All posts by mike.hochanadel

Who I'd like to meet: Ray Kurzweil, Jimi Hendrix, The Chemical Brothers, Jesus, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Orson Wells, Jack Black, Foxy Brown, and Laetitia Casta Interests: Computers, movies, music (listening, playing, collecting), football, games, puzzles, math, philosophy, poetry, reading, comedy, science fiction, billiards, video, podcasts Music: Radiohead, Black Crowes, Air, The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Everything except new country, hip pop, ska/new punk, and 80's music. Movies: Cult movies, Star Wars, Science Fiction, Comedy, Independent, Foreign TV: Mystery Science Theater 3000, Red Dwarf, Dr. Who, Seinfeld, Conan O'Brien, Married: with Children, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show, SCTV, The Kids in the Hall, Saturday Night Live (10 years ago) Books: Atlas Shrugged, The Foundtainhead, Cuckoo's Egg, All Michael Chricton books, Frankenstein, American Indian Myths and Legends, Star Wars books, Indiana Jones books, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, Artificial Intelliegence: A Modern Aproach Heroes: Neil Young, Thome Yorke, Ray Kurzweil, Edgar Allen Poe, Akira Kurasawa, Indiana Jones, The Chemical Brothers Sports: Billiards, Football, Kansas City Chiefs, Kansas City Royals, Professional Wrestling, Kansas State University Athletics About Me: What can I say? I'm usually there to give a helping hand and a laugh. A smart guy who is on his way to realizing his potential. I can be opinionated at times, though. But hey, if everybody thought the same thing, it would be real boring! Video Games: Myst, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Monty Python's Holy Grail, Hexagon, Quake III, NCAA Football, Wrestlemania 2000, Metroid Series, Mega Man Series, Super Dodge Ball

I’m as Free as a Songbird 1.0 Now

After a Thanksgiving hiatus, I’m back and while you are a recovering from the holidays and from my tacky headline, I want to talk about the Songbird 1.0 release.  A lot of other media outlets have covered this release so far, but I wanted to give my take on the media player.  I first found out about Songbird 1.0 since it was announced way back in 2005.  Since then, with each new point release, I’ve downloaded and played with its features.  It’s great to see the evolution of what it was to where it is today.  But some of the issues I’ve had with seem to persist.

The Songbird bird project kicked off in response to the closed sourced media players dominating the choices serious music fans could make.  In the spirit of Firefox, they developed (using Mozilla’s rendering engine) a media player that also browses the web much like Firefox.  What that introduced were new channels of music discovery and collaboration.  It was a good idea to start with and we’re now starting to see a solid base with which other services can build from Songbird.

This took forever on my 300,000+ catalog
This took forever on my 300,000+ catalog

Songbird still has some work left, however.  It seems the goal for the project is to get to the heavy music enthusiasts first and let it float on down to casual music fans.  Importing large libraries and working with them should be a top priority.  For each point release, it seems with my library, which tops 3 digits in gigabytes, Songbird struggles during the initial import and thereafter.  Yes it’s a lot of media to work with but if they want to top my current use of Winamp, they need to resolve that real soon.

The other issues I’ve experienced are somewhat trivial but nagging nonetheless.  They dropped PPC support for the Mac after the 0.7 release, which hinders me because of the Macs I still have running around at home.  Songbird has issues switching between the main view and the mini player view.  Lastly, podcast support is absent in the 1.0 release.  The only, seriously the ONLY, reason I use iTunes is for the podcast support.  If Songbird can champion that, I’ll abandon iTunes.

Not Only is Skreemr Integrated, But I Can Download Direct at the Bottom
Not Only is Skreemr Integrated, But I Can Download Direct at the Bottom

There are some great things about Songbird that make it a contender in the media player market.  The one that most appeals to me is how it displays all media on the bottom of a web page you are browsing.  Say you are hitting up your favorite music blog.  Usually there’s media floating around on the page and you have to scroll around to find it.  This feature collects all of the media at the bottom and allows you to work directly with the files.

Songbird also has some developmental and extensibility features that put it head and shoulders above the rest.  Around the 0.5 release they split out development of Songbird into four factions: Themes, Extensions, Web Development, and Core Development.  This provided a clear path for all different types of coders to contribute to the project.  The most exciting one to me is the Web Development portion because of the API they provide.  You can use the API to setup your own ‘store’ to sell music as opposed to the store that iTunes locks you into.  The other development factions mirrors that of the Firefox community and I think we all know how well that put Firefox ahead in terms of browser potential.

It’s great to see Songbird hit 1.0 and I look forward to finally getting in there and digging around in the code.  Somebody needs to improve super large library performance.  I’ve downloaded the source and compiled it, also setting up the dev kit for extensions, but that’s been in the days of TRAC as it now looks like to they switched to Deki Community Edition form Mindtouch.  Hello, Songbird, it’s time we meet again, now that your finally out of your shell.

Yang is Out as CEO of Yahoo!, I Hope My Fantasty Team is Okay

So while I was working out for the first time in forever earlier tonight (thank you fall cold), the CNBC people had a breaking news item that Jerry Yang dropped out as CEO of Yahoo!  I’m out of the shower now and, to no surprise, TechCrunch had it blasted on their front page.  Yang will step down and take his old job as Chief Yahoo (really?), and the search is on for a replacement CEO.  Is it too little too late?  I’m not sure.  When I think about the history of Yahoo! and my experiences with them, I’m leaning toward yes.

Yahoo! for me back in the day started out as the search engine to end all search engines.  Well, actually it was an index first before it became a search engine.  They competed with the likes of Alta Vista and came out on top.  When you’re on top, the only thing you can do is expand your business.  And boy did Yahoo! ever.  They started spitting out products left and right.   I still use some of their products today.  Their mail and messenger application being among the set.

But with every neat and cool application that came out, there were some duds.  Their Groups community was cool but I never really took to it, even though I was active in a group for my Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class.  Yahoo! was the first to introduce the concept of a ‘Profile’ but it was always hard to find and never really consistent, which is the biggest problem with Yahoo! They branched out but could never keep things consistent across all of their properties.

I enjoy BrightKite thouroughly (follow me at http://brightkite.com/people/hokey) , and when Yahoo! came out with a competitor, Fire Eagle, I jumped in as soon as I could in the hopes of integrating that with my messenger profile and other areas of Yahoo!  But there was no integration at all.  This kind of fragmentation is what burned Rome down and I’m fairly certain that it also dropped Yahoo! down to where it is now.

I hope when Yahoo! finds a new CEO, I hope they start first with consolidating every property across Yahoo!  They are consistent in some places and they excel at those places.  Yahoo! Games is still very popular and the Fantasy Sports area is the best of its kind.  They are going to need some help, and they are taking a step in the right direction by implementing their Yahoo! Open Strategy.  Let’s hope they turn it around.

Turn the ZOOZBeat Around

The guys over at TechCrunch today brought the attention to an announcement that ZOOZBeat is availible for the Nokia N95.  I’ve seen some other music software float around the net for mobile phones.  It’s always nice to see some people who share the same love for music and technology bring out new ways to create music on these tiny devices.  Ever since college, there always seemed to be at least one obscure company that would produce a sequencer or synthesizer for a device that wasn’t originally intended to be musical.

I specifically remember an instance back in college where a programmer buddy of mine one day was touting a drum sequencer program for a Texas Instrument graphing calculator, from what I remember.  For some reason, with the people I hang out with, the integration of music and technology has always been there.  Checking out the videos from the link about, it seems like the ZOOZ folks share that same fascination.  Good luck to those guys.

Where will the boundaries stop?  There is a quiet buzz about the age of convergence, but it seems like devices are still split apart.  Granted the iPhone is pushing that boundry, but smart phones with Windows Mobile have been around for awhile.  You see netbooks this year as a new iteration of devices, so I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some company, big or small, build a custom hardware/software rig geared toward music creation on netbooks.  Really they are tiny XP/Linux machines anyway.

Maybe that would be a direction some other company can take to produce affordable, pro-sumer type equipment.  I’m looking at you Creative.  Much of the music nowadays is remixable, bedroom type production.  Perhaps a netbook with an iPhone interacting with it on top of a wireless remotted Nintendo DSi all controlling the massive rigs you see at Nine Inch Nails concerts is the wave of the future.  I certainly hope so.

Subversion Install Swankiness Part I

Here we go with the newly decided first part of my Subversion install series.  I decided to break it up into smaller chunks of articles as the first part really is the installation/setup part and the second is the integration/deploying part.  So with this first part we’re gonna talk about downloading, verification, repository setup, and Apache integration.  I’ll make it short and sweet as possible but grab a cup of joe so we can get started.

When figuring out how I should download Subversion, I weighed many options.  I could either grab the source from their website at Tigris or install from Ubuntu’s repository.  The hardcore geek in me wanted to compile from source, but I really wanted to roll out the software quick so I can focus on the blog code.  Also  updates trickle down from Ubuntu with relative automation, so I went with acquiring the binary from Ubuntu.  It really makes sense to knock out the binaries for tools surrounding a project and focus on source for project related code.  Why waste your time setting up a utility when it’s the poject you should be working on?

Continue reading Subversion Install Swankiness Part I

From Hypothesis to Well Tested Theora

So Wednesday I scrolled through the Google Reader roll and I found out, thanks to OStatic, that the Theora video codec reached the 1.0 release.  What is Theora?  It’s part of the same community at Xiph.org that hosts the the Vorbis codec for audio.  What is Vorbis?  It’s a completely open source audio compression technology brought up in response to Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’s announcement of charging for the license of the MP3 codec.  So Theora follows in that same tradition and is a completely open sourced video codec.

Usually when projects from work come down my pike, I use ffmpeg to transcode video between formats.  I don’t get that much exposure to the high powered equipment that the producers use to export video.  But when some deadlines must be met, I usually get the task of taking some media, whether it’s from Beta, DVD, or others, and spitting it out to their requirements.

The two machines that compete for my time is a Windows 2000 workstation and a build of Ubuntu Studio Linux.  The nice thing about the W2k build is that I can capture video from Beta with relative ease.  For moving media around bitwise, the Linux build with ffmpeg works out way better.  Batch processing on the Linux machine makes it a snap to script up custom projects and let them roll.  What I haven’t had to opportunity to do is to work with Theora.

Theora and Vorbis haven’t had the kind of uptake MP3 has had in the media arena, mainly due to being late in the game.  When I take on projects, I’ll still probably stick with ffmpeg.  My interest is piqueued however, and I may just drop in the new 1.0 release of Theora to see if I can gain any improvements compared to my other methods of turning out video.  That’s the great thing about open source, you’re free to work with and it gives you room for improvement for a low cost.