This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in November 2007.

A little bit o’ downtime

Posted by Daniel Stout on Wed 28 Nov 2007 at 7:41 AM

I’m sorry if you saw the above message recently. The excellent webhost that powers this site had a bit of rare, unexpected downtime – on Cyber Monday no less. At any rate, things seems to be up and running again. Email is coming in. Email is going out. And my websites are accessible again.

In other news, I got my annual webhosting bill, and so I decided to bring back the advertising on the site. It was mostly unobtrusive, and frankly, it paid for my hosting bill and then some. This isn’t really a for-profit activity for me, but it’s good to have the lease on my web real estate covered.

I finally got the second wave of my Halloween 2007 CD mixes mailed out the week of Thanksgiving. If you’re wanting some good tunes from either This Is Not Dubai or Halloween 2007 and aren’t already on my mailing list, just drop me a line. It’s a pretty time consuming process to make mix CDs, but it’s definitely worth it.

In vinyl news, I’m seeing increasing numbers of albums with download coupons for grabbing an electronic version of the album in MP3 format. A bunch of the indies like Matador, Beggars Banquest, and Polyvinyl all seem to use the same service for the download capability. I had a download for Of Montreal’s Sunlandic Twins, but the .zip file was corrupted. The record label was quick to respond and correct the mistake – the file they had uploaded to their servers was in fact a corrupt file. I haven’t seen or heard of any other groups doing what Interpol did with their most recent album by including the actual CD with the vinyl copy. There is definitely a resurgent market in vinyl. The amount of re-issues and new vinyl coming out is amazing. The market for vinyl hasn’t been this good for at least 15 years. The ’90s were a dismal time to find new vinyl, but wow! ’00s, you’re great!

There seems to be two tiers in the new vinyl market though. Most of the new records I see at the record shop run $12 to $22 depending. But in the catalogs I get, there is a lot of older audiophile re-releases coming in at a staggering $30 or more a disc. Most of the $30 vinyl though is artists from the ’60s and ’70s, that is, older music for an older, wealthier consumer. These audiophile releases skew towards the bland stuff you’ve seen a million times, but at least in some of the ’80s and later vinyl being re-released there is a lot of quirky, strange stuff coming out. I mean, the world doesn’t need another Greatest Hits from Simon & Garfunkel.

What I’d like to know is who is today’s vinyl buyer? Is it 30s+ guys like me who have always had a turntable since the ’80s? Or is it the 20-something crowd, newly turned on to the groove of analog? But as great as their selection is, I don’t see many people looking though the vinyl at the Exclusive Co. It must be selling for them to have as large of a selection as they do, but who’s buying?

Besides vinyl, it’s also gotten really easy to find turntables. The current rage is turntables with USB connectors that you can connect to a computer. That’s an enticing idea. Pro-Ject has a phono preamplifier with built-in USB as well, if you’re looking to go a higher-fi route.

Tags: cyber monday · downtime · vinyl

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Siouxsie’s first solo album: Mantaray

Posted by Daniel Stout on Sun 18 Nov 2007 at 10:34 PM

I’ve been listening to Siouxsie’s debut solo album Mantaray, and it’s good. Siouxsie who? Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie & the Banshees fame.

Siouxsie & the Banshees were big in ’80s for their many great albums, such as Tinderbox. I had heard “Into a Swan” off of her solo album – the local record store had given me a promo 45 RPM of the tune.

So after all this time, Siouxsie has released a solo album, and I was surprised at how good it is. I’ve been listening to the album on vinyl this past week – the vinyl LP was just released on Tuesday (the CD was released in September). The album drives through some really standout tracks. There’s lots to like there.

As always, it’s nice to see artists releasing their albums on vinyl. I paid $12.99 for the vinyl at the Exclusive Co., but you can also get it on Amazon for $15.18 if you don’t have a record store nearby here.

The dark, very cool video for “Into a Swan,” the first single off of the album is availalble on YouTube here, or below:

Tags: into a swan · mantaray · sioux · siouxsie · solo album · vinyl

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KMFDM’s original glory: Naïve re-released

Posted by Daniel Stout on Wed 7 Nov 2007 at 9:40 PM

The KMFDM album Naïve is by far their best album. It’s also extremely difficult to get an original 1991 vintage CD or LP. The album, published by Wax Trax!, was taken off the market very quickly after it was released because of a licensing issue. The song “Liebesleid” on side 2 contains a sample taken from the opening of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The sample was never cleared, and Wax Trax pulled the record. It was a damn shame because it’s such a great album.

KMFDM chose to re-record the entire album – essentially a remix album – and released it as Naïve: Hell To Go. Instead of the bright orange, white, and black cover art, it was in a shade of green. This remix album of course didn’t match up to the brilliance of the original album, but copies of the original version could be found on eBay and other places online for $40 or $50 or more.

A little under a year ago, Metropolis published a new “edited” version of Naïve. The cool thing about the edit is that it contains the original album in its glory – minus the Orff sample on Liebesleid. If you’ve never heard the album before, you won’t miss it. And even if you have, the track doesn’t lose that much, and frankly, it’s just freaking great that it has finally seen the light of day again.

I had been meaning to write about it for a while because I happened upon it at the iTunes Music Store. Amazon.com has a high-bitrate MP3 (non-DRM) download of the album for under $10.

A lot of that late ’80s / early ’90s industrial music sounds dated to my ears now, but Naïve still sounds great. It’s a classic album that unfortunately disappeared from sight shortly after release. I’ve still got my vinyl LP – with the Orff sample intact – but definitely check out the remastered CD.

Tags: hell to go · kmfdm · naive · vinyl · wax trax

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Coding pure in Eclipse

Posted by Daniel Stout on Mon 5 Nov 2007 at 9:14 PM

I’ve used every version of Dreamweaver from 3.0 in 2000 to the current 9.0 (CS3) in 2007. It’s a tool I’ve mostly used because that’s what I was supplied with at various jobs. Even through that many versions, problems have persisted. I still find it quite easy to crash the program. Do something it doesn’t like, and it’ll freeze up or crash or whatever. I’ve always thought the integrated file explorer/FTP Client was always a nice feature, but Dreamweaver’s FTP client has always been one of the worst ones out there. It’s better now than it has been in the past, but I still find it just has tons of problems. It is far worse than any free-standing FTP client.

Oh, and Dreamweaver has the bloat. Big time. Most Adobe apps these days take forever to load, even on my brand-new work computer with a fast multi-core processor and gigs of RAM. But despite its flaws, I’ve still used Dreamweaver. It’s never been a favorite app of mine, which is a shame because I use it so much.

Lately though I’ve been doing more programming than I’ve done since college. It feels good to code again, but in this area Dreamweaver especially falters. People used to use HomeSite for Windows web programming. But that’s been long since discontinued, and Macromedia (now Adobe) has tried to make Dreamweaver a comparable coding tool.

But it’s simply not.

I was interested to hear recently of people using the open source Eclipse for web development. Normally one thinks of Eclipse in relation to Java development, since that is the community from which it springs. But Eclipse is an extensible framework capable of handling many different languages and environments. I took a look at Eclipse.org and downloaded the all-in-one version of Eclipse with PDT – PHP Development Tools – built-in.

It was very easy to get started using. I skipped the tutorials and dived in and created a project. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s already made a significant difference. For one thing, I have easy access to the functions and classes of PHP 5 with references as to input parameters and return types. Also it does syntax checking automatically, so it’s very easy to track typos and such.

There’s a lot of depth in Eclipse, and I’m just learning the tool. But I am already impressed that it has made me more productive. Using an IDE for development just makes a lot more sense. It feels like a real coding tool, and it is.

So I’ve already said goodbye to Dreamweaver and shifted my development work into Eclipse. It’s open source so it’s free software. The Eclipse Foundation manages the community that develops it.

It’s worked well for me at work, but I’ve used it now at home to modernize Manufactured Environments’ templates into the new module structure available in Movable Type 4.0. Eclipse feels like a good match for the type of tasks I’m using it for – PHP development, XML and XSLT development, and general web work.

Tags: dreamweaver · eclipse · homesite · ide · php

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