The second album is an anthology (2006) of some of English band Stereolab’s greatest hits while on the label Elektra Records. It’s a chronological collection of some of their best songs and they are all great listens. You do notice the sonic evolution throughout the album and it makes for a very interesting listening experience. Also a great album.

I hope you enjoy both albums! If you want to preview them I highly recommend Spotify. Thanks João for the recommendation of Spotify

All the tracks are free downloads on their website and I do encourage you to check out more of their releases and support them if you really like their music.

All fires have to burn alive to live…

(Apologies for the strangeness of the last entries, but I just couldn’t let this gem slide past. Hope you like it!)

In their (quite nice!) official website you can download two awesome tracks: Luscious Life and Giver. Hope you like it.

Oh, and I just noticed that the WordPress update ruined my K2 layout! I’ll try to fix it when I get my free time back after this awful exam period. Sorry about that!

These two video clips will give you a sampler of two amazing tracks from the album, and they are pretty cool videoclips themselves. Hope you like it.

You can listen to some of their songs on their MySpace page (unfortunately their official website points there, I’m not too fond of MySpace either). They need to be more listened to, so I hope you also like them!

You can listen to Bitten By The Tailfly on grooveshark lite, which is in a totally different style than their most recent work. Also, if you enjoyed this album you do want to check out the rest of their work, especially Cast of Thousands, which has some really great tracks.

You can listen to a neat selection of tracks from it on the band’s official website (I also really highlight Bend Over Beethoven which is not available there).  Hope you like it!

First off, society, as in massive global force of masses. It shapes you, it forces you into thinking stuff, it is one of the primary forces in your mind growth, whether you like it or not. It’s there and you can’t avoid it. You are part of it without being aware, and you must fit. Commercial companies use this to their advantage, through trends! Trends are the ultimate capitalization of society. It is using society to make you think something that everyone thinks. Trends can be created through advertisement, media, and sometimes, a really really genious one, through word of mouth, but it’s rare. And you end up being the trends and all your behaviour is modelled after them.

Now, how do you live your life? You can live for the now, and you do while you’re a teenager, but that gets boring after a while. Some people get lost amongst complicated relationships and that I can understand. But for other people, their short term goal of getting a degree IS their long term goal! And then they get lost when they realize that the degree is not the end and be all of life’s problems. Then they get shocked and get into a working life, which gets monotonous after a while. And they spice it up through “entertainment”.

They look at entrepreneurs and successful people and think “That guy got lucky”, or “I’m not smart enough” or “I can’t do that”. I say, why not? WHY do you insist that you aren’t smart enough? Give it a shot, give your best, use yourself as best as you can, explore whatever you see interests you most… but explore! Don’t just wait for stuff to go raining on your forehead, your dreams are more important than that.

Now when you say how bad some real world situation is it boils down to this…  you made it that way, but it’s not your fault, a lot of the “big” guys aren’t smarter than you but they make you think they are. Because they want to stay big! And they make you be in the same mindset which is so goddamn appealing to them. In my opinion, it’s really a question of mindset.

If we want to change “the world” we must change the mindset. This is a really bold statement. I’m saying that the way certain people think is dragging everything down for the majority, and upwards for a select minority whichs takes advantage of it. It’s the minorities’ fault though, the mindset creators and keepers. It feels right to everyone and it’s reinforced by millions!

How can we change it?

* Make people unite forcibly => catastrophe, war!  That would work, but it would make some terrible conditions. In my opinion it is the only way to change the mindset quickly, but undesirable.

* Influence: Use the exact same channels that created the mindset to tear it apart. Social media, like radio and TV is obviously controlled by big companies, so there isn’t much one can do. There were ham radio stations and that was great, but too local and restricted.  We have a new media though, the internet. It is uncentralized by design, so no one can control it. Just think about it. It allows anyone to have a voice to say whatever they want. More importantly it creates diversity in mindset through the diverse cultures which interact. It also gives you contact with different realities and shows you what mainstream media tries to hide. So get the word out there about documentaries like Steal This Film or storyofstuff.com! Get people using the internet. Get the word out about podcasts. And then challenge people to make content. Make everyone see how “special people” are just people who worked hard to create the opportunities. Luck is created, opportunities are made.

Don’t just stand there! Do something!

References:

• Steal this film
• storyofstuff.com
• Where do people find the time (via clusterflock)
  

Thanks to Afi, Ana,  Hok, Mafalda, Marita, Rui and Sofia for the wonderful opinions and input, and for all the motivation for finally getting this post out!

I’m loving it and I hope you like it as well. However, variety is the spice of life (wait, what?).  So, I want to spruce things up a little bit and start posting about other stuff. In several occasions in the past I did some drafts that I then decided not to publish because I wasn’t entirely happy with how they sounded. However, I’m done with that. I’ll leave it to you guys to decide if you like them or not. So, I’ll be finishing up and posting the drafts that have been accumulating in my draft folder (before they stop making sense!).

“But I only really care about the music!”. Feel free to follow the “Album of the Week” category then . I’ll try to never forget to put the posts in the appropriate categories!

I’d also like to start another regular thing like the album of the week, because it seems to work pretty well and it’s a lot of fun. Any suggestions? Nothing more frequent than weekly please, I would go crazy. Thanks!

I really look forward to checking out more of their work and I probably should! You can listen to another amazing track from the album (Saturday), on grooveshark lite.

You can listen to My Girls on grooveshark lite, which by the way didn’t stop popping in my head relentlessly during the rest of the day. Have fun kicking it out!

You can listen to a great song from it, Fools, from their official website. Enjoy!

As usual, you can listen to a song from it on grooveshark lite. If you liked this and weren’t familiar with both Calexico and Iron and Wine I recommend checking out their solo work as well!

You can listen to The Man Who Told Everything on grooveshark lite. Enjoy! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go to their show as it sold out, but I’d definitely like to go to their concert while here in London.

Also, feedback is more than welcome, the comment threads have been empty lately, so if you have words of win or fail please leave them in the comments!

You can listen to some amazing tracks from it on their website.

Instrumentally it is pretty much standard rock but melodically and vocally I find it to be quite unique. Their songs also have an evolving feel to them, and indeed some of them are quite huge in duration. You can listen to some songs from their official website, and last time I tried it kicked right off with the album opener Going Against Your Mind, which at 8:42 duration is a prime example of the evolution that I just mentioned. Enjoy!

Their debut album is free to stream from last.fm, so no excuse not to check it out! As usual, if you like it, I’d suggest buying a copy to support this amazing starting band, which is already so promising.

Also, they’re coming to London on the 17th February and I’ve already got my tickets! Can’t wait!

I’ve been revisiting some music I had in my hard drive and this 2006 album struck me for its diversity and experimentalism throughout. I’m talking about the album (with a huge title) I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, by the American band Yo La Tengo. The two sample tracks below are available on their website and show pretty well the diversity that’s part of the album, from quite noisy and edgy to mellow and playful. Give it a listen!

Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind:
Beanbag Chair:

Working for a Nuclear Free City

Full streaming tracks from last.fm so no excuse for not checking them out!

This album has an urban quietness to it that I really appreciate, if that makes any sense. It’s an amazing album to daydream to, as I find it very evocative of urban landscapes. I also really like the way that it’s not overmastered which lends to its quietness and dreamy feeling.

Enough of my lousy attempt at trying to describe what you’ll feel, go listen to it and experience for yourself! Highly recommended.

If you want to use it you need to create an xml folder and create in there a file named current.xml with the XML from twitter that you want to organize and groups.xml with the following structure:

<groups>
  <group name="Test">
    <user>username</user>
  </group>
</groups>

One group entry per group and one user entry per user in group. That should be it, if you browse to the index.xml file in the main directory you should then get a visualisation of the grouped tweets along with a row in the top of the document with buttons that toggle each group (with some jquery hiding goodness and some quick css):

Also in the repo are merge, count and “id of the first tweet” xsl files that I used to do a simple batch script that updates the feed (using curl and Xalan to fetch 200 updates at a time until there are no more updates to fetch merging it all in the current.xml). It is all very raw and quickly put together at the moment, but in the future I might add more features and make it into a client. However, I hope this might help someone to get into XSLT. I found it to be very interesting and quite powerful and look forward to using it in the future.

This week I’ll highlight another of my all-time favourite bands. When I went to see them in Shepherd’s Bush Empire (with the Dodos!) I hadn’t yet heard the new album and was blown away by the new songs. It really is an extraordinary album, which was originally devised as the second part of The Stage Names (as the matching artwork shows), another extraordinary album. This one has a surprising farewell song, Lost Coastlines, with Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg doing a smooth vocal along with Will Sheff, which makes this song one of the most memorable songs, comparing their experience as a band to an epic boat journey, and collapsing into an epic chant of “la la la”. Also lyricswise, some very interesting meta criticism of pop singers in Pop Lie, “and you’re lying when you sing along”. Instrumentally diverse and very unique, highly recommended indeed!

Update: I guess I forgot to mention the band I was talking about! It was in the cover art, but for the record I’m talking about the awesome american band Okkervil River.

This album captivated my attention from the first listen, and it is totally representative of what I look for in music. It is very unique, in times edgy, in times funny (lovely lyrics), extremely varied and very organic. I genuinely think that there is something in it for everyone. If you hate it, sorry that it’s not for you, but I’m being totally honest in here, I adored this album and listened to it endlessly. I particularly love the instrument variety and the drum work in the album, which makes some drum parts the lead parts for me and makes the drums feel like part of the arrangement and not just filler. I would highlight every track of it (maybe a bit less for Where There’s a Will There’s a Whalebone rap), and here is the amazing and epic album opener Swans (Life After Death):

Frightened Rabbit are a Scottish indie rock band from Selkirk, Scotland, consisting of Scott Hutchison (vocals, guitar), Grant Hutchison (drums, vocals), Billy Kennedy (guitar, keyboards, bass) and Andy Monaghan (keyboards, guitar, bass). The band has so far released two studio albums, with their second, The Midnight Organ Fight, receiving widespread critical acclaim.

Indeed it is an amazing album! I love almost the entire album, with particular highlights for The Modern Leper, Good Arms vs Bad Arms, Backwards Walk and Keep Yourself Warm. The lyrics range from very brutal and real to very subjective but clearly personal. I really like the musical arrangements and the overall uniqueness of their sound as well as the emotional vocals. I haven’t yet checked out their early work (except for the christmas albums) but I really look forward to it. Meanwhile, as their awesome label (FatCat) allows you to preview full-length at their website, I highly encourage you to go listen to it and if you like it, buy the album.

“’It’s Christmas…’ is about people deciding to be pleasant to one another for about a day, regardless of whether or not they actually get along the rest of the year. There’s the same fallout after christmas as perhaps a night out where you end up in someone else’s bed – the next day, after the drink has worn off and the warm lights are turned off, everything’s just as shit as it was the day before and that feeling of comfort disappears. I feel like i have a similar relationship with christmas as i do with booze. Each make me feel nice in a fairly false way, and they are really the only two things i actually spend money on, aside from food. It’s also about that total indulgence period, which always comes with the promise that you’ll eat less, drink less and spend less really, really soon… always tomorrow. I feel it’s maybe healthier to live a little more consistently (not that i do), but often humans need excuses to be nice and giving and loving to one another, and Christmas is one of those times, for better or worse’.

(from FatCat via Wikipedia)

Frightened Rabbit – It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop (2008 version):

I totally agree that that is how such celebrations remain important and significant for most people, even when their original meaning was lost. So let’s make it our resolution to keep some of the positiveness of this season alive throughout all 2009, so that when Christmas comes, we’ll be motivated to be even better!

If you liked this, check out the amazing choir version and the rest of their work, it’s a fantastic band.

Happy new year!

The usual approach is to search for bindings existing for the language, and usually there will already have been someone who made the bindings, neatly packaged them and released them for you to use. The problem occurs when there are no such bindings available, which happens more frequently for less mainstream languages (like my beloved Common Lisp). Sometimes there are some incomplete bindings that someone posted, which don’t cover all the cases. However bindings are fairly easy to do, even though they are not that easy to structure properly.

In fact, invoking and getting values back is the easier part, usually you just use some built-in construct to invoke the native procedure, and the FFI takes care of the low-level bindings, and sometimes even memory management. However, in order to feel like it is part of the language, we have to build the proper abstractions around the native calls that make it feel idiomatic. For instance, in the case of Haskell, care has to be taken to properly handle side effects, and create a pure, referentially transparent haskell function.

To make it easier, for the direct bindings one can use wrapper generators like swig. These usually consume a header file and produce a language file full of the direct wrappings of the native functions. Then, using these functions one can use the higher-level features of the language and encapsulate it in the way that we feel a library for that purpose in the target language must be like. In the end, we end up with a library that feels natural in the target language and as long as we took the relevant precautions, has all the characteristics of the language that we love.

That is all. So, next time you find yourself thinking “why doesn’t <language here> have bindings for <library here>? <other language here> has them!” don’t ignore the possibility of building the bindings. It is not as hard as it looks (and way more fun than it sounds!), and if you get them completely right and idiomatic you can even help people by publishing them.

I really like the city and especially South Kensington, where the campus is located. There is clearly a great deal of concern with keeping the original building facades and so the whole city feels like a city with history. The campus has an interesting clash between the modern and the historical, with the Queen’s Tower right in the middle of modern glassy buildings. It really is an interesting place to work in.

Moreover, I’m loving the facilities of the college and especially the sense of community that the college has in its core. Right from the very initial introductions we are urged to join a society of something that interests us. In fact, the amount and diversity of societies is astonishing and there is surely something that anyone would find interesting among them. If not, you are urged to start your own!

As for the weather, it’s been really good lately, with clear skies and sunny days, but I’m sure that will soon change and give way to the permanent rain that London is so well known for. In the meantime, I’m sure I’ll have a lot of work to do!

Update: I transferred to Computing Science (Specialist Pathway) as I missed Computing in my course.

If you have any suggestions of improvement or criticisms, do post them in the comments. Thank you! Enjoy your visit : )

* i.e. stream of all the stuff I post around the web (more info)

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All this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Portugal License.

I recently finished reading a book I had bought a long time ago but never read, Michael Crichton‘s latest book, NEXT (the author is known for the book Jurassic Park, which inspired the popular movie with the same name). It was the first of his books which I read, and I must say I did enjoy it a lot. Just when I started reading it, I noticed that in the end there were appendices… interesting, I thought, let’s check them out. One of them turned out to be the author’s opinion on the subjects and situations described in the novel and the other one a bibliography. That blew me away, it’s really refreshing to see a book which: (1) attempts to be clear about the author’s opinion, (2) tells you where you can find more information about what is narrated. It reveals that the author has done his research and is actually trying to say something relevant in an enjoyable way (through a fictional story).

The story in itself is really interesting and the beginning of the book is really fast and addictive with a lot of stuff happening at the same time. In my opinion it slowed a bit in the middle where no major points were being made, and so it is maybe a bit too long. Despite that, I found the book extremely refreshing because it was really trying to be clear about what it was trying to say and didn’t assume that everyone would see everything happening between the lines and figure out the points being made. Even though that can be rewarding for whomever gets it, it only works for people in the author’s mindset. And that would be a shame because some of the points were really important and great food for thought. In fact, I noticed that I assumed that a lot more of what was happening was fiction than it actually was (MINOR SPOILERS in the link).

For instance, I had no idea there were patents being issued for GENES. Just the concept of it is really weird.. how can you patent something you just happened to stumble upon and understand (or made several tests with coincidental results). But it is frighteningly real! In fact, Crichton depicts in the book some legal implications of those patents which are pretty ridiculous and make you wonder if they could ever happen. It makes you realize how in a trial, when the subject in consideration is not fully understood by the judges, lawyers are able to manipulate it to serve their goals. This leads to misinformed decisions, which are of the worst kind. And ultimately, overprotecting commercial interests just kills research, knowledge and the consumers’ interests.

I also liked how almost no one in the book was depicted as morally perfect. There was no wide line between good and evil, as in the real world, and I liked that depiction of morality.

I’d also like to point out why I read it in English and think you should. In fact, I have decided to try to read all books from now on in their original language (if I can actually read well enough in that language). I feel like it really makes the ideas the author is trying to get across much clearer, and the whole experience is just more authentic and enjoyable (even though the paperbacks’ tiny fonts are pretty annoying).

To sum up, it is a really nice read which brings up a couple of important points that might have passed unnoticed in the flood of news we get every day (and I’m not even talking about how stuff gets hidden in mainstream media, as i think you readers have your own means to find news). I am looking forward to reading more of his books, to see if they are as informed and important as this one, which I recommend to anyone even slightly interested in the subject.

– Image from Wikipedia
Edited for clarity@11 Aug, 2008 – 01:40am

I’ll finally update you with what the hell is going on with my blog (other than my sloppiness). As you are aware, I had it hosted on 110mb.com, mainly because it was a free php hosting account I had registered a loong time ago… They stopped supplying databases for free and so I looked for some free mysql hosting, and ended up using freemysql.net. It worked fine for a while, until every sort of trouble started happening. freemysql.net lost my database once during whatever maintenance, and I didn’t make any backups, but I was too busy at the moment to do anything else than start over again. So I did start over again… Meanwhile I had decided that I didn’t need a database and started trying to do a static website with comments via disqus. I was testing it at my former subdomain in 110mb.com, in a different directory, so I kept both the blogs running during development. Then before I was finished with it, freemysql.net stopped working again… and to make matters worse, 110mb started an advertisement program in their 404 error pages which led to a naked wrestling website (nwwl.com). Seriously now, wtf?

I decided I had enough, and started arranging the details here at dreamhost and moving stuff around. Meanwhile I temporarily put my beta website, without comments or feeds implemented, on the main folder of my subdomain, and moved the old wordpress into a subdirectory. Now I just discovered that by doing that, any links on the RSS readers of the users of my old feed would just redirect to nwwl. I uploaded a stub index.php to correct that situation (I mean, I’d rather show an error than an embarassing picture).

I am really really really sorry for any inconvenience caused by all this situation, and I hope the few of you subscribers haven’t given up on me yet… If anything, this will serve to show you should never trust ad-supported hosting or free mysql hosting.

In honor of Dreamhost I’ve themed my blog with the Dreamhost inspired theme “A Dream to Host”
To better days!

Whether you like it or not, even the smallest things end up influencing people throughout their lives, and the culture of a country is unified by a lot of small things, being unique because of that. I couldn’t help but wonder that if we could grow into something completely different by exposing ourselves to more positive influences then shouldn’t we try? It strengthened my wish to go study abroad. Portugal can be so depressing and I think it shows in the general attitude of the population. And besides, if you never try, you’ll never know, right?

Edit: I realized just now I really did digress a lot(!), but I think it’s interesting food for thought.

Recently I’ve been trying out alternative ways to interact with the computer. As I am now using linux as my main OS (Arch Linux136 FTW!), it’s really easy to try out alternative window managers (WMs). I tried some dynamic tiling WMs at first, including wmii137 and awesome138. They both work by auto arranging the windows so that they don’t overlap showing you your current working window in a bigger frame and the others in smaller frames. Check out their sites for more details and screenshots. I kinda liked the “non-overlapness” of it, but all of them lacked some flexibility in the creation of panes, and tried to be “too smart” in the placement and sizing of frames, so I couldn’t have absolute control on the tiling if I wanted to.rnI then decided to try a “dumber” WM, namely ratpoison. In this one, you only have one frame to begin with and swap the current application which is displayed fullscreen. If you want to use a more elaborate layout, you can split your screen horizontally or vertically and resize the resulting frames (much like emacs or vi). If you have ever used screen (which by the way, is the best CLI app ever, so go try it!) you will feel instantly at home as the functionality and keybindings are both similar.

I must say I’m loving it, I use it with a very simple dzen bar (showing the time). It’s great for those times when you’re left without your fellow rodent, either because you’re using your laptop on your lap, or because you forgot to bring a mouse. It’s also more productive because your hands don’t leave the keyboard for task switching. I’ve also been trying to replace most applications with mouseless alternatives. For firefox, there is this excelent lifehacker post with some keyboard shortcuts (that quote one is awesome, by the way). I also replaced some GUI intensive applications with lightweight CLI ones, so I am using herrie as my music player (it supports audioscrobbler, which is awesome!), and irssi + bitlbee as my irc + im client. I must say my system got a lot snappier using the lightweight apps and WM, and that’s awesome! I would post a screenshot, but really, ratpoison screenshots are not that interesting (unless you want to see a glorified date output in my dzen…). It makes you wonder though, why the hell do we use overlapping windows with decorations all the time if they only cover up information and are generally unpractical. I’ve read some interesting articles and discussions online about human computer interface, and I must say that I have to agree with a lot of the points made. Something should change, particularly for power users. The flexibility the console offers you shouldn’t be replaced by less flexible alternatives for the sake of eye candy.

Anyway, this is not a WM for everyone, but if you like your stuff as lightweight as possible then you can’t go wrong with ratpoison, so try it. And the code base is tiny so you can easily know what the hell is going on under the hood, if you feel like it. I would also love to try going X-less, and using screen as my “window manager” but the internet isn’t making it easy for me with all the flashy sites. It would be cool if all sites could fallback to a content-centric mode for text browsers, but I’m daydreaming again…

The old days were the time of the small microcontrollers, PICs, later AVRs etc. They were really cool in that they could perform logical operations and were easily programmable. Those were the days of old NES, SNES, Saturn, DOS games, etc. To light an LED was seen as a great achievement and would make you the coolest kid in the block. (I’m obviously exaggerating, but you get the point). Those platforms got progressively cheaper and cheaper and reached their golden age with huge communities. Soon everyone who wanted to make something was able to and a lot of really cool stuff was built.

Enter 2007, everyone talks about photorealistic graphics, high-definition video and audio, signal processing and wireless communications. That crazy ol’ blinking LED lost some of its appeal. Everyone wants to be a part of the web 2.0 revolution, the huge mashupable database. Everyone got a lot more demanding in what comes to gadgets and outcomes. Suddenly everyone wants to hack wi-fi, GPS and video into their gadgets. But the good’ol microcontrollers aren’t able to tackle the task at hand anymore, no. Such applications demand high processing power, and to assemble such a system with separate buyable parts would get really expensive and complex. So everyone tries to reach a solution to this dillema. Everyone wants to be able to build cool stuff in the new age.

Hackable platforms come as an answer to this dillema. Giant companies can build platforms that support all the new juicy stuff for much less than individuals and resell it for less still. In fact they were already doing it, they were just locking the platform to perform what they intended it to perform. So everyone got smashing the locks and opening the platforms to public development. The Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, linux-based routers, etc were all targets to this strike. Soon, all hackers got to tackle the power hidden in such gadgets and could command them to do their will. All was well again in “hackworld”.

But the outside (non-hacker) world began to see the potential of hacking. Hackers made their efforts easily accessible so everyone could benefit from it, even without deep technical knowledge of what they were doing. And the outside world liked it. Soon, everyone started to see the potential. Everything they already owned could be made to perform so much more. And hacking became mainstream. It stopped being such an underground activity and became a media subject. The hacking era arrived.

As the communities started growing, a massive overload of projects got to public knowledge. Widespread internet access made it a lot easier. Everyone who wasn’t tech savvy started to see newfound interest in hacking. Hackers started seeing the potential and they gave easy tools for everyone to develop on. Everything was made easier to program.

Some companies started seeing the potential. As hacking was the new cool, a hackable project would be a lot cooler than a closed source one. So came hackable platforms that were designed to be hackable. So came the iRobot Create, the chumby and Google Android.

Android in particular was made in response to the iphone hack craze that had gotten into the world. Everyone was loving to have their iphones hacked and “on steroids”. And Apple screwed them by making it progressively harder and harder. Everyone started to dislike Apple a bit. Apple has already taken a step back and said they will release an SDK, but in my opinion it’s already too late to massively change opinions. On the other hand Android will provide a hackable gadget without a brand on it, it’s not a device, just an operating system. People will be able to choose which brand they want to supply their Android goodness. Everything has been made by Google to encourage its hacking, and in my opinion it will (deservedly) get a large community and project base.

So there you have it, my view on the current state of hacking. In my opinion we are starting to see a golden age of DIY with more and more people being able to create stuff easily. Everyone will get to know the joy of creating something, of seeing something working which was made by them, and get addicted to it.

Happy hacking!

– Images from Wikipedia, WorthPlaying and Google Android