Older blog entries for highgeek (starting at number 34)

Universal's Plan to conquer the media world

I found this article with a rough vision of Universals plans. It reminds me a lot of the Media Monopoly that has been discussed over the years and has been portrait in many articles, movies and books (media!?!). ;-)

I haven't heard anything about the Courtney Love trial. It would be very interesting to see how that is going.

Work

It has been pretty slow and akward lately. I am not really sure what to think of it all. I have been trying to get stuff done, but it is hard to motivate myself under these conditions. I have been trying to dive back into music to keep myself from going nuts over this stuff.

Product Warranty

It is really hard for me to tell if buying something that is pretty expensive and top of the line is going to be something better to get then something mediocre that doesn't have such a big drain in my wallet. Most of the time though, buying something that is entry level or average tends to not work or barely work good enough for it to be of any use or provide a benefit.

The more I look at it just about everything has a warranty that states you should have no manufactoring defects for X amount of time. But what about the fact that most things manufactored have a really short product life span. So you spend the extra money so you would have something useful, but then it looks like that roughly when the warranty has worn off it breaks and you have to buy a new one anyways.

Things aren't build to last forever anymore. Maybe this is something that I still have in me from having grown up in Europe, but things just seem to fall apart after barely any use. The only way to have it last longer is if you make it a full time job to maintain it and take care of it like it is the most precious jewel you have ever seen. So you get frustrated if you spend money on the low end and it doesn't have enough features to be remotely useful. Or you spend an arm and a leg on something and so it can be depreciated, replaced or simply be rendered useless after a very short time. Frustrating I tell you!

Music Industry

ask, this doesn't really come with too much of a surprise. Universal is the biggest record label around. They probably have the most money and have been squeezing artists the longest. See this article for some third party insight.

My view on MP3.com history

The most interesting point of this all, is that we started out MP3.com as an alternative way to distribute music. A way to find out about all the different music in the world to find the music you wanted to listen to without having the labels pre-pick your favorite music style for you. We seem to totally have gone full circle to a point to where we aligned with Emusic who had a totally different strategy which was very much aligned to the old record label A&R way of doing things.

I guess it is too hard to really find the good stuff via a big single source like we had hoped. We figured people could "rate" (download) the songs they liked and therefore bump it up the charts. This would be a way to provide the music the world wanted not what some folks in the A&R group at a random record label thought you would want to hear.

So maybe your best bet would still be the small indie label that has interests in the particular style of music you like, as long as they do not get corrupted by seeing dollar signs.

Again, this is a good example of what record labels have done soo well and continue to do well in the past. Use money to make money. The original goal of having internet distribution for all artists without serious costs to provide a closer link between the artist and music consumer seems to have been shot. Mass media has always been controlled by only a few companies in the world that can easily leave out important information for financial gain. This only proves the fact that money conquers.

Although going public gave us a lot of money and power to play with it also brought a lot of stock holders and investors in on the game that were looking only at profits. This caused the focus of the company to change drasticly towards making money. At least to me the company slowly changed their goals after IPO. It was no longer the same goal we were fighting for.

Online Audio Distribution Technology

The most interesting part to me would be to see how the Technology side will pack out now that the majors are starting to get their feet wet. Will MP3 and Vorbis which still stand as the consumer favorite come out of this alive? Or will DRM-type formats surpass the more open standards because consumers want to pay for someone to sift through the music (record labels) to present them with something that has been mass marketed over the radio and television. My.MP3.com was a great technological idea that tried to provide a way to deliver your music to you digitally where ever you where (provided you had connectivity). Of course this is only useful if you can store a lot of music and if it would be easier then lugging around a CD-ROMs with your favorite MP3s on it.

On the streaming side of things it will be interesting to see if semi-new IETF streaming standards such as RTSP, RTP, SIP and the like will be used by any of these companies that are building this subscription service for the record labels. So far the only a few that have started using RTSP such Apple Quicktime and Real Networks RealPlayer and JMF (Cacheflow, Sun StoreEdge and others have created Servers, Proxies, Mixers and Translators). So there is some support for streaming Vorbis and/or MP3 over RTSP/RTP, but not too much.

From what I know about the Online Music Industry most companies that are distributing music are using HTTP derrivates such as Shoutcast, Icecast or just a M3U based hand off to an HTTP capable audio client. Although it has been effective alternatives now exist that are more reliable and scalable (but also more complex and harder to implement), most distribution companies haven't taken advantage of these new standards. Maybe now that it will be a lot less about investors, it will become more of a technology gain. Hopefully some of my old co-workers are reading this and start looking at some of these new protocols.

Maybe I will find some more time to play with this stuff. Also the XML/DC/MusicBrainz/ID3v2/CDDB/MPEG-7 stuff is a good hobby of mine. It is interesting how a lot of this audio stuff is crossing over into my usual XML/HTTP development that is done for work. It is great to have them overlap every once in a while, but sometimes I wish they could be two totally seperate beasts.

Anyways, back to work. ;-)

A few months ago, I was wondering why my old stomping grounds were not in on either Duet or MusicNet, but this event explains it. So now it will be interesting to see what is going to happen. It almost looks very much like a RTSP vs. HTTP battle from a technology stand point.

Politics

I am starting to get really annoyed at little things that people do. I just hope I won't go crazy. It is good to be in San Diego. It gives me some time to look at the beach, do a couple of climbs, hikes and backpacks in the area to get away from it. I really just need to get more time to play with fun things such my keyboard and MacOS X. All will be good, got nothing to complain about really.

This is a bit old but looks like Courtney Love is at it again. Fighting for fair rights for musicians around the world. This is like money versus a *lot* of money. I wish her all the best and I am happy to see some take the stand. Go Courtney!

San Francisco

I will be up in San Francisco again next week. Doing the work thing and finding some time to hang out with random folks including friends from the office. Should be a challenging but good time.

Audio and Apache

Woke up this sunday morning finding out that krow saw my presentation at ApacheCon and decided to take the hint of writing a mod_icecast for Apache. It is pretty cool how you can show people the way, when you are busy doing other things, at a conference. I am happy to see that someone brought the idea to life, now we will have to see it live to a final release. I put my slides and notes up on my website.

ApacheCon 2001

A few hours ago I finished my talk about Audio and Apache at ApacheCon in Santa Clara. It turned out to be a pretty well attended talk. I had some issues with getting slides going because my laptop had been behaving badly because of the broken i, k,, keys.

I had brought up a point of how increasing the TimeOut directive seemed to have kept more streams alive then having the default time out and this brought up some discussions with some members of the ASF such as gregames, mjcox and dirkx. It was good to hear the discussion on this especially cause i never really thought much about it.

The mod_perl BOF was fun. We totally surrounded our friendly python co-worker, Jick. Met some more of the mod_perl folks that I had not met yet in London or Orlando. Perrin and buddy did a nice talk on some of the architecture done at Etoys.

And I also spend some time catching up with the Covalent folks which was very much needed. Over all a very good conference with lots of great people to talk and hang out with.

Work and Code

I have been hacking at home on work which has been a lot of fun and I am finally getting the hang on things again. I ended up missing the mod_xslt BOF which I am still kinda bumbed about, so if you were in this, please let me know how to get on the mailing list if there ever is one started. I was up pretty late the night before working on code and slides.

Weekend

I am spending the weekend in SF hopefully meeting up with fanf and lars then back to code on Monday. Looks like my SF Studio is finally rented out as well. Which is a big sigh of relief off of my shoulders.

I can't wait to get back into code after a great week like this! I really wish I had time to hack on MacOS X, so far from what I have seen it is a dream come true from a nice GUI with BSD underneath.

Boy has it been good being back in San Diego. I get to code from my own home on my own Aeron Chair. It took a little cleaning up and getting my head back into code. Things are still very busy, but I am starting to feel much better about a lot of things.

ApacheCon 2001

I just recently turned in my ApacheCon paper that talks about how to deliver audio over the net and how it integrates with the Apache HTTPD. It is a pretty basic level paper, but a good recap of what is going on and documents some of the stuff that I have always wanted people had documented. It wasn't the best paper written, in some sense it was a rush job, but still had has some nice jewels in there for those not too familiar with the audio streaming scene.

Other

I haven't had much time to work on other things. I just got a new Ultra 10 at the home office now, but I haven't even turned it on yet. Too many things to play with and soo little motivated time.

I still haven't found anyone to move into my NorthPoint studio in North Beach, San Francisco and I will never find any time to work on some of my organizing projects and catagorization of things around the house.

Work and code

Not much (any?) work was done this weekend and I will be driving up from San Diego to San Francisco in a few minutes.

Read some of the Google research paper (jauderho), and looked at some of the Freehaven ones mentioned by raph, but I will probably not be able to give a thorough read till sometime next week.

Busy Week Ahead

I have a busy week ahead of me, which includes moving stuff from San Francisco to San Diego and many design meetings, read up on their docs and being able to provide some constructive feedback.

My friend Martin is moving back to Italy next week, so it would be nice to be able to spend some time with him as well. Just too many things to do with soo little time.

Still have to do taxes and talk to Pacbell about why I do not want to pay a DSL bill of two months when I only had service for about 2 minutes.

Btw, wish dirkx a happy birthday! ;-)

I just found out about a new fun site to keep track of my alter ego. So from now on my music, clothing, hair color and alternative diary entries will be found there. One of these days I will incorporate the XML into my personal site dynamicly. Hmm.. wish I had the time to do that. ;-)

I have been finishing up my patches to the autoconf/libtool stuff for Apache HTTPD 2.0 to build it outside the source tree. There were some dependencies that didn't work together too well with APR and APR-UTIL. I should be able to post this on the APR/new-httpd list later today or tomorrow.

I have noticed a lot of people talking in their diaries about e-smith which I decided to take a quick look at. Pretty interesting project, it looks like a KDE/GNOME type play, but more on the server side of things.

Friends

I have been spending a decent amount of time in the evenings hang out with dirkx, ardy, harrie, fanf and harrie. Talking about most of the different drives between people in Europe versus the US and big corporations, consulting and start ups. Overall an enlightening conversation that touches on some of the Ph.D. points mentioned in peoples diaries such as neale and chromatic. I might find the time to write up roughly what we discussed.

Environment

mbp: I love my Aeron Chair. I had one at MP3.com, demanded for one in my negotiations with Covalent and now even have one for home. ;-) They are expensive, but are a lot cheaper then replacing your back or productivity.

On the same topic anyone know of a fully split keyboard (ala Interfaces) that is very sturdy without a number keypad? The interfaces was pretty close to what I wanted (it even had the double '6's), but it would nice to ditch the number keypad and have a more old school ibm style keyboard.