David Gans just posted a great list of songs from 2005:

http://playback.trufun.com/2005/12/earworms_of_the.html

I’ve listened to so much great music over the last year that it would be impossible to compile a complete list of great earworms, but here are a few that I thought are also noteworthy:

Conservative Christian from Todd Snider’s latest studio release East Nashville Skyline. No matter how many times I hear this song I have to laugh at the lyrics. What an immensely talented songwriter Todd is.

Dark and Weary World from the South Austin Jug Band is the title track to their latest album which would be on my favorite album’s of 2005 list if I had one. I saw these guys at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival after they won the band competition there and have been a huge fan ever since.

Who Will Save Us From the Saved? off of David Gans’ new album Solo Electric is a well written song with a great message that any critically thinking, freedom loving, rational person can appreciate.

The Grid from the new Michael Gordon and Leo Kottke colaboration, Sixty Six Steps is such a cool song with wonderful lyrics and melody. What a great combination of talent. I hope they keep playing and performing together for a long time.

What are your favorite songs from 2005?

I have to plug Jason Kottke’s best links of 2005. What a great list of links, many of which I’ve not seen before. Enjoy and happy new year!

http://www.kottke.org/05/12/the-best-links-2005

I especially love the speech Steve Jobs gave to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford.

Now is a great time of year for best of lists. As we reflect over the last year and look towards next, one can’t help but wonder what cool things are around the corner. 2005 was a great year for innovation on the internet. With the semantic web coming to fruition and all of the brilliant minded web developers out there, we have sure seen some incredible things this year. While some of the top players in this list were in existance before 2005, all of them certainly reached their pinnacle over the last year. So here it is:

1. Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking app that helps users discover the best sites on the web while also providing a great mechanism for tracking one’s personal bookmarks. Recently, Yahoo! acquired Del.icio.us and despite the hard time I’ve been giving Del.icio.us lately, they still kick major ass in my book.

2. Pandora, also known as the music genome project is a great application for discovering new music. Instead of ranking a song based on popularity, Pandora suggests songs based on many properties of the song such as beat, rhythm, instrumentation, and many many other criteria. With Pandora, I’m always listening to great music!

3. tech.memeorandum crawls the web in search of the stories that are recieving the most buzz. It then lists articles based on their popularity. I find tech.memeorandum one of the best ways to stay on top of breaking news in tech.

4. Technorati is a great blog search engine. With over 23 million blogs indexed in real time technorati is a great up to the minute source for what is cool in the blogosphere.

5. Google Earth is a 3D browser of planet earth with remarkable resolution and slick interface for navigating the earth. If only they’d make it for the Mac!

6. Flickr is a great social tagging application for photos. Its easy to find just about any type of photo using flickr. Its also a great way to share photos. Yahoo! also acquired Flickr this year.

7. Bloglines is a great RSS feed reader and blog management tool. Syndication has reached the public domain in 2005 and is a great way for people to ingest information in a quick, highly efficient way.

I’ve been noodling around on the guitar for years. I’m not a great musician but I definitely have a decent repertoire of songs I’ve written or learned over time. Lately I’ve been using Garage Band to record my guitar and lay down bass and drum tracks. Here are a few useful tips for Garage Band that I’d like to share:

• Unless you have a very nice sound system for your Mac, the best way to hear what you are recording is with a decent pair of headphones. I recommend Etymotics.
• Garage Band has a tuner for tuning real instruments. Just select a real instrument track and then Apple+F key to access the tuner.
• When recording a guitar track, turn all other tracks down to half volume except the drums. This way you can still hear the bass and other tracks and still concentrate on the instrument you are currently recording. If you are having trouble with creativity, try removing various tracks one at a time and replacing them with different parts.
• When recording with a real instrument such as the guitar, play with the existing MIDI instruments to create new instrument sounds. I found that with some tweaking, I could create alot better tone and more original sounding guitar tracks.
• Save often. I like to go back over everything I record in a session later and decide which parts sound best together and do most of my mixing. My brain has to work in different modes when recording versus mixing so I always save everything I record, including the stuff that I might not find interesting at the time I record it.
• Save many files. The more tracks you have in a file, the more memory it takes to record. Try to use the minimum number of tracks necessary to record a song and combine tracks when possible.
• Experiment with preamp effects. I have an Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer distortion peddle that helps me achieve a nice blues tone. I’ve created a special MIDI instrument that adds an amp simulator and a little reverb. The effect is a MIDI instrument with great crunch and tone.
• I’ve plugged in a couple different guitars and my Gibson SG with humbucker pickups sounded alot better than my Fender Telecaster which has single coil pickups. If you have multiple electric guitars, experement because sound quality varies drastically from guitar to guitar.
• A keyboard is a decent investment because its almost impossible to use the computer keyboard or mouse to play in real time.
• Practice with the metronome. You must have absolutely perfect timing to create a decent recording. There are features in Garage Band to fix timing and tuning issues, but the track won’t sound as good as it would have if the timing had been correct originally. If you plan on using looping or mixing any of the prerecorded loops into your recording, then perfect timing is even more important
• When recording, don’t forget to relax and have fun. When I was starting to record I would get impatient because I had to record several takes before I could get a part right. This is natural and the best way to overcome it is to (a) play slower and more accurately and (b) relax and get in the groove!

Update:
People are starting to digg me! If you read this article and you like it I would be eternally grateful if you digg it! Click here to do so. Thanks!

This is a follow up to my post a few days back about the acquisition of del.icio.us by Yahoo!. Since this acquisition, the site seems to be down more than up. I’ve seen various error messages displayed on the site including the most recent one which blames the issue on power outages. C’mon Yahoo!, I understand that there are uncontrolable circumstances that can take a site down, but I’m begining to become sceptacle of all the excuses. Without bookmarks, what is a web geek supposed to do! This is the first time in a long long while that I’ve missed using my browser to store my bookmarks. Hopefully, these are just temporary switchover glitches, otherwise I might have to start using some other social bookmarking site like Furl. Del.icio.us is an immensly useful application with a powerful concept behind it, but in terms of technical implementation its not rocket science and there are tons of other social bookmarking sights just like del.icio.us. My advice to the administrators of del.icio.us is to get it back up and running before users decide to go with a more stable solution.

It was announced last week that Yahoo! has aquired the hugely popular social bookmark tagging site Del.icio.us. I’ve been using Del.icio.us for quite some time now and am absolutely enamoured with it. In addition to providing me with a great way to store and organize my bookmarks, del.icio.us helps me to find the best content on the internet. If you have not checked out Del.icio.us yet, do yourself a favor and check it out right now.

It was bitter sweet for me to hear about the aquisition of Del.icio.us by Yahoo! this week. I’m happy that all of the hard work that the developers of Del.icio.us put in has paid off, but I’m concerned about what Yahoo! will do with my beloved social bookmarking app. Up untill now, Del.icio.us has been completely free to use and free of ads (which is perplexing). This aquisition by Yahoo! falls in line with other aquisitions they have made lately (see flickr). Yahoo! has become a force to be reconned with in this next generation of the web. What an exciting time to be a geek!

It seems that there are two breeds of web developers, those who develop using Microsoft products and those who don’t. Most developers have very explicit opinions on the subject and will argue their perspective to the bitter end. Whether to use Microsoft products or not is a truly holy dilemma. I have spent some time in the academic world where they talk about Microsoft like it is the antichrist. I’ve also spent alot of time in the professional world where I’ve seen mixed emotions on the subject. One thing that I’ve always disliked about Microsoft bashers is that most of them have strong opinions, but no experience to back those opinions. They have never developed applications in Visual Studio nor are they aware of some of the technologies Microsoft has created for developing web applications. I have had a decent amount of exposure to both development environments and my conclusion is that they both have great strengths and the choice to go with one or the other should be based on one’s needs.

When I first started to look for work as a developer, it seemed that most of the companies that were hiring were Microsoft shops. So in order to keep food on the table, I made efforts to learn Visual Basic and SQL Server. I learned ASP after having done some exposure to PHP and I learned SQL Server after having some exposure to MySQL. I consider PHP and ASP to be pretty equal in terms of the technical capabilities. They are both server side scripting languages for creating database driven web applications. However, since PHP is free and can run on any web server it makes an ideal candidate for many many cool open source applications such as the CMS on which this site runs, WordPress. Also, “classic” ASP is no longer supported by Microsoft since they are now promoting ASP.NET while PHP will be around for a long long time. PHP and MySQL are ideal candidates for startups that don’t have much capital to spend on software.

The more freelance projects I take on, the more I see the power of Open Source development. There are so many ways to paint yourself into a corner with proprietary software. If you invest in a proprietary technology you are making a comitment that will affect you for the entire lifecycle of your application. You can plan on upgrading and retrofiting at some point in the future if your application has a long lifecycle. If you use open source tools, not only can you build on the out of the box functionality and if something breaks, you have the power to fix it. I’ve seen it happen many times with Microsoft products, they pump something like its the next big thing and two years later they completely drop the product and stop supporting it. They take measures to make sure that you keep throwing your money at new products.

One thing that I have to give Microsoft credit for is their efforts in server technology. There is a reason that there hasn’t been a release of Windows in three years. Microsoft has focused alot of resources on its .NET initiative and has put out some very innovative server side technologies. I absolutely love ASP.NET and ADO.NET. Things that took 100 lines of code to do in classic ASP can be done in 3 lines of code in ASP.NET. The object libraries that .NET provides is truly immense. ADO.NET makes it easy to work with data. Verson 2.0 of the .NET framework just went out of beta and unleashed many more great tools for web development. Microsoft has made great efforts to establish itself as the best tool for web development and I’m not ashamed to say that I love developing apps using Visual Studio .NET.

So contrary to what most developers on either side of the fence will tell you, there really is no clear advantage in using Microsoft tools or open source tools for web development. The answer lies heavily in one’s particular situation with the key variables being money, development resources and scope.

Folks, sorry for the ads, I have to find a way to cover hosting fees and grow this site. I promise not to make the ads too invasive and if you have any feedback, please let me know. I used to be completely against sponsorship untill I saw the level that guys like Jason Kottke have taken their publishing to. In theory, if I write great articles and gain a base of readers and attract some traffic, then I can (a) upgrade my server infrastructure accordingly and (b) dedicate more time to writing for the site. I’m really enjoying myself so far even though I just started this site a few weeks ago. I still have much work to do, like encorporate my own personal theme into the site which I’ve already designed but have not yet implemented. This cool Blix WordPress theme is so cool looking that its hard for me to get motivated to change the layout. I added my del.icio.us links to the bottom of this page, but I’m looking for a better plugin that will display my link categories in an ambient way (with font size indicating number of links) like they are displayed on del.icio.us. I hope that you find something of value in this site and I would love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!

I use Wikipedia almost everyday to look up obscure references from conversations or things I read here and there. Wikipedia must be one of the heaviest traffic websites on the internet. I love the idea of the read/write internet and the democratic notion of letting everybody edit entries on wikipedia. I think that the wiki paradigm itself is great and I’ve established a personal wiki to organize my thoughts at work using TiddlyWiki. I’ve never edited or composed an article on Wikipedia, but have read thousands of them. To my knowledge the information I get from Wikipedia is accurate.

Lately I’ve been very concerned about Wikipedia. Links have been surfacing to very inaccurate articles on Wikipedia. The news broke today that former MTV jock Adam Curry, self proclaimed “father of the podcast” has been anonymously editing the podcast article on Wikipedia to make it look like he is the sole founder of the podcast. Wikipedia traced the IP address that was used to remove information about Kevin Marks who implemented a mechanism for importing RSS feeds into iTunes and load the feed onto an iPod. In addition to wondering how insignificant Curry’s role was in the creation of the podcast, I’m perplexed about how Curry could so freely and anonymously modify the Wikipedia entry.

I realize that inaccurate information can appear on Wikipedia because it has been published without being reviewed and that corrections are constantly being made. What I wonder about is how bias the articles on Wikipedia are. The people publishing the articles are the ones who are most passionate about the subject. For instance, I would bet that Adam Curry has edited his personal article on Wikipedia. I’m sure that gross inaccuracies are eventually eliminated, but it is pretty easy to use words to spin the truth in favor of one’s personal agenda. I will continue to use Wikipedia because I believe that 99.99% of its article are accurate, but I would love to see Wikipedia implement a more stringent review process for articles.

I have to give an update to this post because things are getting very interesting. I’m streaming January 24, 1971 Seattle Center Arena, Soundboard from archive.org as I’m writing this. It has been decided that downloads of audience recordings and streams of soundboards will be made available on archive.org. A statement on archive.org’s website reads:

“We at archive.org now realize that our mistaken attempts to move quickly were based on what we thought the Grateful Dead wanted.
For this we apologize both to the Grateful Dead and their community.
There has been a great deal of reaction, our actions have caused more than necessary.”

Phil Lesh released a statement that indicates was not consulted about the decision to remove the shows from the archive:

“It was brought to my attention that all of the Grateful Dead shows were taken down from Archive.org right before Thanksgiving. I was not part of this decision making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead’s legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it . I have enjoyed using Archive.org and found it invaluable during the writing of my book. I found myself being pulled back in time listening to old Grateful Dead shows while giggling with glee or feeling that ache in my heart listening to Jerry’s poetic guitar and sweet voice.

We are musicians not businessmen and have made good and bad decisions on our journey. We do love and care about our community as you helped us make the music. We could not have made this kind of music without you as you allowed us to play “without a net”. Your love, trust and patience made it possible for us to try again the next show when we couldn’t get that magic carpet off the ground. Your concerns have been heard and I am sure are being respectfully addressed.”

Bob Weir indicated in this radio interview that the Grateful Dead are in danger of being sued by musicians whose music the Dead covered. I’m not sure that I completely belive his claim:

“We had to cover our asses. What they’re doing is illegal, unless there are arrangements made… particularly in the case of covers - other people’s material.
If we’re perceived to be distributing their songs without their agreenent, they have every right, and really and every obligation, to sue us…

We had to take it down. We had no choice. It’s archive.com’s [sic] job to make arrangements with the other people whose material… we’re playing, and then everything’s good….

Probably a lot of it is stuff that we intend to release in the future anyway.

We need revenue. Our music division needs revnue so we can digitize all of that stuff.

The ‘information wants to be free, man’ - those folks… this is not information, this is music. It’s kind of value-added information. Some people prefer to call it art….

We had to go ahead and do the right thing, and it upset some folks. I’m really sorry about that. So they started up a petition, a boycott, and all that kind of stuff. I really hope they can stick to their guns, and boycott us, and… seeya….”

John Perry Barlow, Bob Weir’s lyricist for the Grateful Dead unleashed this protest on BoingBoing blaming the drummers (I’m not sure if he means it figuratively or literally) :

“You have no idea how sad I am about this. I fought it hammer and tong, but the drummers had inoperable bricks in their head about it.
What’s worse is that they now want to remove all Dead music from the Web. They might as easily put a teaspoon of food coloring in a swimming pool and then tell the pool owner to get it back to them.

It’s like finding out that your brother is a child molester. And then, worse, having everyone then assume that you’re a child molester too. I’ve been called a hypocrite in three languages already.

How magnificently counter-productive of them. It’s as if the goose who laid the golden egg had decided to commit suicide so that he could get more golden eggs.

This is just the beginning of the backlash, I promise you.

This is worse than the RIAA suing their customers.”

This makes me think that the organization is much more divided these days than it has been in the past. How could Phil have not been notified, after all he is 1/4 of the band? I am very happy that they will be restoring the streams of the soundboards, but they still haven’t given the downloads of the soundboards back which they will surely be selling downloads. I truly hope that everybody wins here. I realize that the vault is the Grateful Dead’s legacy and I hope they prosper on a level that is satisfying to them, after all they dedicated their entire career to the dead. I will completely respect their decision to try and sell downloads of soundboards, but I wish they’d be more respectful and in communicado with their fans.

To end this post on a high note, check out the newly redesigned dead.net!