picking from each of our submissions more equally. It's getting to be a great mix of artists. If I have time this weekend, it will be done. Here's the highlights:

• The concept of "anchor" artists (who get play every rotation) will be removed.
• The artist history will be increased from 17 to at least 25. This means a particular artist will be played less often.
• All songs will be picked from member submissions.
• I'll program the picker to iterate though the member list as it grabs each song. Members who have a larger number of submissions will probably get more play, subject to artist history. This will probably need to be tweaked.

I'm also looking to parse ID3 tags and Vorbis metadata in lieu of file pathname info when doing the picking. I'm looking at a few solutions now; it'll probably require using a library external to Python.

As seen in "The Real Estate Book" for South Pinellas County, Florida:

I still haven't figured out what's funnier: the dog with the shirt and sunglasses sitting on a boat, or the fact that Ms. McCormick apparently had her picture pasted in.

I finally got around to watching the last three Enterprise episodes of the season. They were great! I was actually impressed by all the fine acting (especially Randy Oglesby's "Degra"). All until the last few scenes of the season-ender, with its Planet Of The Apes (reimagined) ending.

I haven't visited any Internet-related Star Trek sites lately; I bet people are screaming for Berman and Braga's scalps. ;) Time to make the rounds.

Oh well, I thought they were about to jump the shark last season and it turned out quite well. Let's hope they don't screw this one up.

I haven't yet taken the time to disassemble my stereo setup and take my receiver out, but after doing some research it looks like I'm not the only one having trouble getting my center channel to work. A Google search of "STR-DE545 channel silent" led me to this page that has some useful info. I definitely need to at least pull the receiver out, clean it, and check the center channel terminals. This will be the first time I've bought compressed air in a number of years. Hopefully I can get this fixed and enjoy the new center speaker!

I'm thinking that regardless of who wins tonight, Miikka Kiprusoff has a good chance of winning the Conn Smythe this year. Hopefully it would be after a Calgary win, unlike the situation Jean-Sebastian Giguere was in last year.

Go Flames!

(But what do I know? I'm still a relative newbie when it comes to the NHL.)

I've disabled anonymous comments; I'm tired of dealing with comment spam. Please use TypeKey authentication if you'd like to comment. Don and I have been using it and it seems to work OK.

Thanks!

Via Google Blog: I like Google's doodles. This is a good archive of them.

At work I'm doing testing on an dual-processor Opteron server we have on loan for a few months. I'm mainly testing our "bread-and-butter" 32-bit Windows Server 2003 (while waiting for the x86-64 beta version to be sent to me), but I also have another set of disks that I installed Fedora Core 2 for x86-64 to. I brought it up with Gnome - pretty cool stuff. It's my first Fedora experience - most of my recent Linux work has been with Mandrake.

Anyways, I figured I'd post about this if any of my Unix/Linux buddies would want me to test out any applications on this platform as an informal part of my eval. I plan on testing some PHP/MySQL stuff, as well as current and beta versions of Zope. I don't know how much of the software that comes with FC2 was compiled for 64-bit use, but since the server only has 2GB I don't think that's a huge issue. The server's use of the Hypertransport bus and the Opteron's onboard memory controllers give it some advantages over the comparable Xeons even with 32-bit stuff.

I'd noticed that I was having to sign in to TypeKey every time I wanted to comment, so I took a quick trip to the MT Support Forums and found this nugget. The referenced page has some great replacement JavaScript that seems to have done the trick. Let me know if you've had to continually login to TypeKey to post previously and you no longer have to.

Thanks to TweezerMan for the solution!

My wife and I went out to Pittsburgh Friday for our friends Kim and Jim's wedding. They tied the knot at Phipps Conservatory in an outdoor ceremony; the weather cooperated magnificently. The reception was in the Grand Foyer of the Carnegie Music Hall; what a splendid place that is! We had a great time.

Ryan stayed at home with my parents for the weekend and they had fun together. My sister and brother-in-law were also in town for part of the weekend, and we had an early birthday party last night for Ryan, who turns 4 next weekend. The favorite gift so far appears to be his new drumset, which will stay in the basement. ;)

Also, Don invited me to get a Gmail account, which I've done. I'll start playing with it this week. Thanks Dude!

And in other news, my buddy Phil (who you may know from such "lurker" names as "MASDORDY" and "Dr. N") and his wife Jen are the happy parents of a baby girl born on May 26th whom they've named Keira Lynn. Congratulations, guys!

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 is out.

Penny-per-song streaming jukebox in the EU.

Gmail is pretty cool.

...but after reading this article, you may have stronger feelings. I was reading a Katrina vanden Heuvel op-ed where she mentioned "Enron traders' tapes" and I had to see what was up with that.

The op-ed piece is good reading, too.

The ICYG Artists page is officially out of beta.

After I get some CSS tweaks done on the site, I'm going to comb through the whole thing to see if I can optimize it further.

I think it's ironic that Fedora Core 2 for x86-64 fully supports the hardware I'm evaluating, yet the Windows Server 2003 x86-64 beta version doesn't (at least, it doesn't appear to support the server's on-board RAID controller). I'll contact the manufacturer about this, but based on the fact that I haven't found any info or support online, I think this is a no-go for now.

Update: I reinstalled Fedora to the server and have both Zope 2.7.0 and Zope X3 beta 1 built. Cool stuff.

In this Slashdot discussion about the DRM on the new Velvet Revolver CD's copy-protection, there is this comment by blincoln:

Backups are simply not an issue for the mass market.

Backups are not the issue for audio. Making custom mix CDs or transferring the music to a digitial audio player is.

Any CD that goes in my car is a CD-R for several reasons:

- I don't want the originals to be stolen/melted by the sun/scratched/etc.
- I can condense the music off of 50-100 CDs down to 10 or so CD-Rs because I *really* only want to hear maybe 1-2 tracks off of each one when I'm driving, and almost no pre-pressed CD I own is a full 80 minutes in length.

I also rip tons of my CDs to Ogg Vorbis at work for similar reasons - I have something like 100 albums on my hard drive there, so I don't have to keep lugging CDs back and forth and hoping they don't get broken in my bag.

If a record company wants to prevent me from making mix CDs and ripping to Ogg, they won't get any business from me. I think that once more people realize that that's their goal, it will seriously impact their sales figures. Not everyone I know rips music to their hard drive, but everyone makes mix CDs.

I do use some original CD's in the car, but other than that I am aligned with blincoln. The RIAA needs to decide whether they're going to sell media or licenses. In the digital age, the two don't cleanly mix.

Update: Reading a little more about this, it appears that as long as you don't allow Windows to auto-run the DRM software included on the VR CD, your access to the digital audio isn't impeded.

• HydrogenAudio Forums discussion of VR DRM
• Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention System

We hadn't been to Reservoir Park to see free Shakespeare in quite a while; last night we attended the Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In short, it was great! I don't see much theater, but I've seen quite a few of this company's productions and have always enjoyed them.

My favorite performances:

• Mark Robinson's acrobatic "Puck" was a treat to watch. I thought he was going to hurt himself with some of those cartwheels, but he's obviously in great shape. And his acting was top-notch.
• Doug Durlacher's Danzig-inspired "Oberon" was a great take on the character, and he had the voice to match.
• Melissa Dunphy's songs and violin playing were a great touch.
• Kent McNeillie's "Bottom" was easily the best comedic performance of the night, and produced tons of laughter from me. Great timing and nuance.

The "modern" style of production was fresh, and this is the first time I can recall a cell phone as a prop in a Shakespeare production (to great effect). There's one more performance tonight at 7:30, weather permitting; highly recommended. The HSF is still putting out great work 10 years after their inception.

I just noticed this weekend that ESPN HD was windowboxing its standard-def programming as opposed to stretching it. I first thought "finally, they listened to all the people who said they didn't like the stretch." I hadn't followed its progress towards in-studio HD, so I was surprised to find that not only were they no stretching, but that shows like SportsCenter (on right now) are now in HD. Cool.

Via Lessig Blog: Cory Doctorow, whose works I've been meaning to read, gave a speech to Microsofties about the downside of DRM. He manages to entertain me through the sheer amount of references he makes to the history of copyright in support of his points; much more than just Valenti's "Boston Strangler" zinger (an easy target, but included for completeness). If we are to retain the freedom to do with our digital media as is our right, it'll be greatly helped by the reasoned expressions of people like Cory. And our own evangelism (and action) in the trenches.

Via Slashdot: Papersplease.org.

Is it April 1st?

Isn't this the United States of America? "Give me liberty or give me death" and all that?

I'll be reading more about this a little later, but I figured I'd post something in the meantime.

Via Lessig Blog: I was going to post my reaction to the INDUCE Act yesterday, but needed time to read/understand it and Senator Hatch's speech regarding its goals. It definitely reads overbroad to me - it seems like it would apply to more than just P2P software vendors promising users free (but illegally shared) music. It might be interpreted to apply to programs like CD rippers, which have legitimate uses.

This annotated version of Hatch's speech raises many of the questions that need to be asked before the act breezes through Congress. A highly recommended read.

I think I know what I want the ICYG website to look like, but I'm having a hard time molding the site's CSS to what I'm thinking. I originally started from scratch (to learn CSS from the ground up), and then I started using elements of the MT 3.0D style. Now it's a little bit of a mess. I think I'm going to head over to the CSS Zen Garden for some pointers and re-think the darn thing.

Input is welcome.

I've neglected to participate in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search for a while now. Since my main server at home (GhostRider) has been stable for a while, I'm loading up the client and joining the search again. The lure of a share of the $100,000 EFF prize is too great for me not to imagine the possibilities.

Speaking of dreaming, I haven't been running my RSA Jackpot script in quite a while, either. RSA-640 is still not factored.

While I'm on the subject of numbers, I have to admit that I'm a HUGE 47 fan.

Best Buy supposedly has it for $7.99. I'll be picking up my copy this morning.

Update: They do have it for $7.99.

The first idiot to rip Feedback didn't look at either the track listing on the back of the jacket or listen to the tracks before submitting the track names to FreeDB. Reminds me of a "FIRST POST!" on Slashdot. I've submitted a correction.

My buddy Paul is the only person I keep up with from high school. We went to college in different towns and initially settled down quite a ways away from each other, but we've always managed to keep in touch. When he finished up med school four years ago, he ended up choosing to be a resident at Hershey Med Center. Being less than a half-hour drive away since then has led our families to become pretty close. Each of us is the other's first child's godfather. (Say that fast five times. ;) ) And family events on either side that are in town have usually seen us gather together.

Well, Paul's done with his residency and he and his family are settling into a nice house in Fayetteville, NC as he starts with a practice down there. The great thing for his family is that they'll be living near his brother and sister-in-law. And I know we'll be able to get together occasionally. Now that he'll have broadband I expect that we'll be able to do some video conferencing to keep in good touch.

Well, dude, I hope the move goes smooth for you guys. Good luck down there!

It's loud and proud, but it's not crackly. Thank goodness, because these are some great songs. I don't know all of the originals, but I'm now a fan of all of them. My favorite tracks after two listens are "Summertime Blues" and "Crossroads". I also dig "Heart Full Of Soul" because of the way they've wrapped themselves around such a non-Rush-sounding song.

Alex's overdubbed but tasteful guitars are the highlight of the CD for me. He's all over the place. I remember seeing him play "All Along The Watchtower" at the Kumbaya Festival years ago and thinking how cool he sounded playing Hendrix. Hearing him play more non-Rush material is fine with me!

One subtlety I find neat is the panning of Geddy (left) and Alex (right) on "Crossroads". I'm definitely enjoying the CD more on headphones than in the car.

I think this EP was a great way for Rush to celebrate their 30th anniversary, and the tour is cool, too. :) See you in Scranton!

I'm glad Scott's excited about the upcoming hour-long member-created shows that I've planned to start "real soon now" on ICYG. That's part of the reason I thought it would be a neat project: the ability to change things as we go along and add new features.