In Rainbows – Radiohead

Just as you take my hand
Just as you write my number down
Just as the drinks arrive
Just as they play your favourite song
As your bad mood disappears
No longer wound up like a spring
Before you’ve had too much
Come back in focus again

Listening to this album uncompressed through good speakers is fucking amazing. Radiohead >> *

When the Microsoft Zune came out, and I found out that they use a proprietary extension of MTP that makes it only usable with the Zune software, I swore I’d never buy it. Little did I know that the new iPod Touch I bought to watch videos on the bus would be equally useless – unlike every other iPod, they decided to rewrite the entire transport layer, from USB storage to who-the-hell-knows-what.

While there are valid reasons that Apple decided to do this, their typical Apple-esque secrecy means that syncing music from my Linux desktop to my iPod is a 15+ step process, and any mistake will mean that iTunes bricks your device, which means starting from step #1. Furthermore, any failure syncing over wireless (a very flaky, error-prone procedure) will also brick it.

I know what you’re saying, “just use iTunes LOL”. Well that doesn’t work either – moving all of my music to my laptop isn’t an option, and setting up your iTunes library to go over the network is equally painful / flaky. iTunes treats the drive as if it’s local, so it does all sorts of retarded things like trying to do trickery with file locks and set file watches.

For fuck’s sake, there is no reason that this should be hard. Just implement the standard. Hell, I’ll even give you a bonus protocol. Here’s to hoping the EU sues Apple and forces them to publish all of their protocols.

In the meantime, my best option right now is to write my own FuseFS: basically, it’ll take a path as its argument and “cache” it at the file level, copying it to a temporary directory. When the temp directory gets too big, files get deleted according to MRU. This way, I can point iTunes at it, and it won’t act as slow. I suspect I’ll also have to have a block-based cache too, because iTunes will try to read the tags from lots of files at once, making it just as slow as a regular net drive.

Water were your limbs, and the fire was your hair
and then the moonlight caught your eye
and you rose through the air
Well, if you’ve seen true light, then this is my prayer:
will you call me when you get there?

Update: I posted this originally to the MS social listserv, but I thought it would be good for the blog too. Ignore the moving boxes part, it’s another story

Alright, I’m out of moving boxes, so here we go, top 5 albums of all time (inspired by High Fidelity of course, if you haven’t seen it, do it), and just for fun, I’ll list a bit as to why

1. Abbey Road, The Beatles

   

   The meaning of life, in the last track, of the last album, of the best band in the history of music. And it has the only Ringo drum solo. And a genius album cover, if you never knew this, the album cover is a funeral procession: John is in front, he’s the angel, Ringo behind him is the priest, Paul is the deceased (”Paul is dead”, remember?), and George is the gravedigger.

2. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel

   

   This album is about Anne Frank (kind of), which sounds like a pretty boring topic, but the music is amazing – the horns coming in on Holland, 1945 get me every time, and the last second of the album where you hear him get up and put away the guitar is absolutely perfect.

3. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan

   

   All of Dylan’s early records are good, but this is my favourite to listen to – the line “All you five and 10 cent women with nothin’ in your heads, I’ve got a real gal I’m lovin’, and lord I’ll love her ‘till I’m dead. Go away from my door, and my window too, right now” is such an awesome indictment of the frivolous lifestyles that society and advertising says women should be like back then, but still is appreciative of those who step up above it, all while still fitting the language and simplicity of folk music. This is why Bob Dylan is important.

4. OK Computer, Radiohead

   

   Radiohead’s most accessible album, but still has the themes of the band – Exit Music (for a film) is the perfect summary to Romeo & Juliet (it was written for the movie adaptation) and one of the best songs on the album

5. Emergency and I, The Dismemberment Plan

   

   This band made two really good albums then disappeared – this is their earlier one. The music on this album is really interesting, lots of electronic sounds backed by guitars and a drummer who is amazing, and the lyrics relate to a 20-something who has no idea what he’s doing, but in a strange way

6. Grace, Jeff Buckley (I know I said five, but too bad)

   

   This album is flawless. ignore the visual part of the movie and just listen to the sound. Buckley is an awesome guitarist and a hell of a singer.

Here it is – this is a freebie for all the record companies, this is the way to make piracy go away, and in turn, be the future of music distribution for the entire modern world and completely change the business of music. I’m calling this in 2007, we’ll see if it comes true.

As pervasive fast wireless Internet becomes a standard throughout the nation, the concept of an iPod will be replaced with a device that will stream and cache digital music that is supplied online via music download services. Any time you want, you will be able to pull down any album and listen to it for a flat monthly fee, just like you can with Napster/Zune/et al. Furthermore, you can do the same thing (albeit slower) with television shows and movies.

This solves the MP3 piracy problem not through lockdown DRM, but by making the concept of pirating MP3s inferior – why bother downloading files to your computer if you can just pull them off the net when you want them?

I was going to write an article on how C++ exceptions are evil – I mean, seriously, you’re crazy to use them, evil. But I got too lazy and instead will inform you about Girl Talk. This is what happens when an engineer from Case gets way too good at NI Reaktor and listens to too much MTV. His sense of timing and blend is absolutely perfect, especially the drum tracks that transition amazingly from song to song, you don’t even realize the changes.

It’s like 10 years of pop music blew up and someone collected the pieces into an album

For those of you who aren’t familiar, basically he makes dance/club music by taking other songs and blending them together in strange and interesting ways. Especially crappy rap songs and alternative kitsch songs – the moment when Biggie Smalls comes over in his intro lines “It was all a dream” with Elton John’s Tiny Dancer is fucking brilliant.

And as to the C++ exceptions, here’s the point: the concept of exceptions needs garbage collection to work in a sane fashion and pick up all the pieces after your function blows up, otherwise writing code that doesn’t leak memory or do crazy things is really, really hard. And when I say “hard”, I mean, the amount of time you will spend debugging is O(n^2), where n is defined as the size of the program. Add the “Exception is like a goto without a definite target”, the lack of a sane call stack depending on your compiler and arch, and you’ve got the recipe for disaster.

I Feel it all – Feist

I’m a sucker for Maj12 chords, what can I say.

I didn’t really know this until today, but turns out Stevie Ray Vaughn is really fucking good at guitar.

I forgot to add some headers to gst-music-hash; that’s fixed now, sorry about that.

Update: Unbelieveable, I also forgot to uncomment a line that I blocked out for perf analysis that broke the entire program. Retarded.