After putting off, forgetting about and personal life interruptions a new version of Community Submitted News is out. This version add WordPress shortcodes which allow you to add the form to a single page or post instead of the whole site. This also means that people don’t have to touch their template code to use Community Submitted News, instead they just add the shortcode mentioned in the instructions to the page or post they want the form to show on using the WordPress editor. Let me know what you think.

Get it now

I’m a big music person. As a kid I fell asleep listening to music, played instruments before I actually knew how to play them and am open to just about any style of music. Finding the right online music service has had its challenges but I think I’ve found a site that will satisfy my tastes. Before I get to that though lets talk about the other sites I’ve found on my way.

Last.fm

This was one of the first online music services that I used and it was good for a while. But the I didn’t like the music discovery, it got repetitive pretty quick and seemed to find stuff that wasn’t really a good fit for what I was looking for. Also, I couldn’t listen to an album from start to finish, which is a recurring theme for a few music services. One of the good parts of was the events section which did clue me into a couple of concerts in Buffalo, but wasn’t enough for me to stick around once I found…

Pandora

Pandora is a great services and if my new favorite hadn’t launched just a few months ago I would still probably be using it. Its music discovery, the Music Genome Project, is very good and I was pretty pumped when I first started using it over a year ago. It managed to play songs I was familiar with along with from lesser known artists and it satisfied my genre mixing pretty well with its ability to add different playlists. Over time though, I found songs were being repeated more and more often and there was noticeably less variety in my playlists. The other problem was, again, not being able to play a single album from start to finish. Over time these two issues led me to look at services that allowed my to listen to whole albums, services like…

Myspace Music

Now, I will be the first to tell you that Myspace has become a disgusting, intolerable community filled with far to many bad site templates and fake profiles but much to my surprise quite a few bands put their full albums on the Myspace sites. The biggest problem with sites like Pandora, Last.fm and others internet radio stations is that I cannot just listen to a whole album beginning to end. This is what led me to seek out Myspace Music, which wasn’t perfect but worked well enough combined with Pandora until I found…

MOG

Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. MOG combines the best of both worlds. Internet radio with a good music discovery ability, so far at least, and the option to listen to just a single album or artist. I’m not sure that there is another online music service that offers this and makes it my favorite right there but no it gets better. I’ve been using MOG for a week or so now and it’s really good. Really, really good. I did feel this way about Pandora’s music discovery when I first used it but I am listening to the same artists stations on each service and so far MOG has been finding the better music. What I think is an even better indicator of my love of this service is not just that I use it but that I’m willing to pay for it.

Update 8/6/09 – There is a new version as of 8/6/09. If you are having problems please redownload the plugin. A link is at the bottom of this page.

Well, after a couple of weeks of learning the Wordpress plugin architecture and a few weeks of neglect I have finally released my first Wordpress plugin, Community Submitted News. The purpose of this plugin is to let readers submit articles to a blog/website and create new content. This plugin comes with a full moderation panel and nothing is published to the blog/website until it is approved by an administrator for the site.

It was fun to get into the Wordpress plugin architecture and that was the primary reason for doing this. For the most part is was a pretty easy to use. There are some things about the plugin systems that I wasn’t a big fan of but I guess that’ll happen with any external system that you use. Especially when it has to be flexible enough to deal with so many different possiblities in the plugins and the people programming them.

You can get the plugin here

Links for the Community Submitted News plugin.

Wordpress Plugins page

Studioslice.com Plugin page

Adam Savage on obsession

Adam Savage on colossal failure

The concert itself was good. There are a lot of review out there by people who know classical music much better than myself and my impressions may be totally opposite of what critics think so I won’t say too much about the show. There seemed to be a lack of timing and volume with some of the pieces, especially the Lou Harrison percussion piece. I was quite disappointed with the Canzona Septimi Toni #2 piece. It just seemed like there could and should have been so much more volume and force behind it  during certain parts. Since I am a trumpet player myself I always like to hear brass parts that have a lot of weight behind them, I guess I just enjoy the sound of brass instruments a lot more than others. I enjoyed the second act, especially the last three pieces that the played. The Tan Dan arrangement was good as well I thought. The pace of the piece from about the middle on was nice and brought some pep to the music that was missing in the first act.

In all, it was a good concert considering the circumstances surrounding it. What is far more impressive is how the concert was put on and the fact that the musicians only had three days to work together on the pieces. I thought some of the visual effects could have been left out as they seemed overdone but I did enjoy the stories of the musicians and the display of the composer before some of the pieces were played. All in all, a good show and an impressive feat.

Youtube Symphony Orchestra Act 1

Youtube Symphony Orchestra Act 2

The most important aspect of this deal is what happens to MySQL, which I think isn’t much to be honest. I think that MySQL has become to big for Oracle to kill both philisophically and financially. Sun previously said that MySQL brought in billings of $81 million for the second quarter of 2009. While that’s probably not much compared to Oracles normal earnings, it’s still a heck of a lot for an open source database that relies primarily on providing support and a company(Sun) that apparently doesn’t have as good of a margin as it could. And if they do kill MySQL, they won’t replace that revenue, which is certain to accelerate in the future, by getting people to switch to Oracle. Insead of getting more people to switch to Oracle they will probably just piss off the developers that Oracle needs to buy their products.

But make no mistake about it. As others have said, this acquisition was primarily about Java and Solaris, secondly about MySQL and lastlythe rest of Sun properties which are most likely just around for the ride, which is unfortunate. The one thing I will say is I hope Oracle keeps development of Netbeans and Open Office going as they are both properties that deserve to be continued. I use Netbeans in my daily work and it is an extremely good editor with a bright future ahead of it.

My feelings it that it’s about time Yahoo did this. I mean really, why did this not happen earlier. Surely Yahoo had people smart enough to do this. With all of the properties that Yahoo has bought in the past couple of years(upcoming, flickr, del.icio.us, etc) and properties they already have(Yahoo Games, Sports, Finance, Buzz, Music, etc),  this seems a no brainer to me. This is also the type of thing that if they can pull off right that could lead to the resurgence of Yahoo. The big thing will be user adoption, which is kinda a no brainer, and Yahoo has the resources to do this. They still have a frontpage that has a tremendous amount of traffic along with a massive amount of user accounts so the possibilities are there.

There are some interesting things that I want to point out. The first is that yahoo doesn’t want sites to send back information to it, but also it sending information to other sites about you. From TechCrunch:

Yahoo wants to provide a two-way updates platform that also pushes data updates back out  to other services. So if someone does something on Digg, Yahoo can then inform a site  like CNN of that action. It’s like Facebook Beacon but it doesn’t just drive data to Yahoo,  it also syndicates data out to any number of sites. Also, it supports not just status-like  messages but large data pushes (images, etc). All of the permission controls apply to  these updates as well.

While Facebook just kinda does it, I like that you have control over the access and what is sent out. More from TechCrunch report:

Yahoo will make sure that users know exactly how programs will access their information,
and the prompt should look fairly scary (”skull and cross bones”) so users actually think
about it (they appear to be contrasting their method with that of Facebook’s). This will
encourage developers to do the right thing. This warning and permission granting system
will hold true whether the user is installing something onto Yahoo or using an app off
Yahoo that accesses Yahoo data.

I like this. I think its good that they do something that will get peoples attention when something happens. We tend to just glaze over when we see another security popup.

There are a couple of quotes that I remember hearing but can’t find links to them right now. One was from John Dvorak on one of the TWIT shows which is that yahoo was kinda the first social network in the late 90’s early 2000’s with Yahoo Groups and another was this from the Web Publishing Blog:

Take a closer look at the companies. Compare Google Finance to Yahoo Finance. One of these companies needs an engineer with a cup of coffee, the other needs an engineer, editor, and staff.

While the rest of the post goes on to state that Yahoo will ultimately lose the battle with Google because data is better than content and Yahoo is a walled garden so to speak, it seems that the tide is changing. Now, I don’t think that Yahoo should try and take on Google directly, that would be suicide. This seems more like a play against MySpace, Facebook and the plethora of start pages on the internet.

Overall, this is a play for yahoo to become the start page and social network of internet and future and it could play out well for them if they can execute it. Of course that depends on a couple of things, namely being able to stay afloat during these economic times, keeping the right people around and having time from the yahoo board and shareholders to complete this. Something tells me with the way that the economy is that Jerry Yang still doesn’t have a long leash and if the price of yahoo stock falls too much or a good offer comes along the yahoo shareholders will take it this time around.

Hacker News is another article aggregation site that I’ve come to like in the last few weeks as well. This is more geared towards computer science people and the like. It has a good bit of news but the other refreshing part of the site is the comments. I’m sure you’ve seen the  sheer idoicy, lunacy, bad grammar, and slight dogmatism that happens in other sites comment sections, if you haven’t consider yourself lucky. From what I’ve seen of Hacker News its actually possible to have civil discourse about a topic whereas on other sites you just get ranting, yelling, flaming trolls.

I’ve also managed to come across some good free games that have been consuming large amounts of my time too. The first is TrackMania Nations. It’s a racing game with online and offline capabilites and considering that its free is a very good game. I don’t think I’ve said it on here before but I am a big fan of motorsports. Fourmula 1, ALMS, Rally, GT, IndyCar and yes even NASCAR, so anytime I can get my hands on a good racing game and one that’s free, I get stoked. The nice thing about TrackMania is that there is a paid expansion packs for it as well.

The other game I’ve found is Combat Arms, which is a good FPS. It is online play only and for being free is a good game. Good graphics, decent amount of maps and weapons, and free. What more is  there left to have?

So that’s what I’ve come across in the past few weeks that has caught my eye. Have you folks found any interesting sites or such? Leave the links in the comments

Unfortunatly, it seems like this post is going to be a lot smaller than I was hoping but within the next few days I will have some more stuff up. There has been some interesting discussions and post lately out in Internet Land that I want to weigh in on so stay tuned.