December 2003 Archives
Keith Jarrett has won the Sonning Music Prize, a Danish award that has been given annually since 1959. The first prize went to Igor Stravinsky, and other previous winners include Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Miles Davis (the only other jazz artist to ever win).
http://www.ejazznews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2482
We heard the Jarrett Trio (with Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock) this past fall, and it was a spectacular display of three master artists at the top of their craft, rearchitecting jazz standards with a degree of communication and technical prowess that was truly awesome. This award (which comes with an $80,000 cash prize) is a nice recognition of Jarrett's work and talent.
In the devices that should exist by now category, it seems to me that now that there are CD changers that hold hundreds of disks (like this 400 disk Sony), they ought to come equipped with Ethernet and/or WiFi connections. You should be able to load the changer up with CDs and let it go out to CDDB (or Gracenote or whatever they're called these days) and do their own metadata retrieval and indexing.
Instead they seem to think it's a marketing feature that they have a keyboard connection - now that sounds like a recipe for repetetive stress injuries if I ever heard one.
Update
After some further googling, I did see that there is a 200-disk Kenwood changer that connects to a PC via a RS-232 serial cable (now that's modern) and they offer software to download info from CDDB. And there is a hardware/software system scalled TitleTrack for the Mac that hooks the Mac via USB to Sony changers and accomplishes the same thing. But that costs $389 - almost twice the cost of a 400-disk changer. Jeeze.
My almost-six-year-old son has been spending a fair amount of time using my new 15" Powerbook. When he minimizes a window down into the dock he says "I sucked it up."
I offer this terminology to Apple royalty-free :)
So we gave him KidPix for Hannukah, after having heard raves about it from my brother when his kids were small some dozen years ago. And it's just as cool as I hoped - the drawing tools are intuitive and the effects are easy to use and cool, and I love the sounds!
But I was disappointed to see that the latest version (Kid Pix 3 Deluxe) was a Classic app, not an OS X app, and only supports 800 x 600 resolution with thousands of colors.
MacKiev is supposedly porting Kid Pix to OS X, but they apparently announced it over a year ago...sigh.
We're almost to the end of what has been a very long home remodelling project . As part of that project we added some space to our son's bedroom, including a new closet, and I had the contractor put a power drop in the closet for the express purpose of having a shelf where he could plug in all the battery-operated things he needs to recharge.
Last night before I went to bed, I realized that he's not the only person in the house who needs that kind of facility - I counted six devices of the non-child variety recharging: 2 mobile phones, a digital camera, my Powerbook, a toothbrush, and my bicycle headlight.
I'm sad to see that this week marks the last of Gary Giddins' Weather Bird columns in the Village Voice. Gary has been writing this wonderfully erudite jazz criticism column in the Voice for 30 years, and his writing has enabled me to discover many wonderful artists that I would never have heard otherwise.
Thanks, Gary, for all of the wonderful years, and we'll look forward to whatever writing you do in other forms!
There are some nice interviews with Gary here.
The Creative Commons has just turned one - Happy Birthday, CC! Here is their entirely too groovy flash animation which explains their mission and success to date at providing a common licensing alternative to the copyright mess. It's a big (7 MB) download, but well worth watching!
I was not initially enthusiastic about the Lord of The Rings movies - perhaps I heard too much hype before I saw the first one, but it struck me as being overly long and didn't really grab me. But I just watched the second one on DVD this past weekend, and got *totally* sucked in. Interestingly enough, my colleague Bill Schaefer had the exact opposite experience - so go figure.
At any rate, I'm looking forward to seeing the thrilling conclusion. And here is a story about how the software used to create the final battle scenes was so smart that the Orcs kept running away from the battle. There's a lesson in there somewhere for our foreign policy, I'm sure.
Basically, all the necessary information for decision-making was fed into this network of computers without determining for them whether they would win or lose.
But this attempt to ensure that they acted spontaneously almost sabotaged the the battleground sequences.
"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.
"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."
So some extra computer tinkering was required to ensure that the trilogy's climactic battle worked the way Jackson wanted.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out!
A very clever Canadian billboard. Thanks to kasia in a nutshell.
"The marriage is a first for Krall. Costello's previous two marriages ended
in divorce."
Still, I wouldn't mind hearing Diana Krall sing "Almost Blue", which Elvis wrote for Chet Baker.
There's a good interview in Rolling Stone with Steve Jobs talking about Apple's experience in negotiating with the record companies while setting up the iTunes Music Store and in his remarkably common-sense view of what the issues are facing the music industry.
"People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45s, then they bought LPs, they bought cassettes, they bought 8-tracks, then they bought CDs. They're going to want to buy downloads.
Our position from the beginning has been that eighty percent of the people stealing music online don't really want to be thieves. But that is such a compelling way to get music. It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves -- without a legal alternative that offers those same benefits -- rings hollow."
Worth a read.
I'm a fan of Tim Bray's On Search series of articles, where he's exploring various topics about building search engines, primarily in the web context. He's got several new articles in the series since I last looked, and I particularly think the ones on interfaces and XML - they're great reading. The next time I teach a course on searching, I'll use these articles as the text.
From the interfaces article:
"I think Lucene’s API is well thought out, but there are not one but two elephants in the room that it’s trying hard to ignore. The first is the fact that the world contains many who are not members of the Church of Java, who will be left cool by the notion of, for example, “converting from text from ajava.io.Reader into a TokenStream.” The second elephant is the Web. Suppose I don’t want to write Java code, I just want to tell my website to index this directory. A pure Web interface would solve both these problems..."
From the XML article:
"people don’t want to compose queries and do flexible, powerful structure-sensitive searches. As I’ve written here previously, people in general want to type the minimal number of keystrokes into a search window and say Go, and have the system figure it out for them. Secondly, descriptive markup is a form of metadata, and there is no cheap metadata, and XML is no exception. If your text inventory is in Word or HTML, XMLifying it in any useful way is going to be very, very expensive. Which is to say, XML may not be cost-effective strictly in terms of making search run better."
The Sakai Project has announced its Educational Partners Program, available to interested institutions for contributions of $10,000 per year for three years.
"The Sakai Educational Partners Program (SEPP) is being created and staffed to focus on the needs of partner institutions who wish to adopt Sakai tools or to develop tools for inter-institutional portability. SEPP will provide partners early information on the direction of the Sakai Project, strategic briefings to help plan for Sakai at partner institutions, discussions of the project roadmap. Partners will also get early access to the Tool Portability Profile, early access to Sakai software/tools, developer training, and other Sakai resources as the community for Sakai users and developers grows. The SEPP offers the partners participation in planning for the future of the Sakai Project beyond the first pulse of software development, in developing the long term software, and in cultivating a community to make Sakai’s open source software an integral part of higher education’s future."
Now this looks like it would be too cool - hearing Rosell Rudd and his Trombone Shout Band in Timbuktu:
"Rudd's band consists of trombonists Steve Swell and Deborah Weizs, with Barry Altschul on drums, and Henry Schroy on bass.
This will be Rudd's third trip to Mali. In 2001 he recorded his MALIcool (Universal/Sunnyside), the first time that the trombone was integrated into the kora-based instrumentation of Malian music. Rudd's decision to bring a Trombone Shout Band to the Festival in the Desert “has to do with the strength of the trombone sound over thousands of years, being resonant in just about any kind of environment, particularly out-of-doors,” says Rudd. Rudd has long been inspired by the trombone shout band tradition of East Coast USA.
The repertoire will be a mixture of old and new jazz, blues, and originals. Roswell Rudd will also be performing with The Gangbe Brass Band of Benin with whom he performed at Joe's Pub in their NYC debut in Sept. 2002.
There will be participating groups from eight African countries. The artists from Mali will feature Salif Keita, Ali Farka Toure, and Habib Koite."
I'm heading off to Portland, OR, today to participate in a reprise of the panel on Chandler in Higher Education that we gave at Educause last month. This will be at the meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information meeting.
CNI was formed in 1990 by Paul Evans Peters to bring together librarians and computing professionals from research and education institutions. CNI was one of the first forums to deal seriously with the issues of content on the Internet, and though I haven't attended the meetings regularly since the mid '90s, I always end up coming away from these gatherings knowing more than when I showed up.
I was writing a small Python script the other day to convert plain text files to basic html (ok, don't tell me - I know I could probably have done it with one line of incomprehensible perl), and I had it working on AIX, but it wouldn't work on my Powerbook. Of course this turned out to be because of the difference between end-of-line characters between Unix, Macintosh, and Windows.
Turns out that there is a argument to the Python
file()command that will have it automatically take care of this problem:
"In addition to the standard fopen() values mode may be 'U' or 'rU'. If Python is built with universal newline support (the default) the file is opened as a text file, but lines may be terminated by any of '\n', the Unix end-of-line convention, '\r', the Macintosh convention or '\r\n', the Windows convention. All of these external representations are seen as '\n' by the Python program. If Python is built without universal newline support mode 'U' is the same as normal text mode. Note that file objects so opened also have an attribute called newlines which has a value of None (if no newlines have yet been seen), '\n', '\r', '\r\n', or a tuple containing all the newline types seen. "
(from the current Python library reference documentation).
Cool!
While trying to track this down, I also came across Eric Raymond's May, 2000 Linux Journal article "Why Python?" - a good read.
I wrote in October about importing icalendar objects between Oracle Calendar and Apple's iCal. It turns out that my colleague David Cox has written a script called CT2iCAL to export Oracle Calendar data to iCal, and the details of the issues involved are rather revealing of the state of Internet calendaring standards.
with this anatomically correct chocolate heart! (Thanks to Jon Baum).
