I’m not going to explain the origins of this — either you get it, or you don’t. But you have to admit, it makes a truly awesome (read: obnoxious) ringtone.

Ok, I’m not going to hack (too much) on a phone that hasn’t even been released yet, but if this screenshot is indicative of HTC’s ability to “hide the windows mobile ui” on their new “Touch Diamond” iPhone competitor, they really should just pack it in.

What is up with that giant mess of arrows in the upper right hand corner? Do we really need a T9 slider next to the spacebar? What are those tabs attached to, and why do they look like buttons? Why is there a giant radio button next to “home”? I think the copy of GEOS that shipped with my C64 looked nicer than this.

From time to time, I like to create fun but ultimately pointless videos (such as this one of my cats wrestling, set to The Go! Team’s “Doing It Right”). To entertain my friends, I posted it to my Facebook page. Less than 24 hours later, I received an email from Facebook with the following content:

We have removed your video entitled “Kit Fight!” uploaded at 12:56pm April 19th, 2008. We did this because we learned that your video might include copyrighted material owned by a third party, such as a video clip or background audio.

Now, I’m not going to argue the point. The video used 54 seconds worth of someone’s copyrighted material as a soundtrack. What disturbs me, though, is this video was not publicly available. It was only visible to my 30-or-so friends on the network. It was pretty much impossible for me to gain either money or fame by posting the video — at least until Facebook rejected it and I decided to post it to YouTube instead.

It’s extremely unlikely that someone filed a complaint against this video. Which means that Facebook is either scanning all uploaded content for “copyright violations”, or employing people to watch everything that’s uploaded (what a horrible, horrible job that would be).

Why is a private network within Facebook considered a public space when it comes to copyright law? Or is this just a case of Facebook protecting itself instead of it’s users?

I’m not really mad about this, but it’s a reminder that as a Facebook user, you are completely beholden to their corporate policies. It’s a valuable service, but they control the data you share with them. Creepy.

Update: So it gets weirder… Krista has had the identical video clip on her Facebook profile for the past 4 days. What triggered my takedown notice? If there’s an automated scanner, why wasn’t the video flagged for her?

I’m not normally this prolific, but after the release of Strange Thoughts my buddy Kent and I had the following IM exchange:

Kent: Strange Thoughts was exceptional. I mean, really really terrific — I was literally transported to a new realm of musical understanding. One question though… when are you going to get back to making party music? Me: Umm… right now?

For some reason I don’t have a log of the exact conversation, but my memory of the exchange is very clear and I’m confident Kent used those exact words.

In any case, building a rocking, danceable party mix came effortlessly. There’s literally a TON of phenomenal new music out there right now, and it was a joy to build a set with it. I also wanted to get this out fast, hence the tiny turnaround after Strange Thoughts.

Session 003 hits all my favourite places — soft, epic progressive house and trance tracks like Williams’ “Love on a Real Train” and Jody Wisternoff’s incredible remix of “Miami Nice”. After the first half, things really start to take off in the form of some funky house courtesy of Ministry of Funk. Then we slide into some glitchy, dirty electro funk before polishing it off with Peter Martin’s classic “Perfect Wave”. Enjoy.

1. Arrival - Stoneface & Terminal
2. Love On A Real Train (Version by Studio) - Williams
3. Yes We Can - House Music United
4. If You Should Go feat. Susana (Inpetto & Duderstadt Dub Mix) - Armin van Buuren
5. Titans (Elias Tzikas Mix) - Kosmas Epsilon
6. Give It Up/Reaction (Adam K, Soha & Alex Gold Remix) - Alex Gold
7. Miami Nice (Jody Wisternoff Mix) - Astral Tiger
8. Surin - Quivver
9. Love On A Real Train (Williams Odyssey Mix) - Williams
10. Pictures - Stoneface & Terminal
11. Funky Nation - Ministry of Funk
12. You Control Me - Lil Devious
13. Word - Sebastien Leger & Chris Lake
14. In The End (Mazzali & Orlandi Mix) - Fuzzy Hair & Rock Da World
15. Bleep - Sandy W
16. Perfect Wave - Peter Martin

 

 phoenix sessions 003: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’s a cliche — dance music and obscure science fiction samples go together like cake and frosting. But it’s an awesome cliche, because there’s something amazing about that little snippet of speech, taken out of context. And later — sometimes years later — you’re watching an old movie on TV, totally unexpected, and that line of dialogue weaves its way back into your consciousness in its original form. This happened to me a few months back watching The Thin Red Line. I think 90% of that movie has been sampled, mostly by UNKLE. (THX-1138 is another film where every 3rd line of dialog is familiar).

With that in mind, I wanted to create my own sample-laden mixset. The tone is darker and spacier, with less emphasis on the dancefloor and more attention paid to the headphones. There’s a bunch of futuristic dub, a bit of downtempo, and some killer progressive stuff in there. Enjoy.

1. Serene - UNKLE
2. Masato Eternity - System 7
3. Bleed - Shiloh
4. Obscure Hobbies - Pako & Fredrick
5. Your Friends Are Scary - Younger Brother
6. A Coffee Shop In Rotterdam - Alexander Robotnick
7. Reckoner - Umut Gokcen vs Radiohead
8. Indigo (Androcell Remix) - Tripswitch
9. Fast Freeze - MyMy
10. Itajai Vibes (Claes Rosen Remix) - Sultan, Ned Shepard & Maher Daniel
11. 8000 - Extrawelt
12. A Case In Point - Terry Lee Brown Jr.
13. The Queen of All Everything - Ott

 

 DJBS - Strange Thoughts [70:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A few days ago, the web development community exploded into an uproar concerning the IE team’s plan to introduce a new method of triggering standards compliance mode in Internet Explorer 8. Web developers, with justifiable but thinly veiled vitriol, ripped into Microsoft and the Web Standards Project for going along with this scheme.

In essence, what the IE team wants is web developers to “opt-in” to new renderer features using a custom meta tag or HTTP header. Pages will then be frozen at that renderer, ensuring they remain consistently rendered from now until the end of time (or at least, until Microsoft stops supporting that rendering model or breaks it accidentally). We went down this path once before, using the Doctype declaration to differentiate between “quirks” mode and “standards” mode. IE7 is, unfortunately, also quirky in standards mode, so apparently we need a new “super-standards” mode for the next version (and so forth).

From the perspective of the IE team, this solution makes sense. They can effectively freeze HTML rendering at today’s IE7 baseline and proceed with enhanced features in later releases. Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, but I never considered HTML content to perfect screenshots that should remain immutable. Well designed HTML is flexible — it can be rendered by a desktop browser, or stripped to it’s barest essentials by a mobile parser. (Note that I’m drawing a clear line between web content and web applications — web apps are by their very nature a snapshot of the present). The IE team should be encouraged to fix their mistakes at the expense of breaking badly developed content, just as users should be encouraged to update their rendering engines as frequently as possible. Notice that the IE team is the only browser developer that seems to have this problem.

As a web designer and developer, apparently I’m supposed to help Microsoft maintain their dominance in the web browser market by tagging my pages for their benefit. But what do I get out of the bargain?

Let’s assume for a moment that IE8 has been released with a spectacular new rendering engine, on par with Firefox or Safari or Opera in terms of “write once, render anywhere”. Let’s also assume I have a pretty good idea of what my target audience’s browser technology will be: 50% “IE8 compatible” (meaning IE8/FF/Safari etc), 30% IE7, and 20% IE6. None of these markets are small enough to ignore or deliver reduced functionality to. I would still need to optimize for three different version of Internet Explorer. IE7 doesn’t go away, and neither does IE6. I can’t just freeze the renderer at the IE7 level — I want to use all those fancy new features in IE8 that have been available in alternate browsers for years now.

So where does this leave me, the web developer? Still coding for multiple releases of IE. In fact, the problem gets worse as Microsoft accelerates it’s release schedule — people simply don’t update quickly enough. IE6 is still estimated to have a 35% market share — over a year after IE7’s release. How do we solve the problem of supporting multiple renderers?

Simple. We deprecate IE6. We no longer support it. And we provide a clear, direct upgrade path that involves little to no effort on the part of the user. Maybe this involves just swapping out the rendering engine, leaving the browser’s UI intact (to minimize the impact on the user’s day-to-day experience interacting with their browser). I’m certain part of the resistance to upgrading to IE7 today is the horrendous overhaul to the UI that occurred between versions.

Apple doesn’t seem to have any problems keeping it’s Safari users (or iTunes users) on the latest release through an effective software update system. Firefox also has a fairly effective system, although it could be improved. But web developers don’t complain about supporting multiple, ancient versions of those browsers because the system, and the users, are proactive about updates.

We need to get over the idea of preserving out-of-date content as a snapshot of the day it was released. We need to stop worrying about breaking 5-year-old browsers and just get on with it.

Update: After further reflection, there is another (possibly better) approach Microsoft could take. They could include the IE6 and IE7 rendering engines in each new update, and provide a user-accessible toggle for enabling it on specific sites. Using the info bar, much in the same way they do when blocking popups or enabling ActiveX downloads, a message could be displayed along the lines of “This page may not be compatible with the Internet Explorer 8 display system. Would you like to switch to Internet Explorer 6 compatibility mode for this site?” IE would remember the setting and use it on subsequent visits. The compatibility message could be triggered by detecting known CSS hacks, or even based on the Last-Modified date of the document.

When I bought my 06 Jetta, I knew there was one tradeoff I had to make — a lack of auxiliary input on the stereo, or any CD changer control for me to shunt my iPod into. It’s not that VW doesn’t provide these. It’s just that they weren’t provided on my car. I saved a bundle buy buying a demo model, and the speaker system is divine, but there was just no headunit/iPod fever in my future.

I figured at the time it would be a simple matter of replacing the factory stereo with an aftermarket one that featured aux-in. Aside from some Germanic connector funkiness, the VW actually features a fairly straightforwardly-sized double-DIN headunit that can be swapped out using an adaptor plate. Compare this to some of the custom fittings used in Subarus and Mazdas I’ve seen and I was feeling pretty confident.

Now, it’s not like I needed anything super fancy. I’ve been rocking a 3rd generation iPod since 2003 using an old iRiver FM transmitter that I picked up while still driving my Echo. The iRiver actually has remarkably clear sound. It can easily overpower any station not directly claimed in my area, and has nice clear bassy sound. I’m not an auto audiophile at all — combine the traffic and wind noise and I’m happy just to have something static free. But the iRiver only used the headphone jack on the iPod, and it was always a pain to stow it and retrieve it whenever I needed to pause or change tracks. And as my iPod battery continued its inevitable march into paperweight status, I was looking for something that I could dock with directly.

The first thing that stunned be about the aftermarket car stereo market was the price. The second was the cheesy slick salesman status that seemed to permeate the showrooms. But the price was the killer.

As soon as you get into the double-DIN market, you’re looking at $1000+ DVD systems or $2000+ navigation systems. I don’t need a navigation system (I’ve lived here for over 20 years), and I can’t imagine a single situation where I would want to watch a DVD in the front seat of my car. And even if I did, I have a iPod that plays video. A simple double-din CD player with an iPod connection couldn’t be had for less than $800, and that’s not including any kind of installation. And since I’m fussy about aesthetics (I did buy a VW, after all), I was astounded by the faux-techy UI veneers that seemed like they hadn’t been updated since, oh, Railroad Tycoon was popular. Which might explain why most of them look a lot like Railroad Tycoon.

So the new headunit was out. I’d upgraded to a Touch. It was time for Plan B. I realized (after checking my bank balance) that what I was really looking for was a nicer way to mount and charge my iPod, while still providing access to its controls. FM transmission was actually working quite well for me, so I didn’t need to throw that out immediately. I’d been reading about the Harmon/Kardon Drive+Play system for several years, so I decided to investigate further. Their newest system, the Drive+Play 2, seemed nice but was overpriced ($450) for what it gave me. The original system was available for only $80, so I bit and bought one. “Bit” being the operative word here.

After much fussing with the wiring, I managed to get the system wired into my car while only setting off one airbag alarm in the process (no permanent damage!). It took only a few days to realize just how high the suck knob turns when it comes to the Drive+Play.

For starters, the FM transmitter is absolutely horrendous. Apparently I’d been treated quite nicely by my iRiver transmitter, as the Harmon/Kardon version was not only seriously underpowered (resulting in frequent bursts of interference), but almost comically overdriven. Whenever my music would hit peak volume, the audio would compress to near-inaudibility, making it sound like I was listening to dance music over a 1950’s era intercontinental phone line. And since it was connected to the dock port, I had no control over the audio levels.

That wasn’t the worst of the Drive+Play’s offenses. The most heinous was it’s propensity for completely failing to turn the FM Transmitter on at frequent but random intervals. Let me say that again: the Drive+Play would fail to engage it’s only enabled method of audio output, treating me to a delightful (and long) serenade of radio static until I managed to massage it into compliance by fussing repeatedly with the station settings and cycling the power. Awesome.

My final solution is a lot like my first solution, just updated for the Touch and providing me pretty much everything I need short of a direct connection. I’ll work on that later (hello, eBay). What I settled on was a Belkin TuneBase FM that I found on sale at my local big box electronics retailer. The TuneBase is pretty much perfect: good quality sound (very close to what I was getting with the iRiver), charging station, and the thick stand supports the Touch perfectly. Sometimes the high-tech/low-tech solution really is the best.

Everyone has their hangups and preferences when it comes to music. I’ve long accepted the fact that dance music is a fringe group, but one of the friendliest and internet savvy. And the flow and swings really make work, play, and driving much more interesting. So pretty much 90% of my waking day.

My hangup with dance music (or electronic music, whatever you want to call it) is Divas. I hate Divas. Really, I eschew lyrics in general, but a wailing house diva will really make my eardrums rebel. Yet every once in a while a soaring female vocal will catch me just the right way and I can’t stop listening.

This set features two of my absolute favourite female vocal performances from the past year. The first is Hybrid’s “I Know (Keenan & Anderson Remix)”, a truly breathtaking track. The second is Robyn’s “With Every Heartbeat”, a track which drifts tantalizingly close to diva cheese before punching through with an emotional chorus that is absolutely stunning. Unfortunately, it’s also a track that’s had a lot of airplay by DJs much more famous than I, so I mixed things up a bit by pulling the chunky minimalist Hugg & Pepp mix into the soaring (but mostly vocal free) Rory Phillips take.

The rest of the mix finds a solid progressive groove, with a bit more diversity and less driving dance tracks than my last few efforts. I hope you like it.

One of my all-time favourite mixsets is Sasha & Digweed’s first “Northern Exposure” double CD, an album that first truly introduced me to the art of the DJ set. Along with the brilliant track selection and song mixing, the duo included a graphic showing how each track overlapped. Maybe it was just showing off, but I was always impressed by how well they were able to layer diverse songs on top of each other, sometimes 3 at at time.

I thought it would be fun to do the same thing for this set, to illustrate graphically these sets are put together, showing loops and edits alongside mixed overlaps. I hope you like it as well.

Now, on with the tracklist:

1. Magic Games Mastered - Jacuqes Renault
2. Flicker (Cinematrik Remix) - Boom Jinx
3. Leaving Planet Earth (Dousk Remix) - Talisman & Hudson
4. I Know (Keenen & Anderson Remix) - Hybrid
5. Hearts on Fire (Joakim Remix) - Cut Copy
6. Bucovina feat. Shantel (Ian Oliver’s Clubovina Mix) - Ian Oliver
7. Blew (Becker Remix) - Antix
8. G Platz (Neil Quigley’s Pacemaker Dub) - Nick Muir
9. A Field - Vector Lovers
10. With Every Heartbeat (Hugg & Pepp Remix) - Robyn with Kleerup
11. With Every Heartbeat (Rory Phillips Remix) - Robyn with Kleerup
12. My Moon My Man (Boys Noize Classic) - Feist
13. 2.20 Girl (Gutterstylz Dub Mix) - Suicide Sports Club
14. Beautiful Life (Gui Boratto Remix) - Gui Boratto

 

 DJBS - phoenix sessions 002 [77:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the questions I hate to answer is “what do you do for a living?” It’s not that I don’t know what I do, it’s just that there isn’t a commonly used term that I can use to describe it. Most people don’t want to hear an extended diatribe concerning the exact position that’s occupied somewhere between graphic designer and web programmer. So usually I just tell people that I design websites, although there’s an aching part of my brain that assumes my fellow conversee now sees me as some kind of FrontPage doodling monkey.

I think the best term I’ve found is Interaction Designer, although it’s a term that means different things to different people. I like the word Interaction, because it makes my work feel so much more dynamic. I don’t build brochureware, I build web applications, you insensitive clod! It implies action, which is basically true because client-side code is all about making things move around on the screen in a predictable and consistent manner. I’m also appreciative of the word Designer because I work with image and color (and spend at least a third of my time in Photoshop). It makes me feel like a graphic designer (now with more future!), even though I have little formal education in it.

So what’s my point? And what does this have to do with drugs and programming languages? Well, as an Interaction Designer I get to experience plenty of web development platforms from the socket side in. That way, I get to form all kinds of uneducated opinions about the language and the people who write in it… and go to battle for it. And since I’m technically a Computer Scientist (note the capital letters), I know just enough about the topic to get myself into trouble when I post my opinions on the internet.

Over the past several years, I’ve written client side code in Flash and AJAX that talk to servers running a variety of frameworks — Struts, Spring, JSF, PHP, some custom XSLT (shudder) and JSP jobby, and a variety of others. I tend to learn enough about these frameworks to understand their architecture and templating system, but rarely need to go any deeper. But my latest gig has me looking at things from the other side… literally. It seems that Interaction, as defined by this job, also includes slinging PHP code and writing SQL queries. It’s not that I’m incapable (in fact, sometimes it’s nice to exercise those server side brain muscles), but ultimately it’s not what I really enjoy doing. Especially since I’ve apparently inherited the frankenplatform, a heinous mishmash of PHP libraries built on no framework in particular (unless you consider Joomla a web application framework… yeah, me neither). The problem with frankenplatforms is they are really hard to bring back into line with some established pattern or system. Which, I promise, brings me almost to my point.

In my attempt to understand and hopefully improve the frankenplatform, I’ve been doing a lot of research into alternative PHP frameworks, as well as popular alternatives such as Ruby on Rails or Django. And this has brought me into close contact with the various religious groups that preach their benefits.

In Nathan Rabin’s excellent review of New York, New York (part of his always hilarious My Year of Flops series), he writes about 70s “coke movies” and “pot movies”, revealing the unique characteristics of films powered by their respective drugs (and drug addled crew). I think this same concept can be applied to programming languages.

The “coke movie” of development platforms is clearly Perl – all twitchy and ego-fuelled, operating at hyper speed and totally incoherent to the sober kids down the hall. Ruby is most likely the pot platform – mellow and creative, beloved of indie kids and legal for medicinal purposes in California. If The Shins were a web framework, they’d be Ruby on Rails.

PHP is, I think, crystal meth. Sketchy and unpredictable, with bad teeth and a hideous grin, it still manages to accomplish a heck of a lot in a short amount of time. It steals the best ideas from it’s friends, but takes them to the street and abuses them until they’re almost unrecognizable. It’s also cheap and readily available.

Which leaves us with Java. Java is the beer of our drug metaphor. Cheap, ubiquitous, it gets the job done in the least sexy possible way. You can fuel a whole party on beer, but it’s a heck of a lot of work and you find yourself staring at a urinal more often than you’d planned. Still, you can get it pretty much anywhere and it’s been popular since the beginning of recorded history.

You’ll notice I left out .Net. It’s easy to take cheap shots at .Net, like making it the wine cooler or the Bacardi Breezer. So I will. .Net is the Bacardi Breezer, last refuge of the undergrad and technical school dropout, attractive only because it comes in the shiniest box.

Which is why I’m actively trying to recruit someone to take over the server side. Clearly, I’m not qualified.

One of the advantages of being a bedroom DJ is only releasing sets when I am truly happy with them. Phoenix Sessions, my latest series, is an attempt to redefine some of the sounds I am using and mixing styles. Of course, you’ll still find some booty shakin’, head noddin’ tracks in here, but the first half in particular explores some downtempo and progressive breaks.

1. Sleepless Nights - 120 Days
2. Best Mamgu Ever - Underworld
3. No More, Anymore (Elusive Mix) - Matthew Adams
4. Human - James Zabiela
5. The White Flash (Ft. Thom Yorke) - Modeselektor
6. Gridlock (Digweed & Muirs Stripped Down Mix) - John Digweed
7. Smoke (Dark Globes Angel Of The North Remix) - Trafik
8. Moods Feat. Lemon (Valentino Kanzyani Remix) - Shlomi Aber
9. Whatever This May Be (Ogi Gee Cash & Synchronized Remix) - Luke Star, Yves Eaux & Leron
10. Beta Receptor (M.I.K.E.`s Undergroove Remix) - The Delta Rock Duo
11. Royal Gregory - Holy Fuck
12. Lumberjack - Kris Menace & Alan Braxe
13. Sunset Boulevard - Paul Keeley

 

 phoenix sessions 001 [77:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download