A tale of music discovery in the Information Age

  1. Load up boingboing, one of the more interesting blogs on the internet, to see what they've scared up recently.
  2. Notice an article on the holographic projection of sea-life on a recent Diesel fashion show. Sounds interesting...
  3. Follow the link over to youtube, to get a look at the effects
  4. You're a sucker for distorted vocals and dirty beats (see Vitalic, Battles), so you immediately notice the first song on play in the video, and suddenly you must know the answer to the question: who are these people?
  5. Search for some of the lyrics. Nope not good enough. Try again. And again.
  6. Bingo
  7. You ask yourself, who the heck is this "Walter Meego" guy?
  8. Look up "his" wikipedia page.
  9. Oh it's actually a them (who thought up that band name?). And they're from Chicago. Independent until recently, only E.P.s so far. The person who wrote the "style" section is laughably amateur, not at all in wikipedia style. This means the page doesn't get much traffic. Not surprising considering the other facts.
  10. Hop over to their myspace page, looking for more music to sample. They say they are working on a full-length album, good for them. You're much more impressed with "Romantic," the song from the video, than their other stuff, but that's life. Hopefully the eventual album is more in that style. Not touring much at the moment, unfortunately. You've discovered them just a bit too late to reasonably tip-off your NY-habiting friend about their show there that very night.
  11. Check if youtube has any videos of theirs, to get more a feel for their style
  12. First up, a video which appears to have been made in a dorm room, and includes a synchronized dance scene ala the macarena. The whole thing is kind of flippant and uninteresting. Okay okay they're independent, you get it. You just have such high expectations after seeing such great stuff from other bands.
  13. Second up, for the song which tipped you off, is a video involving ninjas playing in a theme park, playground, rollerskating, and getting rejected by the girls they make advances on. This is, put simply, an abomination. It runs totally counter to the song, trivializing the depth and sorrow of it in again, a flippant way. A commenter captures this in more than one language:
    I don't like this video. I love the song. I'm just so frustrated I'm gonna say this in swedish because I'm way too frustrated to think right now. Videon gör inte låten någon som helst rättvisa! What were you thinking? You've made light of the song and yourself with this video! C'mon u guys got some serious potential! Silly video and so's the other one.
  14. Disappointing, yes, but not a deal-breaker, after all, it's just the music you're there for. Still, someone needs to give these guys a talking to. Competition in the music industry is fierce, and videos are one of the best ways to spread the word. If your talent doesn't translate into the visual realm, find someone whose does.
  15. Head over to Amazon to pick up an E.P. Think twice and go to the band's website. They probably keep more of the money that way.
  16. Hmm... Romantic was the song you liked, but the Romantic EP is stuck together with "Wanna be a star" which is a bit more straightforward in just about every way... beats, lyrics. Definitely a B-side. But the sample remix isn't terrible. Ah well. If you were playing the iTunes game you may wait and purchase by the track, but you're not, so platters it is.
  17. Reflect on how awesome it is that you just used a fashion show soundtrack together with a host of internet tools as a music recommendation system to find a promising, yet (deeply?) flawed, relatively unknown band.
  18. Write a blog post about it.

Luck favors the curious...

In response to a Slashdot posting on "The Best of Web 2.0", I visited some of the honored sites. As I'm prone to do when I'm curious about something, on one particular site I went to browse the source and was rewarded with the following:
interested in joining meebo? we have full time and internship oppportunities available including front-end software engineer (JavaScript/DHTML/Ajax/C/C++), back-end software engineer (C/C++/networking/databases), and visual designer. email secretjobs at meebo dot com with your resume and cover letter. thanks!
I'm not particularly interested in the position, so I place the offer here. Enjoy! In a side-note, it's interesting to watch the url, where you can clearly see Meebo's load-balancing at work. Load http://meebo.com and you'll be redirected to some variant of http://www\n\n.meebo.com, where \n represents a number (in reg-ex). It seems they're airing their load-balancing for the world to see. I sort of appreciate the open-ness in a way. On a second note, what the heck is up with compressing the html into a single line? Is this to save on bandwidth or just obfuscate the code? If you happen to know, I'm once again curious Oh and my apologies to Meebo for airing their secrets...

Open Source in Action

Ever since I picked up Ruby on Rails, a Ruby-language web framework for a project of mine, I've been curious about what web frameworks were out there for Python, another of my favored languages. A few of them out there are Django and TurboGears. Another that happened to catch my attention was the web.py a framework by Aaron Swartz whom I recently met at the first (of hopefully many yet to come) Startup school in Boston. Anyway, I was browsing the source of 0.13 of Aaron's framework and noticed something amiss. Specifically, in storify, Aaron was testing isinstance(k, list) on a value k which he had just used to index into an array. Now in Python arrays are mutable, and arrays and dictionaries can only be indexed by immutable values. That's ints, strings, but not lists. Seeing that something was amiss, I sent him a quick e-mail, and now I'm in his changelog entry for version 0.132. I'm reproducing the relevant line here for my future self: Fix bug with storify when it received multiple inputs (tx Ben Woosley). In other news, Apple just announced it was recognizing contributors to their WebCore HTML Layout engine, with gifts of computers and free tickets to Apple's WWDC. They list none-to-trivial contributions to on a blog posting on David Hyatt's blog Surfin' Safari. One could call these events arguments both for the model of open source, and for code reviews as well. But then my evidence is anecdotal, so you're welcome to your own interpretation.

Progress for IE

I'm now running the latest beta of Internet Explorer 7 alongside Firefox, Opera, and (even) Amaya. I've run up against many of IE flaws, so I'm glad to say that quite a few have been fixed in the latest release. I'm even limiting my special, conditional comments-enable css hacks for IE down to version 6 and earlier. Now, it's not perfect, the IE team still has a lot of work ahead of hit, but after years of stagnation it's nice to see some progress. In addition, I'm actually pretty happy with the user interface. It's a nice departure from the past, and while I can tell there's still some "old IE" in there, I'm happy with the direction it's going. I'm not dropping Firefox anytime soon, but I'm really glad to see some fresh change in the works at Microsoft. Now if we could only get some nice application/xhtml+xml and image/svg+xml implementations out of Redmond...

Making Internet Explorer, Multiviews, and application/xhtml+xml agree (Edit x2)

Being a tinkerer and technophile, or more appropriately, a "simplicity/cleanliness in implementation/interface"-ophile, I've been trying to get a trivial portion of my site to serve as application/xhtml+xml to the proper browsers, while allowing me to use URLs without file-type extensions (which I think are a little ugly anyways). I ran into plenty of trouble finding a solution which IE agrees with, so I'm happy to share it to those who are interested. There are loads of purported solutions on-line, such as writing the HTTP Content-type header with php or python, or using Apache's mod-rewrite to redirect to the proper page based on the browser's Accept header. For me, the scripting solutions are out, as I'm interested in doing a bit more than just serving the same XHTML 1.0 in different ways. For instance, I'm using XHTML 1.1 now, and plan to use XHTML 2.0 in the future (when IE probably still won't support application/xhtml+xml). I don't want to just have the page interpreted differently, I want to use the new language to make my markup more simple and semantic. This leaves the option of maintaining two copies of the files in question and having the server determine which to serve when a request for an extension-less file such "index" is sent. There are two options here. The first is mod-rewrite, which unfortunately I couldn't get to work, and without access to my friend's "apache.conf", I can't debug. The other way is called "Multiviews", it's used primarily to serve different translations of a given page based on the browser or user-agent's language preference. This works unambiguously because basically every browser gets the Accept-Language header right. Unfortunately the Accept header is more problematic. The problem here, as usual lies in the most recent version of IE, which doesn't list much of anything in it's Accept header. For example, rather than list text/html as the preferred document type along with others IE accepts, it includes the blanket */*. This will of course match with any and all MIME types and therefore give no information about what IE "likes". So the trivial solution, which involves giving the browser what it asks for, is out. Time for a Hack. If one just does as he expects he needs to do in this situation, and puts the two files up as normal, turns on multiviews and trys to access the page in Firefox and then in IE, they'll find that the application/xhtml+xml is preferred in both. Unfortunately since IE won't interpret the page, users of IE (who really aren't bad people) get a download dialog box. This won't do, so I did some tinkering and I finally found a solution which actually works. I present to you my awesomely bad hack: Append white-space to the end of the smaller file, such that they are equal in size. The same XHTML is about 5-10% smaller, keeping in mind the need for IE-specific stylesheets and alerts. Lacking other reasons, Apache is providing the XHTML to (the seemingly indifferent) IE due to the smaller file size. The Multiviews algorithm spells this out. Seemingly there should be work-arounds, using .var and quality-of-source values, but I was unable to get this to work. The white-space has been the only workable solution I've come up with so far is . This results in the following behavior:
application/xhtml+xml
  • Firefox 1.5
  • Opera 8.5
text/html
  • IE 6.0
  • Safari 2.0
Once I script the white-space addition, serving both will be a simple process. If you have a better solution, or problems with the one above, feel free to comment or contact me.

Edit: Level to the Rescue

So here we have open-source web-serving. Someone has provided me a much better solution in the comments below, which I'll discuss now, lest we all do things without understanding them. The approach is to use the Apache level designator to force IE to prefer HTML over XHTML. One can see how this works in the Apache documentation for the Content Negotiation algoritm. I'd done some experimenting with the qs factor, but it had affected multiple browsers, rather than just one. Referring to the algorithm documentation, all quality-of-source values being equal, any browser which advertises that it prefers application/xhtml+xml over text/html in its HTTP accept-header will have the algorithm settled in step 1 of the algoritm. This covers Firefox and Opera. The others, IE & Safari, give both text/html and * a quality factor of 1, and so continue on down the steps. They had been finishing at step 8, which decides based on content-length. The much nicer solution is to stop them at step 4 in the algorithm, this time on the level parameter. A big thanks to Chris for the tip.

Edit 2: Not so fast

Alright so level isn't working for me... IE still tries to load the application/xhtml+xml files if they're of smaller file size. Tried level in both the .htaccess and through type-maps to no avail. If anyone has this working or another alternative, I'd be happy to hear it...