Endless Groove Episode 2 continues in the idea of finding a nice, mellow relaxing groove and just letting it run its course. That’s not to say there aren’t moments that make you want to break out and dance, but this is music to work to. Or to drive to. This is a collection of music that I absolutely love, each track with a sprinkling of magic melody to keep things interesting. It also features one of the best tracks I’ve heard in years, the perfectly named The Magnificent by Lindstrøm. Killer.

1. Memory Tapes – Treeship (edit)
2. Tigerskin – Platin
3. Fritz Kalkbrenner – Blackmail
4. Hernan Cattaneo & Soundexile – Butterfly Effect (remix)
5. Pryda – Reeperbahn
6. Sebastian Davidson – Nightbird (Shur-I-Kan’s Sound of Summer Mix)
7. Lindstrøm – The Magnificent
8. Good Guy Mikesh & Filburt – Someone Told Me
9. Woolfy vs. Projections – Absynth (Markus Worgull Remix)
10. Shonen Jump – Vincenzo
11. Antix – The Hoard (Dousk Remix)
12. Dølle Jølle – Balearic Incarnation (Todd Terje’s Extra Doll Mix)
13. Iridium – Lullabies In The Dark

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:12:39 — 128.3MB)

I spend a lot of time sitting at my computer (shocking, I know). Sometimes, I just want some nice, mellow house music that sets itself into a groove and rolls. Some of my sets have had this characteristic, but I decided to create a new imprint called “Endless Groove”, just for these sorts of mixes. It’s got a bunch of tech house and a bit of progressive, and every once in a while the set kicks it up a notch and you may find you head bobbing along and your feet tapping your chair. At least, if you’re anything like me…

1. The Black Dog – Train By The Autobahn (Part 1)
2. Danny Howells – September
3. Lindstrøm – Where You Go I Go Too
4. Adele – Hometown Glory (Pocketknife’s Familiar Faces Remix)
5. Junior Boys – Hazel (Ewan Pearson’s House Dub Mix)
6. Felix Da Housecat & Kris Menace – Artificial
7. The Chain – Geo
8. Matias Aguayo - Minimal (DJ Koze Mix)
9. Schodt – First Breath (Dankann Remix)
10. Tore Jarlo – Raining Down On You feat. Pia (Dumb Dan Edit)
11. Bertrand Dupart & Gwen – Lolita (Rocco Remix)
12. Low Motion Disco – Things Are Gonna Get Easier (Windsurf Remix)
13. Paul Keeley – Life Aquatic
14. Danny Howells – September (re-entry)

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:23:46 — 114.9MB)

So it turns out that if you wait to too long between set releases, pretty much every one of your favourite artists releases a killer new track. I guess you could refer to this set as the Epic Mix.

16 Bit Lolitas make a couple of appearances with tracks from their magnificent new LP. DJBS favourites UNKLE, Jaytech and Way Out West all contribute in one way or another — I even found room for the new version of the all-time classic Shapeshifter’s track, Lola’s Theme (which made an appearance on one of my first ever mix sets, many years ago).

This will probably be the last set released under the “phoenix sessions” moniker for a while, as I intend to explore some new spaces in the near future. Stay tuned.

1. Black River (Gui Boratto Remix) – Bomb The Bass
2. Reformation (Robert Babicz Remix) – Lucca
3. Coconut Blues – Gabriel Ananda
4. Bazook (Bazookapella) – Chris the Greek & Matheos
5. Formula of Fear (Uberzone Dub Mix) – Hybrid
6. Murder Weapon – 16 Bit Lolitas
7. Azteca (KOS’s Stadium Mix) – KOS
8. Twilight (Layo and Bushwacka! Remix) – UNKLE
9. Lola’s Theme (2008 Re-edit) – The Shapeshifters
10. Heart & Soul – Yvel and Tristan
11. The Warning (Terracotta Army’s Eastern Invasion) – Way Out West
12. Nobody Seems to Care (feat. Jennifer Horne) – 16 Bit Lolitas
13. Candy (James Zabiela Remix) – Spooky
14. Geko – Guy J
15. Meaningful Story (Jaytech Remix) – Dinka
16. Omptine D’Un Ature Ete, L’Apres Midi – Jay Haze and Yann Thiersen

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:19:51 — 147.7MB)

When I first saw 280 North’s “280 Slides” application, I have to admit I was very impressed. They built a truly native-feeling (well, if you’re on a Mac) tool on the standard web platform. Not an easy feat, and clearly some big brains operating on the problem.

But the more I read about their toolkit (Objective-J), the more unsettled I felt. It’s the same feeling I get when I see tools like Flex. These are some seriously complicated development environments, meant to abstract away to the fundamental building blocks of the web.

When 280 North released their Objective-J toolkit a few days ago, called Cappuccino, I poured through their documentation and demos to get my head around what they had built. And it’s very impressive. But as a jQuery addict, I didn’t like their dismissal of it as at tool for making small adjustments to a web page. I feel that you can build a full-fledged web application in jQuery just as simply — or simpler — by embracing HTML/CSS as a layout engine, and JavaScript as a scripting language.

So I tackled re-implementing their FlickDemo application (several hundred lines of Objective-J) using jQuery and jQuery UI. It took about 3 hours to build, and ended up being about 45 lines of code (plus the frameworks, of course), and just under 200 lines of CSS declarations.

What I didn’t do: I didn’t bother hacking the CSS to work in Internet Explorer. It’s not that it couldn’t be done — jQuery supports it just fine — I’m just lazy. So you’ll need a modern WebKit or Gecko browser to see the demo. I also didn’t implement the drop shadows that Cappuccino uses on their images.

Also, the jQuery version doesn’t take over all you keyboard shortcuts, so you can still navigate around in your browser.

Original Cappuccino version

My jQuery version

Download the source here: flickrDemo-jQuery.zip

Update: Due to popular demand, I’ve changed the behavior of the slider so the image size updates in realtime. Total change: one word.

Update 2: Alexander Simmerl was nice enough to provide an upgrade to the image loading, bulking up the code by a few lines but greatly improving the load animation. In the comments, dak contributed a 2-line CSS fix for the inline-block layout problems in FF2 and IE7, which I’ve also merged.

I think this is as far as I’ll take the demo. Ultimately, it’s not that compelling of an application (but it does make a good demo). To respond to some of the criticism I’ve read, my point was not to argue that jQuery was a drop-in replacement for Cappuccino. Clearly there’s a ton of nuances to the Cappuccino runtime that would need to be carefully reimplemented if we wanted a 100% identical demo. My point is that it’s quite simple to do web application development in jQuery, and something as heavy as Cappuccino is not the only option (and in many cases, probably not the best option). I see Cappuccino as a kind of AIR-in-reverse (native apps that run in a web browser!) and possibly an interesting technology path for coders that are already familiar with Cocoa but don’t have experience with the nuances of direct web development. One thing I’m sure of is HTML/CSS/JavaScript are not going anywhere… they may be complimented by frameworks like Cappuccino, but the core will remain.

About a month ago, the hard drive in my 15-month-old Macbook Pro started making that bad “clicky-clicky” sound that is often associated with impending data loss. The 15 month age is critical to this story, as it’s over the standard 1-year warranty period for the MBP, and I was clearly too cheap (and suspicious) to purchase any kind of AppleCare protection.

Now, nothing really bad had happened to the machine yet, but when live and die by a single machine you tend to trust your instincts with these kinds of things. The hard disk was definitely threatening to take a dirt nap.

In one of the few signs of intelligence I’ve managed to display over the past few years, I have regular Time Machine backups, so I wasn’t overly concerned about losing any work. It was more an issue of timing… when was this thing going to bite it, and what would I be working on while it happened? And how could I circumvent the inevitable 2-3 day layover associated with the local Mac repair shop? (Keep in mind, there’s no Apple store — hence, no genius bar — in Calgary). Then it occurred to me: why simply replace the hard drive when I could upgrade it?

Read the rest of this post… »

A large chunk of this mix came together on a flight from Calgary to Montreal, early one morning a few weeks ago. It was a really nice way to spend the flight, and the presence of power adaptors on the seats really made my day. Flying the horrors of Continental or United lately has really blinded me to the perks the rest of the civilized world enjoys.

Only one comment this time about the set: Sultan and Ned Shepard have delivered one of the most mind-blowing breakdowns in recent memory in the form of “Jeopardy”. I’ve switched things around a bit here by combining the original’s techy progressions with 16-Bit Lolitas’ funkier remix, and it gives me chills. Enjoy.

1. Bonafied Lovin’ (Juri Hulkkonen Remix) – Chromeo
2. Movin’ (UNKLE’s Surrender Sounds Session 9) – Skylark
3. Mongoose (Guy J Remix) – Sasha
4. Jeopardy feat. Kuba Oms – Sultan and Ned Shepard
5. Jeopardy feat. Kuba Oms (16-Bit Lolitas Mix) – Sultan and Ned Shepard
6. One Dress, Two Legs (Dub Mix) – Jaytech and Jeff Drake
7. Fun Punch (Bag Raiders Remix) – Bag Raiders
8. Ikaros feat. Nicky (Retroid Remix) – Clesk, Pea and Shuda
9. Anime (Rocco Main Mix) – Hernan Cattaneo and John Tonks
10. Shine On – Soda Inc.
11. The Big Space (Subsky Mix) – 3kStatic
12. Dusty Horizon (Trafik’s Sirocco Mix) – Roland Klinkenberg
13. Pyramid – Jaytech

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:11:59 — 103.2MB)

The alt text on Google’s Marc Chagall-themed logo today reads “Happy Birthday, Marc Chagall! Chagall images are copyrighted and used with permission.“

Well that’s a relief.

As seen in the checkout line while buying groceries yesterday:

(Forgive the bad flash from my cell phone camera…)

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?