April 2007 Archives

[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - God Given]

Yesterday I bought the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero. This is an incredibly early first thoughts kind of post after listening to the album exactly once.

I like it. I mean I really like it. I'll post something more substantial in a week or so after I've had a chance to digest the album. I've been a fan for a long time. Over the years I've been interested in the direction Trent has taken the NIN sound and I'm all rather happy with Year Zero after the first listen. 'God Given' is my fave track so far. That will change over time I'm sure.

I suspect listening to the new NIN album will mean I'll be listening to his other albums too. NIN will be my most listened to band on my weekly last.fm chart for sure. All NIN all the time ;-)

[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - The Great Destroyer]

It's Diet Coke. With. Vitamins. The only reason I can possibly think of that someone came up with this idea was a case of "...because we can...".

And the shop totally reeled me in with their cunning use of a "TRY ME!" sticker. Dammit, I always fall for that trick.

[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - The Greater Good]

Interesting news following the massive pet food recall a couple of weeks back. Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China.

ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 — As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

Lovely. Also a little scary that this type of food import isn't screened that well before being blindly allowed into the country.

The link to China has set off concerns among critics of the Food and Drug Administration that ingredients in pet food as well as human food, which are increasingly coming from abroad, are not being adequately screened.

“They have fewer people inspecting product at the ports than ever before,” says Caroline Smith DeWaal, the director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. “Until China gets programs in place to verify the safety of their products, they need to be inspected by U.S. inspectors. This open-door policy on food ingredients is an open invitation for an attack on the food supply, either intentional or unintentional.”

[Moozik: Stranglers - Golden Brown]

Larry King had most of the cast of Heroes on this evening's show. What I saw of it was very entertaining. I must admit that I was a little distracted because my dog threw up in the middle of the interview so missed quite a lot of good stuff I'm sure.

Probably to be found on wikipedia but there were a couple of "I didn't know that" moments. Jack Coleman (Mr Bennett - Claire's Dad) used to be in Dynasty back in the day. Masi Oka (Hiro) has a 180 IQ and used to work at Industrial Light & Magic.

[Moozik: Project Pitchfork - Timekiller]

If they do manage to persuade them all to play, this would be some after party.

New Order, Bono and Depeche Mode are tipped to give next month's Cannes Film Festival in France a musical boost by performing at a party following the premiere of Ian Curtis biopic Control.

The rock and pop stars are among the celebrities who will be attending the screening and the celebration of the tragic Joy Division star's life - and party organizers are trying to persuade the musicians to play.

New Order, Bono, Depeche Mode Could Perform At Cannes

[Moozik: Girls Under Glass - Body Electric]

As seen on reddit today - amusing eBay feedback. I like this guy.

My current faves are "As Promised—painless, clean, and photos to prove the hit was done right AA+++" and "What the..? What THE HELL is this stuff? How the HELL do you get it off? HELP!!".

[Moozik: Fad Gadget - Plainsong]

I've mentioned before how TV networks over here in the US don't give anywhere near enough time for a new programme to develop before deciding on whether to pull the plug. Well, I think we now have a new record.

It's been a short "Drive" for Fox's midseason drama, which has been pulled off the schedule after two weeks on the air.

"Drive" received a strong promotional push on Fox's juggernaut "American Idol" and was launched with a two-night premiere, a strategy regularly used for the network's hit serialized drama "24."

But "Drive" never clicked with viewers, and its two low-rated airings on Monday seemed to hurt its leadout, "24," which posted its lowest adults 18-49 rating for an original episode in more than three years.

It is not clear when and on what platform the remaining nine episodes of "Drive" will air. Streaming the episodes on Fox.com or offering them as downloads through iTunes are among the possibilities under consideration.

Fox revokes "Drive" license

After 2 weeks? And I still haven't watched those episodes yet. Oh well, guess there's no hurry now after all. Shame really. As a big Firefly and Serenity fan I was really interested in seeing Nathan Fillion on TV once again.

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Nothing]

Yes I traveled down the road of madness by actually reading some comments on slashdot. But I was amused by this comment posted to the Worst Sci-Fi Sequel poll regarding Return of the Jedi.

>> Now the Ewoks were just plain silly. It could have been the best movie of the series if he changed it from Ewoks to Wookies.

Silly? Scary more like. Watch the battle for Endor again with adult eyes. Teddy bears bashing out the brains of storm troopers with rocks. Then playing drums with the empty helmets. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HEADS?! I lie awake at night fearing that SETI@home will make contact with Endor and they will invade the Earth, farming us like cows to make their delicious human head soup. Brrr...

Re:Ep1 didn't ruin the franchise, Jedi did

[Moozik: Muse - Map Of The Problematique]

Fox Soccer Channel often get celebs to do the whole "I'm blah blah blah, and you're watching Fox Soccer Channel" 5 second promo. The other week I saw a Duran Duran one, and then this morning I saw a Depeche Mode one which I thought was really cool. Andy spoke first "I'm Andy Fletcher from Depeche Mode and Chelsea are the best team in the world.". Then Martin spoke "I'm Martin Gore from Depeche Mode and actually, Arsenal are the best team in the world".

I'm going to bite my tongue on the whole Arsenal being the best team in the world thing ;-)

[Moozik: Simple Minds - Sweat In Bullet]

I did find one other thing that I'm going to add to the small list of things I don't like about Banshee. Currently there is no playlist support for iPods. This means that you can create playlists all day long in Banshee but they won't show up on your iPod. Which is a little annoying.

Playlist support was asked for in the Banshee Bugzilla back in 2005 and the latest word from Aaron is that iPod playlist support will be in the next series. Hmm. What to do?

Well, Perl can read/write the iTunes database on my iPod thanks to Mac::iPod::GNUpod [0] and my Banshee library resides in a sqlite database which Perl can talk to thanks to DBD::SQLite so tonight I hacked together an early version of a playlist syncing program. I still have the odd bug or two to work out but it's looking promising.

Let's see if I get it finished before Banshee officially supports what I'm attempting to do ;-)

[0] - Why is that module in the Mac::* namespace?

[Moozik: Front 242 - Animal (Gate)]

It would appear that I've been living in a cave for the past 3 years and completely missed the Gary Numan tribute album. Wow, it got some craptacular reviews on amazon.com but c'mon, St Etienne covering "Stormtrooper In Drag", Daman Albarn covering "We Have A Technical", and Jesus Jones covering "We Are So Fragile". How could it go wrong? Purchased ;-)

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Leave In Silence]

My commute home usually takes between 30-45 minutes depending on traffic. Tonight though it took 2 hours. The freeway was closed and they were forcing everyone to exit onto what the Americans refer to as "surface streets" i.e those non-freeway streets that connect the Phoenix metro area. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued.

What always surprises me in these situations is how quickly people lose their temper. Perhaps I've been commuting here in the Phoenix metro area for so long that I'm just immune to it now. I turn up the volume to a level that would kill most large horses and just rock out playing the ol' steering wheel drums. What? You've never played the drums on your steering wheel? Oh you haven't lived.

It's times like these that I wish I had a video camera in my car. An elderly looking lady with tattoos driving an old Beetle forced her way in behind my car. She was livid. Unlike me, she was hitting her steering wheel out of anger. She was ranting and raving and kept steering slightly to the left and then to the right peering around my car. Each time she did this she got angrier and angrier. Of course she had to call someone and proceeded to give them a piece of her mind too. I was cracking up.

Then I had the youngish couple who were obviously going to be late for something and were fighting about it. The girl was driving and through my amazing lip reading and body language identification skills, ahem, could see he was pissed off and she was shouting back "well what the fu** do you want me to do about it?". Comedy gold.

Next was someone like me who was oblivious to the world around them and was dancing and singing their head off. This bloke made me grin as it was a refreshing change from the anger. Getting angry is not going to make the traffic move any faster. There's nothing you can do about it. Just relax and listen to some music.

Number of accidents witnessed due to people not paying attention and driving too close: 3. Drivers in Phoenix, quite frankly, are completely crap.

[Moozik: The Mission - Beyond The Pale]

Dear CNN and MSNBC,

Please show more coverage of the Don Imus controversy because there is nothing else going on in the world this week.

Sincerely,

Kevin Spencer.

[Moozik: Arctic Monkeys - Dancing Shoes]

More and more often I hear people sing the praises of PostgreSQL. The last time I had a peek at PostgreSQL was over a year ago and I remember not feeling overly warm and fuzzy about that lack of out of the box replication. While no doubt a decent choice for smaller apps where a single DB server will suffice, when you're working on something a little bigger with multiple DB servers behind a load balancer - replication is *extremely* important.

The other day, on an interesting thread on use.perl.org I mentioned:

...I haven't really kept up with the advances other open source RDBMS have made in the replication arena so perhaps MySQL is not the only game in town nowadays.

And I got an interesting answer.

I don't think any of the other major libre RDBMS come with decent and/or out of the box replication.

Postgres replication is still a 3rd party add on, and it doesn't come with commercial support either, oh and it can be backwards incompatible in undocumented ways between releases.

Also it corrupts itself unless you vacuum the databases and is a resource hog.

Re: Answering The Question

Hmm, so perhaps I'll give PostgreSQL another 12 months or so and give it another peek to see how they've progressed in the replication arena.

[Moozik: Garbage - As Heaven Is Wide]

So back in January I mentioned that I didn't know if I really cared about the final 9 episodes of The Sopranos. Well, turns out I do care after all.

The first of the last 9 episodes aired Sunday night and I found myself watching with enthusiasm. I don't know what happened between January and this week but I'm now all rather interested in seeing how it plays out. Bizarre.

[Moozik: Bauhaus - Dark Entries]

For those playing along at home, today marks another week in the further adventures of dog tries to break record for Vet visits in one lifetime. This week's installment is ear infection. Again. For the nth time.

Got hardly any sleep Tuesday night as the poor bloke couldn't sit still because his ear bothered him so much. He was acting like to total lunatic, charging around the place, bumping into doors, whacking the bed. The only sleep I think I got was on the floor leaning against the bed holding his head in my lap.

So I've got more antibiotic ear drops. I think I should have purchased shares in the company that makes the bloody stuff.

[Moozik: Love and Rockets - Holiday On The Moon]

I find you can never go wrong with Yogurt and Green Onion crisps. Yum.

[Moozik: Informatik - Hopeless]

Alanis Morissette's piss take of Fergie's My Humps. Classic.

Moozik: Haujobb - Homes & Gardens]

This year, the annual DM prank was Dave opening a restaurant in New York called The Bitter Apple. If you're a DM fan, you might find the menu slightly amusing. From the main courses I liked "A Steak That I'm Used To", "(Set Me Free) Ravioli", and "Leave In Salmon". And from the desserts, "Milkshake The Disease".

[Moozik: My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When]

So I've been using Banshee as my primary music player for the past few weeks and I think I have chosen wisely. As I mentioned earlier, I was a bit partial to iTunes and wondered whether I'd end up missing it. I must give the Banshee developers a tip of my hat because the honest answer is no, I don't miss iTunes.

So what did I like about Banshee? Importing my iTunes playcounts and playlists was easy thanks to the banshee-itunes-import-plugin [0]. Both playlists and smart playlists are supported. Has impressive album artwork support, last.fm upload support, and likes my iPod. One feature that I really like is the recommended artists plugin. When you begin playing a song, Banshee displays other Recommended Artists, Top Tracks by this artist and Top Albums by this artist at the bottom of the window (see screenshot). Clicking on one of these 'Recommended Artists' or 'Top Albums' takes you to the corresponding last.fm page. NICE.

And what did I not like about Banshee? Feels a little sluggish. On the same hardware, iTunes was lightning fast. Banshee has some subtle lagging when selecting playlists, searching for songs, and synching my iPod. If you're trying Banshee after coming from another music player, you probably won't even notice it. But compared to iTunes, I notice it. Then there are the little subtle bugs that I come across from time to time. To be honest though, I'm not that bothered by them. This is an open source project maintained by volunteers who are not getting paid for their work so I just report the bugs as I find them and let those fine Banshee hackers do their magic. I would love to hack on Banshee myself but at the moment I don't have time to learn C# and mono. Maybe at some point in the future.

To conclude then, I really like Banshee and will certainly stick with it for the foreseeable future. Really, go try it out.

[0] Had I realized that Banshee just uses a sqlite backend to maintain its library, I would have written my own importer and not placed as much emphasis on finding a plugin to do it