Monthly Archive for May, 2004

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Skeemz on Brussels Jazz Marathon

Published 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 on May 13, 2004 in spam. Closed

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 on May 12, 2004 in podcast. Closed

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 on May 9, 2004 in music. Closed

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]