• Etsy - Your place to buy and sell all things handmade
  

  

  Your place to buy and sell all things handmade. New, unique ways to shop online.

  Tags: shopping, crafts, handmade

• Waterfall Software - Typeset
  

  

  Typeset lets you preview, search, and organize your font collection so that you can always find the right style for a project on your Mac.

  Tags: type, fonts, typography, software, macintosh, mac

• Waterfall Software - Wallet
  

  

  store and organize passwords, serial numbers, credit cards

  Tags: software, macintosh, mac, wallet

• Mason Proper is in a van.
  

  

  recommended by a friend

  Tags: music, band, via:cirino

• Wellington Boots from Hunter Boots of Scotland
  

  

  boots!

  Tags: boots, shopping

WSJ: Free, Legal and Ignored. The subhead says it all: Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No; Too Many Strings Attached. The article is about the unsurprising-to-anyone-except-Napster miserable failure of subscription based music services to take hold in universities. Compared to the complicated barrage of restrictions on the music offered by Napster, the students come across as models of common sense:

• While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall...
• Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.
• "People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting," says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up...

There’s also a telling quotation from the director of the Campus Computing Project, who says, “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” which is one of the kinder descriptions of the unfriendliness of the industry that I’ve read lately.

I’m still waiting for someone in the industry to wake up and understand that their path to profitability lies in supporting good music and making their rich back catalogs available, not in fighting the fans of music tooth and nail. Today, three years after the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there are still many albums and tracks that can’t be found anywhere online—some by major artists (just try tracking down any non-album Sting tracks from before the late 90s), some by minor artists on major labels (Annabouboula, anyone?), and some by great cultural figures (I’d gladly pay through the nose for access to e.e. cummings’s Six Nonlectures as digital files, or even on CD). Instead we get American Idol and Rock Star. What, no one ever told these guys that a steady diet of candy can kill you?

BTW, for a good counterexample, check out Verve’s deep catalog—including a bunch of rare Impulse! recordings—though they don’t quite get it right; they support both iTunes and Windows Media, but no DRM-free offerings. But at least they’re opening up their catalog.

…is worth a lot. After the six months or so I’ve had, spending Saturday and this morning at the beach relaxed me enough to more than make up for the lawn mowing, Ikea shopping, and other odds and ends that consumed the rest of the weekend.

I’ll post some photos later, but the other information I thought I’d post today will go up later at some point.

Ten for February 22^nd

1. Crooked Fingers - Dignity & Shame  I think Crooked Fingers is the only band with multiple releases where I own every single one of their albums. Well, except for this one - I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. Mark preordered and got an autographed copy. They play KEXP today. Stream the disc on the Merge site.
   
   
2. Enon - Lost Marbles and Exploded Evidence  Touch and Go's got a classy new website. They've got an MP3.
   
   
3. Jeff Hanson  Out on Kill Rock Stars. They've got an MP3.
   
   
4. Ida - Heart Like A River  Is Ida a Providence band? That's been confusing me lately. Their new disc is out on Polyvinyl. They've got an MP3.
   
   
5. Iron And Wine - Woman King  Check out Joe's review on 75 or Less. There's an MP3.
   
   
6. I ♥ Huckabees  
   
   
7. Karate - In The Fishtank  I had no idea this was being released. A nice suprise.
   
   
8. Mogwai - Government Commisions  Their live BBC material from the past few years.
   
   
9. Robbers On High Street - Tree City  
   
   
10. M. Ward - Transistor Radio  I've only heard a few tracks from the radio, but they were CRAZY good. Once again, you can stream the disc on Merge's site.

Early this week, in an email to a coworker, I mentioned that I made music and pointed her to my site. On Thursday she wrote back and said “cool, you’re even on iTunes!” This surprised me; my two albums were submitted about 3 and 8 weeks ago and hadn’t shown up on iTunes as of Monday or so. But I looked, and indeed, there they both are on iTunes. For those of you who’ve heard the music, I’d appreciate a customer review. For those of you who haven’t, what are you waiting for? :-) Of course there are also old-fashioned shiny discs in plastic cases. Thanks!

Last modified: 24 June 2006, 19:18

I have learned a lot during the last two weeks while visiting six countries. One of the most interesting days began with a flight from Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg to Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. The Russian airports could use some upgrading of services, shopping facilities, and direction signs in English, but they are said to be quite safe. Boarding the Ilyushin-86 aircraft was an experience. Like many European airports, the first step is to ride on a bus across the tarmac to the plane. What was different was the entry -- it started by going up steps into the belly of the plane where luggage is stored. From the storage area a stairway led to the main cabin where there were approximately 350 seats arranged in three sets of three per row.

The Il-86 development was announced at the 1971 Paris Airshow and the wide-body entered service in late 1980. This particular IL-86 was showing it's age and may easily have been twenty-five years old. The interior of the plane and the uniforms of the flight attendants were outdated but the service was efficient and friendly. The four Kuznetsov NK86 turbofan jet engines lifted the plane to cruising altitude very quickly for the one hour trip. The flight to Moscow and the return to St. Petersburg both left on time and arrived at the destination on time.

The afternoon at the Kremlin far exceeded my expectations. Kremlin means "fortress" in Russian and generally refers to any major fortified central complex in Russian cities. The one we visited is the best known one, the Moscow Kremlin, where the Russian government is based and where the President of Russia lives.

Standing in the center of Red Square was a real treat with spectacular sights in every direction. Saint Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin towers are majestic and incredibly colorful. The Red square separates the Kremlin from an historic merchant quarter and the major streets of Moscow radiate from the square in all directions. The square is steeped in centuries of history. I don't recall the famous events that took place there in 1941 and 1945 nor the establishment of Lenin's Mausoleum, but I do remember when a German pilot named Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 on Vasilevski Spusk next to the Red Square in 1987. On the eastern side of the square is the spectacular GUM department store which in addition to shops offering all the top retailing brands of the world had dedicated the first floor of huge open ceiling building to the inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci. It would have been easy to spend a whole day there.

Following a one-hour tour of the Kremlin art galleries -- which rival the Vatican Library in Rome -- we had a traditional Russian dinner, complete with vodka, and then a return flight to St. Petersburg. We got back to the ship after midnight. It was a day I will never forget.More on the rest of the trip to follow.

Following Nakamura-san at the Business Leadership Forum would not be easy but Sunil Bharti Mittal, CEO of Bharti TeleVentures Limited had quite an amazing story to tell. Bharti is India's leading mobile operator and one of the top five companies in India. Revenue per month per person has shrunk from $30 to $8 and he believes it will go to $3-$4. The good news is that the number of users has gone from 2 million to 90 million. India is a huge consumption economy because there are so  many young people -- 50% are under 25. He expects mobile phone users to grow from 90 million to 300+ million by 2009-2010 and his strategy to address the market has been to give away everything except the customer ; i.e. outsource everything except the customer relationship. IT was outsourced to IBM -- a $1 billion contract. Networking was outsourced to Nokia & Ericsson. Call centers were outsourced to an IBM joint venture in India. Mr. Mittal said their growth (1 million new customers per month) could not be achieved without having outsourced to top partners. Complete alignment is achieved and the business model becomes predictable. Innovation in many areas including "Lifetime Validity" where incoming calls are free to customers for life. The theory is simple, if people receive a lot of free inbound calls, they will eventually *make* calls, which are not free. His goal is for his many partners to be happy -- not to laugh but to smile. He hopes to grow from 7 billion minutes per month to 20 billion.  

Mr. Yang Mingsheng, President and CEO of the Agricultural Bank of China, was the only speaker who did use English but the simultaneous translation to Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, and English allowed all of us to hear what he had to say -- which was a lot. The bank has 500,000 employees and 28,000 branch offices. Although I could not understand a word of what he was saying without the headphones, I could tell that the speaker was very articulate, enthusiastic, and confident. 95% of all bank services are available online. The bank has 400 million depositors, 12.4 million outstanding loans, and 220 million credit cards issued. They have introduced many e-banking and mobile products to their customers. This is being done by centralizing IT infrastructure. Mr. Mingsheng is both a ceo and a member of government. For hobbies he writes poetry and plays the violin. His speech covered every aspect of consumer and business banking services. I don't think a similar presentation by Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase would much if anything that ABC isn't also doing. 

Pierluigi Bernasconi, CEO of an Italian electronics retailer called MediaMarket. The company is the No. 1 consumer electronics retailer in Europe with 66 stores in Italy, more than 500 stores in more than a dozen European countries, and a new web-based business in Germany. One of their stores is the largest in the world -- it has six floors of consumer electronics products. Steady growth over the past decade has taken them from $4 to $16 billion. They have taken an innovative business model approach whereby they have two different store brands (MediaMarket and Saturn) that compete with each other. They believe that "self competition" results in better service and price to the consumer. Fifty million people per month spend time in one of their stores.  Mr. Bernasconi described an intensely competitive environment in Italy from 4,000 photography shops, 6,000 telephone stores, e-retail sites, hyperStores, and in the future new channels such as Digital Terrestrial TV.  In spite of this the company continuously outperforms the competition and gains market share. They have been using the web for sales and communications since 1995. Utilizing advanced IT the company has integrated all their distribution channels. They believe that communication is key and will result in customers thinking of MediaMarket or Saturn as the first choice as a place to get information and subsequently purchase. Their strategy is to exploit multi-channel strategies -- tying together so a person can call from land line or mobile, surf via the web  connect via digital terrestrial set top box, or visit in person and all the experiences are recognized and tracked.  

Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories

Interoperability and DRM Are Mutually Exclusive: The music industry’s insistence upon DRM iswhat put the ITMS in the position that Apple now enjoys; the recordindustry is decrying a lock-in advantage that they themselves handedto Apple. (Via Daring Fireball.)

This article is a good start, but it gives too much credit to the music industry. They are not just misguided about the impossibility of interoperable DRM. Anyone with a clue has understood this since the original interoperable DRM efforts collapsed circa 2000. Some music industry executives may still lack a clue, but they do not have much incentive to learn because the central issue for them is not interoperability, but control. Attacking Apple here (like the publishers attacking Google, or the telecoms attacking net neutrality) is misdirection covering up that issue. The major labels don't really care that one DRM system dominates the market, they only care that the system is not theirs to do as they please, for example in introducing variable per-track pricing (shades of the telecoms and net neutrality).

I rarely buy from iTMS because I dislike its tying down to particular machines and lower quality than what I get by buying CDs and ripping them at a custom AAC rate. Not to mention the pleasure of walking down to my locally-owned record store and browsing their well-chosen new arrivals (last month's purchases):

• Trio Beyond (Jack de Johnette, Larry Goldings, John Scofield): Saudades
• John Coltrane: Soultrane
• Marc Johnson: Shades of Jade
• Louis Mhlanga: World Traveler
• Boards of Canada: Trans Canada Highway
• Thelonious Monk: The Classic Quartet
• Vijay Iyer and Rudesh Mahanthappa: Raw Materials
• Andrey Dergatchev: The Return (soundtrack of the intense, beautiful movie by Andrey Zvyagintsev)
• Christian McBride: Live at Tonic

The music critic Ivan March has selected the new Alan Bush Claudio CD as his Critic's choice of the year in Gramophone Magazine, December 2002.In the November 2002 issue he reviews both the Claudio CD, which features the Violin Concerto and Dialectic, and Chamber Music Volume 1 by the Summerhayes Trio.He says of both discs "I cannot recommend them too highly".

MusicWeb also has two other reviews of the Claudio CD, both very favourable.
Rob Barnett's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Sept02
Peter Grahame Woolf's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Oct02

There is also a review in the orchestral section of International Record Review, December 2002.

  Listen to tracks from the Claudio CD
The Violin Concerto CD can be purchased from Claudio Records

Also on MusicWeb, Chamber Music Vol. 1 was featured as recording of the month for November 2002.
See the review by Rob Barnett at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Dec02

There are other reviews of the CD in International Record Review (December 2002) by Piers Burton-Page and BBC Music Magazine (December 2002) by Michael Oliver.

Piers Burton-Page writes "...a superb CD...these new recordings of his chamber music, convincingly played, excellently engineered and attractively presented...should be on everyone's shopping list".

Michael Oliver says "There is very little British Chamber Music of the Thirties that approaches the intensity, passionate eloquence and intellectual rigour of his Concert Piece, very little from the Forties that can be compared with his Three Concert Studies for exciting economical power and an expressiveness all the more profound for its restraint".

  Listen to tracks from Chamber Music Volume 1
Chamber Music Volume 1 can be purchased from Crotchet Records

I was recently stumped with CSS over handheld devices. I was using Sony Ericsson J200i, an entry level nice hand phone from Sony Ericsson to access WAP pages over GPRS. Now I need to test run my web sites development and CSS on handheld devices. In a quick impulse shopping I got myself a mid entry level Sony Ericsson K700i for RM850. The phone was selected for its price and features. The guy was nice enough to throw me a free gift in the form of quite nice canvas bag. So if you are shopping for Sony Ericsson, just try your luck but don't forget to be nice to the salesperson. I also bought a DiGi prepaid, activated the GPRS account and surf away with K700i.

Project Distributor: Introduction to our distributed web service model
So Darren and I have put in about a month now on the Project Distributor website. We are starting to reach that critical point where the site is pretty cool, we have plenty of users, we are thinking about running out of the allowable bandwidth for the demo site, and all sorts of other things that tend to happen all at once. Now, there are some problems you can design yourself out of, and others that you really have to throw some money at. Our latest enhancements can be summed up in a short list.

• Buy a domain name and start hosting in two places. Project Distributor.com should be up fairly soon to accompany MarkItUp.ASPXConnection.com
• Have people host their own versions of the application. And that means a big source release is in the future. At this juncture risk fragmentation.
• Design away fragmentation with a series of ingenious features that will make everyone want to use the application at hand.

I'm here to talk about the last two, since Darren already bought some additional hosting for us. The concept will be to release a fairly stable version of the application so that groups can host tools, code snippets and other source/binary releases for their teams to share. The application is very lightweight and easy to set-up, so it won't require a bunch of hand holding and configuration to get up and running initially. From our standpoint we solve a number of issues at this juncture. The most obvious problem is what we classify the Lutz Roeder use case. .NET Reflector is the key type of application we'd love to get hosted because it makes it a bit easier to find, not that Google does a bad job, we'd just like to get a bunch of tools in one place, with some features for feedback, new releases, and some cool client tools for publishing.

Now, Lutz would put his application up and he'd whack our bandwidth. He is the prime example of someone that should be hosting their own tools, but possibly using our interface. He doesn't have to, we haven't even asked him yet in fact, but if he decides to do so, then all the better for the web application moving forward. Users such as Lutz probably want a certain level of control over their own sites as well in terms of branding and controlling access. This will only come from hosting the application yourself (and maybe some other features we'll see later).

From a security standpoint many teams will also want to host their own servers. In this manner they get control over the hardware their sources and binaries are stored on. They can accept tools up to any maximum (instead of our imposed limits) and provide unlimited download bandwidth if they choose. Or they can take advantage of our gating mechanisms to make sure their server doesn't get overloaded with downloads and open their tools up to the public.

The only major problem from this source release is that the initial problem we were trying to solve, promoting the visibility of tools, starts to erode. You see, the more sites that host their own tools the harder it is to find the right site with the right tools. We are trying to solve this in a number of ways. The first is allowing users of a site to store bookmarks to other projects and external resources. This is only a temporary fix, because it still doesn't allow a mass search and categorization infrastructure required to truly promote the visibility of the tools being hosted. We have to come up with a solution that brings all of the sites, but we don't want to create just another portal or gateway site. That is boring. Now you have the background, so how will we solve the fragmentation issue?

Designing away Fragmentation
I won't lie to you, I've implemented this model several times, but have never had a project that was capable of really showing off the feature set we are about to talk about. The concept is to unify all of the sites, by allowing them to easily manage views of data from all of the sites combined. Each site owns their own content, maintains their own users, but in turn peers with other sites to obtain additional content.

Web services provide a dual feature set in this model. At the current level they allow us to generate really great client-side tools for managing, well, your tools! We have a drop-client target right now so you can drag and drop new releases to existing projects in just a few seconds. Some new tools for working with build systems to promote the source code up to the server are in the works. We natively integrate with your RSS reader and will have our own alert services in the drop client just in case you don't have one. There aren't any search or local caching features, but those are also planned for the drop client so you can background download new releases, just like Windows Update.

That doesn't solve fragmentation though, that just makes me realize how much work I have left to do. The second feature of web services lies in the ability for each site to aggregate data from the many other sites that are out there hosting the application. Remember, everything we make available at the service layer can also now be remoted. The more caching we put into the data layer, the more performant the entire process will be, and we can even tune the caching depending on whether the data layer is merging off-site contents or database contents.

Peer Sites
I'm sure there is another name out there somewhere, but for the past 2 years I've called these peer sites. Each instance of the project distributor will have a number of options allowing for adding peers that will be aggregated and added to the local collection while users traverse the site. The first step is to get the peer sites running in a read-only mode. And set up some really great options so the entire process can be controlled. This solves a number of use case scenarios for us including the following.

• Fragmentation can be mitigated through proper configuration. If everyone aggregates 5 or 6 sites into their peers, then we have a huge network now of interconnected peers and users can pick and choose which one they use for purposes of searching the tool network.
• Peer connections are unidirectional or bidirectional. Access is configurable. Teams can include tools from external sites while keeping their own tools completely private. They can exist behind a DMZ or a private network.
• Users can host their own personal tool sites in the same manner as the team sites. They can configure statically which projects to make available even. In this way you can build a collection of personal tools that you love, and have the latest information automatically update on your machine for your perusal.

Peer sites solve plenty of visibility issues, but that is pretty much all they solve for now. We still want to enable all of the features available to the client tools. After all, the web service methods and proxy infrastructure is in place to do so much more.

Master Sites
Well, we want to solve another problem. That is where you edit your data. A master site is where the users, groups, projects, etc... are all hosted, but thankfully, you'll be able to log in through any site (assuming it is peered with your master site) and then edit your own projects and such. This is a remote principal context and is actually one of the cooler features associated with the peering functionality of project distributor. We'll be fully secure in our login and credentials region, but unfortunately we'll still be transferring data in open text in the short term. Maybe we'll fix that with enough push back.

Clone Sites
A clone site is where we empower a site to act on behalf of a master site. For me, my local project distributor is currently cloned to the main project distributor site. What does this mean? Right now it means I get all of the data from PD, and that users who trust my site can log-in to their project distributor accounts and cross edit data. Pretty nice if you ask me. It basically means you can fully host a project distributor installation and never, ever have to install a database server. Users can just act on behalf of a remote server.

Configuration
This isn't a super reusable model like some of those you read about in the popular software architecture books, and it probably accounts for why master/peer/clone sites don't exist very often. The considerations for every option are heavily customized to the problem being solved, and I'm sure we'll be making modifications or updating the configuration context for a while. Right now you can independently configure your primary server type, whether master or clone, whether or not users can use you for a pass-through authentication and edit server, whether or not web services are enabled so peers can enable unidirectional only communications, setting up asymmetric security credentials. Man, you name it and it is in there

For the peer section we have full and selective modes. A full peer pulls all of the data on the remote peer locally for display (in a delay caching manner, just like you'd expect, unless you set up a scheduled pull which is also possible). I expect most people to configure full peers because they really are really easy to set up and maintain. A selective peer is where you specify the groups/projects that you want to display. This is best for a user setting up their own personal toolbox who wants to select a couple of items from many different peers.

We have an extensively exhaustive configuration module already and we'll be continuously adding more to it. The concept is to easily modify your toolbox to your own designs without having to touch the code. If we haven't given you enough options to satisfy your need then we'll have to make something up, because I'm just about running out ;-)

These are the basics of the model ideas I have for project distributor. That doesn't mean Darren doesn't have other great ideas happening as well. He has some pretty extensive UI enhancements, but I'll let him talk about those. We even have another product idea that is kind of a bolt-on for project distributor, but that is probably a couple of months out putting it into next year. Unfortunately we have too many ideas for our own good right now. Better than not having any ideas I guess. I'll try to drop some code with some of the ideas above, that way you can get a look at how the entire system is implemented. I have some diagrams as well, but I'm far too tired right now to add the img tags to the HTML view.

A few details about the FeedBurner.com redesign

Late, late, late on a Tuesday night almost two weeks ago, we re-launched FeedBurner.com with much-needed updates to the design, content and overall direction.

Traci already commented on the strategic importance of the new site, while Rachelle provided a more personal account.

But as the designer and half-developer (Rachelle did the other half — actually, probably more than half — with great skill and speed), I’m going to share a couple of “behind the scenes” details that I find super neat. Hopefully you’ll feel the same way.

Powered By FeedBurner

Going in to this project, two requirements became clear:

1. Traci (our marketing director) needed the ability to make content updates without routing all changes through the design team.

2. Many types of content needed to be reused in slightly different settings and formats around the site.

To address these requirements, we came up with the idea of modular content — basically, little nuggets of content that can be randomized, subscribed, inserted and updated anywhere.

For a couple of content types — blog posts, publisher buzz, press releases — we used feeds and our very own BuzzBoost service to repurpose content wherever we needed it on the site (mmm, dog food). For others, we generated custom blocks of static HTML or Javascript and included those in the JSPs that contain forms, session information (“You are signed in as…”) and other application components.

Of course, we had to generate all of this content somewhere…

Powered By MovableType

We’re using MovableType to store and publish the press releases, in the news, events, corporate backgrounder, stats, Publisher Buzz, and of course our blog, Burning Questions. Our MovableType installation is rigged up with a variety of templates that publish static files in HTML, Javascript and Atom formats — all of which are then pulled into the pages like I mentioned above.

One of the complaints people have about MovableType — that it creates static files by default — is actually a huge advantage here. We’re able to publish flat, lightweight static files to a single server, then pull in these files in a variety of ways across our distributed server environment.

Elegant, dual-float layout

When I was first learning CSS, doing multi-column layouts was always the hardest part. Even two-column layouts seemed tricky, weighing the pros and cons of various approaches and never being totally satisfied with the end result.

Then I got floats. Like, really got them. It was Doug Bowman’s slides from this presentation that secured my understanding and I haven’t fretted about CSS layouts since.

On the new FeedBurner.com, everything but the home page uses a classic dual-float, two-column layout. I set a width on both columns in the CSS, then assigned float:left on the left column and float:right on the right. Finished with a clear:both footer, it’s a solid layout that works regardless of which column is longest.

A new approach to navigation

While many sites feature massive navigation (practically a site map), we took a page from Flickr’s design books this time around and divided our navigation into two sections. A high-priority “primary” navigation and a lower-priority “secondary” navigation are based on prominence, not hierarchy, which helps focus the page and not overwhelm people with choices.

We also made heavy use of in-text hyperlinking across sections, to encourage exploration without forcing folks to grok and traverse our site architecture via the navigation.

Coming soon

Perhaps the best things to come out of this redesign process haven’t arrived yet. As a result of our extensive brainstorming and planning, we have tons of ideas and a general roadmap for web site improvements over the coming months.

And now, with the addition of Rachelle Bowden to our team, we have the manpower womanpower to get it done.

Questions? Comments?

Use the comment form. As always, I love to hear from you!

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