Archive for May, 2004

Google & Yahoo results for Nigritude Ultramarine

Published by Peter on May 27, 2004 in Google. 1 Comment

Check out on my StereoSearch page how the search results for nigritude ultramarine compare for Google and Yahoo (or 7 other search engines).

NR GOOGLE (387.000 pgs) YAHOO (130.000 pgs)
1. www.sim64.co.uk www.sim64.co.uk
2. forums.merkey.net www.time2dine.co.nz
3. lookupcars.co.uk forums.merkey.net
4. www.internet-marketing-research.net lookupcars.co.uk
5. www.geneostar.com www.nigritude-ultramarine.co.uk

Before I forget: Nigritude Ultramarine for Baare

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Baare’s Nigritude Ultramarine

Published by Peter on May 26, 2004 in Google. 0 Comments

Baare Nigritude Ultramarine on Pixagogo

My friend Baare is participating in a contest for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialists. Goal is to get yourself as high as possible in the Google rankings for the search terms Nigritude Ultramarine.

By letting the contestants combine content creation (for example, having your fellow geeks write about it in their blogs), creative domain names (check nigritude-ultramarine.photo-web-site.com/nigritude_ultramarine, cross-linking, hoaxes, link farms, and more tricks from the book, this will probably prove to be a very useful experiment in Googlistics.

May your nigritude be ultramarine, Baare!

Organizing my CD collection

Published by Peter on May 24, 2004 in tool. 0 Comments

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Virgo or because it’s Spring, but this weekend I felt the irresistible urge to empty my CD racks and re-organize my CDs. I have about 400 CDs, and I have a tendency of messing them all up if I have no structure I can follow. It’s not as bad as my cousin Quasi-Modo, who keeps dozens of CDs and DVDs on one large stack, and owns LOADS of empty boxes, but anyway … (Weird, he’s a Virgo too?)

So how can I organize them? What should be the logic? I remembered this quote from Dave Winer

“Well, I think there are three ways of managing and finding information– chronology, which is blogs, search, and taxonomy (…)” Dave Winer, while visiting Microsoft.

Let me re-taxonomize this to: sorted, categorized and indexed.

Sorted

Storing in an certain order, defined by a number of sortable non-ambiguous parameters (numbers/text). Typically this leaves you with a one-dimensional space where each album has its coordinates. Micro-organization of a library: per author/title. Mental image: a sorted Excel sheet.
For CDs: release year, label, album, artist name (but watch out with Me’Shell Ndegeo’cello, The The), …

  • Release year/Artist name : nice for a historical overview but not practical. Who knows you should look for Original Musiquarium under 1982?
  • Date of purchase : like John Cusack in High Fidelity. If you remember in which sequence you bought all your CDs, you either don’t have many, or you need to get a life.
  • Artist name/Album Name : Like most record shops, but almost half of my CDs are compilations, so this means 200 albums under ‘Various Artists’?
  • By ASIN/ISBN/barcode number : feasible, but pointless. Good for warehousing, not for humans.

    • Categorized

    Storing in a taxonomy of preferably non-intersecting groups and subgroups, based on easy-to-discern characteristics. Macro-organization of a library: fiction/non-fiction/poetry/… Mental image: Outlook folders.
    For CDs: genre, compilation, record company, sleeve colour, artist gender, …

  • Genre : Where is the line between Electronic, Dance, Acid Jazz, Nu Jazz, Lounge, Chill-out, Deep House? Who is the authority on this? Does Quincy Jones go with Jazz? Even Stuff like that?
  • Compilation/not : I used this one because it’s an easy split. An album is either a compilation or not, right? What do I do with DJ Spinna’s Wonder of Stevie? I went with ‘compilation’.
  • Label : great for storing (the side logos all measure up nicely), less trivial for finding something
  • Artist Gender : male/female/group. (any other options I did not think of?) Diana Ross would be separate from Diana Ross & the Supremes? Where does Dana International go? :-)

    • Indexed

    Storing in a way that information can be found by searching on keywords and/or properties. Mental image: Google.

    This would be my ideal way of buying music: I purchase an album/a song - I get a token/proof of purchase - using this token, the music automatically ’shows up’ on my PC in a format I can use for burning CDs, loading onto my portable player - I can search for artists, genre, title and even have collaborative filtering: ‘music that sound like Jazzanova’. Basically this is iTunes. Does this work with ‘real’ CDs? Apart from manually scrolling through your collection (which can be a physical pleasure with the occasional surprise) I see no implementation of this. Virgin Megastore used to have something inspiring though: you scrolled through their huge selection, took out any CD, showed its barcode to a reader, and could listen to 30-seconds excerpts of each song.

    Conclusion:
    So what did I end up with? A custom mix of Sorted & Categorized:

  • Category ‘Compilations’ -> Categories ‘Lounge’, ‘Jazz’, ‘Chill out’, … -> Sorted on Album name
  • Category ‘Non-Compilations’ -> Categories ‘Jazz’/'the rest’ -> Sorted on Artist/Album name
    Satisfying weekend ;-)

    [Listening to: “Jazz Mediterranee : Koop Remix - Henri Salvador” - DJ Smash - Phonography - Volume 2]

    • Converge already! (Struggling with WLBS)

    Published by Peter on May 19, 2004 in windows. 0 Comments

    I hate when things don’t go my way. One server in our NLB (Network Load Balancing) cluster did not want to join the cluster anymore. When I issued a wlbs start, it tried for a couple of seconds to join the cluster, but then remained in ‘Converging’ state. A couple of times I saw an entry in the System Log " ... does not have the same number or type of port rules ...".

    I tried:

    • Reboot: worked 1st time, but after that: did not help
    • Compare rules 1: compared output of wlbs display: changed all load parameters to ‘Equal’ (I normally give the servers weights that take into account the # of processors and #MB RAM)
    • Compare rules 2: compared output of wlbs display: identical
    • Compare rules 3: compared output of regedit -e wlbs.reg.%COMPUTERNAME%.reg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WLBS: no significant differences
    • Recreate rules 1: recreate all 18 port rules on rogue server (so much fun :-/ ): did not help
    • Recreate rules 2: change ALL servers to use only 1 rule: did not help
    • Curse: did not help
    • Restart service: disable NLB on network adapter, press OK, re-enable NLB => Bingo! Server back in the cluster without a blink.

    Now I only have to re-create the 18 rules on all servers and I’m done!

    Mental note to self: check out if I can build a dedicated load balancing device in Linux, one that (1) takes into account server load (give work to least busy server) (2) response time on individual ports (and automatically disable non-responsive ports) (3) has a web interface, so I can configure from any server in the subnet.

    Skeemz on Brussels Jazz Marathon

    Published by Peter on May 16, 2004 in Belgium and music. 1 Comment

    Skeemz in Brussels - Pixagogo album
    Brussels in the sun, what a pleasure. Some glasses of white wine, listening to music on a ‘terraske’ with some friends, yesterday was really a nice day. Certainly with the pleasant contribution of Skeemz, a Ghent-based band that played funky hip-hop/R&B music. Good lyrics, a cute singer with a great soulful voice and a young but skilled band that was obviously having fun. Supported by my favourite female drummer of the moment, Isolde Lasoen. She plays in so many bands (Skeemz, Bruno de Bruxelles, Briskey, Daan, …) so she’s actually hard to avoid on live concerts. Next appointment: Daan in Brussels on May 29th.

    Here are some pictures of Skeemz: DJ Buzz, Lady Linn, Isolde Lasoen and the others.

    Spam ads in Atom-2-RSS converter from 2RSS.com

    Published by Peter on May 13, 2004 in spam. 0 Comments

    I publish my blog via Blogger, and since they refuse to support RSS, I have to find a way to convert my Atom feeds into RSS, so it is accessible for any RSS reader. I had found an on-line service by www.2rss.com that did just that. They only updated once in 4 hours, but that was OK. I was using an older version of SharpReader that did not support Atom feeds, so I was using it for myself too, to read e.g. Evan Williams’s blog, the guy who created Blogger.

    This morning - to my astonishment - I saw a bunch of “ADV: Goto XXX site for YYY” advert posts coming in. I have some 5 blog feeds that I converted via 2rss.com, and all of them contained 1 or 2 adverts, including mine (that hurt!). OK, 2rss.com may have some bills to pay, but they might have warned me. Anyway, I have to find an alternative now.

    • My aggregator: I want to be able to read Atom feeds without a 3rd party converting it. That was easy, I upgraded my SharpReader to version 0.9.4.1 and that was done.
    • My own blog feed: how can I automatically convert my Atom feed into an RSS for other people to use? I’m currently going with Feedburner.com. It adds some nice features while converting to RSS actually, like adding a picture, stats per post, stripping links, …
    [Listening to: “Let It All Hang Out” - Hombres - Sampled Vol 3 (CD 2/2)]

    Feed-based automatic download/caching

    Published by Peter on May 12, 2004 in podcast. 0 Comments

    Interesting idea on HubLog (actually it’s an idea of Les Orchard).

    I’d love to pay a monthly fee to have shows by Joss Whedon stream on down to my file-server with BitTorrent. I’d love to subscribe to favorite indie bands’ releases and have them show up in the music folder. I’m cheap, so I’d like the price to be low, but I’ll still pay for what I like. And I’d love to do all this, still being able to tinker, still seeing that people producing things I like get paid, without going to jail or letting them empty my wallet with a wet/dry vac.

    Sounds a bit like a RSS+BitTorrent version of MMS, which basically is a combination of an SMS notification and a GPRS download. Do RSS and/or Atom have extensions that could support this? Looking at Orchard I would guess that with RSS, you would have to use a hack like ‘automatically follow all links if they point to a .mpg file‘. Atom seems to provide for a Link:Type attribute, which allows neater integration.

    So the system could be as follows:

    • a watcher application periodically checks certain RSS/Atom links (basically this is an aggregator)
    • it triggers on certain conditions, like the occurence of a type="video/mpeg" mime-type link, or a link that ends in .mpg/.mpeg
    • when it triggers it starts downloading in one of several ways, (S)FTP, BitTorrent, … - presumably you would need proper authentication (this is where payment comes in)
    • you are alerted when new content is available on your local system (this could be a 2nd ‘delayed’ feed)

    It’s basically caching of content before it is consumed. Pre-caching?

    [Listening to: “That Night” - Jazzanova - Jazzanova Remixed - Disc 1]

    Metafilter on Steve Gadd

    Published by Peter on May 9, 2004 in music. 0 Comments

    Great post on Steve Gadd on MetaFilter. He’s one of the reasons I wanted to start drumming, after hearing him on Simon & Garfunkel’s “Concert in Central Park”. When I started browsing through the Steve Gadd Grooves and Fills, I discovered that he was also responsible for “Chuck E’s In Love” (Rickie Lee Jones) and “Stuff Like That” (Quincy Jones). Tunes that got stuck in my head. He’s probably on more of my CDs than I can imagine. Janis Ian, Michael Franks, Al Jarreau, Michael McDonald, Steely Dan, …

    I wonder who his worthy counterpart would be as a bass player (in my collection, then). Tony Levin? Pino Palladino? Anthony Jackson? My vote would go to the latter.

    Nice follow-up at mrfeinberg.com.

    [Listening to: “Harlequin” - Weather Report - Heavy Weather]
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