Author: Nathan

Music Software: Indy.tv, Moodamp

I was looking for music online to supplement my collection and decided to check out some of the more interesting new software available. A bit of searching around, and I stumbled over Moodamp.

The premise is good, at least. You tell the software what mood you’re currently in, and then rate each song as you hear it. Eventually, Moodamp “learns” what you feel like listening to in that mood and plays mostly songs that you’ve given a Good/Awesome rating. Moreover, Moodamp contains a P2P module that you can enable, which will search/download music “like” the songs that you currently think are “Awesome” in that mood.

Reality is a little rougher. Moodamp doesn’t have any way of scanning new music predictively in order to tell if you might like it. This, combined with the fact that it gets new music from P2P by searching for the artist name, leads to some amusing (but annoying) problems. For instance, I have a collection of Lamb (the trip-hop band) songs, which I rate as “Awesome.” Moodamp helpfully goes to download new music for me, and comes back with songs by “Lamb of God” (some sort of heavy metal screamer band) – needless to say, that isn’t at all helpful. And as you might imagine, Moodamp won’t find songs by Hooverphonic or Bjork which might sound vaguely similar to Lamb, since those artists are not named “Lamb.”

After a few more technical glitches, like having no way to tell Moodamp “never download any more Lamb of God music” and no way to delete what it already downloaded (close to 350MB of irrelevant music, most of which I rated as “Bad”), I gave up. A bit more searching and I found indy.tv.

Indy.tv promises to be a search engine for independent, freely available music. That sounds good to me, since I don’t like the possibility of getting sued for downloading. I installed the player (and it has a very, very nice interface) and started rating songs. Indy.tv claims that the player will compare songs you rate favorably to the playlists of other people who have rated those songs favorably, and end up improving its offering such that you hear mostly things that you like.

I spent about 3.5 hours playing with it. After that, I still hadn’t rated a song higher than three stars (“I’d listen to the whole thing” according to the Indy.tv “How to rate” guide). There’s entirely too much pop, country, folk, reggae, and rap, and just plain people-being-silly. I prefer trance, rock, metal, trip-hop, etc. I only heard one song that vaguely qualified in a “techno/trance” category, and it wasn’t good enough to give three stars. I finally just gave up, although I intend to spend another evening playing with it in hopes that I gave up just before it gave me some really kickass music and it’s just waiting for me to fire it up again. (I doubt it.)

I guess I’m still waiting for a music search engine that will scan your collection of music stylistically and somehow match that to music out there. That way if you have no country songs, it won’t waste your time giving you someone’s rendition of Achy Breaky heart, or give you a thousand Bob Marley covers if you listen to nothing but drum’n’bass. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but they’re starting to fall asleep.

Shakespeare Was Wrong About Roses

According to this article, a “rose by any other name” might actually not smell as sweet.

From the article:

British neurologists report that the naming of an odor strongly influences a person’s perception of that scent.

For example, individuals were asked to sniff a cheddar cheese odor that was labeled either “cheddar cheese” or “body odor.” Participants uniformly rated the odor as being much more pleasant when it was labeled “cheddar cheese,” compared to when it was labeled “body odor.”

At least Shakespeare can’t be embarassed, since he’s dead now.

“Groaner” Blog-Related Neologism du Jour

Someone pointed me over to read an article about weblogs at cba.org. I was scanning the article when I noticed that apparently there’s a new word floating around the (*gag*) “blogosphere.”

More and more lawyers are joining the “blogosphere” (the loose confederacy of those speaking out on the Web) every day, authoring their own blogs (or “blawgs,” a term coined by American lawyer and blogger Denise Howell).’

“Blawg.” Oh, “law” and “blog.” How clever. Someone shoot me.

Miscellany: Babies, Design, Search Engine Wars

A couple of things worth seeing – I’ll try to bring a bit of these every day or two, to keep you entertained:

Also, some musings on the search engine wars: Google is better at indexing blogs/forums, but Yahoo! seems to be doing better on the static page front.

Try searching for “HTTP” in both; Google returns companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! returns useful information regarding the Hyper Text Transport Protocol. If you search for me, using either “Nathan Simpson” or “Nathaniel Simpson,” I’ll come up sooner on Yahoo! than Google. However, if you search for something I’ve written about, like “NG Resonance,” Yahoo! doesn’t return any results from my site at all.

I know that Yahoo!’s search is “beta” stage, so maybe they haven’t gotten around to indexing blogs/forums yet. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. If Yahoo! does as well once it’s fully indexing (assuming they intend to), it might convert me away from Google. Nothing sucks like a bunch of irrelevant results:-)

The IP Police are Watching Your Website

Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed some unusual traffic on my site. It’s a bot, typically, one hitting every file on my site, but not affiliated with a known search engine such as Google. Being the curious type, I tend to plug in IP addresses to this nify “whois” service in order to find out who’s playing around on my site.

The first bot I noticed was Cyveillance. This one has been around a while; at least since 2003. The company’s website claims that it “is focused on helping organizations monitor the Internet for issues such as identity theft, fraud, security risks, unauthorized product distribution and many forms of brand abuse.” It’s interesting that this bot never identifies itself as Cyveillance; you can only tell that it’s a bot by watching the rate at which it chews through your bandwidth.

The second one I observed was NameProtect, which bills itself as a company aiming to “empower our clients with proactive, filtered and actionable eMarket Intelligence supporting the protection of brand assets, recovery of diverted revenues and detection of online identity theft & fraud in today’s global economy.” Again, this bot did not identify itself.

The most recent one, which I observed last week, was MarkMonitor. This company claims to specialize “in protecting corporate intellectual property online from infringers, scam artists and online black-market activities.” The bot, unlike the other two, did identify itself as a Markmonitor bot.

I found an article at CSOOnline where someone from World Wrestling Entertainment was discussing their use of MarkMonitor to find everything from black market DVDs to misappropriated website images.

I suppose overall I don’t really blame companies for tracking this sort of thing, but it does occur to me that these companies are making money (in part) from my bandwidth and that of a million other small website owners. I imagine that the majority of website owners these days are not sitting around trying to figure out how to steal your intellectual property, and if some evil bastard does steal your property, somebody eventually will complain. Hell, your money would be better spent if you paid web-savvy teenagers to tattle on bad, wicked website people; they seem to be jumping at the chance for spare cash. You won’t generate goodwill by stealing bandwidth from people who buy your products every day.

Furthermore, Googling these various bots (and indeed, my own personal experience) reveals that the bots are not well-behaved guests. They completely ignore robots.txt instructions, crawling wherever they please on your site. Some people have gone so far as to ban blocks of IP addresses from these companies. I’m too lazy to do that.

Not completely lazy, though. Seeing these bots on my site gives me a near-irresistable urge to pull a South Park movie Cartman and scream “Coca Cola IBM Nike Armani Gap Honeywell McDonald’s Sony Hershey’s Mattel Harley Davidson Jesus H. Christ!!!!!!!”

Just in the case, you know, that the IP Police are listening.

Seth Godin Gets It Wrong

I usually wouldn’t bother, but since no one (as far as I can tell) has presented a dissenting opinion, I’d like to add one.

I stumbled across Seth Godin’s post on the “new digital divide this morning. It’s an interesting concept, but one that seems to completely ignore history and the nature of people.

Seth says that the ‘net is dividing into “Digerati” and “Left Behind”, distinguished by Firefox-using, Google News-reading, RSS-attention deficit, caffeine-high geeks vs. the IE-only, television watching, blogless dirty masses (okay, I embellished a bit) . I think this is catchy but completely useless.

First of all, this “divide” is not new. People have said the same thing about Windows vs. Linux users, internet users vs. the offline, McAfee vs. Norton, whatever. Believe it or not, there are people who consciously choose to, say, use Windows or who won’t use Firefox. There are even people who don’t use RSS because of RSS spam. I think the hype about the bleeding edge drives its adoption, but it isn’t necessarily the case that people “without” are deprived: SUVs anyone?

Secondly, a lot of people still prefer to watch the news instead of reading it, largely because watching the news is media-rich and a bit easier for people who don’t read a million words a minute. Likewise, not everyone cares about Flickr; I don’t. I glanced at it when it came out a few months ago, uttered a “Meh.” and went on with my life. I’m sure it has great productive uses, but I can’t think of any offhand.

And the final point I disagree with: blogging vs. reading. It’s all well and good to say that if you don’t blog, you’re left behind. But let’s be realistic. Blogging is time-consuming – very much so. It takes quite a bit of time to gather links and properly put everything together, assuming that you want to do more than write about what you had for breakfast. A hell of a lot of people don’t have the time; if you’re working two jobs trying to pay the bills, no way are you going to blog if your jobs aren’t blogging-related.

In summary, it’s great to be “digerati,” but unless your job involves working closely with technology, you may just find that you don’t have the time. You’ll be better served in the long run by spending time talking to your friends in the manner that is most comfortable for you (cell? SMS? coffee shop? IM?), instead of wasting it trying to play “keep up with the Digerati.”

Reviewing Bruce Mau’s “Massive Change” Exhibit – AGO

A few days ago (Wednesday May 4), I found myself at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) looking at the Massive Change exhibit. Since I already have the book, I had a bit of an idea of what to expect.

The first thing I noticed was that the AGO building face had been repainted for the Massive Change exhibit. Formerly a relatively plain structure of stone and steel, it was now painted white with “MASSIVE CHANGE” painted in huge letters over the rather chaotic surface, so that it was actually difficult to read once you approached the building. I pointed out to my friend that “This is one change they could have done without.”

Once inside, I ambled on up the stairs leading to the exhibit space. The museum is apparently free this month to the public, in honor of “May is Museum Month,” but that only applies to the permanent collection. In something of an irony, the viewing public have no access to the “massively connected, socially aware” sort of world that the exhibit is supposedly promoting.

I think the exhibit really highlighted my ADHD tendencies, even though I’ve never been diagnosed as such. I stepped into the Segway room, where the ‘revolutionary’ human transporter was displayed in all of its design stages – full prototypes all. There was also the IBOT, which its inventor insists is not a wheelchair – trust me, it’s a fancy wheelchair.:-P

From there, I made my way into a darkened room with numerous projectors on the ceiling, each projecting a globe onto the wall. The globes showed different things – earthquakes and their severity, the hole in the ozone layer over time, light pollution of the night sky over a year. The light pollution globe was the most fascinating, particularly because it highlighted fires in red. Granted, it recorded all fires over the period of a year, but the result was intriguing: two massive parallel bands from West Africa across the center all the way to the east coast, and great burned-out areas in the Amazon areas in South America. You could also clearly see gas burnoff concentrated off the coast of South Korea and throughout Indonesia, little green dots on a black globe.

The next room was covered in photographs, floors and walls all; the photographs were arranged in columns by size and subject matter, with the largest photos on the outside edges and the smallest in the center. Most amusing to me was the pixellated porn column – at the distances you were viewing the images, the images across the room resolved clearly enough to make out a number of hardcore scenes that probably made visiting parents wince.

The next installation was a little set of human interface devices: mice, Nintendo’s Power Glove, the Newton, tablet PCs, etc. They were all traced out from oldest to most recent, with little lines showing what directly or indirectly influenced the design of what.

The military-commercial connection was highlighted as well, with long streamers hanging from the ceiling and breaking the space up into a maze. Each streamer featured a different aspect of the connection; MREs, ATVs, DSRVs, Predator drones, it was military- and acronym-itis. Basically the point was that the military both bleeds over into civilian design, and it occasionally takes from civilian design (specifically things like GoreTex).

Skip a little boring empty space with a nook for cuddling/reading books, and I found myself in a technicolor room with fabrics and ceramics spelling out little catchy graphic-design blurbs: “INNOVATE” or “INCREDIBLE” or whatever. The scale trick was used here again, with nanoscale materials on one side of the room wrapping around to insulators and fabrics made of larger materials. The most interesting thing, from my perspective, was the little brick of Aerogel, which I’d read about but never actually seen. It is every bit as amazing as it looks; it’s practically transparent in thinner layers, and only mildly cloudy even when it’s six inches thick. Crazy stuff.

Enter the ethics question: the next display was a number of things regarding genetic engineering. Each question had a clear plastic case divided into “yes” and “no” boxes, and a stack of yellow slips of paper. “Should we genetically engineer food?” “Should we create human-animal genetic hybrids?” In most cases, surprisingly, the “yes” votes outnumbered the nays, except for that last human-animal question, which I guesstimate was probably 85% nos. I dropped a few slips of paper into all the “yes” boxes. I imagine that the intent was for each person to drop a single slip, but there was no such rule posted anywhere. Based on the thickness of the stack I picked up each time, I must have voted 10-15 “yes” votes for each question. Score one for being unpredictable. 🙂

There was another section in the same room which basically illustrated how much garbage the average person tosses in a year, along with the expected “this is what recycling can do” section with everything from plastic cups to Ikea furniture (not recycled, but made with “sustainable” wood).

The final room was a series of audiovisual stations and some hanging “audio” stations, each featuring a presentation or, in the case of the hanging boxes, a “famous” speaker, talking about some aspect of the global society. There were some interesting presentations; perhaps the message driven home the hardest was that China is really a major contender for this century, something that cannot be underestimated. There was also a presentation on the ruthless efficiency that companies like Wal-Mart are able to bring to bear on the marketplace.

Overall, an interesting exhibit, although not as thought-provoking to me as it might be to other people. I blame my lack of excitement on having spent so much time studying both design and sociology, and on having read the book before seeing the exhibit. I made my way to the exit, feeling slightly persecuted as I was herded through the makeshift gift shop at the end of the exhibit. Down the stairs, and out into the night-lit streets, I took a deep breath of reality. It’s an interesting vision that Mau presents, one where technology has the potential to address every one of the world’s ills, but I’m not convinced that the will is there. May the coming decades prove me wrong.

Book Review: George Mikes’ Tsi-Tsa

I’ve decided that since I read a lot of books, I might as well review them here for other peoples’ enjoyment – or to spare them the trouble of reading the book themselves.

Cass suggested that I read a little (only 100 pages or so) book called Tsi-Tsa, by George Mikes, even though she didn’t really remember it. So since it was really short, I spent an hour yesterday reading it.

Warning: this review contains SPOILERS!!1!!1!!!1111

First, apparently Tsi-Tsa is phoneticization of Hungarian “cica,” meaning “pussy.” Just so we have that clear. (Specifically, it doesn’t mean “cat” – the concept, sure, but not the word.)

In a nutshell, the story is:

  • George doesn’t like cats. He remembers boys in his town killing them by inserting water pumps in their anuses and making them swell up until the animals explode. Seriously. I can’t make this shit up.
  • George leaves his doors and windows open for some dumb reason. (Later, George gets robbed because of this. Gee, who would have seen that coming?)
  • Cat walks into George’s house, so he feeds it.
  • Cat enjoys being fed by a sucker.
  • Cat stays at George’s house; Cat’s REAL owner gives George half of the cat. We’re never cleared on which half he owns.
  • Cat moves into George’s house because she got tired of eating Spanish food.
  • Cat’s owner gives other half of Cat to George.
  • Cat runs away.
  • George gets hit in the eye with a tennis ball and contemplates suicide. He gets robbed (see above re: doors and windows). His car blows up and catches on fire.
  • George finds Cat.
  • Cat gets hit by a car.
  • Cat stays in the hospital for a while.
  • Cat goes back to George’s house.

The end!

The only good thing about this novel was its length, and one minor anecdote: Some tough guy’s dog died, so he was crying to his mother. She said, “Get a new dog!” He looked at her and said, “And when you die, I’ll get another little old lady!”

Otherwise, this book was a barely-disguised attack on humans. First, by wasting their time by making them read it, and secondly by pretty much explicitly stating on the last page that it was written because humans aren’t more special than cats and a cat deserves a biography too. Take that, lame humans.

Now you don’t have to read it!

Ethnocentrism and Blogger Diversity

I heard about this first last week, but it’s been paraded about again on MSNBC that there is a “diversity problem” in the blogging community.

So what’s the problem? Apparently, Rebecca MacKinnon and Halley Suitt feel that the blogging world is dominated by white American males. They even went so far as to challenge people “to each find 10 bloggers who [aren’t] male, white or English-speaking—and link to them,” since “Don’t you think that out of 8 million blogs, there could be 50 new voices worth hearing?” Sounds reasonable, at first.

Supposedly, this was all sparked by a comment made by one Keith Jenkins, specifically:

“My fear is that the overwelmingly white and male American blogosphere, hell bent (in some quarters) on replacing the current ranks of professional journalists with themselves, will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.”

Let’s see. Rebecca MacKinnon is originally from Temple, Arizona. American? Check. Halley Suitt hails from Boston. American? Check. Keith W. Jenkins is New York City-born. American? Check.

I can’t help but find it funny that Suitt and MacKinnon have apparently mistaken Jenkins’ complaint as a complaint that there are too many American bloggers. In fact, I read the issue to be specifically a race-gender issue, framed entirely in the context of American blogging only. Nowhere does Jenkins discuss the international scene in his comment. Yet MacKinnon and Suitt are talking about the blogosphere as a whole, using Jenkin’s argument to fuel a call for “greater diversity.”

It’s ironic in a way that Jenkins was stating some fear of the minority American voice being lost in the greater blog shuffle, yet two American women took it upon themselves to raise it as a call to arms for the international scene. It isn’t so surprising, perhaps, when you realize that MacKinnon is “involved in a project called Global Voices, to highlight bloggers from around the world.” In any case, the ultimate effect is to call for greater dilution of the top-end of popular blogs by the injection of international blogs. While I’m all for plurality, this will make the minority American blogger even less visible than before.

It’s odd; world-wide, whether you search for Japanese bloggers or Chinese bloggers or French bloggers – they all come down to being male-dominated. Try it yourself sometime – but don’t limit yourself to browsing “English-only” blogs. Learn how to find the “About me” links irrespective of language.

By and large, the blogging world is dominated by figures who are already famous offline, or by those they’ve selected. MacKinnon, Ito, Reynolds, Wheaton – you’ll find name after name with some sort of pre-blogging status, seasoned with a dash of the occasional oblivion-to-fame story (most of whom shot up on the basis of links from the famous). It’s the way of the world. I would propose that the blogging world is more than sufficiently diverse, but so heavily stratified that the diverse working-class voices will remain in the background. The supposed online “lack of diversity” is really just the same offline patriarchal, capitalist divides reflected in the digital world. After all, you can’t have some construction worker crashing Wozniak’s Super Bowl Party.

In summary, fuck the a-list bloggers. If you have something interesting to say, say it and they will come.