If you're like me, you'll be Under the Bridge to discover that those Funky Monks, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, have once again reached the Higher Ground and, Universally Speaking have announced the release of their new double album Stadium Arcadium.
I'm a huge Chili Peppers fan having crowd surfed for the first time at the Reading portion of the Leeds-Reading festival in 1999 while they were playing. iTunes has a pre-order deal for the new album:
Brian has passed me the baton, so here we go with my leg of the relay:
Total volume of music on your computer:
12.78 GB. 3336 songs.
The last album you purchased was:
"O" - Damien Rice
Song playing right now:
So Easy - Royksopp
Five songs you’ve been listening to a lot recently, from several genres:
P.I.M.P. - Fifty Cent
I've had a few parties lately and I'm not sure how this crept into my party shuffle so often on iTunes but hey, it's up there. It also used to be the ringtone for my fiancee on my cellphone since she was the one who introduced me to 50 cent originally.
Green Eyes - Coldplay
Despite my inability to get presale tickets, I still love listening to them. I saw them at the Reading Leeds festival the year before I left for America and then at a small venue called the Metro with a couple of hundred people in Chicago.
Come - The Kleptones
Not commercially available this mashup team really rocks. The first album I heard was "A night at the hip hopera" and subsequently "From Detroit to J.A.". Brilliant.
Everybody's Changing - Keane
Just saw these guys for the second time in 3 months here in Chicago. The Riviera venue was better musically but the Aragon ballroom was crazy because it looks like a castle! The performance was not as good though and a little flat despite the presence of the cameras recording the event for the DVD.
Old Love - Eric Clapton
I've
been learning a ton of old songs in guitar class and this is my
favorite so far. The chords are a little more novel than the
usual tripe and the sound is really funky.
Five people to whom you’re passing the baton:
Bugger. Five bloggers who may take the baton from me who haven't already done this:
Cameron Childress, because he knows the way to San Jose. (well, San Diego but I don't know any songs about SD).
Dean Saxe, because he came to visit Chicago recently.
Sean Corfield, for his sagely words of advice in response to my request for reading material for my new position as Senior Architect.
Robert Occhialini, for hosting Melissa and I this weekend as we float in to Atlanta to celebrate Mark's wedding.
Spike, for pushing CFEclipse onto my desktop and increasing my productivity.
Bugger again. Just saw that Sean and Spike already did this. Guess I'll leave it at three.
I've had iTunes for about a year now and my iPod mini since August and have had two frustrations:
But this was supposed to be a post about great extensions so here are the solutions to my problems. Jeff, the sagely CSS guru and MacHead from work, showed me a fun tool today for his Mac called iEatBrainz which scans your MP3 and AAC files, compares some key fingerprint element of the files against a central repository and then finds the closest match for your songs. Once you review the matches you can write the results back to your MP3/AAC files.
Great... Well, it only runs on Macs so I was SOL. However, scanning the site I noticed it runs off MusicBrainz.org and listed on their site is a windows product called MusicBrainz Tagger which does the same thing. I've just scanned my 1600 songs in less than half an hour and it successfully categorized 1000 without assistance. It then provides an interface to the MusicBrainz site to allow you to manually tag any it can't identify outright, based on extra clues like artist name, album or title stored in the filename (I'm butchering the actual detail of what it does I'm sure!). So this product has fixed 66% of my music collection unassisted.
Jeff also directed me the answer to my second problem. I hadn't found a good beats per minute batch analysis tool. I want this to help me sort my collection into slow, medium and fast songs to match different running paces on the treadmill but while iTunes was obviously able to assist with the mix part, it gave no answer to the BPM. Enter MixMeister BPM Analyzer. It has been running over an hour and a half now but is nearly finished with my 1600 songs. Some of them look a little goofy like Sting's "If I ever loose my faith in you" which is reported as 195.98 BPM, but overall, it looks pretty good with many of my bangin house tunes up at the top. You simply point it at your music collection and hit submit and then listen to the joys of your processor fan whirring on and off for nearly two hours while it updates all your ID3 tags.
The last step to joy is that iTunes doesn't automatically rescan all your ID3 tags after they have changed. To do this, you must highlight all your collection in the Library view and right click on a song to select "Convert ID3 tags". Select version 1.0 and it sets to work reading the ID3 tags and updating itself. That took less than 10 minutes for the whole collection.
I am exhausted from a big push at work and forgot to post a couple of updates here. The first was a concert by Jamie Cullum here in Chicago at Park West. He is a new face from England who sings with all the tones of a jazz singer, reworking recent classics like Radiohead's High and Dry. It was a departure from my typical Tuesday night schedule of working late and heading to the Old Town School for my guitar lesson.
It was worth skipping class for and the supporting act, David Ryan Harris was good too. We started listening to Jamie Cullum based on an iTunes playlist Melissa had come across but ever since then I've been spreading the word. In addition to the Radiohead cover he covered Jeff Beck's "Lover you should've come over" and Sinatra's "Singing in the Rain". I got a cheezy pic with my camera phone but it's not worth the trouble since my LG phone takes crap pictures in the dark. If the pic had come out as planned, you would be looking at a picture of Jamie playing the piano with his head. Not your typical Jazz singer!
I'm currently listening to an awesome recommendation from the same Jeff at work who brought you Yahoo! CSS. The Kleptones Night at the Hip Hopera is an incredible blend of classic Queen songs with the likes of ODB and loads more. I've not finished the album yet but I haven't heard Vanilla Ice yet?
I just came home from my 4th guitar class with the chords and bass pattern to Ring Of Fire by Johnny Cash and after some practise I got it going. In my struggles I couldn't help but wish there was something out there where I can specify the chords, strum pattern, set a tempo and hit play to get a pace partner.
I scanned around and found a fun site called ActionTab.com which has interactive flash fingerpicking demonstrations with two speeds. It is just okay as a tool for beginners - I think I want what I described above though so I'll add it to my todo pile and if I get any spare time to work on this I will post it here when I'm done.
Thanks to Robert at Bump.net for the tip that Apple has launched the Apple iTunes Affiliate Program. Naturally, I have joined but I'll be suprised if I have any more success than I do with amazon where I have generated $2.87 only over the last year! Hehe.
I love my iPod Mini though. Running just isn't the same without it and the armband. The biggest boon for me was the addition of the iTrip mini, without which our disastrous road trip to Cincinnati the other week would have been unbearable. We hit the road at 7am from Chicago on a pleasant Saturday morning to beat the air show traffic. After just over an hour on the road Melissa (driving) inhaled sharply, followed by an "Oh no!". I suspected she'd just witnessed some tragic accident which hadn't yet registered with my own eyes but after just a moment longer she informed me that we had left the garment bag for the wedding dangling in the closet.
After 10 minutes searching for the exit we made the tough decision to turn around to collect it. Before we reached the exit there were several other candidates:
1. Keep driving and buy new clothes in Cincy.
2. Drive back and then grab a last minute flight there
3. Stay at home and sulk
By 10am we were back on the road again and ready to roll but man, that was a tough call. I prefer sulking but the wedding was a blast.
The iTrip fitted nicely into the trip because it sits atop your iPod Mini flush with the case and broadcasts your iPod songs at a selectable frequency which you receive through your car stereo. It works great in my Ford Focus and her Honda Accord but I understand certain cars have issues with it. Gary, Indiana also posed some threat to the signal I discovered, potentially due to the noxious smells we encountered!
While typing this post out I have received notice that this site doesn't qualify for the Apple program so now I'm curious why...
This weekend I read a PHP and MySQL book cover to cover, watched Dodgeball at the Regal 24, met the lead singer of Keane and then was caught on camera in the background of a Fox 5 Atlanta outside broadcast this morning while I sipped my coffee and read the closing chapter of the Benjamin Franklin book.
As a veteran CFer and SQL Programmer I was intrigued to read about PHP and MySQL in "PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition" by Luke Welling and Laura Thompson. Learning a new language is always going to reveal some interesting things and one that was particularly intersting was the availability of the GD libraries to allow the creation of dynamic images. This was of relevance to a recent thread on CF-Talk where someone brought up the idea of CAPTCHA images from a CF only standpoint. PHP uses the GD libraries to generate GIF, JPEG and PNG images which allow you to combine text and images on the fly for buttons or, indeed, CAPTCHA images. I reviewed the C code to implement this and it struck me as something which could be easily migrated to CF as a custom tag.
Imagine being able to call
<cfdraw imageName="myImage" height="300" width="300" format="JPG">
circle(10,100,50,red);
text(verdana,10,50,50,black);
</cfdraw>
to see a dynamic JPEG image of a circle at 10,100 50 pixels wide in red with some black text over the top in Verdana 10px font at 50,50.
That would be fun. The book was a little disappointing from an established programmer perspective. I would guess that 80% of what someone with existing programming skills would need to know to write code in PHP with MySQL is presented in the first 258 pages. Then pages 259 through 436 offer some advanced topics including the dynamic image information before the remaining 350 pages describe 8 example applications and offer some information on building large projects and debugging them.
A great book I recently finished was "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Trusse. I heard an interview with Lynne on NPR and thought the book sounded like fun. The British author takes a dicatatorial stance on the issue of punctuation and its abuse (note the correct absence of an apostrophe in its). Not only did I learn about the subtle mistakes in my own writing but I have a keener eye for spotting errors elsewhere. The book is a quick read with delightfully humorous examples taken from the media and her local environment. One example which stands out is the sign "Book's, DVD's and CD's" - where book's should be apostropheless since it is a plural whereas CD's and DVD's is correct since the apostrophe indicates the contraction of the word discs to d's.
Pick up a copy of "Beginning Java Databases" for an incredibly good account of writing Java to connect to a database, run queries and extract metadata about the database. Here the first 60 pages are a "what you need to know" quick-start guide to querying a database followed by a more detailed discussion of SQL concepts and JDBC application development. I have thoroughly enjoyed the book and it is empowering in many ways since it takes what you know about databases in ColdFusion and escalates you to the underlying principles.
Watch Dodgeball with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. Seriously. It makes great light relief after a week of geeky books and it has to be my favorite movie of the year so far, ranking as high as Old School, maybe higher.
...and finally, after the Keane concert at the Cotton Club in Atlanta on Friday night I had a surprise opportunity to chat with Tom Chaplin, the lead singer of Keane. For the uninitiated, Keane's album "Hopes and Fears" is number one in the British album chart and they are making waves on US radio stations currently with "Somewhere only we know". There is a good review of the band at MetroWest Daily News. The fun part was knowing that this has the potential of another Coldplay. I saw Coldplay at the Reading-Leeds festival in 1999 when the band were new to the scene but still with a good crowd. When I moved to the US in 2000 I saw them play at a small club, maybe Metro, and there were fewer than 100 people there. Big contrast with the 2002 concert I attended in Atlanta at the Gwinett Civic Center where I strained my eyes to make out the band members on the stage from the rediculously priced seats I bought for Melissa and I.
A while back I posted about Mike's band Crashlander and their website. They are currently the number one download of the day on the Washington Post's MP3 hotlist (What? You didn't realize they had one?). The song getting all the attention is a song called "Rise" performed at the Velvet Room gig a while ago.
I'm impressed with my Girlfriend's Brother's band Crashlander for several reasons. The website is well put together, there are free sampler songs to download and most importantly, they don't have the sound of "another garage band with tired riffs". Freeload one and all and look out for them around DC.