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magikist

On the bathroom wall at TT The Bear's on the night of a Wesley Willis show.

News Passing Me By: Wesley Willis

So I just found out today that Wesley Willis passed away on August 21, 2003. It’s funny how long these kinds of news can wait to come around sometimes.

Photo is from Wesley’s show at TT The Bear’s in Cambride, MA - Sep 14, 2001

Beats

So I was talking with my old pal Ben about Dub Beats and I mentioned that Aesop Rock's "Skip Town" has the same backing beat as "You Are My Angel" by Horace Andy. Dub tracks are very intriguing to me, they turn up all over the place but it's so damn hard to trace them back to the originals. Listening to the Trojan Records DJ Box Set or the Dub Box Set always sets my mind racing about where I've heard that damn track before... so really I'm just building a google relationship between "Skip Town" and "You Are My Angel."

Brainstorm: Website that hosts out-of-print independent release albums. There are lots of out-of-print albums that are hard to find and not being issued and it would be pretty neat to make them available. Yes - it's a marginal market - but I'd love to have access to albums that artists don't press anymore because there's not enough demand. You could charge a nominal fee for high quality downloads and use some returns to run the servers and give a little kickback to the artist. hmmmm.... time for bed...

update: found that the same beat from Skip Town / You Are My Angel is also on the track "King Tubby's In Fine Style" off of the Dubwise and Otherwise compilation.

MusicBrainz

Hot Damn. Today I basically spent the whole day inputting albums into MusicBrainz . Musicbrainz is an open-source answer to Gracenote who commandeered the cddb.org database a few years back. There’s still FreeDB but it just doesn’t cut it for me for several reasons - MusicBrainz does has all these features on top of what FreeDB does:

• Various Artists - The cddb schema for handling various artist compilations is mediocre at best. MusicBrainz actually associates the various artist tracks with the respective artist. Yay.


• Entry Style - The cddb entries are completely unregulated and if one shows up wrong you can send in an email and maybe have a change reflected on the server. I think I tried once and gave up pretty soon. MusicBrainz has a Style Guide to regulate what all the entries look like. No more “MOTLIE CREW” as an artist name. (I did find a “Mos def and Talib kawileb” that I had to change)


• Track Identification - Yes! MusicBrainz supports waveform fingerprinting of the songs. TRM from Relatable . I’m not sure if I trust them. I can’t figure out if their algorithm has any royalty/copyright schemes built in. There is a GPL implementation to be downloaded from MusicBrainz, I guess that’s at least somewhat good news. I ran the tagger (windows) on a mess of random mp3’s and it did a good job identifying them. This will only get better as the databaes grows.


• User Moderation - If I think that an entry is bad I can do a whole slew of things to fix it up. The changes don’t take effect immediately - another independent user needs to approve the change and then it goes through. It’s a neat voting system. I guess I could create myself another account approve my own changes - ok it’s not hacker proof.


• Database- They use Postgres and the screenshot of the DB schema is pretty fun to oogle at.


• Modifications - are immediate, satisfying, thus:


• Adding Albums - is addictive

I need to sit down and read through all their licensing documentation.

I like what they’re doing - I just don’t want them to go closed/corporate/evil as soon as the database has reaches critical mass. In that case at least we cabn always salvage the current data because their Data is free to download under the various Creative Commons licenses. I really really really hope for all of us that they stick to their Social Contract . I hate it when projects like this go bad.

4kbps ogg

wow. a 5:46 minute version of Sultans of Swing ogg vorbis taking up 196KB. Granted I haven’t tried encoding mp3 at 4kbps but this is pretty cool.

drugs

from an old sears roebuck catalog reprint

Opinion - NY Times

Ok, it's from a few days ago, i still like it.

NY Times Opinion Page, Dec 16, 2003.

To the Editor:
  The Arrest of a sadistic magalomaniac like Saddam Hussein is cause for celebration (front page, Dec 15), but I'm mystified why the United States government is so selective in its attention.
  Idi Amin, the Butcherer of Uganda, died recently after a long, luxurious exile provided by our dear friends the Saudis.
  And Augusto Pinochet, whose dictatorship led to the torture and murder of thousands of Chileans, is living in retirement.
  There must be some reason we are so obsesed with Saddam Hussein — perhaps something to do with Iraq's unusual geology? DAVID HAYDEN
  Wilton, Conn., Dec. 15, 2003

IRiver Playlists

I got an IRiver iMP-550 for my Birthday/Christmas from my mom. They say they'll support Ogg Vorbis soon.

I've been playing with it a little bit and was having a hard time getting my playlists to work. I figured the problem related to the differing Unix/Windows text formats. Unix uses just a LF (LineFeed) while Windows uses CR-LF(CarriageReturn and LineFeed) at the end of its lines. The iMP-550 playlists must be in the CR-LF format as of firmware 1.40.

Another thing that I thought might be going wrong is that unix uses a / (forward slash) for path separators while Windows uses a \ (back slash). This was a problem as well. The iMP-550 playlists must use backslash as a path separator as of firmware 1.40.

Ugh, so I guess I need to do a recode lat1..ibmpc playlist.m3u for my playlists before I burn the CD. I hope IRiver is responsive to my suggestions. It should be pretty easy to support unix style playlists.

Hope this helps anyone making a cursory websearch on this stuff. I know I find good solutions on people's blogs all the time.

Keywords: IRiver Playlist CD crlf lf problem not recognized iMP iFP iHP firmware m3u winamp

Quote

"So we're eating chocolate-dipped Body of Christ?"
- overheard at dinner tonight

my kinda...

FAQ

Getting Out Of The House

-Waiter: So, Technically I’m supposed to charge you 50¢ for a water.
-Me (actual): And technically I can always drink from the tap in the bathroom. Thanks
-Me (should have said in retrospect): Oh good god, another place to boycott.
-Waiter: Cool, hold onto the cup though.
……… at the Orange Peel

It’s good to get out of the house. It’s been me and my computers a little bit to much lately. I took up my buddy Mike’s offer for a ride to Asheville, NC. He was going to see King Wilkie (they play at the Cantab Lounge a lot) on Saturday night and Karl Denson
.

My old pals Ian and Josh have moved down to Asheville. What a nice chance to go see them. I see them evey now and then when I pass through Floyd but it was neat to catch up with them in their natural environment.

I caught up with Ian on a bad day - he was working on his car - replacing some brakepads - couldn’t get the hydraulic piston pushed in far enough to put the new pad in and was getting frustrated in how the hell we was gonna get to work the next day.

Josh was just getting off a week of having the flu and taking exams. Helluva combination. He’s quite good at keeping positive though. One of the best in my experience. We went down to see his pottery studio - a nice big space in the River District of Asheville. Old industrial spaced being converted to art/dance/creativity studios. He’s renting a big space and has some other potters that rent some studio space from him. There’s another room that Scrapy Hamilton rents out. All in all he’s just facilitating a good thing.

He’s got some friends across the street that have a HUGE woodshop. There’s a dance/capoeira studio upstairs. Cool community.

Asheville’s one of those great towns that has a great music scene, great restaurants, cafes, down to earth people, an arts scene, all the things that make a place great.

I can’t wait to go back.

Damn You Computers

Looks like part of the registry on my mom's computer was sitting on some bad sectors or maybe WIN2K just decided to croak for some other reason. It's really a pain to even get a decent boot floppy together to run scandisk.exe these days. I finally found an image online somewhere. Still no good - it's high time to reinstall anyway. There's so much junk everywhere.

Maybe I can teach her how to use bookmarks instead of putting all the shortcuts on the desktop.
Maybe I can have her use Firebird and Thunderbird. MSIE had a google and a yahoo toolbar at the top - taking about half the real estate. They were there for "blocking pop-ups". Yay Mozilla project. It'll probably be fine moving her off Pegasus Mail.

Hell, I'll buy a new HD without bad sectors tomorrow and get a clean install. That's the regular thing to do with Windows anyway. I was looking over someone's shoulder when they were installing some software on OS X. Hmm, seems like the programs are nicely isolated into images that get mounted. How damn cool is that. No "Program Files" folder. No Registry. Macs have always had it pretty nice. I remember way back in the day when it was all in the System:Preferences folder. Not bad.

Hmm, I need to learn more about package management in Linux. My Debian box has lots of packages that I've installed over apt, but when I compile and install programs that I can't find in packages I just make -install and I'll never get my system clean again. I reckon I could build a .deb and install that but I haven't dealt with it yet. I may as well just get Gentoo.

What I was really wanting to post about is that I just found out that Syntrillium has been aquired by Adobe. RIP. It was nice to see them independent making their awesome Cool Edit App. It's better than going to Microsoft, I guess. Welcome, Adobe Audition.

foam-face

foam face indeed.

rm -fr -rf

So I use rm -rf. Any one out there use rm -fr. I've only found one person, but it's not a question I go asking a lot.

Gallery

Alright dammit, enough playing with Gallery. It's time for bed. Gotta get up at 8. Hell. That's 3 hours.

Here's the fruits of my labor... TADA.

More pics will indeed be posted there. I'm really digging Gallery, it does a lot of things right. I wonder if it can export to XML. I'll have to research that another day.

It's hosted at 1and1.com [more info], they have the GD graphics libraries installed and everything - it's still possible to sign up for 3 free years. 500MB. 3Gig transfer a month. Free. Shell access. I'm digging it. It's no anize but it'll do. I'll probably come begging to dfc for space on anize.org when this 1and1 deal actually requires me to pay.

update: why have unused domain names lying around, now you can go to http://lookthatshitup.com/gallery as well.

Hip Hop Kitty

Even though I've gotten a personal answer about what the deal with the fist-pumping kitties is, I was tickeld to find it as the last entry on this SAQ.

While I'm On A Tree Kick...

I spent part of last night modifying the unix utility tree. If you're using CVS it ends up placing a 'CVS' directory in every directory that's under version control. If I run tree on the top directory my view is crowded by all the version control data. When I was working with CVS a lot I had ended up using this alias

alias treecvs 'tree | grep -v -e "-- CVS" | grep -v -e "-- Entries" | grep -v -e "-- Repository" | grep -v -e "-- Root"'

to clean things up a little. Just recently my colleague Fernando suggested I just modify tree itself to filter directories. Hooray for open source.

Here's you have it, my own personal tree. (tree-1.4b3.tgz) I added the -Q and the -X option. -Q does a regex include of directories. -X does a regex exclude of directories. All the regex code was already there for including/excluding files so this was a pretty simple hack.

I'll kick it around testing for a bit longer and then probably suggest the modification to the maintainer of the project.

Family Tree

Hey Hey Hey, I found myself . Pretty wild stuff, I’d never really researched my own genealogy all that far but this is definitely quite interesting. It’s exactly like friendster except different.

hatch

shot from the ferry from Boston to
P-town

Domes

We went to Virginia Beach for Thanksgiving. Sailing. Eating. Movies. On the way back there was a planned stop at a Monolithic Dome . The one we stopped to see was quite suburban-generic inside with linoleum floors and such. My mom wants to build a house to get out of the trailer complex that’s been home for some 15 years now. It’s just not manageable to do all the upkeep as these things fall apart. Her dome would be funky inside. Wood floors, neat shapes and colors. Funky. She’s been interested in alternative building techinques for some time. Cob , Earthship , Cordwood , and on and on. The monolithic domes are pretty neat. They’re an expansion on Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Domes . A dome maximizes the interior volume you get per wall/roof area. It’s also incredibly strong. The Monloithic Domes are built out of concrete so they will last for a long time and they’re super energy efficient. They say it costs about as much to build as a conventional house. Maybe I’ll be involved in the building of one of these things next summer. I’ll just have toride it out and see if it really gets built. I’d like to see it happen.