SXSW 2010 music download
I'm currently working my way through the SXSW 2010 music download.
http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/
The first download is 646 singles from musical groups playing at this years SXSW festival. That's not all the bands, mind you. Just the ones included in the first download/release. Last year there were 1302 songs.
Every year since 2005 there's been a music download, and every year I spend the subsequent 365 days trying to trim and cull the list into a "Rob's Best-Of." In 2005, 2006, and 2007 I was able to do this, getting down to about 150 songs for each year. I failed to accomplish this in 2008 and 2009. Of course, in 2009 there were nearly 600 more songs than in previous years, but still.
Part of the problem stems from the results of the 2005-2007 best-of play lists. There are a number of songs on these lists that I simply do not like any more. I can't understand why I put a few of them there in there in the first place. So, that poses an interesting question: if those songs are there, what did I delete and why?
With 2008 and 2009 I found myself deleting fewer and fewer songs. "Well, I don't really want to listen to that /now/ but what about later?" It's an interesting question, I think...but one that freezes decision making.
There's also the possibility that my inner pack-rat is being a little more assertive. Just a little.
Anyway, I'm 200 songs in, or so, and I'm finding the quality and caliber of music to be as varied as all the previous years offerings. There's some really great music and some really awful "music." For the record, I don't even bother with the death-metal. Sorry death-metal fans, but I'm so very done with having someone scream (gutturally) at me for four-and-a-half minutes straight. And most of the rap is predictably narcissistic.
Gallery software upgrade
Though we've not really been using it that much over the past year, I finally decided it was time to upgrade our online photo gallery software.
http://bernhard.us/photos/main.php
The previous version of the software was not tied to a database and had almost zero anti-spam tools. It was something of a mess.
The new version is much easier to manage, seems to be faster, and certainly offers more features. It took a while for me to migrate everything over from the old gallery install but I believe I've done it without losing anything. I've even managed to figure out how to get redirects to work so all the old url's automatically forward to the correct album in the new install.
Now, I just need to get back into the habit of uploading albums starting with the backlog of family photos. That task is only slightly daunting.
Into The Night
Check out this great time-lapsed video of Chicago along Lake Shore Drive.
Into the Night from kris.wm on Vimeo.
photoblog meta
Just an FYI: thanks to some help from an admin over on the PixelPost forum, the RSS feed for cetan.org now has click-able thumbnails.
I'd been meaning to implement this for ages but only recently got around to asking them how to actually do it.
Oh and if you're looking at the syndicated feed on LiveJournal, the reason 6 or so photos just showed up in your friends list is that syndication was completely h0rked. No feeds were coming through until they fixed it this afternoon and then the floodgates were opened.
random webness
Photographer Mike Stimpson re-creates famous photos in Lego
A few minutes at Kuroshio Aquarium in Japan. Shot in HD with a Digital SLR (Canon 5D Mark II). Click though to Vimeo to see it in HD.
Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.
edit: links fixed.
reconstituted
Thanks to efforts by 
moonwick the missing images from cetan.org have been restored and the blog is complete again.
From the first image to today's.
It feels good to be fully restored.
As an aside, when I restored the software portion of the site, I enabled some extra features I had not been using. Specifically, the "Archive" page now shows only 25 images at a time and allows you to scroll backwards a page at a time. Previously it was loading all the thumbnails on one page, which was really annoying. You can also browse by various categories and by month (again at 25 images-per page). Check it out by clicking on "Archive." The category options are currently at the bottom of the page.
ignotus facebokus
How an update to my facebook page is made:
I linked my twitter account to facebook so tweets show up as updates and I don't need to spend any time updating two accounts with the same worthless information.
twitter --> facebook
I update twitter through IM. Because official IM from twitter is technically broken, I have to use excla.im which sends updates for me.
excla.im --> twitter --> facebook
I don't have access to IM from anywhere but home, so I use a handy interface to IM from using IRC. This is called bitlbee. I connect to an IRC server running bitlbee
bitlbee --> excla.im --> twitter --> facebook
Like any good geek, I connect to IRC through the irssi client
irssi --> bitlbee --> excla.im --> twitter --> facebook
And of course, I'm keeping irssi running through screen on a shell account.
screen --> irssi --> bitlbee --> excla.im --> twitter --> facebook
And how does one connect to a shell account? Why through an SSH client, of course! (In my case either Putty or SecureCRT.)
securecrt --> screen --> irssi --> bitlbee --> excla.im --> twitter --> facebook
All of this so that my facebook page can tell you how I watched "No Reservations" last night and it was Chicago and it was a reasonably good episode.
----
As an aside, if I'm using Putty, that means I'm running Portable Putty off of my flash drive which should probably be described as:
usb --> putty --> screen --> irssi --> bitlbee --> excla.im --> twitter --> facebook
cetan dot org update
Just a quick update on my photoblog: cetan.org.
- Because only files and not the database were lost, I was able to reinstall the software and pick up where I left off. The problem, however, is that because the files are missing, the photo-portion of the blog is just empty past a certain date.
- Because I'm a stickler for details, I set up the software to not obfuscate the filenames of the images I uploaded. So I could, technically, retrieve all the filenames of the images from the database, match these to files on my computer, and copy the files up to the server, thus restoring the site. However, even with this information, it will be a lot of work, and I would still (probably) need to create all the thumbnails by hand. I'm holding out on possible data recovery from the problem hardware.
- cetan.org is syndicated on LiveJournal as
cetan_rss but they still are having problems with external feeds. Entries in the photoblog are not showing up for hours and hours. Silly LJ.
And I guess that's it for now. I'm trying to update once a day during the week mostly from the archives right now. I've been shooting film during the lunch hour and don't have anything developed yet, so it'll be a bit before anything "new" shows up. Also, the weather has made walking difficult and this weeks' range of high temps doesn't really help matters any.
Wordpress 2.7
I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7 today. The RSS feed might be a little messed up (it isn't showing me the latest entry in Google Reader). I'm not sure what happened there.
Otherwise, things are all different with the admin side of things. But it does have this "quickpress" feature for dropping in a short entry with a minimal amount of fuss. I'll take me a bit to figure out where all the features were moved to, but all in all, this feels like a solid upgrade.
RSS syndication on livejournal seems to be broken
I don't know why, but for some reason, getting the RSS feed for this blog to update on LiveJournal Syndication has always been annoyingly difficult. I have to go into the PHP code and modify the GMT off-set by hand (something that should already be set by the GMT off-set in the configuration but apparently wasn't good enough for LiveJournal.)
Of course, every time I update this WordPress install I have to go and re-edit the PHP files for RSS feeds.
Further complicating matters was that I seemed to have /no problem/ whatsoever having RSS updates from cetan.org show up rather quickly on LiveJournal. I don't know why, but It Just Worked (tm).
However, ever since the big LiveJournal server move nothing seems to be updating for hours and hours. I updated cetan.org this morning at about 6 am CST but it just now (~3 pm CST) it showed up on LiveJournal.
All the more reason, I guess, to use something like Google Reader for feeds rather than LiveJournal syndication.
Edit/update (2008/09/12) - Well, it seems like I'm not only one annoyed by this. Enter jwz:
http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=937843
200 words
The 200 most used words on this blog's latest 15 entries** (where size is a function of frequency) thanks to Wordle.net and nugget
See it larger: here
**Edit: It looks like this only grabs the latest entries off the RSS feed and is not a calculation of all entries. Oh well.
No more Flickr upload limits
Flickr has changed an important feature recently: if you are a paid user you are no longer restricted by a 2GB per month upload cap.
For a while now I've been considering using Flickr to archive my JPG files but have been concerned about the limit. But now, at only $25/year, this policy change will be a substantial storage opportunity and most importantly, the images can be kept private. Organization will be key to this whole project. What good is an archive if you can't find the files you may need?
Wordpress 2.5 preview
I've been rather happy with Wordpress as a tool for blogging. Since leaving LiveJournal, I've only found myself missing two features: Friends-Only posts and Voice Posts.
Voice Posts are a novelty item, I admit it, but the lack of friends-only posts has resulting in me simply not posting. Anything I would normally want for friends-only ends up being shelved and stored away.
Now, Wordpress 2.5 does not provide these features by any means, but it is a substantial update (or at least appears to be) to the tools I use to actually create posts. I'm looking forward to trying it out. Perhaps it will reinvigorate me to begin posting more regularly.
Disconnected
As I've indicated previously, I'm unable to spend much time online anymore and so have been ineffective in keeping up with reading the blogs or emails of friends and family. Prior to this, I felt like I was doing a poor job of staying connected with people. However, this change has shown me how much further things could (and have) slipped. I feel very isolated and frustrated by the forces preventing me from staying more connected.
I have a copy of AbiWord Portable installed on a USB key now, with the hope that this will allow me the ability to write while at work without needing to be online. None of what I write will be stored outside the key itself, which makes me feel more comfortable. However, there's still the issue of getting it onto the blog complete with working links and (when applicable) photos.
It occurs to me that without much connection to the "virtual" world, I feel what I do have to say has little value anyway. Certainly my blog has not been the bastion of culture and enlightenment, (how many entries are not about either Nathan or photography?), but it has been important to me to keep communications between friends open. We don't get to visit with people as often as we'd like and so blogging seems to be the next best thing.
Perhaps one aspect of my frustration is that I've bitten off more than I can chew. I have this blog, the photoblog, a flickr community, and a dozen domains in various states of disrepair. So many unfinished projects and ideas dragging around my virtual sandbox weighs heavily on me.
I guess I just want to say: I'm sorry for not keeping up with what's been going on. It's not that I don't care. If I had the opportunity I would read and respond to every post and email. But sadly, for now, that won't be an option. I'll read what I can, when I can and I hope to post a little more frequently too.