Monthly Archives: March 2003

Mood Music

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I sent this message to the chi-improv mailing list, but then thought it might be of interest to others…
The sixth most angry jazz song is “Morning [Including Circles]” from the Anthony Braxton/Joseph Jarman album “Together Alone”.
I know this thanks to the Microsoft Entertainment Mood Search.
Fancy this: if you filter to restrict to the “weight” to “light,” it shoots to number one.
NRG Ensemble’s “Hyperspace” is #13 on the “Moderate weight angry jazz” charts.

Apple Catches Up To Java 1.4.1

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Apple finally released Java 1.4.1 yesterday, several months behind the release from Sun. I’m not too fired up since at work we still
deploy all our applications in 1.3 and I haven’t been doing a lot of personal development where I might get to play with
new features. Still, I’d heard that there were notable performance improvements, and so I casually accepted the offer to install when Software Update came up.
Unfortunately, the release doesn’t work right with JBuilder, which is the IDE I use at work. Fortunately, Apple has this documented. The work around got me running just fine, once I found it. Thank you, Google.

The Way Things Work

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Seen in the March/April Mother Jones…
Step one: Send 32-page letter regarding stance on international Tobacco treaty
Step two: Arrange two or three “closed-door” meetings with White House staffers.
Step three: one month after sending letter, contribute $55,764 to the Republican Party
Step four: congratulate yourself when the Assistant Surgeon General is ordered to reverse position and support ten out of your eleven provisions.
MoJones quotes California representative Henry Waxman: “It’s either an eye-popping coincidence or a testament to the insidious influence that Philip Morris has on the Bush Administration.”
Read the whole story and this extra on the Bush Administration’s tobacco policies.

Kids These Days…

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Spotted in NewsScan Daily:
TEXT MESSAGE ESSAY BEWILDERS BRITISH TEACHER
A 13-year-old’s “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay proved to be almost
indecipherable to her poor teacher. “I could not believe what I was seeing.
The page was riddled with hieroglyphics, many of which I simply could not
translate,” the teacher told the Daily Telegraph newspaper. The girl’s
essay began: “My summr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF
& thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.” For those who had trouble
reading that, here’s a translation: “My summer holidays were a complete
waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his
girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York.
It’s a great place.” The text messaging craze is partially to blame for a
decline in grammar and written English abilities, says Judith Gillespie of
the Scottish Parent Teacher Council. “Pupils think orally and write
phonetically.” (Reuters/CNN 3 Mar 2003)

Open Up JavaSound

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I haven’t done much programming with JavaSound, but I’m interested in doing some work like that eventually (perhaps with my friend Rob’s SoundGrid project.) Anyway, he and I were discussing over email about how he might create his own sound bank. From the Sun documentation, it appeared to us that the only way was with Beatnik’s proprietary SoundBank editor.
Rob did some searching and found this open “Request for Enhancement” asking for support of some more open and more popular formats. If you care about these things, you can add your vote for this to be opened up. (See the bottom left corner of the page.) Note: you must have a (free) membership in the Java Developer Connection to read or vote on Java bugs and RFE’s.