Having gotten used to the convenience of getting almost all of my music straight from eMusic, its good to remember every now and then that there’s definitely a price to pay for the ease of getting albums as intangible collections of bits. Some albums that go beyond the typical jewel-case and minimal two page liner just aren’t done justice by being purchased as files alone, even if I’ll only end up listening to them that way and not from the physical media. Take Sufjan Stevens’ recently released “Songs for Christmas” boxed set. This compilation of 5 previously officially unreleased (though mostly already distributed by fans online) holiday themed EPs, recorded yearly since 2001 just became available on eMusic recently. Just as I was about to download it, I noticed a review that commented on how many extra bonuses were included in the actual physical boxed set. The set includes: a songbook with chord charts for 29 of the 42 songs, a collection of Christmas stories and essays, a comic, stickers, a Christmas photo of Sufjan and family, and album art for each of the individual discs. Sure, none of that stuff is essential and for anything other than a Christmas album would probably be kind of cheesy, but together make for a charming addition to the music and reflect the personal nature of the project (the discs were originally a yearly Christmas gift for friends and family). After seeing that I hopped over to Amazon (where it’s currently in the top 30 albums) and ordered the album there instead. It was a good call. All the extras are just a bonus on top of an excellent holiday album (and I am not a “holiday album” person by any stretch of the imagination), something right up there with Vince Guaraldi’s classic score for A Charlie Brown Christmas in terms of listenable Christmas music. This is a good thing, as its become a yearly tradition requested by Jolayne to listen to Christmas music on our drive out to Ohio for the holidays. Having another album that we both like never hurts.

Car Damage

Originally uploaded by willgorman.

I think it’s about time that the people of Kansas City collectively sat down and reassessed their winter driving skills. They clearly need some work. Snow and ice seem to bring out the idiot in people in a way that I’ve rarely seen back in Ohio, and the first snow storm of the year is apparently some kind of grand jubilee for them. Pictured is the handiwork done to Jolayne’s car today by one of our fair city’s mentally enfeebled wintertime drivers. Jolayne, fortunately, is totally fine though understandably not too happy. She was heading home early to try to miss the worst of the expected storm when another driver (uninsured, naturally) triggered a 4 car chain reaction of which Jolayne was car number 4. A pickup truck from the lane next to her sideswiped her as a result of the initial collision. A close call definitely, and we’re certainly relieved it wasn’t much worse, but it’s frustrating nonetheless. It’s a pretty busy time of year anyway, plus with grad school and her practicum and getting ready to head home for Christmas in a couple weeks we sort of had enough to do without having a car out of commission for a little while. Not that it would ever be a good time for this to happen, but this time is definitely not the best.

Comments

Comment by Dave on 2006-11-30 20:53:54 +0000

I’m glad you folks are unhurt. You have my sympathies about the car, as I’ve had my share of people crashing into various of mine.

Comment by Carrie on 2006-11-30 22:34:23 +0000

Ack! I’m glad Jolayne didn’t get hurt, but man does that suck.

Comment by Will on 2006-12-02 14:17:16 +0000

Thanks for the concern, it looks like hopefully this isn’t going to be as much of problem as we thought. We were able to get a rental car and find a body shop to come pick up Jolayne’s car yesterday.

Comment by Ash on 2006-12-18 11:02:09 +0000

Ouch! Glad Jolayne didn’t get hurt. And, YES, KC drivers are pathetic. I tried my darndest not to drive into work on the days that it was going to snow while I was there.

Thanks to Neal for pointing out that comments were teh borken. I’m not sure what was up with that. MT Blacklist was blowing up with errors about the regexs in the blacklist and I thought maybe there had been a new version of Perl installed or something that was breaking it. For a moment I thought I finally had no other option but to finally upgrade to MT 3.x. And then I just reimported the blacklist, the exact same blacklist that it was complaining about, and it started working just fine. Computers these days…

Comments

Comment by Will on 2006-11-28 21:56:18 +0000

See, it works now.

Comment by Ash on 2006-11-29 00:54:33 +0000

Woot! he’s back folks. Now that you’re paying 1and1, you’re going to update again good work

All good things must come to an end, including my 3 years of free hosting with 1&1. I’ve decided to stick with them and get one of their hosting plans though not so much because they had the best price or the most options (for example, no WebDAV, which would have been nice) but mostly because I’m just too lazy to transfer my domain registrations and data to another provider. I’d be interested to know how many other beneficiaries of their crazy 3 year promotion actually stuck around as well, and how long they have to keep a paying plan for 1&1 to not have lost money on the deal. So now that I’ve got tons more storage and bandwidth, and now that I’m actually paying for it, I figure I should put it to good use and maybe dust this thing off a little bit and actually post more than once every 3 months or so.

Ohboyohboyohboy! I’ve been waiting for this ever since Geobloggers closed up shop when Dan Catt went to work for Flickr. Flickr has finally rolled out their integrated mapping/geotagging functionality, so no more having to use 3rd party apps/sites for tagging/viewing and the best part is that it still recognizes the same geobloggers tags so all the pictures I’ve mapped before show up already. I’m obviously excited about geotagging pictures (perhaps a little too much so, you might think) but now that it doesn’t require any Greasemonkey scripts, extensions, or other websites, maybe geotagging will gain a bit more exposure and acceptance. It’s super easy to do, there’s just a new tab in the Organizr called “Map” where you can search for locations and drag and drop your photos onto the map. Furthermore, you can even keep some level of privacy by specifying who’s allowed to see your geotag info. The only real downside is that it (well, obviously) uses Yahoo maps instead of Google, and they just don’t always have as much detail in some places. It does seem to be a little slow at the moment, but I wonder if that’s just from thousands of giddy geeks putting it through its paces. At any rate, here’s the map of all my geotagged photos.

Comments

Comment by Eduardo Manchon on 2006-09-08 04:35:18 +0000

If you prefer Google Maps for mapping photos Panoramio, may be interesting for you. Btw, you can later watch the photos in Google Earth KML feed, a much better experience than web based maps.

Eduardo

Anyone that’s done any programming in C/C++ knows about the dangers of using an uninitialized primitive data type. Nothing quite like performing a calculation on a double with a junk value or dereferencing an uninitialized pointer to some random block of memory that makes it past a NULL check. However, there are also cases where attempting to intialize an object that has a default constructor can cause you some trouble if you’re not careful (in addition to being unnecessary). For example, the Microsoft ATL class CComBSTR. CComBSTR is a wrapper class around the BSTR data type, which is a Microsoft specific type of Unicode string. It’s basically just a pointer (unsigned short*) to a contiguous block of characters in memory, much like the good old C style char* strings, only instead of being NULL terminated, BSTR’s have their length stored in the 4 bytes preceding the address that the pointer references. Like char*’s you’ve got to handle their memory management yourself, so the CComBSTR class wrapper keeps a member variable BSTR and takes care of the allocation and deallocation for you. However, it makes that member variable public, which is useful in some cases, but can also be dangerous if you’re not careful. Which brings me back to the problem of initialization. If you declare a CComBSTR and attempt to initialize it to NULL like:

CComBSTR sTheString = NULL;

while you might assume that this would just set the member variable BSTR to NULL, what it actually does is allocate a BSTR of 0 length which takes up 2 bytes of memory (possibly 6, I’m not sure what it does with the 4 byte length field). This isn’t a problem in and of itself though, since if you just use the CComBSTR correctly it will deallocate that memory anytime you assign another string to the CComBSTR, or when it goes out of scope and is destroyed. What can be a problem though is if you pass in the member variable BSTR to a function that takes a BSTR*, like most COM interface methods/properties that take strings do. For example:

pSomeCOMInterface->get_String(&sTheString.m_str);

If the CComBSTR had just been initialized with its default constructor, you’d be fine, since the BSTR copied into m_str would be deallocated when the CComBSTR was destroyed or reassigned. In this case though, we’re replacing the reference that the CComBSTR had to the 0 length string and causing a memory leak. So in addition to being unnecessary, the initialization to NULL actually made it easier to leak memory, since you wouldn’t expect that CComBSTR to have allocated anything. Sure it’s only a few bytes but depending on how it’s called in your code a tiny leak like that can be just as bad as losing track of some massive chunk of memory.

I’ve already talked about them repeatedly, but there’s an article about eMusic I read the other day that I thought was pretty interesting. It confirmed some things that I already knew, like the fact that I’m pretty much the exact definition of their target market (the over 25 music fan that likes to check out new stuff on a whim and wouldn’t even consider buying music with DRM). However, there were some things I was suprised to learn, like that they’re the number 2 retailer of downloadable music behind, obviously, iTunes. That’s good news for me that they’re doing well, because honestly I don’t know what I’d do without my monthly downloads. I’ve got almost 300 albums left to get!

One thing I’ve been hoping for quite some time that eMusic would add is RSS feeds of their most recently added music. I’ve just learned from their forums though that they’ve already had that feature for a little while now, they’ve just done a good job of hiding it for some reason. However, it’s pretty cool because you can get an RSS feed for pretty much any category you want, no matter how broad or specific. Basically all you have to do is navigate to a page that contains the set of results you want to get updated on, for example New This Month->Alternative/Punk->Indie Pop->Freshly Ripped and then just replace the word “browse” in the URL with “rss”. So

http://www.emusic.com/browse/n/b/n/a/0-0/65+1200000301+⁶⁸⁄₀.html

would become

http://www.emusic.com/rss/n/b/n/a/0-0/65+1200000301+⁶⁸⁄₀.html

Plug that URL into your preferred feed reader and that’s all it takes to get updates via RSS about the newest music available in your genre(s) of choice. It’s pretty handy, so hopefully they’ll make it a little more accessible in the future.

Ever since Amazon announced their S3 online storage service for developers I’d been hoping that someone would come out with an app to take advantage of that service in a way that was aimed at end users rather than developers and it looks like that’s just happened. The recently released beta for JungleDisk is just such a program, providing an easy to use wrapper around Amazon’s storage service that adds no additional cost. The S3 service provides cheap, reliable, encrypted online storage space where you only pay for what you use each month, as opposed to most storage providers where you have to pay a flat fee for a certain amount of space, regardless how much you actually use. The rates are pretty nice too, just $0.15 per GB stored per month and $0.20 per GB of bandwidth used. However, it’s really intended primarily for developers to make use of in web apps and there’s no front end to it to just allow you to copy files over. That’s where JungleDisk comes in. It runs a WebDAV server on your computer that allows you to drag and drop files just like into a normal Windows folder, but it sends them off to S3 in the background. It works well, and in conjunction with two other programs I think it’s going to become part of my automated backup solution. The first other program is NetDrive, a WebDAV client that allows you to map a drive letter to JungleDisk’s server and access it as if it were a local disk. This means that you can now use folders on that drive to create folder pairs for syncing with Microsoft’s SyncToy. And since SyncToy can be set to run automatically, well there’s your automated backup.

As far as backups go, it’s probably about as reliable as you can get (at least for the cost anyway) because data sent to S3 is duplicated at several different physical locations. It’s for that reason that even though hard drives are dirt cheap these days (I’ve recently just crossed the 1 terabyte of total space line myself) it still makes sense to use this for backups of things that you want to be absolutely sure about. For example, my 5 gigs or so of photos. Using JungleDisk and S3 I can transfer those out for $1.00 of bandwidth and then store them for just $0.75/month. On the other hand for 60+ gigs of music it would be $9.00/month so I’ll probably still stick with just backing those up on an external hard drive.

Here’s something fun you can try at home. First, find a cool spring night. That could be kind of tricky depending on the time of year, but I just happen to have one right here that I’m going to use. Next, open up a bunch of windows in your house/apartment/whatever. Ideally you should be able to hear crickets, but if not, no big deal it’ll still work. Maybe turn on a fan or two and get a nice breeze going. Fire up your media player of choice and load up “Wien” by Labradford from their album Fixed::Context. If for some reason you don’t already happen to have this track handy, it can be easily and cheaply obtained from eMusic. Once you’ve got it loaded, set it to repeat and hit play. Now for the final step (and here’s where it gets good): just sit there. See what I’m talking about? I know, you can thank me later.

Comments

Comment by Posko on 2006-05-01 05:26:17 +0000

Now, just throw in being naked… and you’ll be all set!

Comment by Will on 2006-05-01 16:47:46 +0000

Hey, once you have the basic routine down feel free to improvise as you see fit.

Comment by dad on 2006-05-04 09:00:54 +0000

Be warned–Don’t go posting psuedonymous comments to inflate your blog’s ratings! Excerpt from May 3, 2006 InformationWeek Daily follows:

1. Editor’s Note: Blogs And Ethics Can Coexist

The Internet for years has been cutting into the circulation bases and advertising revenue of daily newspapers. The dailies have been generally slow to adapt as Web sites offered the timeliest possible news, blogs, and compelling online presentations featuring lots of links to outside and related resources.

One less positive development when it comes to online news and journalism has been the ever-more-fuzzy distinction between blogs–with their lack of fact checking and their flame-oriented reader comments and other shortcomings—and the journalistic work that drives daily newspapers. Particularly for twenty-somethings and those even younger, I wonder whether they can recognize the difference between blogs and the more traditional forms of reporting and journalism in newspapers.

But recent events should make that distinction more clear and raise the level of accountability among bloggers. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Los Angeles Times was using pseudonyms to post comments on his and other blogs, including comments that deal with his column and other issues involving the newspaper.

The reporter was suspended by the Times , his column and blog were axed, and he’ll be reassigned upon his return. In an explanation (reg. required) to readers, the Times said, “…employing pseudonyms constitutes deception and violates a central tenet of The Times’ ethics guidelines: Staff members must not misrepresent themselves and must not conceal their affiliation with The Times. This rule applies equally to the newspaper and the Web world.”

The widespread use of blogging makes it extremely difficult for an organization like this to apply commonsense rules that respect the integrity of its traditional products and readers and require its employees to apply similar ethics online. The Times has succeeded in doing both. It’s allowing high-profile writers to blog while also holding them accountable. That’s a noteworthy step forward for blogging, as well as for newspapers as they try to balance online and offline businesses. Do you agree? Please weigh in at my blog entry .

Tom Smith

tsmith@cmp.com

http://www.informationweek.com

Dad

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full year since the crazy, hectic wedding planning came to an end and our long awaited wedding finally arrived. Despite having to brave freezing rain and snow at the end of April (and of course it’s unseasonably warm at this time this year) it was without a doubt the happiest, most special day of our lives and a lot of that was due to all of our families and friends who were there with us. We went out to celebrate Friday night by going to Skies for dinner, a revolving restaurant that offers some pretty cool views of the KC area. Oh, and some really nice food too. Definitely a good choice for an anniversary dinner out. Today we learned that even though we’ve only been married for a year apparently we’re already starting to think exactly alike. We both managed to get each other the same gift completely independently: cooking classes for 2 at the Culinary Center of Kansas City. Well, not the exact same gift fortunately. Jolayne signed us up for a class on BBQ and I got a gift certificate so we still need to figure out what class to take with that. Anybody want to be victims volunteers to test out the results of our soon to be acquired cooking-fu mastery?

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2006-04-23 19:19:37 +0000

Haha, that’s really funny. It’s seems like a fairly random gift, too.

So who was the first one to open their gift? Could they keep a straight face?

Comment by Will on 2006-04-23 21:10:52 +0000

Jolayne was the first one to open the gift and, no, she pretty much lost it. We both thought it was hilarious.

Comment by Ash Bhoopathy on 2006-04-24 20:53:42 +0000

Hahaha, you fatties! (kidding)

Congratulations on your first anniversary, dude, that’s awesome. 1 of many to come.

Comment by Posko on 2006-04-27 16:43:37 +0000

Ah yes… waiting for that day to arrive soon. Is it that common these days for the Bride and Groom to get each other gifts? I’ve heard about people doing that, but Kimberly and I decided not to.

Anyways… Congrats!!!

Comment by Will on 2006-04-30 23:30:09 +0000

Thanks!

I’m not sure if that’s very common or not for the bride and groom to get each other gifts traditionally. Jolayne and I weren’t going to since we’d talked about it and decided that the honeymoon trip was really enough of a gift. Then she got me a PSP anyway, definitely not a traditional gift at all. Not that I’m complaining.