Monthly Archives: January 2006

Start Your iPods

This work week, we start with:

  1. Adrian Belew - The Ideal Woman
  2. Robyn Hitchcock - Beautiful Queen
  3. The Replacements - Gary's Got a Boner
  4. The Cars - Let's Go
  5. Jimi Hendrix - Wind Cries Mary
  6. Tortoise - Spiderwebbed
  7. Cassandra Wilson - Tea For Two
  8. Pavement - Two States (live)
  9. Colorblind James Experience - She Took The Ring Off The Dead Man's Finger
  10. Pavement - Perfume-V (live)
  11. Bonus : Steven Jesse Bernstein - This Clouded Heart

Just a note... that Tortoise song, like many Tortoise songs, runs into the song the follows it: there's no discrete end. But, in an MP3, there has to be a discrete end; and in this case, it's abrupt and ugly - not even a fade-out, just a CHOP.

So, what I'd like to see is an "alpha channel" for sound. What's an alpha channel, Precious ? Well, a 24-bit image is made of 3 channels (Red, Blue and Green) with 8 bits of color information per channel. A 32-bit image has Red, Blue, Green and Alpha channels, where the Alpha channel controls the transparency for that pixel. So, using the alpha channel, you can blend or mask one image onto another smoothly, without sharp edges. An alpha channel in an MP3 could be used to control how the sound blends with other sounds; for example, you could have the end of a song gradually become 'transparent'. This would need one other little addition: the ability to put a marker in an MP3 that tells the player when to start the next song (even if that's before the current song has ended). The player would see that marker, start the next song, and then blend the two songs together using the alpha values of the ending song.

I know some players can do something like this automatically, for every song; but it'd be nice if the song itself could control it; that way, songs that were intended to run together on the original record (like that Tortoise song) could run together in MP3 form, too.

Minor - Major

Like many bloggers, TBogg does a weekly random Top 10. A lot of people (regulars, mostly) post their own random ten in response. We all get to feel good about ourselves, because everybody else has lousy taste in music - or something.

Anyway, it looks like the majority of people who post their random 10 list them in "Song - Artist" order, instead of "Artist - Song" order. This annoys me (no big deal, I'm easily annoyed).

It simply feels wrong to put the more-specific (and presumably less well-known) part of the song information before the less-specific (and presumably more well-known). You can assume everyone has heard of The Beatles. And you can assume not everyone has heard of their song "Long Long Long".

Why does it matter? Well, for one thing, when I see a list of songs, I skim, looking for bands I like, dislike or merely recognize. If it's a band I dislike, I won't bother looking at the song title. Putting the band (the part of the info that people have a better chance of recognizing) first means people can evaluate the list, at least at one level, faster.

Secondly, in all the programming languages I can think of, when you're looking at an object, or a structure, or any heirarchical data, you start with the most-general part, then work down to specifics, in a left to right order: MyObject.SomethingInsideMyObject.SomethingInsideThatThing.TheGoodies. Or, even more familiar, filenames:

    C:temppicturesbooty.jpg

.
You'd never write:

    booty.jpg/pictures/temp/C:

Even if the syntax of that form was better, the idea of working from the inside out feels counter-intuitive.

And putting the song first feels counter-intuitive, too.

Yeah, this is stupid. I'm waiting for 5:00.

Tift and Son

Sony P7

Mrs. Cleek and I went to see Son Volt and Tift Merritt last night, at The Disco Rodeo.

Here's Tift:

Sony P7

She was good, if a bit hoarse. My wife likes her better on record, than live. I like her better live.

Here's Jay Farrar from Son Volt, playing harmonica:

Sony P7

It's a good thing Farrar has interesting lyrics and can write such rocking songs, because the combination of his near monotone delivery and minimal stage presence would sink anyone else - I think I saw him break his blank expression with a smile once the whole night. Nonetheless, I do love me some Son Volt. They have a few songs that rank among my all-time favorites (including their cover of Ron Wood's Mystifies Me).

Interestingly, the lead guitar player, Brad Rice, played for both Tift and Son Volt last night. He played on the latest Son Volt album, and he was playing for Tift when we saw her on Austin City Limits last Saturday night. Busy guy.

Adept at Ignoring Facts

A study finds that Democrats and Republicans are both adept at Ignoring Facts. Not only that, they get a mental rush while they do it.

    The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.
    Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
    The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

Heh.

via /.

That fits nicely with a study (pdf), linked-to by a Slashdot poster, which notes:

  1. Your brain uncritically accepts the first information it gets in any new
    subject area as correct, whether it is or not.

  2. Subsequent information that is in keeping with the information already
    present in your brain is uncritically accepted as correct, whether it is or
    not.

  3. A new item that is contradictory to the information present in your brain is
    automatically rejected as incorrect, whether it is or not.

  4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its
    information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is
    contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no
    internal way to know which items of its information are correct
    representations of the real world and which are not.

  5. Your brain has no way to know whether or not it has all the information
    required to respond appropriately to a given stimulus.

  6. Unless your brain has additional information to the contrary, it interprets
    similar items as being identical.

  7. Your brain cannot measure anything directly. All measurements must be
    made by comparison against an appropriate standard, which is often done
    incorrectly.

  8. Your brain continues to interpret the external world as it was when the last
    sensory signal about a given subject area was received. As a result, the
    brain is not aware that some of its formerly correct information is now
    incorrect.

Stupid brains.

The benefits of careful reading

So, I'm trying to install some new forum software to handle user questions for my software company (my fun job, not the one I hate), because the one I am currently using is giving me some problems.

The new stuff installs OK, and then I try to import the old forum posts into the new forum setup. There's a utility that comes with the new stuff that's supposed to handle this, and it does, mostly. All the posts and all the users and accounts and everything gets imported nicely, with not too much hassle. I'm impressed. But, all the dates on all the posts show up as Jan 1, 1970. Now, all you programmers will recognize that date as a timestamp of 0 - the beginning of time for Unix systems (and all that copied the Unix time system), so I sadly realized that the forum importer was just failing to get a valid time, and as default, was setting all timestamps to zero. Oh well.

I thought I'd re-import the old posts, with some different settings, to try to fix this date issue. But, I couldn't find a way in the new system, to erase all the stuff I had just imported first. So, I went for a re-install. I started the installer, and it said "Hey, you already did this. Do you want to write over the existing stuff (possible problems ahead!) or do you want to delete the old stuff and create from scratch (warning! you'll lose all your old stuff!) ?" Well, of course I went with the "from scratch" option - I wanted to lose the old stuff, it was wrong.

But, if I had read a little more carefully, I would've seen that the warning about the "from scratch" option was warning me that it wasn't going to just delete the database tables associated with the forum software... No, it was going to delete all the tables in the database. What? You mean even tables that the forum software shouldn't even be looking at? Yup.

So, kaboom. And it's gone. Goodbye database! Goodbye new forum. Goodbye existing forum. Goodbye website back-end. Goodbye customer registration data. Goodbye ability to add new customers. Hello tech ISP support - got any recent backups? Yeah, we have one from 4 days ago. That'll be $75, please.

Again, if I had read carefully, this wouldn't have happened. But then again, software really shouldn't do things that are both unexpected and calamitous.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Not what I wanted to do tonight.

--

Update:
After twelve hours of panic (and even a few scary dreams about data-eating viruses destroying my home PC), it's all back to normal. They restored my db file, with only 3 days of data missing; and I can fix that by hand. Now I'll run a full backup of my own, create a new db for the new forum to live in and try it all again.