Category Archives: Internet

video.google.com

I guess this is old news, but Google has a video site now. I didn’t even realize I’d been there before, but my browser completed the URL as I typed it. Some pretty amusing videos there, and the big hullabaloo over them actually charging people for stuff. I got cable, I got Netflix. Why would I pay for crappy internet videos? Even if I didn’t have those, who’s paying $2 for an episode of the original Twilight Zone? For that price I could get it on DVD. However, it is a good source for viral Internet video clips, hosted for free (for now). Like iFilm, but without the mandatory commercials, and with potentially higher quality video.
     There are a few annoyances, like no true browse feature. A link that says “Another 15 popular videos” is a big fat liar. All it does is refresh the page with another random video assortment, so some of the same videos keep popping up. It forces you to use a proprietary video viewer for DRM purposes, but it scales poorly compared to Windows Media Player. And some videos are only available through an embedded Flash player. Being Google, you can of course search, but also like Google, you’ll get a lot of irrelevant videos in the results.

Some of the more entertaining videos:
A reasonable attempt at deciphering Fall Out Boy. I’m not sure if emo can be translated to English, but a solid effort.
Dumbest dog you will ever see.
Bored Russian kids that could teach the Olympics a thing or two about making feats of senseless athleticism entertaining.
The system administrator song.

Rhapsody.com Review

On a lark, I subscribed to the Rhapsody Unlimited music subscription service, lured in the by their 14-day free trial ($10/month after that). I had fun with Pandora, but wanted to try something that gave me more control over what I listened to. In this case, complete control. Rhapsody has over 1.3M songs, and gives you the power to listen to any of them in any order. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but you’ll still run across missing albums, and occasionally missing artists. At least they have a button that reveals all of an artist’s missing albums.

Listening on the go

One of the benefits of the Unlimited service is Rhapsody To Go, which allows you to download tracks to a compatible portable device (the ones that say Subscription). There are 3 catches in that statement: 1) you are a current Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber, 2) your MP3 player is Janus/PlaysForSure compatible (iPods aren’t), and 3) you’re using Windows XP. And 4 catches if you include the fact that not all Rhapsody tracks are Subscription tracks, but in my experience almost all are. The quality of purchased and downloaded tracks is 128K, in WMA, AAC, or MP3.

Since I don’t see myself dropping the service anytime soon, I’m highly motivated to get a Subscription compatible player. Because I’d like an expandable player, I’m leaning towards the Sandisk e200 with a microSD slot, removable recharbable battery, FM tuner, and voice recorder, due out in March (happy birthday to me). [Attention Sandisk: when your marketing dept. launches a product at CES, without so much as a press release on your website, it’s time to fire them.]

Listening at home

You can listen two ways, through their web interface or their dedicated client. I usually use the client/jukebox software for its interface and convenience features. If you add a track to your library, it can download it so you can listen to it even when the site is down (which happens occasionally). Assuming you’re a current subscriber, of course, and are using Windows XP (I’m guessing it’s a DRM issue). You can purchase tracks for $.89 and albums for $7.99.

I don’t know how much music I listened to before, but I find with Rhapsody I listen to about 3 albums a night. It allows me to more thoroughly explore artists and genres. I find I’ll listen to classic rock musicians from past to present, until they start sucking (which happens pretty consistently as they approach the 1980s), and indie musicians from present to past, for pretty much the same reasons. I’m generalizing, but there’s definitely a pattern there, and it’s cool to see how the artists evolve (or devolve).

They also have several pre-programmed radio stations to help you explore new stuff, and allow you to create a station based on your tastes, like Pandora. I haven’t tried the custom station feature, and would be impressed if it was as good as Pandora, but I’ve been too busy albums to check.

MySpace Is Glorious!

Within a day of creating an account (had to use work, I’ll be fired soon I’m sure), I am getting solicitations from hot ladies! They all want me to email them, which can only mean they are really interested. Not all of them live near me, but for these ladies, a long distance relationship would be just as rewarding. I submit, for you reading pleasure (and imminent jealousy!), a missive from a lovely young woman with the handle “irin”:

Hello!!!!
I want will get acquainted with male.
I saw your structure and you have very much interested me.
I very much would like to find out about you more.
It would be very pleasant for me if you will write on mine email: irin-73@mail.ru
I shall look forward to hearing from you.
Irina.

And there’s more where that came from!

Pandora: Your Personal Music Geek

When I was in college, I was a database of certain types of music. Mainly alternative, especially industrial. I’d actually keep handy a two page typed wishlist of albums to get, if I could find it cheap/used. If you mentioned bands or songs you liked, I’d be right there with, “well, if you liked that, give this a listen.” Since college, I’ve backed off a bit (and I have a theory that most people’s interest in music peaks when they’re in college). However, with a wide variety of net radio stations available (and working on a screenplay that involves, in part, the music industry), my interest is again rekindling, especially with indie music. So I could really use a music geek to advise me, based on stuff I know I like.

Enter Pandora, a web version of said geek, but without my endearing arrogance. Give it a song or an artist, and it creates a radio station filled with similar music. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project (I hadn’t heard of it, either), which catalogs musical attributes of songs and artists, so it can find similar ones. It also accepts your feedback to help sculpt the station; if you don’t like a song it plays, it’ll never play it again on that station (but it might show up on another). You can also combine artists/songs on one station to create hybrids. For instance, I’ve combined Elliot Smith and Jon Brion to form a station I call Pop Genius. For the record, I am not a genius. Just brilliant. Anyway, I also created a KMFDM station, which has so far played Static-X, NIN, and Rob Zombie. Hmm. I wonder if I can recreate AOL’s WB channel by entering the best tracks from the Smallville soundtracks. Uh, not that I’d want to… What? No, you’re gay!

The interface is Flash, and is quite smooth and intuitive. You can pause and skip tracks, but not rewind. The sound quality is excellent! I listen to a lot of net radio, and this is probably the clearest, cleanest feed I’ve heard, even though others are also listed as 128Kbs. I have a hunch that the ones I’m accessing through iTunes are streaming 128K MP3, whereas Pandora might be using a variable bitrate format utilized by Flash. It is currently commercial free, but they warn they’ll be ramping up the advertising. I don’t know if this means radio commercials or not, but they’ll give you an ad-free version for $36/year. That seems reasonable, and well under the $10/month Rhapsody/Listen.com charges (although you can directly choose songs and albums with those services, whereas Pandora you can only “steer” the selections with feedback).

The only issue is whether they’ll be able to keep up with cataloging new and old music. Obviously, if a song’s attributes haven’t been cataloged, the software can’t really recommend it. They claim they don’t pigeonhole artists, which is good considering the range some of them have (how I miss Leeb and Fulber, who created a new band for every variation of industrial they tried: Front Line Assembly, Delerium, Intermix, and a few others). However, their catalog is 10K artists, and 300K songs, so you’ll probably be good for quite a while.

Stay tuned, I plan to experiment with some software that may complement Pandora frighteningly well, as well as necessitate that MP3 player I’ve been eyeing for a while now…

Out: AOL Radio; In: Commercial Free

To paraphrase Milton, if I have to hear one more Geico commercial, I’m going to blow up the building. I don’t care if I’ll save hundreds of dollars on my car insurance. If I do switch from 21st Century (who’s getting way too expensive), it won’t be to Geico. Because AOL Radio plays their commercials on every one of their stations. All. The. Freaking. Time.
     Since they only have two sponsors (Dorritos being the other), I have to drop them to retain my sanity. I previously wrote good things about them, and I’m officially taking them back. I wish I didn’t have to, because I did like the music and the easy links to AMG. Anyway, this is what I’m pimpin’ now:

SomaFM
I found these guys through iTunes, and listen to the Indie Pop Rocks station. Very few interruptions, and a good music selection. Belle and Sebastian, Guided by Voices, Elliot Smith. They also just introduced me to The Go! Team (no affiliation with The Crack Team… as far as you know!), which is next on my pickup list. Also check out the Secret Agent channel, a modern take on 60s lounge music, Bossa Nova, and Connery-era James Bond. And occasionally a little Bollywood flavor throw in. Very chill.

3wk
They have a couple indie stations, one modern and one classic (which the announced with King Crimson background music, so it must be good). More cool music, no commercials (although they do remind you they’re listener supported, but that’s way less obnoxious than an insurance commercial).

ChroniX Aggression
What’s sometimes referred to as “alternative metal”. Fear Factory, Slipknot, System of a Down. Good music to get the heart pumping, before you rip it out and wolf it down.

What I like about these stations is that they display the artist and song while they’re playing, so you can punch it into your search bar and get more info. 3wk will even tell you the album and the label its on.

Now I just gotta find a replacement for the WB station… not that I listen to any of that really catchy pop music. You can’t prove it!

An AJAX Alternative

There is a lot of talk these days about rich web client interfaces with AJAX, and I’ll admit I find it exciting. However, there is an alternative
called OpenLaszlo. It has the same goal as
AJAX (desktop feel and response time in a web application), but uses Flash
instead of JavaScript/DHTML. While most web developers know JavaScript
already, the advantage here is that you only have one target platform:
the Flash plugin. The word from the trenches is that it’s very
difficult to overestimate the amount of time you need to test AJAX apps,
especially cross-browser. And I hate testing. Another advantage for bigger web
shops is that the backend/middle tier guys rarely do the front end
stuff, as they’re tied up with business logic and data access issues,
which is quite a handful already. For these apps, they have to master
XML and/or web services, too. At the same time, your front end guys are
often professional graphic designers who know Flash about as well as
they know JavaScript, if not better. So OpenLaszlo can help leverage
your existing skill mix.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp AJAX is not without support, though. There is a JavaScript
library called Rico (developed by
Sabre Airline Solutions) to help developers get up and running. It was a
Sabre lead who made the comment about the difficult testing, so it looks
like they’ve open sourced their framework to get the community to help.
I don’t know if you want to open source a competitive edge, but the rest
of us are the better for it. I’ve also heard good things about DWR, but it’s a Java library.
My current goal is still to concentrate on the middle tier,
getting up to speed on Spring and Hibernate. I figure once I’m
comfortable with those technologies, my choice for a rich client will be
obvious (or simply won’t matter).

Netscape Radio Now AOL

I listen to a lot of net radio, since I’m on the computer a lot and a crave variety in my music. One of my main sources was Netscape Radio, which apparently is now AOL Radio. For a while now, I have experienced problems with my Radio@Netscape player, where it basically won’t start. When it was working, I saw occasional ads for unlimited listening at AOL Radio, and since they’re the same company (until Time Warner gives AOL the boot) I thought I’d check it out. Turns out AOL has the same stations and an interface that looks identical, but offers unlimited listening (Netscape cut you off after a couple hours). The new interface appears to be pure web-based and launches in a popup, unlike Netscape’s, which required a separate downloadable executable. Unfortunately for now, Firefox is not supported, but they promise it will be next month. So it’s time to dust off your IE.

I listen to it often due to the good selection of stations and the ability to rate songs. I have no idea how much my vote counts, but I like to feel listened to (hence this blog). In addition, they link the artist, song, and album to the AOL’s music page which licenses data from the All Music Guide, making it easy to learn about artists I’m not familiar with. My staples are Indie Rock Mix and Electronica, but other notable stations include Melancholia, for when your misery wants company; The WB Radio, the music of Smallville; Xtreme Alt Rock, hard but not boring; and a variety of single-artist stations for bands like The Ramones, The Doors, Yes, and others. Plus just about every other style of music you can think of, and several promotional stations for things like the Warp Tour and Live 8. Overall, a good one-stop music shop.

Get Behind Me, Comment Spam

I’ve recently been attacked by comment spammers. This is where they post comments in your blog that advertise a product. The goal isn’t to get you to buy said product, it’s to increase their pagerank on Google (although a few might not be smart enough to realize this). It’s very annoying, and removing comments with Movable Type (MT), the software that runs this blog, is like a 5-click process (per comment!).
     This is why I am weeping with joy over MT-Blacklist. Since the evil, scum-sucking spammers want to increase their pagerank, they must use the same site name, which becomes the chink in their armor. You can now add that to your Blacklist and have it automatically blocked. Furthermore, a centralized collection agent processes MT comment notification emails, so users can forward spam to the list and have it automatically added to the master blacklist. Unfortunately, that part is down for reasons explained on the site (Perl hacker needed to optimize the collector; I’d consider it if I had the time). So for now, you have to update your own list, but some nifty catch-alls help out a lot. Like if you wanted to comment about any drugs that enhance your bait and tackle, you’d have to email me directly… and immediately.
     It gets even better! The plugin is really easy to install. And if it doesn’t block something, you can add it after the fact, and it will back-check your comments! It shows you what it’s about to delete, and even automatically rebuilds the site for you (although you can uncheck that box if you want).
     Thank you MT-Blacklist. Thank you.

Strongbadassmofo

So when I tell you about the awesomeness that is the Strongbad email, you should be saying, “duh”. ‘Cause you knew about it like only a million years ago. Pfffffft. But if you’re not saying that, you have a crapload of hilarious web pages to go through. And also, you’re not as cool as me (but you knew that). So get crackin’! Also, there are a lot of easter eggs, especially at the end of the episodes, so you end up waving your mouse cursor all over the damn screen like you’ve got Parkinson’s, searching for a cool extra tidbit. And it’s worth it.

Apologies to those with Parkinson’s. Peace.

Dude, I Think She Likes You…

I received yet another “new feature” notification for a web site I’m registered with. Difference is, this is the first one I’ve ever been impressed with. American Singles has a new feature called Click! that acts as a mutual friend. It’s dead simple, and so brilliant you’ll wonder why I didn’t think of it first. As you view the personals, you can mark them as Yes, Maybe, or No. If you mark a profile as Yes, and its the author does the same for your profile, you “click”, and the site let’s you know you’re interested in each other. If you marked her Maybe, and she marks you as Yes, you’re sent a subtle hint: “Are you sure she’s not a Yes?” No’s are treated like you never viewed and/or marked the ad, so no hurt feelings.

This is so much easier than real life, where I assume a girl’s not interested unless she actually smiles at me. Consider that a warning.