25 Tuesday Mar 2008
Posted in Music
A change from All Music’s seemingly frequent blogging of American Idol they’ve actually written a brief artist spot light blog on Matthew Ryan here. With Matthew’s new album coming out this can only help.
22 Saturday Mar 2008
Posted in General, Technology
With the big push at SeeWhy to get Version 3.4 out of the door coming to an end, I’m expecting to get time to finalise SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM – a BAM solution for JBoss jBPM (JBoss’ Business Process Management tool which is also used to provide orchestration of the JBoss SOA platform) using the SeeWhy realtime BI product. The core of this has been largely finished for some time, as we demo’d it in Orlando for JBoss World but the production quality finishing and the final piece of functionality – providing the closed loop capabilities such that SeeWhy can start new jBPM processes or get existing processes to resume had been held up. Unfortunately trying to get a good grip on this and the threading implications hasn’t been so straight forward giving the limited amount and quality of documentation (for example javadoc for jBPM is very sparse) and example code available. Although I am very pleased with the quality of documentation that the next generation of jBPM is likely to have having seen the PVM (Process Virtual Machine) source code for its first release.
19 Wednesday Mar 2008
Posted in Technology
In addition the the sad passing of respected writer and film director Anthony Minghella, it is sad news that the visionary author Arthur C Clarke has also died today. Although best known for writing the film 2001 which was filmed by Stanley Kubrick he was a well established as visionary and respected author long before this. Clarke had published papers describing things such as geo-stationary orbit years before it was achieved – something that is central to our everyday lives and take for granted. The BBC has full Obituary here.
18 Tuesday Mar 2008
Posted in Photography
If you pick up photo magazines regularly you’ll know that they will devote pages to tips and techniques, interesting places to go take photos and so on. But I’ve never read anything addressing the issue of the law beyond the usual model waiver (giving you copyright to your photos that they appear in). So it has been good to read an article at photojojo (here) which describes in simple language the basic legal position of taking photos in public places. Although photojojo is American based the principles of their ’10 commandments’ should be valid in most western nations, but they have made the attempt to also provide links to sites that outline the legal situation other English speaking countries (to have a list of sites covering non English speaking countries would make the ultimate reference for this sort of thing – particularly for when you’re on holiday in a country that maybe a little more sensitive).
18 Tuesday Mar 2008
Posted in General
With the government backing down on the 2p (~$0.04) per litre fuel increase in the last budget, and the feeling that fuel prices seem to be continuously and rapidly climbing, I decided I’d like to see a graph of the price changes. Thanks to the folks at PetrolPrices.com I’ve got a set of figures (from the AA) that have allowed me to build a graph.
The figures are a lot more comprehensive than I have currently made use of. If I get time to build something richer then I’ll post that. If there is any interest then I’ll make the spreadsheet available.
del.icio.us tags: Fuel, pricing, AAC, PetrolPrices.com, cost, motoring, petrol, diesel, car
14 Friday Mar 2008
Posted in Music
The FT (FT.com – article here) have an interesting interview with Tom Whalley the CEO of Warner Brothers Records. Rather than blaming P2P etc for the problems the industry are experiencing he is highly critical of how the business is being run. For example …
“One of the excuses people were making [for stealing music] was that there were not enough good songs on CDs. And they weren’t wrong,” he said. “What had happened was we took the single out of the marketplace because it wasn’t economically viable and you had to buy a full album whether you liked it or not.”
The argument that killing the single off has contributed to file sharing isn’t one I had considered. But the single is definitely being murdered. It used to be that you would be able to get a single and get several bonus tracks. Now its one extra track which is usually a remix or even cheaply the instrumental version.
Tom also is critical of the position that record companies are just trying to exploit their existing artists and not putting effort into A&R (diametrically opposite to EMI’s new boss who seems to think A&R are a bunch of overpaid slackers). He also says in the article that the new 360 degree deals where the company’s cut in on touring profits can also be dangerous. Keep the artists on the road, and they’re not in the studio creating new material for you to sell, and the dividend ration despite the piracy still has to favour recording.
14 Friday Mar 2008
Posted in Music
13 Thursday Mar 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
The radical idea of adding a surcharge to the fees that ISPs charge for broadband connectivity as levy for P2P piracy is to be discussed at the SXSW conference according to the wired article here (Surcharge on ISPs). It is an interesting and brave move, and already has presidents for example the Performing Rights Society (PRS) levy in the UK on venues who play music (just about any public venue), or Canada’s charge for blank media. The achilles heel to this that I can see is the move could seriously hurt the download what you like for a fixed monthly fee services, whilst the majors mess about with licensing contracts.
Hopefully a download of the session will be made available as the arguments for and against this will be very interesting.
11 Tuesday Mar 2008
Posted in Technology
MIT have implemented a fascinating site that analyzes net traffic showing which cities around the world the traffic is travelling to and from. The traffic is then being brilliantly visualised. The project was developed to help people analyse and understand the volumes of traffic and how it changes over time. To see the site go here.
11 Tuesday Mar 2008
Posted in Music
On Jesse Malin in this week’s Uncut new letter which primarily focuses on Neil Young …
Coincidentally, one of the new records I’ve been playing quite a bit recently is On Your Sleeve by Jesse Malin, an album of cover versions of some of Jesse’s favourite songs. I’m not entirely sure the world needs another version of “Wonderful World”, but elsewhere there are affecting takes on Paul Simon’s “Me And Julio Down By the School Yard”, “Sway” by the Rolling Stones, The Hold Steady’s “You can Make Them Like You” and Neil’s “Looking For A Love”.
You can hear tracks from the album here: www.indian.co.uk/jessemalin/player/player.html
