July 2004 Archives
I'm on vacation in the UK this week, visiting my brother (the Public Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in London - not an easy job these years) and other family and friends. It's interesting that a bunch of folks I know have ended up living and working in London - underscores the global nature of the mobile, connected, workforce.
London is, of course, an endlessly fascinating and energizing city, and it's great to see it accompanying a six-year-old. We spent most of yetsterday visiting the Tower, and it's been a long time since I saw someone so delighted at displays of armor and swords!
At any rate, expect light (if any more) blogging till late next week.
I just realized I hadn't yet written anything about the Vancouver Folk Music Festival last weekend.
Well, it was another glorious summer weekend in Jericho Park, one of the most spectacular settings for a festival on this (or probably any other) continent. The lineup was as terrific as always.
Some particular favorites from the weekend (though there was much I wanted to hear that I didn't get to -
The Wailin' Jennys - three women from Winnipeg who sing wonderfully together, write and/or pick great songs (like their cover of Neil Young's Old Man), and project a warm, competent yet not-too-serious persona on stage. Their CD almost captures the magic of their in-person performances.
Fiamma Fumana - an interesting quartet from Italy featuring a combination of traditional instruments with electronica. They had the audience really up and hopping at the workshop I heard them at. Plus how could you not love a band that features a woman who plays bass and doubles on flute and Italian bagpipes?
Oliver Schroer and the Twisted String - Oliver is a Vancouver fiddle player with more energy than any three people I know. He's played with almost every artist in Canada over the last few years. This year he brought a large (like twenty people) group of kids (high-school age mostly) that he's been working with in a couple of provincial towns in BC to play at the festival. They played an assortment of his challenging new-age fiddle music (with titles like Fireballs of the Eucharist, you know these aren't your father's fiddle tunes). Their energy was completely contagious all throughout the festival!
Kaki King - A wonderful young acoustic guitar player, Kaki King wowed us all with her tecnique, compositions, and dynamics. As it says on her web site:
Thumping bass lines, tapping melodies, and slapping percussion on her guitar, Kaki King is a one-woman force sent to wreak acoustic havoc. At 24, she is already a riveting performer, combining jaw-dropping technique with unique compositions. Though her style and tunings are suggestive of Michael Hedges, Kaki is more about the L train to Williamsburg than placid landscapes. Her playing has a passion and an edge that keeps her tenuously balanced, one foot in the acoustic world, the other in rock'n'roll.
A great weekend, and I look forward to next year!
Is it too late to go back to school? From Wired News:
Duke University will give each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen a free iPod this fall as part of an initiative to foster innovative uses of technology in the classroom, the school said Monday. Duke wants to experiment with creative academic uses for the devices. The school will preload the 20-GB iPods (retail price, $300) with freshman-orientation information, an academic calendar and even the Duke fight songs before handing them out to the incoming class Aug. 19.
Students also will be able to use the devices to download course content, recorded lectures, foreign language lessons, audio books and music from a special Duke website modeled after iTunes. The school will supply voice recorders for some classes, enabling students to record notes while working in the field.
That Tracy Futhey is one forward thinking CIO!
Is it too late to go back to school? From Wired News:
Duke University will give each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen a free iPod this fall as part of an initiative to foster innovative uses of technology in the classroom, the school said Monday. Duke wants to experiment with creative academic uses for the devices. The school will preload the 20-GB iPods (retail price, $300) with freshman-orientation information, an academic calendar and even the Duke fight songs before handing them out to the incoming class Aug. 19.
Students also will be able to use the devices to download course content, recorded lectures, foreign language lessons, audio books and music from a special Duke website modeled after iTunes. The school will supply voice recorders for some classes, enabling students to record notes while working in the field.
That Tracy Futhey is one forward thinking CIO!
Last week I spent a day working with my trio at Audio Logic recording studio. This was the first recording we've done in almost five years, and I was struck by how the recording process has changed since I first started recording in the early 1970s, both for the better and the worse.
One of the biggest differences, of course, is the digitization of the recording process. One of the dominant features of any 1970s or 1980s recording studio control room was the big multitrack tape machine. This time in, I don't think I even saw a single tape machine in the studio. And while the mixing console still has the recognizable sliders and eq modules, much of the control of the actual recording process is now done from a PC keyboard and mouse (wireless, of course). The recording is done onto a bank of hard drives that is hidden from sight - no muss, no fuss.
The current studio is superbly set up for the modern style of recording popular music - a combination of digital instruments and regular instruments (whether acoustic or electric - perhaps we should call them "analog" instruments) recorded primarily one at a time, building up tracks as you go, editing digitally, adding samples, etc.
But it's clear when you work in a modern studio that the studios and the engineers themselves are no longer set up (for the most part) to record a group of musicians playing non-digital instruments in real-time together. If you look at photos from old recording sessions (say up through the 1960s) you'll see that for the most part musicians recorded together in the same room, and that the studios had all sorts of movable baffles and half-height walls (known in the trade as "gobos") that allowed for acoustic isolation between instruments (better for recording each instrument optimally) while allowing the musicians to see each other. Current studios accomplish the same thing by isolating the different instruments usually in different rooms, with double-pane glass windows allowing for site lines. The problem with this approach is that it requires the musicians to hear each other with headphones, which is very different than generating the kind of feeling you get playing together in the open air in the same room.
When you tell a young recording engineer that you want to record all together in the same room, and you want to do it directly to a stereo mix, meaning that you're unable to go back and fix things (either in the performance or the recording) later, you're likely to get stares of incomprehension, followed by a look of stark terror. Jay Kenney at Audiologic is not young enough for that response (sorry, Jay!), and he did a fine job of getting a respectable jazz sound for us, even if it wasn't quite the Rudy vanGelder classic sound I had imagined - hard to say whether that's because of the studio or the players...if you know what I mean.
There are some photos of our studio adventure here, and drop me a line if you're interested in hearing the results when we finish editing them.
Apple announced new iPods - the best news is that the 20GB and 40GB models are both $100 cheaper than they were previously! Might be getting just close enough for me to buy one....
Upon reading through the Ecto FAQ, Question 11 pointed me to installing SOAP Lite, which seems to have fixed things.
My advice is to be careful about upgrading Movable Type!
Since I upgraded Movable Type to v 3.01, I can't get Ecto working - which makes me realize just how much I've come to depend on it for authoring my postings.
It's strange, though - I have MT 3.01 set up as a clean install in another directory, and Ecto works fine with that install, so it doesn't seem to be an Ecto problem.
The error message I get back (reproduced below) is the same kind of message I get when there is a cgi module that can't find where perl is installed. But I've checked all the cgi modules and they all point to perl in the right place. And I've tried copying the mt-xmlrpc.cgi file over from the working version, to no avail. All help welcome with this one!
The server encountered an error attempting to retrieve the requested resource. Please notify the owner of the problem.Error notes: Premature end of script headers: /hw54/d90/oren/weblog/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
I've upgraded my installation of Movable Type to version 3.01.
I've turned comments back on, but I have used the new feature which allows me to approve or disapprove each comment before it's posted. So please go ahead and comment at will, but don't be surprised when your comment isn't visible right away.
I'll be working on getting TypeKey authentication and authorization for comments going, but it may not happen this week.
Unfortunately, I didn't realize until after I had upgraded that Jay Allen's excellent MT-Blacklist software doesn't yet work with MT 3.0 and up....sigh - now I've got to go delete all those spam comments one by one.
In the last couple of days my weblog has been deluged with hundreds of spam comments, so I've temporarily (I hope) disabled comments.
I am completely enraged by this flow of spam - I feel as if somebody has deliberately set out to ruin my neighborhood. It used to be such a nice network before the riff-raff started using it. I hope the people who engage in this spamming overdose on their own cheap prescription drugs.
For years one of my most (maybe my single most) frequently visited web sites has been the All Music Guide - an invaluable resource for looking up details about musical artists and recordings.
Now AMG has redesigned their web site - my first impression is that the user interface has gotten much less usable, but that may be a false (or incomplete) impression, because it is SO DAMN SLOW! I'm getting browser timeout errors much more frequently than I'm getting content - definitely not acceptable.
And, in this day and age, how can anybody be doing thls:
Notice: You are accessing allmusic.com with a browser that is not currently supported. The appearance and functionality of the site could be impacted. allmusic.com is optimized for Internet Explorer 5.5 and above for Windows.
sheesh - I hate to see a good resource go bad. sigh.
I finally solved the ISync problems I reported in June on my office iMac. It looks like something got really corrupted - I had totally remove iSync from the Mac and reinstall it. Just deleting the preferences files didn't do it. Now I'm syncing away between my various Macs, .Mac, and my Nokia phone.
Just last week I got my brand spanking new 20-inch iMac for my kitchen and family room at home - what a sweet, sweet, computer! I spent a couple of days fighting networking only to finally figure out that it was the ethernet wiring in my wall that wasn't working. Went down to the Apple Store, picked up an Airport Extreme card, put it in, and all's well. Watching video on the 20-inch screen is extremely groovy. In an effort to reduce clutter (Michele hates wires), I added an Apple wireless keyboard and a Kensington wireless mouse (to get two buttons). Here it is looking quite at home in its new place of prominence.
But - right after I got it, Apple announced that they've stopped taking orders for iMacs, as a whole new line will be available in September. The rumors have it that the new iMac will sport a vertical "pizza box" display and a G5 processor. While I'm sad to not get the faster processor, I *love* the "desklamp" display on my iMac - it makes viewing from lots of different parts of the room possible, especially for watching DVDs.
On another note, Apple previewed the next version of OS X, codenamed Tiger, at its WorldWide Developer's Conference last week. Apple's official preview site is here, and there is lots of detailed coverage of what's known so far at the Apple Insider. Some interesting tidbits include an RSS-enabled version of the Safari web browser, and something called the Dashboard, which seems to be a way to put html and Javascript applets directly onto the Mac desktop.
And just to finish off the Mac news, Apple announced with much brouhaha that 100 million songs have been sold from the iTunes Music Store. Lucky Kevin Britten won a bunch of booty from Apple for being the one to purchase the 100 millionth song (“Somersault (Dangermouse remix)” by Zero 7, if you're wondering). While the proprietary rights management encoding on the iTMS songs bothers me more and more as I want to make my music available to a wider range of devices (not all of which are produced by Apple), they clearly are the market leader here, with the best product. I'm waiting for prices to come down as a result of the volume - but not holding my breath.
On Thursday afternoon Julian Lombardi from Wisconsin and Mark McCahill from Minnesota demonstrated Croquet, an open-source, interactive, networked, 3D immersive environment they're building.
If I understand this project correctly, the goal is to provide a platform where building and sharing interactive objects in a social 3D space becomes as easy and accessible as it has been to write and publish web pages.
While I'm not currently in any position to judge the specific technology or implementation, I think the concept of an easily manipulated shared immersive environment is incredibly powerful and is likely to be very important in the evolution of computing in education. Watching my six year old navigate around the space in his Harry Potter game on the Mac is very instructive - he takes to the environment and the challenges with incredible glee as well as sophistication. Croquet may well be one glimpse into our professional future.
While in Boulder for the Leadership Institute, we caught Richard Thompson playing at the Boulder Chataqua - what a great show in a great 100 year old barn!
RT is on tour playing with a terrific band - Danny Thompson on upright bass, Dave Mattucks on drums, and Pete Zorn on everything (the night we saw them he played rhythm guitar, mandolin, alto sax, baritone sax, penny whistle, and sang all the backup vocals). I do have to say that I miss hearing the female harmonies on lots of his tunes - while I never saw him with Linda, I have had the pleasure of hearing Christine Collister sing with Richard several times.
The song list included lots of old favorites, and some new (or at least unfamiliar to me) tunes, and ranged from delicate acoustic numbers to searing (and loud!) electric tunes. It seemed to me that RT was less interested in exploring the dimensions of harmonic dissonance in his playing than the last few times I saw him, but he was reaching farther out in rhythmic dimensions in his solos.
And for an added bonus, the show finished off with bangup version of Tear Stained Letter featuring Michael Doucet sitting in on fiddle.
A great time all around@
John Perry Barlow today posted a long post titled Too Alive to Be Virtual, about how he's been too busy to blog all the things he's been thinking of writing about - I know just how he feels! So, in an effort to do at least a little catching up...
On the last day of the Educause Leadership Institute in Boulder, Mark Sheehan gave another terrific session on Organizational Culture. While I typically have not been really focused on organizational development in my professional life, this session really resonated with me - whether because Mark has a wonderful way of leading people into this territory, or because I'm at a point where this kind of topic makes sense to me.
Mark introduced us to the work of Ed Schein , a faculty member at MIT and writer of the seminal work on organizational culture, Organizational Culture and Leadership. The first chapter of the new third edition of the book is up at that link as a PDF, and is well worth a read.
When we examine culture and leadership closely, we see that they are two sides of the same coin; neither can really be understood by itself. On the one hand, cultural norms define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership—who will get promoted, who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it can be argued that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture; that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional.
One question struck me at the Institute - why, in a field that is heavily dominated by males, were all of the brightest and most engaging people I met at the Leadership Institute women? Something to ponder...
I'm in Sedona for the 2004 ECAR Summer Symposium.
Mark Hamilton, the President of the University of Alaska, talked this morning about a Presidential perspective on higher education and the changes higher ed is undergoing.
Mark is a retired Army general, obviously incredibly intelligent, and a very engaging speaker.
One of the remarks he made is that the best organizational structure follows by one generation the most popular children's toy. He talked about when he was young he played with wooden blocks, and organizations when he entered the work force resembled pyramidal piles of blocks. When he had kids they started playing with Legos, which enabled building flatter structures, and even inverted pyramids - and the organizational structures began to follow suit. The next trend he noticed was Transformers, where you use all and only the same pieces to create a new thing - and he notes that this is where we are with our current organizations, trying to be nimble and respond to changing circumstances while not having new resources added to do so.
Mark then noted that the current major trend in children's toys are interactive experiences that encourage independent learners to interact with the environment - whether that's a card game like Pokemon or immersive computer games. He challenged us to think of how the organizational structures will respond to that kind of experience.
Another quote of his that struck home with me is that "excellence in an organizaiton is done on the margin."
From eWeek:
The Mozilla Foundation has confirmed findings that its Mozilla and Firefox browsers are vulnerable to attacks using the "shell:" scheme, which execute arbitrary code under Windows without the user having to click a link.
There's already a fix available from Mozilla here. If you run Mozilla browsers (including Firefox) on Windows, you should install this fix.
Even Business Week says to stop using Internet Explorer -
In late June network security experts saw one of their worst fears realized. Attackers exploited a pair of known but unpatched flaws in Microsoft's (MSFT ) Web server and Internet Explorer browser to compromise seemingly safe Web sites. People who browsed the sites using Windows computers -- without downloading anything -- were infected with malicious code. I've been increasingly concerned about IE's endless security problems, and this episode has convinced me that the program is simply too dangerous for routine use.
We went downtown for the fireworks on Sunday night. It's not always easy to feel good about being an American these days (I have increasing thoughts about migrating north across the border to Canada), but few things beat seeing the wonder and joy on the face of a six-year-old watching fireworks.
Hugh MacLeod is an advertising guy who authors a cool blog called Gaping Void that I scan occasionally. Many of his posts take the form of postcard-format cartoons with short, clever one-liners (hey - sounds like advertising :).
I was struck by a couple of his recent sayings this morning:
It's all about thriving in markets that are smarter and faster than you are.
and
Smarter conversations equals better products
Check him out when you get a chance.
