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unaloggin' again.

dchud — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:16:53 +0000

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Music 2009

dchud — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:30:34 +0000

This was a very good year for new music. Here are some of my favorites:

Allen Toussaint, The Bright Mississippi. We saw him at the Silver Spring jazz festival. If you were ever looking for a record to use to introduce a non-jazz fan to jazz, this could be it: it's immediately accessible, it's dripping with talent and experience and emotion and That Feel, it references and looks back to tradition while keeping a forward-moving vibe, and above all else Allen Toussaint's playing has this incredible measured-groove touch that I can't get enough of. Do yourself a favor and go get this.

Beirut, March of the Zapotec. Didn't see him. In the past I haven't liked his music much, but I love this part of his 2009 record and have listened to it constantly. This happens once in a while -- I don't like Bright Eyes but I loved "I'm Wide Awake". There's something about the arrangements and vibe and how his voice fits into it all that makes me think I've been missing something.

"La Llorona" New Official Beirut Video from Owen Cook on Vimeo.

Califone, All My Friends are Funeral Singers. I love everything this band does. We saw them at the Rock and Roll Hotel, and it was a terrific show. I just can't believe there weren't more than 100 or so people there. If you get a chance to see them, don't miss it.

califone - funeral singers from Califone on Vimeo.

Do Make Say Think, Other Truths. Saw them at Rock and Roll Hotel, another great show. I couldn't find any videos from this record but here's one of a favorite song from an earlier record, 'You, You're a History in Rust.'

No. 4 Do Make Say Think - "A With Living" from Retread Sessions on Vimeo.

One of the best things about the DMST show was that the opening acts were basically the same musicians in different configurations. One of these configurations was a set of performances of music/recordings from Charles Spearin's Happiness Project. Do yourself a favor and open that link up in another tab, stop reading this, and go check that out. You'll be glad you did.

Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest. Call me a fanboy, I can take it. Hell, ask my family, one of my favorite impressions to do is Michael McDonald, and they released a remixed track with him (!). Check out this video of Grizzly Bear (sans our friend the Doobie Brother) playing in a cab.

Metric, Fantasies. I like every record they put out more than the one before. I saw them in Ottawa at the civic center on a stage, which, essentially, is a hockey rink. I don't understand why they aren't the biggest pop band in the world. Maybe it's better we keep them our big little secret. The kids of the friends I attended the show with mishear the line and chant "everybody just wanna play the wii, play the wii, play the wii", maybe somebody should tell Emily.

METRIC - Sick Muse - OFFICIAL VIDEO from Metric Music on Vimeo.

Neko Case, Middle Cyclone. I liked her earlier records okay but went a little nuts over this one. Still can't get enough of it.

St. Vincent, Actor. I first heard/saw her in a take-away show but was a bit disappointed by the production choices on the first record. I love her sound stripped down with just a guitar. This came out and grabbed me from the first "paint the black hole blacker" backing vocal and I've been hooked since, elaborate arrangements and all. It also made me hear the previous release with new ears, and I like it a lot more now too. Still, love that tight feel of just her and her guitar.

St. Vincent Tour Videos // 01 from Alan Del Rio Ortiz on Vimeo.

Those are my favorite full records of 2009.

I also really liked Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, particularly "Summertime Clothes" and though it's cliche to say it, "My Girls". The video does the song justice.

Animal Collective "My Girls" from Chad von Nau on Vimeo.

I liked the new Akron/Family, "Set 'em Wild, Set 'em Free" a lot, too, particularly "River". We saw them at the Rock and Roll Hotel, another great show there.

KEXP Session 16.1 - AKRON/FAMILY from More Dust Than Digital on Vimeo.

We live just 5-6 blocks from Rock and Roll Hotel, this tiny little place so many of my favorite bands play. We also saw Apostle of Hustle there, which was a great show with only maybe 40 people in the crowd. They put out a new record this year but I somehow never did hear it. If I did, though, it might be more prominent on this list since I like the earlier ones so much.

I like the latest Dirty Projectors record a lot, too, but none of it as much as the track they did with David Byrne on the Dark Was the Night charity compilation, "Knotty Pine".

Some artists I like a lot came out with new records that never quite stuck for me. A.C. Newman, M. Ward, the Dodos come to mind. I'll give them all another shot, though. The new Fiery Furnaces convinced me that I will just never like them.

There were a few year-old records I listened to a lot more in 2009 that seem worth mentioning again: Joan as Police Woman's 'To Survive', Juana Molina's 'Un Dia', and Deerhunter's 'Microcastle' all stuck in my ear repeatedly.

The National (#1) and Spoon (#6) didn't release records this year, but they are both at the top of my last.fm charts for 2009. Good money's betting on their new records to be my favorites for 2010, easy.

I spend a ton of money on music all the time, and I also download a ton of music all the time for free. Usually I find a way to spend money a "legit way" on artists I spend the most time with, either by buying their records or seeing their shows or, preferably, going to their shows and buying their records from them at their shows. Sometimes I look back and see that I haven't spent a single dime on my very favorite stuff, and this year I want to correct that.

I have never "purchased" a Neko Case or St. Vincent record, nor paid to see either of them perform. I might see St. Vincent in a few weeks, but I might miss her. In any case I don't like not supporting artists as directly as I can.

So: the first five people living in the US or Canada who read this and write me privately (not in the comments! use my email address, i'll use my inbox to judge who's first) with their snail mail address will get a copy of the new St. Vincent or Neko Case records sent to them by me, purchased from the most obviously preferred sales venue available on the artists' own promotional websites. Say which record you prefer. Limit one per person, and I'll do three of one, two of the other, so if you're the fourth person to ask for one you'll be out of luck.

...still you're surprised, 'prised, 'prised, when I eat ya...

2009 - a year in pictures

dchud — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 07:08:48 +0000

Funny how sometimes the story of a year plays out in the photos you choose to share.

This is how it started.

Happy new year, indeed. This is what I'd done:

Broken fifth metacarpal. It healed okay, I think.

I spent the better part of January and February healing up from the hand and serving on a DC grand jury. No pictures of that. There was one major highlight in that period, though:

What a day! Broken as I was (the hand, and my back had gone wonky a few days before inauguration) and cold as it was I'll never regret being there, it was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen.

I must've started feeling better by the end of February.

Though maybe I was just being foolish.

Manon caught in the act, with her new camera:

I've grown to prefer shooting black and white film. Here's the red filter in action:

And again with the red filter. It's still hard sometimes for me to believe these places are so close to where I live. We're half a block from the park, and we'll probably move before long, but while we're here, it's wonderful.

Due to additional broken bones in my family, passover was just the two of us. I think we've perfected the meatless seder, and next year maybe we'll have a big group. Here's what I look like with a mouthful of horseradish - the good kind.

In April a very cool project I'm lucky to get to work on sometimes launched a major rewrite. You can do weird mashup stuff with it now like this:

Springtime also means baseball season. The Nats weren't very good but did show signs of life, especially Zimmerman's hitting streak, and the Six Weeks of Healthy Nyjer Morgan. We saw Randy Johnson's 300th win this year, which was fun despite the deluge in which it occurred. The Nats might be actually competitive next year, we'll see. I still haven't had a chance to see the Tigers in DC yet, though, maybe they'll come one of these years.

The Wings had a good run, and even though I saw them lose in person twice (Caps, Preds) it was still a great season for them. They came oh so close:

With the Wings ultimately losing, the highlight of the hockey season for me was seeing the playoff game when Ovechkin and Crosby had matching hat tricks. Probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen at a live sporting event, and that's saying something. I don't have a picture of all the hats on the ice after #8's third that night because I was deliriously screaming at the time. Imagine a lot of drunk people in red hugging and screaming a lot, and hats flying everywhere for ten minutes.

We started ordering local vegetables from a CSA-like service, and it immediately changed how and what we eat, both for the better.

Not that I'm a strict vegetarian, though, or strictly kosher, just mostly both. A highlight of visiting my brother in Austin in June was a trip to Cooper's BBQ:

Another highlight of visiting Austin was visiting my favorite Ben Shahn painting again:

Eastern Market, which burned up shortly after I arrived in DC, reopened after reconstruction, with a big ceremony and big crowds. Strong neighborhood, here.

I even got to say hello to Mayor Fenty that day, and shook his hand just after taking this. Seemed genuinely amicable.

After fourteen years of disuse I started studying Japanese again. I have a long way to go but it's been interesting firing up those language-acquisition and mid-deep-memory sections of the brain again.

We saw Jandek! Seeing the Corwood Rep in person made us want to take things back up to a meta level.

After a few years away I was able to return to my favorite professional conference, Access, in Charlottetown, PEI. It was a great time, though things get kinda rough there sometimes.

At that event I met a very cool librarian who skates on a roller derby team in Toronto. I was in Toronto for another event a few weeks later and got to see her and her teammates and a roller derby bout for the first time. Bill took a picture of us. I love the positive energy, collective/DIY feel, seeing women in a contact sport (which I mean literally... as a boy I did everything, soccer, football, basketball, baseball, street hockey, dodgeball, "indoor nerf soccer with combat", etc., and my sister realized she loved contact sports the first time she tried one in *college*. not fair! girls can/should kick ass, too, and all power to them when they do, whether they're 4, 14, or 44.), and seeing a reinvigorated sport gain popularity. There's a small but growing league here in DC, too, and they skate right down the street from us at the Armory. It's been great fun to watch them, and almost as much fun to learn a few things about sport photography.

I was pretty excited to see their bout today, in fact, but it got canceled due to a blizzard.

...which brings us up to December 19.

Thanks for reliving 2009 with me. There's lots left out, here, namely pictures I should have taken of family and friends who visited us, several more xrays and injuries of various levels of acuteness that made it a fairly painful year, and any of the shots I somehow never took during a fun vacation in Ottawa and Montreal. Oh well, next year.

What questions do you have about learning programming?

dchud — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:13:36 +0000

In the spirit of nanowrimo I'm going to jumpstart writing a book today. The goal of the book is to help librarians learn how to program. I've talked with many people about this and don't know if I'm up for the task but it's time to give it a go or stop dreaming about it.

I have some thoughts about where to start and what ground to cover but I want to be sure it answers many typical questions new coders have along the way. I also hope to develop the text online as I go, using comments, questions, and suggestions for improvements as they come in to help ensure that the book addresses its readers' needs usefully.

So we might as well start now. What questions do you have about learning to code? What goals would you want to achieve by learning? What specific problems are you unable to solve on your own now that you might be able to solve on your own eventually if you had the right kind of support along the way?

There are many options available for doing this kind of thing online but I want to start by keeping it simple. Post your questions here in the comments, hit me @dchud on Twitter, over email, phone, in person, or whatever works for you.

Please let me know what you think and we'll see where it goes. Thanks!

Time lapse.

dchud — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:04:48 +0000

Chicken Soup for the Old Webapp's Soul

dchud — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:34:15 +0000

I cut my teeth as a legit full-time programmer at my previous job. I'd written webapps before but nothing particularly complicated. I didn't know any one language much better than others. I hadn't built something substantial from scratch and seen it through from requirements to long-term (i.e. more than a year or two) maintenance.

All of this is to say - I still maintain two apps from that period. The thing about those apps is that they reflect how I didn't know what I was doing when I started, and I only knew enough about what I was doing when I finished regular coding on them to know what was wrong but not necessarily how to fix it. So I'm left with two apps people still care about. One's been broken for a year, and I made the mistake of rewriting it from scratch, so, natch, I haven't finished yet. Don't do that.

The other one broke last night. Badly. I just fixed it, finally, but I can see nothing but bad decisions and do-repeat-yourselfness and things that need Cleaning Up in there. Even so, and despite there being one horrific showstopper bug in there that needed a fix to get it running again, this other app kept chugging along, however pokily, until a perfect storm of long-term-maintenance-mode and indifferent-and-remote-and-slapdash-sysadminnery threatened to bring down the whole thing.

So, here are some pearls of idiot wisdom for you. By which I mean to say: don't make my mistakes. They weren't original mistakes when I made 'em, but if you go and do them now, they'll just be embarrassing *and* tired.

If you're leaving an app running indefinitely, e.g. for N years until somebody might say "okay, fine, you can shut it down," set up a regular log rotation scheme. If you don't, your logs will eat up your hard drives eventually. Maybe not overnight, maybe not in a month, but in 2.8 years since you've paid regular attention to it, yeah, maybe. Learn logrotate or whatever the kids use these days, and use it.
Before you run an upgrade, check your available disk space.
Whenever you check on the server, check your available disk space. (Get the point yet?)
If your old app fails suddenly after an upgrade, and you can't tell why, it might not be all the dependencies in your old app. It might, in fact, be that your logfiles filled up your disk, ya dope.
If you clean up that mess and find that your app still doesn't work, remember: if you filled your drive, things broke unpredictably. Your data and other subsystems might not be in a stable state. If you have a database, verify that your tables aren't corrupt using something like myisamchk and fix them if they are corrupt.
If you're still stuck, go onto your friendly nearest IRC channel or list and say "hey, I'm an idiot, this old app of mine failed and I see X, Y, and Z but not what's going wrong still after I cleaned all that up." Your friendly chatmates might say lots of useful things to help you rule out the myriad things that might have gone wrong. They will listen to you vent a bit and help you lighten up a bit. They will help you focus on the problem you have to fix instead of your emotional baggage of the half-baked app you wrote and never cleaned up real nice and the ridiculous non-rotated logs that filled up the disk and broke everything. They will remind you to pour yourself a drink and chill out. And if you listen well and stay patient with yourself, they'll share your joy when you fix your problem.

And finally: always keep a good bottle of bourbon at the ready for such times.

[Much thanks to robcaSSon, edsu, rangi, erikhatcher, and wickr for the patient support!]

Apple TV Duo

dchud — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:28:02 +0000

I used to think that Apple's presumably forthcoming tablet was going to have to either shrink a MacBook or grow an iPhone. Now I think that was wrong.

Once I saw this rendering of a docking tablet, it seemed clear that I was looking from the wrong direction. They aren't just going to make a smaller laptop or a bigger iPod.

They're going to make a portable Apple TV.

Take the Apple TV, put it into an iMac frame with a 24" or 30" screen, and make the guts of it a docking tablet. Everything converges. Even better, make the frame work with or without the tablet docked in... because you'll want to use the tablet while on your couch watching the TV. Why not?

Need to do work? Plug it in and use it like an iMac. Want to watch TV? Sit back and use it like a TV. Need to hit the road? Dock/sync up and drop it in your bag. It all fits together perfectly.

We've already used our 24" iMac like a TV for the two years we've had it. Netflix, Boxee, Hulu streaming, DVDs, espn360.com and mlb.tv, and video podcasts. The 2008 Olympics with that msnbc+silverlight thingy. For us, then, this would be a natural next step. We need a new portable for one of us, anyway, and an Apple TV Duo would match our needs well, especially if the price came in at around the same price as a low-end iMac or MacBook. The pad itself doesn't even need to be that powerful.

What to call it, though? "Apple TV Duo" is clunky but recycles the "Duo" of their early docking laptop (of which I sold many during my brief days as a CompUSA salesperson). I still like "MacPad" but that presumes a shrink-the-MacBook approach. Any of iPod Mega/Maxi/Multi could work in theory, but those presume a grow-the-iPod approach.

Bands I've Seen

dchud — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:34:27 +0000

Succumbing, but not on the 'book. And unable, natch, to stop at 50.

Rush
Marillion
John Prine
Arlo Guthrie
John Mellencamp
Billy Joel
Ray Charles
Sonny Rollins x2
Los Lobos x3
The National x3
Los Super Seven
Jane's Addiction
Jesus and Mary Chain
Philip Glass
Al Jarreau
Pat Metheny
Henry Rollins
Soundgarden
Ice Cube
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Pearl Jam
Ministry
Frank Morgan x2
The Books x2
Los Cubanos Postizos x2
Marc Ribot
Broken Social Scene x2
The Shins
Arcade Fire
Son Volt
Bob Mould x2
Wilco x2
Chris Lightcap Quintet x2
Tony Malaby Trio 
Craig Taborn Quartet
Steve Turre Shell Choir
James Carter Quartet x3
McCoy Tyner
Geri Allen
Buckwheat Zydeco
Robert Cray
George Winston
Johnny Mathis
Carl Perkins
Tim Berne's Big Satan
Ken Vandermark
Dave Brubek x2
Eliane Elias
Beans
Tortoise
Apostle of Hustle
Mark Kozelek
Bang on a Can All-Stars x2
Moxy Früvous
Norah Jones
Christopher O'Reilly doing Radiohead
Sufjan Stevens
Butch Morris Conduction
Honeyboy Edwards
Clogs
Bell Orchestre
Varnaline
Spoon
Juana Molina
Brian Wilson
Buddy Guy
Dave Matthews Band
Jeff Buckley
Morphine x2
Sugar
Jimmy Page
Santana
Los Van Van
The Iguanas
The Radiators
The Black Keys
The Pogues
Joe Jackson x2
sfSoundGroup
kd lang
The Orchid
Alejandro Escovedo
Guy Clark
The Cult
Metallica
Bruce Cockburn
The Jayhawks
R.E.M.
Throwing Muses
Richard Thompson x2
Bruce Springsteen
Bo Diddley
The Decemberists x2
Max Roach
Nick Brignola
Cubanismo
Vinx
Stars
Animal Collective
The Hold Steady x2
Cesaria Evora
Jim Hall
Califone x2
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
David Broza
Etta James
Joshua Redman
The Evens
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Jon McDonald
Bela Fleck
Lyle Lovett x2
Mike Seeger
Warsaw Village Band
Leon Russell
George Shearing
Joe Pass
Joe Williams
Diane Schuur
Emily Haines
John Trudell
--- updated 2009-10
Akron/Family
Mose Allison
Jandek
The Stills
Metric
Do Make Say Think

Dreaming of a read/write Linked Data web

dchud — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:24:54 +0000

I just turned in my fourth (count 'em, 4!) "Libraries in Computers" column for "Computers in Libraries" magazine about Linked Data in 2009. The third is due to appear in print next month, and this one's due in October. It took me four go-rounds, though, before I could get to the key payoff, answering a nagging Collect Underpants kinda question. Surely, less understanding editors would have already sacked such an idiot who needs to write the same story four times before making any sense of it. Shhh! Don't tell them.

All this talk about Linking Data is great, because we can all follow links. But I think what will put Linked Data over the proverbial top is opening an explicit feedback loop into the Linked Data web. Like the web itself and its transition through the Age Of Web 2.0 Hype Budgets, a read-only existence is only a temporary state of affairs. When people start figuring out how to write into the web as much as they read from it — and gaining value from such interactions — is when things start to get really interesting. So let's just skip the Trough of Disillusionment, here, and jump right into the read/write Linked Data web.

I've written here before about my most recent keynote-length talk about the value I see in Linked Data. Flip through those slides far enough and you'll see a long series of seemingly disconnected screenshots excerpted from an imagined user session in a well-known digital library application. Following that is a similarly imagined user session in a well-known OPAC at that app's same host institution. Following that is a series of screenshots from a diverse set of additional web resources about the same intellectual content — the same subject and the same authority records, but different institutions (several academic libraries, a few major museums, and online encyclopedias). And, finally, there's a slide that shows a search result set from a well-known search engine that shows barely a few of those diverse sites.

The intended effect of those slides is summed up simply — nobody will find your stuff, and even if they do, they'll never find all the other cool similar stuff out there about the same thing, because we're not feeding it all into the web correctly. We're not linking these things well enough. We haven't pulled our own thickly entangled yet beautifully informative traditional web of authorized headings and cross-referenced name forms up into the modern Web and used those as a target for linking our stuff together yet.

But wait… did you see it?

There it is again!

A *target* for linking!

A read-only target!

Hence my failure.

In suggesting that what we all need to do is to start pointing our web resources that have LCSH subject headings into sites like id.loc.gov I failed to mention one key thing: when we start pointing our stuff at sites like id.loc.gov, those sites need to start pointing back at sites like ours.

If today a reasonable search on a prominent search engine cannot find the eight great sites with archival materials about Billy Strayhorn, how is adding links from each of them to the same record about Billy Strayhorn at id.loc.gov going to help tie the sites together? That was my goal, my current problem statement. Actually, I'd better spell that out, since I've left it implicit.

I work in a big library. We have lots of collections. Collections of collections of collections. Materials so spread out that we honestly can't answer the question "what all do you have about Billy Strayhorn?" without knowing we're probably missing something. On one hand, this is reasonable, because it's a really big library. On the other hand, it's not reasonable, because lots of people come to libraries asking for "all the stuff you have about so-and-so" and even if some librarians in some libraries could say "right here, yes, right here, this is everything we have about so-and-so", there'd still be what all the other libraries and other sites share about so-and-so on the web that that person's maybe going to want to connect to also, so even that librarian's answer is still insufficient.

There's the question, then: how do we give people a better answer than "here's a few things, and you can search for it to find other stuff, but I know you'll be missing some really important stuff, and lots of things I don't even know about, so, yeah, search Google, but you'll still miss a ton of cool stuff"?

Popping that off the stack, we're back at the unstated earlier question: can't we just future-crawl the future-web and find the future-graph of sites future-pointing at that same id.loc.gov record about Billy Strayhorn and work back out from future-there? Wouldn't that give us a big picture of all the stuff out there about Billy Strayhorn, and help each of us at each of our libraries give a better answer to that patron's question, whether or not we even have anything about Billy Strayhorn?

Well, yes, maybe, but only if we each have a really big copy of the future-web's future-graph. But most of us don't. Even if I run a crawl seeded by the eight sites with materials about Billy Strayhorn, I'm not too confident that I wouldn't have to repeat the same process again for materials by or about George Russell. Or Charlie Christian, or Charlie Rouse. And so on. What are the odds?

Not good.

So lately my mind's stuck on models for doing something somewhere between manually trawling server logs for patterns in HTTP_REFERER values and automatically populating a list of links from whatever referring pages link in. The former is a lot of work, the latter is a public request for embarrassing spam. Which is what the Trackback spec can often lead to.

If I'm a leaf note in a Linked Data library collection world, I want somebody searching for Foo at Footown Library to find my interesting set of resources about Foo at Bartown University Library. If Footown and Bartown both point their Foo pages to id.loc.gov/foo-as-a-URI, then there will two sets of folks able to see that we've both got stuff about Foo: the biggest crawlers out there, the ones likely to see both links; and the host of id.loc.gov/foo-as-a-URI. That's not a lot of options.

The traditional record for Foo has long been used to make these kinds of connections in OPACs, but those connections tend to be tightly scoped at the boundaries of the local collection. Similar connections are made from the same record at other sites, but the connections an authority record enables among holdings at any one institution are not connected to the connections made at any other institution, or at least I don't think they are, at least not in the open web, in a crawlable-by-little-old-me sort of way.

I don't know how to do this, but I'm pretty sure we need to find a way.

Actual conversations with my Mom, early 2009

dchud — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:44:54 +0000

The following phone conversation excerpts took place between January 1, 2009, and mid-March, 2009. The names have been preserved to embarrass the participants.

"Hi Danny, happy new year, how are you?" "Hi Mom, happy new year, I broke my hand."

"Hi Mom, I'm feeling better, how are you?" "Hi Danny, I'm glad you're feeling better, but I broke my foot."

"Hi Danny, I'm really struggling with this foot, how's your hand?" "Hi Mom, my hand's getting better still, but now my back hurts like hell."

"Hi Mom, my back's feeling better and my hand's all healed, how's your foot?" "Oh it's finally getting better." "Oh good. Maybe things will get back to normal for both of us."

"Hi Danny, guess what, I broke my toe."

Fast forward to July:

"Hi Mom, guess what, I have bunions."