This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in January 2008.

No network connection on Ubuntu 7.10

Ubuntu 7.10 presented a challenge when I installed it on my desktop system a few months ago. It worked fine on my laptop, but on my dual-boot desktop, there was no wired network connection. I have it setup with Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. I’ve seen people having the same problem installing this latest version of Ubuntu and also with openSUSE 10.3. I have a solution for that problem that worked for me, and hopefully will help other people who are booting into Ubuntu and finding that there is no network connection.

I haven’t heard what caused the problem – some change in the kernel or what. But the solution is novel: it actually takes a setting change in Windows XP to fix the problem. And if you guessed it’s a change with the network settings, you’re correct.

So to fix the problem: bring up the Device Manager. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to right-click on My Computer in the Start Menu and select Properties. Click on the Hardware tab and then click Device Manager.

When the Device Manager comes up, looks for the item labeled Network Adapters. Click the plus and expand it. You might have one or more items show up here. Look for your Ethernet NIC card. Right-click on it and select Properties. Click on the Advanced tab. Change the setting for Wake-On-Lan After Shutdown to enabled. That’s it. Changing that one setting will correct the problem then when you boot into Linux. That’s what worked for me.

Tags: ethernet · network · troubleshooting · ubuntu · ubuntu 7.10

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Announcing AnalogCulture.org

You may be interested to know that I’ve siphoned off my writing about music onto a blog of its own called Analog Culture. I started it up at the beginning of the year and have been posting there including a post tonight about Dean Wareham’s upcoming book about his romance with his bass player Britta Phillips.

Analog Culture will continue in the vein of music reportage with an emphasis on vinyl recordings.

So hop over to AnalogCulture.org and have a look!

Tags: analog culture · music

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Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards

Famous for leading bands such as Galaxie 500 and Luna, Dean Wareham has been around for a while. Galaxie 500 was known for its dreamy, laid back pop. Luna was more prolific, and their Penthouse is still one of my favorite albums. Luna disbanded in recent years after Wareham took up with their new bass player, Britta Phillips. Britta was the Bonnie to Dean’s Clyde and a music match was made.

In an excerpt from his new book in Men’s Vogue, Wareham recounts the autobiographical tale of how Luna came to be in need of a bass player, and Britta Phillips took the gig. One thing led to another, and he goes on to talk about the problems of maintaining an affair with his bass player while having a wife and baby at home.

Claudia and I had been in denial about the state of our marriage—we loved each other, somewhere, but we had lost the romantic connection. Our life together was about diapers and chores and being sure not to wake the baby. We were irritable and sleep-deprived, and becoming parents seemed to highlight latent differences in our personalities. Still, I had no intention of leaving her and Jack. The very thought of it struck fear in my heart. And yet I couldn’t stop. I’ve heard preachers say that once you let the devil into your life, it’s hard to get him out, and I have found this to be true.

I promised myself that I would make a move, a decision, do something to fix my life. Soon, I said, soon.

And Britta has become Dean’s muse. They’ve released a few albums together, and you can get the scoop at their website.

Wareham’s new book is called Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance. It’s due out on March 13.

Tags: black postcards · book · britta phillips · dean wareham · galaxie 500 · luna

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The death of Computer Science education

Fascinating article in CrossTalk written by two retired computer science professors from NYU that asks the question Where are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? Their assertion is that the computer science curriculum is faltering because of changes made by universities in light of declining enrollments. Dewar and Schonberg, the authors of the article, say that computer science is being dumbed down – the more difficult parts have been diminished or eliminated. Mathematics requirements for example are gradually being whittled down. Also students are increasingly being taught to make use of libraries and other code bases without understanding the underlying code. Programming language theory is also on the out.

James Maguire talked to Robert Dewar about the article and wrote about his comments. It’s perhaps a bit more accessible than the original, academically-oriented article, but you’ll get the point either way: colleges are playing a numbers game to increase enrollments in computer science programs.

Tags: computer science · curriculum · education · software engineers

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Queens do a triple-10 inch release of Era Vulgaris

Queens of the Stone Age did an interesting thing with the vinyl release of their most recent album Era Vulgaris. The album is only 47 minutes so it might have in fact fit onto one piece of vinyl, but instead of going the conventional route they released the album on not one but three 10” discs of vinyl.

The package is a unique shape – wider than a typical 10” sleeve and much thicker. It’s a double-folding gatefold sleeve. The front lifts to the left, and then the next layer lifts to the right, so you have a triptych when the album is opened. Each panel holds a 10-inch piece of vinyl in a sleeve.

To get the album to fit on six sides of vinyl, they broke it up to two songs per side of vinyl. Don’t sit for long, because you’re going to be doing a lot of vinyl flipping. You might note that the CD version of the album only contains 11 songs. They did in fact put a vinyl-only bonus track on there after Misfit Love called “Running Joke.”

It’s a cool concept. Not very practical, but it’ll be a unique addition to your collection. If you haven’t heard Era Vulgaris, it’s one of the Queens’ best albums. Very good stuff. This album has a bit more range and variation than some of their albums and is really quite a fine album.

As an aside, I should note that the cover art is a little disconcerting the first time you see the vinyl release. The cover art subtly has the look of a worn album cover – there’s the tell-tale wearing of an album against other records. It’s not that apparent on the CD, but the vinyl made me do a double-take. At first glance it looks like a record that’s been in someone’s collection for the past twenty years rather than a brand new release. Very clever, and nicely done.

Tags: 10-inch · era vulgaris · queens of the stone age · vinyl

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Musicogenic epilepsy? Avoid Sean Paul

MSNBC has an interesting Associated Press story about a woman named Stacey Gayle in Alberta, Canada, who has a rare condition called musicogenic epilepsy. Gayle suffered from having many seizures throughout the day, and at some point began to suspect that listening to music was causing her seizures.

Eighteen months ago, she began to suspect that music by reggae and hip-hop artist Sean Paul was triggering some of her seizures. She recalled being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper’s music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she heard his music.

Her suspicions were confirmed on a visit to the Long Island medical center last February, when she played Paul’s hit “Temperature” on her iPod for doctors. Soon after, she suffered three seizures.

So watch out: listening to Sean Paul’s music may be damaging to your health. Fortunately she had surgery, which has eliminated the seizures. The doctors studied her condition, and hopefully they found some scientific insights into the strange brain activity that was taking place. Not being able to listen to music would be a horrible fate!

Tags: alberta · canada · music · musicogenic epilepsy · sean paul · stacey gayle · temperature

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Mark Cuban’s idea for music: The Album is dead

Billionaire and sports fanatic Mark Cuban has an idea for the music industry: instead of releasing albums, serialize the release of music so people can buy one song at a time over a period of time. He writes:

If an artist commits to release music on a weekly or bi weekly basis, then consumers can make a commitment knowing they are going to get something new and hopefully exciting for their 99c. If the commitment is strong enough its feasible that artists could sell subscriptions to their serialized releases. My guess is that consumers will feel better about subscribing to an artist and getting a song a week or every 2 than dropping 10 dollars at a time for an album.

Cuban looked at the sale of digital singles and sees a market for individual songs, whereas he sees the market for albums has dried up.

I don’t really agree with that assessment. CDs don’t sell like they used to, but there’s strong evidence that there’s a market for albums. I wrote earlier this week about an article in Time that notes that vinyl LP sales rose 15% in the past year to nearly a million records. That’s something. Those are all people who wanted good sound and wanted an artifiact – a physical object to hold and keep in their collection.

I was the fifth commenter on Cuban’s blog post, and read throught the fifty or so other comments after that for some interesting discussion of Mark’s idea.

Serialization for music could only be a niche. It’s not like serializing a novel, where a novelist is writing a novel over the span of months, and segments can be easily chunked out. When it comes to music, the studio time is booked in such a way to maximize bang for the buck. It’s expensive so usually artists are working under some type of deadline. Writing doesn’t have that type of overhead. So while the serialization idea is interesting, it would take some pretty fundamental changes to the way music is typically recorded to make it work well.

Tags: albums · hit singles · mark cuban · music · vinyl

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Kicking the tires: ecto 2.3.10 for Windows

I’ve been looking at ways to be more productive with blogging, and one tip I’ve heard various places is to use an offline blog editor. The one I hear mentioned the most is ecto. ecto comes in Mac and Windows versions, but the Mac version is the predominant one. I decided to give ecto 2.3.10 for Windows a go and see what it’s like. You can try ecto for free for two weeks, and then it is $17.95 to buy.

I must say that my initial impressions are not good. Here’s a list of problems I’ve run into in the process of getting my first blog post posted with ecto. First, the installer crashed. I don’t think I’ve ever had an installer crash before. And it didn’t crash in a typical Windows way. It just disappeared, which is something I’ve seen happen on Mac and Linux, but not really on Windows. So I ran the installer again, and this time it installed.

Right away it runs through the blog setup. I setup my first blog and accepted the defaults. Then it brought me to the main window. On the left-hand column was the name of my blog, and on the right, presumably, would be the list of blog entries. But when I clicked on the blog name, it would pause for a moment and then spit out this error:

fault response contains string value where integer expected [fault response : struct mapped to type Fault : member faultCode mapped to type Int32]

Not a very useful error because it didn’t tell me what was wrong. But I hadn’t done much in ecto so far, so I figured it was one of the settings. For the API type, ecto had selected “MetaWeblog.” I changed this to “MovableType,” and then the strange error went away.

That was about the time when I noticed that the main window was having redraw problems. There is a field labeled View on the main toolbar. It’s a dropdown field that you can select what entries to view, such as, All, Published, or Drafts. But when you select one of the menus items in the row above, such as Help or Windows, the remnants of that menu overwrites the contents of the View field. It looks odd and is clearly a bug.

Now that I’m actually writing a post, I’m noticing a few more things. For example, the spell checker doesn’t seem to be self-aware. So far it has marked a number of words as misspelled: ecto, blog, toolbar, blogging, offline – to name a few. A blogging tool that doesn’t know the word “blog” seems odd or careless.

Speaking of careless, the user interface isn’t consistent. When you’re setting up a profile, it uses this attractive, flat, 2D design to the buttons. But everywhere else in the application uses the default Windows XP button styles (I’m running ecto on Windows XP).

Another thing is I switched from Rich View to HTML View. In Rich View, when you hit Enter, it does the paragraph double-spacing, which is what I would expect. But when you’re in the HTML View, there is no need for paragraph spacing – the <p> tags take care of that. But surprisingly even in code view, it does a double-space, even though the actual code that ecto itself produces is single-spaced. You have to hit shift-Enter to do a single space in code view. I changed the Edit Mode from Rich Text to HTML, which is apparently different somehow than the Rich View and HTML View, but that didn’t fix the problem.

Here’s another thing I noticed, even though I’m in HTML View, it doesn’t consider my code sacrosanct. I put in a couple of &#8211; to do an n-dash, but it replaces my HTML entities with &ndash; Not a big deal, but I’d prefer that it leave my code alone. There don’t seem to be any preference settings where you can change this behavior. In fact, I can’t find any preference settings at all for the editing window. So I guess it’s either take it or leave it.

Despite all that, I generally like what I see, but I have to wonder if anyone is using the Windows version on a successful basis day-in and day-out. I think for now the bugs and the editing defaults that are non-customizable will keep me from using ecto for Windows. I had high hopes from what I had heard about the Mac version, but the Windows version needs major work.

Tags: blogging software · ecto · windows

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Letting Last.fm linger

I’ve got an account with Last.fm that tracks what I’m listening to on the computer. Unfortunately there’s no automatic way to record what I’m listening to on vinyl. At any rate, Last.fm is the kind of thing that one can just leave running and not worry about it. Occasionally the Last.fm plug-in to iTunes alerts me that it has a new version. Otherwise it pretty much maintains itself. I like that it records what I listen to on my iPod as well when I sync it.

But here’s the idea: leave the Last.fm account alone for a few months, and then check in and see what it recorded. There are a variety of tools online to visualize what you’ve recorded into Last.fm. It would be fun to just let this go for a while and see what happens. As I’ve been listening to more classical lately, I would expect some of my top 50 artists to change somewhat. What else would change? I’ll have to check back in a few months and report what I find: the mysteries of Dan’s listening habits revealed.

Tags: last.fm · social music

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An end to comment spam: reCAPTCHA

One of the chores of managing a blog is dealing with comment spam. Comment spam is an endless stream of computer-generated comments that are intending to fill blogs with links to pages filled with spam content. The purpose of leaving comments helps raise the profile of the spammers’ pages in Google. Then when people search for certain keywords, they’ll end up at some spam site. Google works hard to eliminate spam from its index. But the maintaining of individual blogs is up to the blogger.

The folks behind WordPress had an ingenious plug-in called Akismet that for a long time eliminated spam comments for people with WordPress blogs, or even those who ran the plug-in on Movable Type, such as myself. But a while ago, the spammers beat Akismet. Spam comments were getting the blessing of Akismet, which simply wasn’t the case before.

When I had installed Akismet, people were able to comment directly on the blog. Occasionally, Akismet would misidentify a comment, but overall it did a good job. But when Akismet started failing consistently on certain spam comments, I ended up having to moderate comments. This is a good solution in the sense that it prevents any spam from getting to the blog. But comment moderation is a time consuming process, plus it doesn’t allow people to instantly comment on something. Their comment may take hours to show up on the site, just depending on when I get a chance to moderate the comments.

As Akismet became increaingly useless, I knew I needed to find a new solution. I looked at what was available for Movable Type for plug-ins. I did some Google searching for possible solutions. What I settled on is a service from Carnegie Mellon University called reCAPTCHA. I’ve been running reCAPTCHA for a couple of months, and it has succeeded on several fronts: I have turned off comment moderation and comments appears instantly, I no longer have to deal with comment spam, and I no longer run the Akismet plug-in.

reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA form of bot-deterrence. A CAPTCHA is a form that requires you to enter in some letters or words that presumably a robot program can’t read. That ensures that a person is leaving the comment. reCAPTCHA takes this idea a couple of steps forward. First, it has two words, both of which have been taken from projects to scan in library books. One of the words is known, and one of the words is unknown. That is, the OCR program reading the scan was unable to identify the word. But as a human, usually you can identify the word. So by entering in the two words, you’re helping digitize books.

Another nice aspect of reCAPTCHA is that it is accessible. You can click on the speaker symbol and get an audio CAPTCHA. If vision is a problem, then the audio route works well.

reCAPTCHA’s slogan is “Stop spam. Read books.” That’s something I can identify with. You can go to the reCAPTCHA website at reCAPTCHA.net, and find plug-ins for most types of blogging software or you can roll your own with some PHP code. You also need to setup a free account, and register a domain for the plug-in to work. You get a public and a private key to encode your transmissions between your blog and the reCAPTCHA service. In my experience, that all works very well.

So if you’ve left a comment recently on one of my sites, thanks for filling out the CAPTCHA code. It has made my job as a blogger much easier. It has completely removed one of the big headaches of blogging. Not having to deal with comment spam finally is amazing.

Tags: captcha · carnegie mellon university · comment spam · recaptcha · spam

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Places to buy Vinyl Records online

With the explosion of new vinyl coming out, you may run into the question of where to buy the stuff. Chain stores no longer vinyl – whether you’re talking Fye up to a store like Target or Walmart, you’re just not going to find vinyl. If you’re looking for a bricks & mortar store, your best bet is a local independent music shop. These stores can cater to your vinyl needs, and often can do special orders for things they don’t carry.

If you’re looking for online buying, there are now a variety of options. I’ll point out the ones I’ve worked with that either have the best selection or the best prices or both.

Not surprisingly, Amazon.com has become a contender in the vinyl market. They opened up a vinyl store on their website last fall. The Amazon.com Vinyl Store has a lot of software with an especially good selection of alternative rock and a variety of other genres. The bands that have most strongly adopted vinyl seem to be in the alternative slant of things, so it only seems natural that alternative rock would have a strong representation at Amazon’s store. Amazon has slight discounts over the retail prices of the vinyl – although not as deep as my local record store. They also offer their customary free shipping for orders over $25. A couple of records will easily put you into that category.

Somewhat strangely, the big-box electronics store Circuit City has a large selection of vinyl records on their website. Currently featuring 10,624 different albums, the Circuit City vinyl store has a variety of ways to slice and dice the collection and find what you want. You can search obviously by artist or album title, but you can drill down with genre searches or if you’re looking for a specific format such as the 12” single, you can search just those as well. Other ways to search are by decade or by price. Lots of ways on the Circuit City website to find what you’re looking for. The store isn’t as attractive as Amazon’s, but the sheer volume of the available vinyl is impressive.

Those are two big stores, and to balance those out I’ll point out a couple of niche stores. The first is Music Direct, which is based in Chicago and features an excellent print catalog. Their website too is really great. They focus more on the audiophile end of the spectrum and include not only vinyl, but SACD and DVD-A releases as well. They also have a handsome selection of audio electronics including turntables. In my experience, they ship quickly, and they do a good job of packing the vinyl for shipment. If I had to judge, I would probably say that their general demographic is a little bit older, hence you’ll see lots of classic rock and jazz vinyl re-issues. And for some reason those categories seem to be more expensive. While a re-issue of My Bloody Valentine, for example, might run you $15, a re-issue of The Doors will run you $30.

If you’re looking for dance & DJ vinyl, a great place to go for that is Turntable Lab, based out of NYC. Their vinyl selection is freakishly good. You’ll see things in there that you won’t see anywhere else. Rare 12” remixes abound and they also have a selection of regular vinyl as well. The website is pretty deep – there’s a ton of stuff to find on their including streetwear, books, DJ equipment and so on. They’re running a free shipping deal if you order $99 worth of stuff.

Those are a few of my favorite places to find vinyl online. In all cases, I prefer to buy from a local shop, but the advantage of the websites is their encyclopedic collections of vinyl. There is bound to be something there of interest, and I hope you have good luck with these businesses.

Tags: amazon.com · circuit city · music direct · turntable lab · vinyl

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Vinyl gets its groove back

I’ve written previously about how we’ve entered a new golden age for vinyl records. And this seems to be truly the case. Record companies are releasing and re-releasing lavish editions of albums on vinyl. Gatefold sleeves, which were relatively uncommon in the ’80s, now appear on many releases. The quality of the vinyl itself has improved as well. Many ordinary releases are coming with 180 gram vinyl. And the sheer quantity of new releases and re-releases is astounding.

Time Magazine has an article in their latest issue about the resurgence of vinyl. They put some hard numbers onto what, for me, has been a general impression.

… 990,000 vinyl albums were sold in 2007, up 15.4% from the 858,000 units bought in 2006. Mike Dreese, CEO of Newbury Comics, a New England chain of independent music retailers that sells LPs and CDs, says his vinyl sales were up 37% last year, and Patrick Amory, general manager of indie label Matador Records, whose artists include Cat Power and the New Pornographers, claims, “We can’t keep up with the demand.”

That’s amazing. Nearly a million vinyl records were sold last year. The ’90s were a disappointing time for vinyl, but the last couple of years have been truly stunning.

So if you’re looking to get into vinyl – or get back into vinyl – now is a great time. Independent record stores are the best places to find vinyl, or as I’ll write about in another entry, there are some large online stores for vinyl as well.

Tags: resurgence · time magazine · vinyl

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The Logic of This is why I’m Hot

Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic clearly studied philosophy while at Harvard. And according to his bio, that is the case. When you take philosophy, you’ll encounter formal logic. You may take one or several classes on the topic. This may surprise you, but this can be handy in discussions of popular music.

For example, Mr. Yglesias asks the question: is Mims’ #1 single “This is Why I’m Hot” making the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent? Mims says that he is hot because he is fly, and “you ain’t ‘cause you’re not.”

It’s a controversial topic certainly. One that’s sure to fly in the face of philosophers everywhere. But if Yglesias’s account isn’t enough, treat yourself to this breakdown of the logic in Mims’ song in this article in the Village Voice from Rob Harvilla. It’s quite a delight and includes some Venn diagrams in case you need help getting a grasp on hot and fly and not hot and not fly.

If only every rap song caused this much intellectualizing. [via Cosmic Variance]

Tags: affirming the consequent · logic · mims · this is why i'm hot · village voice

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The 2007 Darwin Awards

Every year the Darwin Awards are awarded to people who have left this mortal coil in embarrassingly stupid ways. In the race for the survival of the fittest, these are the losers. The 2007 Darwin Award winners have just been announced. There are some real winners amongst the 17 stories. Be sure to check out The Enema Within and others.

The website is getting Slashdotted at the moment and doesn’t seem to be holding up well. So give it a bit, and try back later.

Tags: 2007 · darwin awards

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It’s called a ‘prank,’ Seth

Seth Godin weighs in on what Gizmodo did: they turned off some TVs by remote control at the CES expo. Seth calls this a “crime” and “vandalism.” There’s a lot of seriousness in this world, and Mr. Godin is using some very serious words. There’s an important distinction to be made here though. To identify that distinction we’ll need to turn to Merriam-Webster for the definition of two words: vandalism and prank.

Merriam-Webster says that vandalism is:

willful or malicious destruction or defacement of public or private property

Their definition of prank reads:

a mildly mischievous act or a ludicrous act

So, I have to ask, Seth, where is the “destruction or defacement of … property?” Turning off a wall of TVs at a convention should be called what it is: a prank, or a mildly mischievous act. Did Gizmodo damage the televisions? Did they spray paint “Sony sucks!” across the front? Obviously, no.

Was it a stupid thing to do? Yes. Was it amusing? Not really. But was it a “crime” or “vandalism”? Definitely not!

So Gizmodo pulled a prank that caused no damage to life or property. It was, at most, a pretty mild prank because a TV that has been turned off is a temporary inconvenience – yes, even at CES – that can easily be rectified.

Tags: ces · crime · gizmodo · prank · punishment · seth godin · vandalism

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Psychedelic ’60s vs. Muzak: Easy Listening Acid Trip

George Petros has assembled a compilation of several hundred songs and put it online. What type of songs are they?

I was searching for druggy and/or exotic Pop songs reinterpreted by contemporaneous Easy Listening artists, from 1966 through 1971. A few compositions herein pre-date that era, but the performers presented them in the pseudo-psychedelic style of the day.

The list of songs available is extensive. You can either click the song title and listen to the track online, or if you’re really into it, just download the MP3 track. This is an odd compilation of music. It’s elevator psychedelia tunes.

Petros writes:

Over the course of 13 years I collected the tracks comprising this compilation. Most came from LPs and 8-Tracks that I found in thrift stores and at garage sales all across America. Some came from the LP collections of Joseph Lanza, author of Elevator Music; Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore; Athan Maroulis, proprietor of Stardust Records; and the illustrator Jim Blanchard. Some came from various Lounge-style CDs issued in the mid-90s.

[via 3QD]

Tags: easy listening · elevator music · george petros · muzak

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How high can you go? New price frontiers in the Mac Pro

Jason Kottke points to a tweet from Jake Dobkin that asks the question:

i just configured a single 8-core mac pro to $26,820.90— can anyone get a more expensive one than that?

In case you hadn’t heard, Apple just released an upgraded Mac Pro today that starts at $2,799 and can contain as much as two four-core Intel Xeon processors for a total of eight processor cores. It must be an absolute screamer, but it comes at a price.

Jason did his own calculation at the Apple Store and configured a Mac Pro that ran to $27,340.90.

That’s an expensive computer, but hey, the shipping’s free! Who can beat that? Actually, if you’re buying a souped-up Mac Pro, it’s time to spring for the expedited shipping.

The MacWorld Expo is next week so Apple must have a full bevy of things to announce then, hence the early release of the Mac Pro and the new eight-core Xserve. The thing I’d like to see is new designs for the MacBook Pro. Apple’s been using the same form factor for a while, and it’d be cool to sprinkle some Apple design dust on those puppies.

Tags: apple · mac pro · pricing · xserve

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Sony BMG: Why download when you can shop and download?

Sony BMG has announced that they’re jumping into the DRM-free music scene. They’re going to start selling MP3 downloads of their music. Well, sort of.

Okay, here are the problems, and there are several. First, it’s not a download store like iTunes. In order to buy MP3s from Sony BMG, you first have to go to a retail store like Best Buy and purchase a $12.99 card for a specific album that has a special code on the back. You then go home – or more likely, give it as a gift to your cousin – and then you have to navigate to the special website and input the code. From there you’ll be able to download the album in all of its MP3 glory. What’s wrong with that? For one thing, it’s a major hassle of a way to buy an album. It would seem logical that if you’re at Best Buy or Fye or wherever that it would be easier and perhaps cheaper to just buy the CD, listen to it on the way home, and then rip it later.

And here’s the show stopper: they are only selling 37 albums this way. Sony BMG’s big foray into unDRMed music is a measly 37 albums that include hot titles from Céline Dion, Tony Bennett, Barry Manilow, and…well, you get the idea.

John Scalzi has a funny take on why it won’t work. [via Daring Fireball]

Tags: celine dion · drm · mp3 · platinum music pass · sony bmg

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Yahoo Pipes: Fundamentally Powerful RSS Processing

Yahoo Pipes has been out for a while, and I’ve been meaning to give it a try. Well, I finally did, and it is thoroughly impressive. Pipes is “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Basically, it allows you to mix and match RSS feeds and do all sorts of creative processing on them. You can combine feeds, or take parts of certain feeds and feed them through other feeds. You can even translate feeds from one language to another. Pipes allows you to do keywords, so that only entries matching a certain keyword are extracted.

The interface for Pipes is amazing. It’s like a regular application in your browser window. The “programming” of a pipe is handled through the graphical interface. It’s very intuitive and very easy to learn. You can watch a couple of introductory videos, which I recommend, and then you’re off and running.

My initial project for using Yahoo Pipes was to create a megafeed for myself. I wanted to combine all the random RSS feeds that are generated by the different blogs and services I publish and use. So I made a feed that has eight RSS feeds all feeding into one hopper. I then sort all the combined entries by date so that all the newest entries from whatever feeds are at the top, and then I cut it off at 20 entries. That’s enough back data, and it prevents the RSS feeds from getting too large.

The Daniel Stout Megafeed has the feeds from my various blogs plus my del.icio.us links, my LibraryThing bookstream, and my Flickr photos. It’s pretty awesome. You can subscribe to it here. So check out Yahoo Pipes if you’re interested in doing some post-processing of RSS feeds. It’s a handy yet very powerful tool that will change the way you think about online content.

Tags: megafeed · pipes · rss · yahoo pipes

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Rolling Stone on the Death of High Fidelity

Rolling Stone has a great article entitled The Death of High Fidelity: In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever. This topic has been written about other places, but it’s nice to see a mainstream magazine like Rolling Stone giving significant coverage to this issue. And the issue is that music is being mastered at ever increasingly levels of loudness. It’s done through dynamic range compression that limits the range between the soft sounds and the louder sounds. Basically, it’s done to get your attention, and also because many people are listening to music on digital formats. The increased loudness is seen as a way to compensate for the reducing fidelity of an MP3 rip.

To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments — as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan’s Modern Times and Norah Jones’ Not Too Late. “When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart,” says Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction. “It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting.”

There’s is so much good music coming out right now, it’s a shame that a lot of it won’t stand the test of time because of too-loud mastering. Awareness seems to be raising about the issues though as more articles are written about it, so hopefully a change can come in the industry, and bring back the musicality of music.

Tags: dynamic range · loudness · rolling stone

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Best of Bootie 2007: Massive mashups third year in a row!

Bootie, which is billed as the biggest bootleg mashup party in the world, has come out with their third yearly mashup compilation. These are the mashup tracks from the past year that stormed things out on the dance floor. It’s bastardized tracks featuring two or more artists – as is the definition of mashup – and there are of course always some strange synergies to be realized.

Their 21 track beat-mixed collection is featured for download on the Best of Bootie 2007 CD page. There are multiple options for downloading the collection: as a .zip file, each track individually, or as a BitTorrent download. If you look over in the left-hand column there are also 10 additional tracks that didn’t make it into the beat-mixed collection. These are also fine examples of the craft of mashups. It seems to me that this year’s compilation delves a bit deeper into the back catalog, and doesn’t have as many recent tracks in there.

And if you haven’t been keeping up with the Best of Bootie collections, also check out the freely downloadable Best of Bootie 2006 and Best of Bootie 2005.

DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D are the two DJs who compile the collections from the Bootie club nights in San Francisco and elsewhere. They also go by the moniker A plus D. If you go to their website AplusD.net, there are many more recent mashups available for download.

Tags: a plus d · best of bootie · bootie · mashups

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Listening to the Jesus Lizard has warped me

Sometime this past summer I picked up a couple of records by a ’90s band known as The Jesus Lizard. And ever since that point, I’ve been listening to The Jesus Lizard incessantly. They’re great. It’s tight, guitar-driven rock with a significant bent towards the alternative side of the spectrum.

A couple of their best albums have been re-issued on vinyl. Circuit City surprisingly has a huge selection of vinyl that includes The Jesus Lizard’s Liar and Down, for $9.99 each on vinyl LP.

But listening to all this great hard-driving music from the Jesus Lizard has warped my perspective. As I look over the last six months of listening, I’ve seen some bands rise up in my listening repertoire. I can see clearly, looking back, that I’ve been listening to a whole lot more Big Black, Cop Shoot Cop, and oddly, Queens of the Stone Age. These bands seem to compliment the Jesus Lizard, and if you like their sound, you might like these other bands.

Tags: big black · cop shoot cop · queens of the stone age · the jesus lizard

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Traffic Patterns: A quick year-end look at webstats

I think I missed last year, but at the end of the year and at the beginning of the new one, I like to take a look back a bit and see what happened. Last week Monday, I shared the top posts of the year. Today I thought I’d take a look at how traffic on Manufactured Environments has been.

Pageviews for Manufactured Environments 2006-2007

The graph above shows the pageviews by month since I’ve had this site hosted with Media Temple. I switched to them in March 2006, which is a partial month. What struck me about this graph is how stable the traffic has been over the past year and a half. Starting in June 2006, the traffic has routinely been very close to 120,000 pageviews a month, which works out to be about 4,000 pageviews a day.

There’s been a bump in the summer months, especially July and August, but the rest of the year has been fairly consistent. The two highest traffic months were August 2006 with 171,949 pageviews and July 2007 with 159,966 pageviews.

I recently started using Google Analytics again on the site. One thing that I noticed in the stats is how international the traffic is here at Manufactured Environments. Google says that in the past month, visitors from 96 countries have been here. Traffic from the U.S. accounted for 58% of total traffic in December, with 42% from abroad. The top 5 foreign countries by visitors to this site are the U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia and Italy.

Tags: pageviews · traffic · webstats · year-end

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