Category Archives: Music

Albums, concerts, playlists, musicians, and the joy of listening.

Sing It From the Rafters

Music,

WordPress 1.2 is available. I’m at a loss for words at the moment, so I’ll just quote the features list:

  • Sub-categories: Categories can be arranged hierarchically and infinitely deep. Multiple categories combined with sub-categories gives WordPress the most comprehensive taxonomy system of any blogging software available.
  • OPML Export and Import: You can import and export OPML to systems like Bloglines or desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
  • Automatic Thumbnail Creation System: WordPress has a refined upload feature that automatically creates thumbnails any size you want.
  • Encrypted passwords and cookies: All passwords in the database and password cookies are encrypted, ensuring maximal security.
  • New plugin architecture: The new plugin architecture simplifies modifying or extending WordPress’ features. Plugins can now hook into nearly every action WordPress does.
  • Localization of WordPress and Unicode support: The efforts put into internationalizing WordPress have borne fruit, and now you can adapt WordPRess to work in your native language. Several translations are already available.
  • Advanced comment moderation: You can now fine-tune your moderation filters in a manner very similar to blacklists for other weblog tools. There is also mass-editing of comments, which makes it a snap to delete hundreds of comments with the click of a button, if necessary.
  • Post preview: Near-instant previews while writing or editing articles help you proofread and make improvements before finally presenting your work of art to the world.
  • RSS and LiveJournal Importers: The new RSS import script is the closest thing to an universal importer. It allows you to import entries from Radio weblogs even other blogging tools that we may not support specifically. The LiveJournal importer finally lets you have a full blooded self-hosted weblog without losing all your old LiveJournal posts.
  • Unlimited update services: Now you can define multiple weblog change monitoring services to be pinged when you post.
  • Directory flexbility: Now you can have all the WordPress files in one directory and the weblog in a higher level directory.

Sting

Music, Personal

I’m in the midst of finals, so there is not a lot of time for extra-curricular writing here. Things have still been busy. Most notably, I am now a member of the Web Standards Project, and you can see where my bio will eventually go. A friend in San Francisco told me the other day that whenever I come up in conversation it’s as “Photo Matt,” partly because no one can remember my last name. This was exciting to hear because it puts me a single word away from one-word celebrities such as Sting, Prince, Common, Madonna, Ludacris, Seal, and Poe. I suppose I’m in the less-exclusive two-word celebrity club with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Puff Daddy (P. Diddy?), Big Boi, and Andre 3000. Right. The reason I think it’s all funny is that the filename of my bio is photomatt.html, breaking the convention of every other bio on the WaSP site. I guess Molly forgot my last name.

Once again, sorry for the unexpected break in posting. As my schedule settles things should return back to normal, whatever that may be. Besides, all the action is on WordPress anyway, which is fast-approaching its version 1.2 release. Version 1.0 was a big deal and made a lot of necessary architectual changes that we really needed to move forward, but I think 1.2 is the one that’s going to make waves. As a welcome side-effect of WordPress’ recent surge in popularity, there has been a lot more activity with volunteers sending in patches and working on documentation, both of which are sincerely appreciated. The official chat channel has been busy too, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net. I currently have two bots running in the channel, wpbot and pressbot. Wpbot is based on the interesting Mozbot package, which has great logging features and a few other nicities, but just wasn’t what I was ultimately looking for. What I really wanted was JiBot, and that’s what pressbot is. It was more involved installation than Mozbot—I had to download and compile Python, SQLite, and a number of Python packages—but it has been totally worth it. I have been doing a number of development-related setups lately, especially on Windows, and I can’t wait until I get a free moment to write about them. My productivity and organazation has improved several-fold as a result of a few pieces of well-connected open-source software.

Mix CDs

Music

The drive up to Austin was made all the more enjoyable by the mix CDs Kymberlie gave me last night at the H-Town Bloggers pre-SxSW party. Kymberlie runs a thing called Burn It which is like a giant secret-santa type mix CD exchange. If her CDs are indication of the quality, I’d love to participate next time.

Mix CDs are so fun because they provide vignettes of someone else’s tastes, the best and most interesting. Mix CDs are like linklogs of music.

Jay-Z Construction Kit

Music

The Jay-Z Construction Set is a toolkit with all of the necessary software and raw material to create a new remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album. It includes nine different variations on the Black Album, over 1200 clip art images, and a couple hundred meg of classic samples and breaks.

It’s the Jay-Z Construction set, as featured in the New York Times. Taking Grey Tuesday to its natural conclusion. I came across this via Mr Haughey, who should be ostracized for mixing Kenny G with anything. Wasn’t the Louis Armstrong incident bad enough?

Oh, and their hype blog runs WordPress.

Death of Flexible Width Designs

Design, Music

It’s over, it’s done. Those of you holding on should wave the white flag as two of the best flexible width sites, Doug Bowman and Dan Cederholm, have thrown in the towel and gone fixed-width without even an entry of explanation, I suppose because the benefits of fixed-width are so obvious no explanation is necessary. Update: Cedorholm’s design is now centered.

Bowman's Stop Design Cederholm's Simple Bits

The assault is coming from all sides:

Dear Mr Antonioni:
I recently screened your classic film, The Red Desert, starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. I have a problem with the way you used screen space. My theater’s screen is big and wide. It is capable of handling many actors at the same time. For instance, crowd scenes and battle scenes work well. But in your movie there are only a few actors — and many times they are pictured in one corner of the screen or another, against a stark minimalist background. This is a terrible waste of screen space. For instance, there is one scene where Ms Vitti is filmed on the left side of the screen and there is a white forest behind her. The white forest is not much to look at. Sure, I can look to the left and watch Ms Vitti’s performance, but what do I see when I squint my eyes and look only at the right side of the screen? Not much! I urge you to add extra characters and situations to your movie so every inch of my screen bursts with action at all times.

Sincerely,
Howard Gumpf

Ouch. Now I think the film/web analogy is a bad one, and it breaks down with any sort of critical thought. Zeldman knows this but he’s trying to make a point.

Was it that long ago that flexible-width designs were all the rage? They came in with a bang, and left with a whimper. Is anyone still holding out? Are there any good flexible sites left? The only place I see it anymore in web applications (such as the WordPress administration interface) and in lightly designed e-commerce sites like Amazon.

Style Updates

Meta, Music,

For better or worse, there have been a number of stylesheet updates around here, so you may notice things looking slightly different. First off are the shadows behind the main content box, for whose sake non-semantic elements were added to this page for the first time ever. How quick we are to sell out!

Speaking of selling out, text advertisements may appear at the top every now and then. Yes they suck but it’s the holidays and extra cash is always nice.

I moved the background image for the post titles from the anchor element to the h2 element to prevent the blinking when you rolled over the titles in IE on Windows. My Mother will be sorely disappointed as she thought that was a rather cool effect I had done intentionally. I wish!

Tantek and Eric informed me that my site was completely borked in respectively Mac IE 5 and Safari. This site is an experiment, so I make no guarantees as to browser compabilitiy but I try to be good about testing things on browsers available to me. Last night I used Greg’s Powerbook to see what was going on. It seems Safari was having trouble with some commented out content (the ads that are temporarily disabled) so I moved that from HTML comments to PHP comments. Commenting things out server-side is actually a much better practice because it keeps the source code maintainability for you the author but hides the comments from any visitors. There is also a savings in bandwidth, but in many cases that will be minimal. So as a best practice go from:

<-- Three extra divs added because prima the donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. -->

to:

<?php /* :-- Three extra divs added because the prima donna designer just HAD to have his shadows. And my idiot boss agrees with him. And they'll never see this comment. MUHAHAHA! */ ?>

As for Mac IE, I wasn’t sure where to begin. It doesn’t handle the float on the menu list items well so instead of a nice tabby menu you have a series of giant honking bars in the header. I could go to display: inline for the navigation list items and work with the horizontal menu from there, but I’ve always prefered having the list items floated and the anchors as blocks, which you can’t do when the containing list element is inline. If I remember correctly Eric helped me around this problem before on the WordPress site (thank you!) by giving the items a fixed width, but I don’t have the space to burn here like I did on that menu.

Checking over my stats, Mac IE users make up approximately 2.1% of my viewing audience over the life of this site, and closer to 0.9% over the last month. Uowever is this low and declining number because other browsers are now in vogue on the Mac and IE hasn’t been updated recently to quench Mac users’ insatiable desire for upgrades? Or is it because my site looks so bad in their browser? The world may never know.

So the moral of the story is: the web is a jungle and watch your comments when on Safari.

Dotson Gig Tonight

Jazz, Music

Well the last gig got canned due to torrential rain, and now this Monday I’m feeling a bit under the weather. That’s life! Here are the details again, try to make it out if you can:

Tonight at 7:30 PM I’ll be performing with the Dennis Dotson big band on lead alto. Our entire program is going to be exclusively music from the highly talented composer and pianist Joe LoCascio, who will also be playing with us. It is the first night of what they’re calling JazzFest 2003 and there are more details, including directions and a map, at JazzHouston. They say they’re charging for tickets but I don’t think they have in the past so I’m not sure about that. I’ve been looking forward to this gig and I think it’s going to be great, so if you’d like to hear some exciting jazz tonight, try to check it out.

By the way, welcome to December. It’s by far my favorite month of the year and I’m going to savor every minute of it. December is the month I look forward to when trudging through all the other months. Lot’s of exciting things planned this month, from HPUG to WordPress to even something with the elusive Mike. And that’s just the volunteer stuff.

Update: Thanks to all who came out. Having people you love in the audience makes performing a whole difference experience. 🙂

Dennis Dotson Big Band Gig

Jazz, Music

Tonight at 7:30 PM I’ll be performing with the Dennis Dotson big band on lead alto. Our entire program is going to be exclusively music from the highly talented composer and pianist Joe LoCascio, who will also be playing with us. It is the first night of what they’re calling JazzFest 2003 and there are more details, including directions and a map, at JazzHouston. They say they’re charging for tickets but I don’t think they have in the past so I’m not sure about that. I’ve been looking forward to this gig and I think it’s going to be great, so if you’d like to hear some exciting jazz tonight, try to check it out.

The gig has been cancelled due to rain! Sorry to any who were planning on going. It will most likely be rescheduled and I’ll post an update when it is.

Opera and Hallowe’en

Music, Personal

Haven’t been around here much lately, though I have been posting to the WordPress blog, coding like crazy, and generally keeping busy. However there are two recent events I wanted to highlight. The first was attending the opening night of Julius Caesar with the lovely Elissa. The performance was excellent, though longer than I am used to, and I would recommend it. I saw several people I know from school there, which doesn’t happen often, but they all seemed to disappear after intermission. Did we miss the party or something? We stayed in our nosebleed seats all night, but apparantly the thing to do is scope out empty seats during the first act and grab them after intermission. Noted.

Elissa and I before we left We grabbed some fries beforehand.

The following night was the first official “party” I hosted at my new place, and it went well. Hallowe’en is my least favorite holiday, which isn’t to say I don’t like it, because it’s still a holiday, but as far as holidays go it’s the one I tend to enjoy the least. Anyway the party went well with food and candles and costumes and people I liked, and we ended up watching Ringu (the Japanese movie that inpsired The Ring), ordering pizza, and then by popular demand (with one dissenting vote) following it up with its American cousin, The Ring. Everyone had told me the Japanese version was supposed to be scarier and better, but I actually prefer the American version for a couple of reasons. Though things are less tidy, it’s more interesting and engaging. I hear a sequel is in the works. I didn’t dress up, but we did have one or two interesting ensembles.

Sarah and Elissa Patriq with Sarah's fake cigar Your author with bunny ears

Impartial Cache

Music

Lately it is with less frequency that news from the White House sends a chill up my spine, yet it seems the White House is using technical means to prevent spidering and archival of key documents. This is, without question, highly questionable. I hope there is a good reason for this or that it will be reversed quickly, but one has to wonder whether such a deliberate action could have been done by someone who is not a stakeholder, like a web lackey.

Of course this is a situation that could be addressed by technical means. A spidering robot that did not follow the robot exclusion rules could spider a number of public government web pages at set intervals, say twice a day, archive the results of the crawl, and a summary of the differences between the versions could be offered as a service of government transparancy. WhiteHouse.gov would certainly be worth watching and others such as the Fed could be interesting as well. It’s not a trivial task, but I would imagine one of the groups interested in such things would have no problem funding the development and mantainance of such a tool. For complete transparancy the tool could be open source. I can’t think of a legitimate objection that could be brought against such a service by operators of the websites in question. Bandwidth use would be trivial compared to the amount of traffic such sites must get every day.

Two Great Shows

Jazz, Music

Radiohead was really exciting. The Chronicle has a review, but like most stories there it’s painful to read and I doubt that link will last as long as this entry is on my front page. Our seats were on the lawn and we were a bit to the left and back. We had a good clear view of the stage but couldn’t see too many details, though certainly everything came through. I would have liked te been closer to see how some of the effects were done, but maybe next time. They went through old and new songs, starting with some of the latest ones from Hail to the Thief and moving forward. There were a few flubs, such as Yorke skipping a section on 2 + 2 = 5 one or two other minor things that I doubt too many people noticed. My only complaint would be that with several songs they would end with a solo usually from the guitarist on the right (I can’t think of his name at the moment) but you could tell it was the end of the song and the energy was dying around him as he was trying to build up his solo. It would of been nice if they took a cue from jazz and went from a solo back into the melody or some sort of chorus to end the tune and keep the energy up.

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at Jone’s Hall last night was one of those musical experiences that will stay indelibly burned in my memory for a long time. I had been looking for tickets and the day before my uncle called asking if I’d like to go with him, row B right in the center. Close enough to hear the musician’s sounds and not just the amplification, I was blown away. Every soloist and every piece was top-notch. The highlight of the evening, besides of course Houston native and HSPVA grad Andre Hayward’s music, was Eric Lewis’ piano. I have never heard of this man before, nor can I find anything on the web. Throughout the concert whenever Wynton introduced him he prefaced his name with what sounded like “Top Professor” which I’m sure means something, but I’m not sure what. Lewis’ solo on A Love Supreme’s Resolution was so intense and captivating that I was completely taken away by it in a way that music effects you only a few times in your life. The personnel of the group was different in several regards from the program, but that’s to be expected with the dynamics of a touring group and the fact that the programs are printed months before. If you have a chance to check out the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, do so. Highly recommended.

Ongoing

Jazz, Music, Personal

I usually write entries in my head before I put my fingers to the keyboard. The problem with this is that the longer I go between entries, the more that I try to cram into my mental post and inevitably the more that’s lost.

When you last left your Author he was gearing up for the second night of the Kemah Jazz Festival. It was fantastic, as expected, and he had good fun with the company. Tim Hagans made a guest appearance on Woody Witt’s set and it was the highlight of the night. Ended up leaving a little bit early due to tiredness, and slept well.

Saturday started with leftover pizza from Star Pizza, which, in hindsight, was most likely bad. Your Author was very, very hungry and ignored the fact that it tasted a little funny (it was vegetarian “gourmet” pizza anyway) and he was already on the way to rehearsal. By the end of the dress rehearsal with Steve Fulton things were queasy. But not too queasy to miss Kathy and Christine‘s birthday party that night, to which he was accompanied by Elissa. Too queasy to eat much there save a taste of really nice meat stick from Coffee “BBQ” Mike and a slice of cake, both of which were sorely regretted later.

Saturday night and Sunday morning were very harsh, and will not be discussed. Many thanks to my angel of a mother who helped smooth things over.

Sunday the Author was still sick, but knew he couldn’t miss the gig at Kemah, so went and played anyway. It went well, and many thanks to those such as Cody, Elissa, Greg, Sarah, and the others that attended. Food was still a bad idea though, and the trip had an early end. That night the fever came back strong and not much sleep was had.

Monday was a day of recovery. Tuesday was a return to normal affairs and catching up with things.

Which brings us to today. Things are very busy with many projects, but that’s par for the course. Tonight is the Radiohead concert which I’ve been looking forward to for months it seems. The weather is gorgeous. Can’t wait.

Kemah Jazz 2003

Jazz, Music

As I may have told some of you already, I’m performing in the Kemah Boardwalk Jazz Festival again this year. This year I’m performing with a different (and honestly much better) group than I did in previous years. So on Sunday from 2:10–3:00 I’ll be on the Kemah stage, jazzin’ it up. An interesting note about this performance is that I’m going to be making my public debut on flute. So if you can make it down come and say hi to me before or after the gig and we’ll chat.

If you’re interested in seeing some of the other performances as well this weekend probably the closest thing to a good schedule online is at JazzHouston. I have some pictures from last night’s performance forthcoming. All of the music was fantastic, and I really mean that. One of the non-music highlights of the night for me (besides the beautiful sky and good pizza) was Dennis Dotson saying my name from the stage as part of troubleshooting some amplicification problems. It’s the little things. 🙂

If you need any more information, feel free to contact me. Don’t be shy, no one else is: several days ago I got a call on my cell phone from a number I didn’t recognize. I said hello and an unfamilar voice asked me if I had this year’s schedule for the festival. Apparently from a search engine she came across last year’s schedule and assumed I was the authority to contact, on my phone nonetheless, for this year’s. I directed her to a website or two that would have more current information than mine. It was certainly an interesting experience, but now I’m faced with problems of transparency. I want it to be as easy as possible for my readers to get in contact with me, except when I don’t. We’ll see how this works out. Of course it never would have been a problem in the first place if the festival had a decent website or the schedule available in a non-graphic form. What if a blind person wants to go and can only get to the schedule through the web? I guess they’re out of luck. The festival organizers are very open to suggestions though, and I’m sure if this issue is brought to their attention they’ll address it, it just probably hasn’t occurred to them.

Another Semester

Education, Music, Personal

It is with a slightly stuffy nose that I will start my third semester of college tomorrow. For the curious here is my schedule as it stands now, as much for my own reference as anyone elses.

  1. Monday
    • 10:00–11:00 — 3310: Introduction to Political Theory, taught by the prolific Ross Lence. AH 302.
    • 11:00–12:00 — 1336: U.S. and Texas Constitutions and Politics, taught by my favorite instructor of last year Dr. Little. PGH 350.
    • 2:30–4:00 — 3319: Politics of Social Policy, by Dr. Lineberry. PGH 347.
  2. Tuesday
    • 10:00–11:30 — 3332: Philosophy of Language, Dr. Saka. AH 205.
  3. Wednesday
    • 10:00–11:00 — 3310: Introduction to Political Theory. AH 302.
    • 11:00–12:00 — 1336: U.S. and Texas Constitutions and Politics. PGH 350.
    • 2:30–4:00 — 3319: Politics of Social Policy. PGH 347.
  4. Thursday
    • 10:00–11:30 — 3332: Philosophy of Language. AH 205.
  5. Friday
    • 10:00–11:00 — 3310: Introduction to Political Theory. AH 302.
    • 11:00–12:00 — 1336: U.S. and Texas Constitutions and Politics. PGH 350.

As you can see it’s a little light, but that’s by design as I’d like to devote myself as much as possible to excelling in these courses, which by virtue of their instructors should be pleasantly challenging. Also playing in two or possibly three big bands, developing a new business, and moving WordPress forward, I knew that my extra-curricular commitments would be high and I didn’t want to over-commit myself (and possibly get ill again) like I did last semester.

No More Outlook Express

Music

Microsoft abandons Outlook Express says ZDNet UK. I find this highly disappointing because I’ve really become attached to OE, mostly because of it’s enhanced IMAP functionality over Outlook 2003. However if you look at that bizarre out-of-context quote in the middle of the article,

“IMAP is just not a very rich protocol,” Steve Conn, Exchange Server product manager, told ZDNet Australia during the company’s Tech Ed conference. “The great majority of people used Outlook Express because they weren’t on a LAN environment, and Outlook was just too fat for them.”

It’s as out of place here as it is in the article. Basically though it sounds like they’re going to be focusing on Exchange functionality over IMAP. I’ve played around with Outlook 2003 and was very impressed but whether I use it or not is very dependent on how it works with IMAP, which I live on. I’ve been browsing the Evolution blog and the screenshots for the next version look really great, if reminiscent of Entourage. That would be fine for my desktop, and even my Mom’s desktop (I’m moving her over to Linux), but on my laptop which is tied to Windows by proprietary drivers and hardware, I’m still out of luck. Why is Microsoft abandoning the things that made them so prevalent on desktops? Hat tip: Leonard.

Truly Bizarre

Music

Last Wednesday I transfered this domain to the new server, a dual Xeon with cute hard drives and RAM for days. This domain was, by far, the hardest one to transfer. I couldn’t tar it up because the previous system had a 2 gigabyte file size limit, and that mark was crossed long ago. What I ended up doing with the help of Mat is simply FTPing the albums directory (about 3 gigabytes) to the new server manually, and then packaging and transferring the rest of the account as I would normally. It was a hassle but it worked. Then another problem popped up, everyone seemed to be holding on the their outdated or cached DNS information like it was the last chocolate on earth, even though I had turned down the TTL days before. It was hairy for a few hours, but it all resolved itself, so to speak.

Except one. Mozilla 1.4 on this desktop still pulls up photomatt.net from the old server! Is it not simply a page cache, as I have cleared that and force reloaded more times than I can count. It is not a DNS issue, because Internet Explorer and Opera on the same machine seem to get to the new site just fine. I can ping, I can sing laments, I can fling books, but to no avail. So for the first times since I made the switch I am posting from IE instead of Mozilla, while I contemplate the best course of action from here. Perhaps another go at Firebird or the Mozilla 1.5 alpha is in order. That may solve it, but I’m still so confused as to why it is acting the way it does. Bizzare. Also if you don’t see this entry put your glasses on or, alternatively, contact me.

Elissa Is So…

Essays, Music

Elissa made me a really cool mix CD, so cool I feel like I have to share the track list.

  1. Explosion — Dilute
  2. Paper Bag — Fiona Apple
  3. Kaini Industries — Boards of Canada
  4. Easy — Emiliana Torrini
  5. Why You’d Want to Live Here — Death Cab for Cutie
  6. Your Bleedin’ Heart — Reggie & the Full Effect
  7. In the Morning of the Magician… — The Flaming Lips
  8. Reunited — Funkstorung featuring Wu Tang
  9. Highschool Lover — AIR
  10. Is It Wicked Not to Care? — Belle & Sebastian
  11. Merge — Lamb
  12. You Got Me — Roots featuring Erykah Badu
  13. Labour of Love — Frente
  14. Playboys — Mono
  15. Felt Mountain — Goldfrapp

Collected Links

Music,

Sometimes these things just build up, here are a few links worth browsing.

Hot Jazz Tonight

Jazz, Music

The word on the street is that tonight at 7:30 PM at the Pasta Co. on Woodway (map) there will be some burning big band jazz with yours truly and my good friend Rene in the alto section, and the lovely Sarah Williams screaming with the trumpets. Last week was a blast and this week should be even better. I need to get a list of all the amazing people in the band together, because everyone is so talented they deserve individual mention. Come check it out and say hi to me if you do.

Update: Thanks to Josh, Elissa, Jesse, Eddie, Emily’s parents Denise and Bob, my parents, my cousins Norma and Megan, Kelly Dean, and everyone else for coming out.