Inspirational Technology

eMusic - Crack for the music addict

I just subscribed to eMusic and man I'm addicted already. I was skeptical about it since it's owned by a major media company and was offering supposedly unrestricted MP3s. Well it looks like they are really standard MP3s, 128kps which kinda sucks but isn't horrible. This is key to me though, I simply refuse to use any service that puts DRM on the music files. Not because I want to share them, but because I want to be able to use them for my own use including copying them to any machine that I own. The service is $9.95 per month for supposedly unlimited downloads. We'll see how long it lasts before they screw it up.

The best thing, they make it easy to download an entire album and there's software available to do this on Mac OS X called Pickup. I'm only ever interested in entire albums, which is why I've never been much for the music download scene. Well that and the fact that the music I'm most interested in is anything but popular.

I own about 2500 CDs and about 1000 records, but I have an insatiable thirst for different kinds of music in obscure genres and so far eMusic has plenty of that to offer. If you want anything that appears on the top 40 charts, you can forget it because you won't find it there, but if you like classic Jazz, blues, electronic music, punk or world beat there's a ton of stuff available. I mean come on, you've just got to love a site where Son House can make the top 20 most popular albums list. Yeah man, I loves me some Son House. It's funny too, the Son House Revisted CD set was one of the last CDs I've purchased and eMusic actually has it online, amazing. Try finding Son House using Limewire or brethren, ain't gonna happen. Even better they have all the Fat Possum blues artists available, this means R.L. Burnside, Robert Belfour and the man with the killer last name Junior Kimbrough. I own a ton of these guy's recordings on vinyl, but haven't been able to listen to them since I sold all my high end audio gear when I went back to school. I'm listening to a freshly burned copy of Robert Belfour's one album right now, I've missed being able to listen to it. R.L. Burnside's Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey is next on the playlist.

Anyway, there's a huge amount of classic stuff available. Of particular interest is the Complete Riverside Recordings box sets for people like Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum. I've wanted to be able to listen to this stuff for a long time, but those sets are like $150 each. Even when I was spending a lot of money on CDs that was a little steep for me. Now they're all a simple download away. I've already started with Volume 1 of the Art Tatum solo sessions. Oh yeah they also have lots of Jimmy Smith, love that organ grinder swing of Jimmy Smith. Again gives me an opportunity to get some stuff that I have only on vinyl in digital form.

Beyond the classic stuff, there's also a ton of really interesting electronic music available. In particular I snatched all the Theivery Corporation I could find and came across a really sweet group called Jeep Jazz Project. And Tom Waits, yep that's right the last two Tom Waits albums are available (actually 3, but I already have Mule Variations on CD).

Some other artists from day one, Big Joe Turner, Ella Fitzgerald, Issac Hayes (Shaft baby, yeah I can dig it), James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Louis Armstrong, Mike Bloomfield, Ravi Shankar, Tricky and yep Motorhead. Some new stuff, Outcast, Metaphor, Scorn, Tribe of Twelve and Margot Leverett. Also dug up recordings of Hindemith's cello sonatas and Requiem, both works I've wanted to hear for a long time.

Hopefully eMusic makes it and they don't end up screwing up the service like so many others. Right now there's so much music there that I've always wanted to listen to, I love it.

Mariner Write

Another rumor now is that Apple has purchased Mariner Software. No idea if that is true or not, but their word processor Mariner Write actually seems pretty decent. May not be good enough for Word power users, but for someone like me who doesn't use anything more fancy then tables it might be usable. I'm trying the latest beta for a while to see how it goes. I'd love to have something that isn't Word so that I could use a word processor without feeling dirty.

BTW, if Apple did actually buy this company, a fresh Cocoa UI wrapped around their word processing component would make for a very interesting product indeed.

They also have a spreadsheet which I played with for about 5 minutes. It's definitely a quick Carbon port of an OS 9 app so it's not something I care too much for. The word processor has been reworked more to fit better as an OS X app. It's still an obvious Carbon app, but supports font smoothing and services which are critical to me.

New iPods and New Music Service?

Apple may be expanding faster than we thought [MacRumors]

Hmm, Apple launching a music service would be a very interesting twist. I kind of doubt it, but it would be cool. Of course it has to be completely unrestricted MP3s or it will simply fail a painful death just like every other service that tries to sell crippled files.

Controlling Your Mac with AppleScript and Java

AppleScript, while a fantastic language for running scripts locally, has minimal support for doing anything else, like sockets or serving Web pages. This is where AppleScript and Java form a powerful team. Scott D.W. Rankin shows you how to put this dynamic duo to work to control your Mac from remote locations. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]

Cool, I didn't know you could do this from Java.

JaxMe 1.53 with XML:DB API support

JaxMe 1.53 released with XML:DB API support. [xmlhack]

Cool, another XML:DB API implementation.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Came across an interesting article on O'Reilly network Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl that led me to an even more interesting paper on Latent Semantic Indexing. Fascinating stuff and could be very useful for providing full text indexing of XML data where you could add the XPath to a node as another dimension in the index. Something certainly worth exploring.

Xindice 1.1 beta 1

I've just posted builds of Xindice 1.1 Beta 1. Documentation is in a pretty bad state right now, but this is the first downloadable release of the 1.1 tree.

Because of the documentation issue, I'm not particularly happy with this release. We needed to get something out so that people can start migrating away from 1.0 systems. Hopefully someone will step up to write better documentation.

Now MS owns Virtual PC too

Microsoft buys Virtual PC from Connectix [Mac Net Journal]

This is just great, I guess Office wasn't a big enough hammer to hold over Apple's head. Now they can not only threaten to pull Office, but also the one way to run any other PC software. Things are going to get ugly between Apple and Microsoft in the coming years.

Why nerds are unpopular

Why nerds are unpopular.

Ahh, all the wonderful memories of highschool.

NoteTaker 1.1 offers major enhancements

NoteTaker 1.1 is a major update to the $69.95 note taking, organizing, outlining, and research tool from AquaMinds. [Mac Net Journal]

Excellent, I use this app and while it's surprisingly mature for a 1.0, it still has lots of room to improve. Overall still the best notetaking app that I've seen on OS X.

MP3 Sushi Server

MP3 Sushi Server is a very cool and very easy to use app to stream your MP3 collection. Just point it at your iTunes directory and let it roll. You can access it either as a radio station that plays songs randomly or via a web site that lets you browse the collection. It also supports Rendezvous so you can use it on a local network without worrying about IP addresses. Very, very cool. It's really just a wrapper around some open source tools like icecast, but it's the packaging that makes all the difference.

Quartz Extreme

If you ever wondered exactly how much of a difference Quart Extreme makes, try running JBuilder on a Mac that doesn't have it. My Cube has a Rage 128 video card and Quartz Extreme doesn't work, JBuilder just about kills it. Really sucks. It's funny to see the flurry screen saver come on and draw at about 1 frame per second.

Wish new video cards for cubes weren't so rare and expensive.

Network Clipboard

Here's a cool little app to share clipboards between Macs. Very handy if you work with more then one machine. nsRemotePasteboard

The Browser Formerly Known As Chimera

[MacSlash]

Chimera is on its way to being renamed Camino. Bummer, I like Chimera a lot better. Of course I'm using Safari now because I like the way it renders. Miss the tabs, though not as bad as I expected.

iTunes 32k Limit

Well, I guess you can't have it all... [MacRumors]

ITunes has a limit of 32,000 songs. One of the comments on MacRumors was that would be like 2,500 CDs, well... I own 2,500 CDs and had been slowly converting all of them to MP3s using iTunes. Hope they remove that limit before I finish.

Google buys Pyra

Heading out for the airport I checked my mail and Doc has a bombshell. Google bought Pyra. [Scripting News]

It's troubling to think that Google feels the need to grow outside search services.

Xindice Documentation

This is a list of all known documentation for Xindice. If you know of something
that is not on this list, please let me know about it.
kstaken@xmldatabases.org

Documentation

Users Guide - The Xindice users guide.
Developers Guide - The Xindice developers guide
Administrators Guide - The Xindice administrators guide
Command Line Tools Reference - The Xindice command line tools reference
API Docs - Xindice API Javadoc (this is currently unavailable).
XML:DB API Spec - The specification for the XML:DB API used by Xindice.
XML:DB API Use Cases - Provides some examples of using the XML:DB API.
XML:DB XUpdate Spec - The specification for XUpdate used by Xindice.
XUpdate Use Cases - Example XUpdate queries.
Klemens Waldor's Xindice Notes - Some notes and tips from a Xindice user.
Xindice Wiki - Wiki with more documentation.
Xindice Internals - Describes the internal workings of Xindice

Tutorials

Running Xindice with Cocoon 2 - a short tutorial about using Xindice with Cocoon 2.0.1
Getting Started with Xindice 1.1 - Tom Dyson
How to send XML-RPC messages in Xindice 1.1 - Mark Szpakowski
Using Xindice within the Cocoon XMLForm Framework - Josema Alonso
We need some more.

Articles

Introduction to dbXML - From XML.com.
Introduction to the XML:DB API - From XML.com.
Introduction to Xindice - From IBM developerWorks.
Apache's Xindice Organizes XML Data Without Schema - From DevX.com.

Books

Beginning PHP4 Databases - Contains a chapter on using Xindice with PHP.

xindice-dev - Archive for the main Xindice developers list.
xindice-users - Archive for the main Xindice Users list
XML:DB list archive - Archives for all the XML:DB lists, useful since Xindice uses the technology.
dbXML devel - The old dbXML developers archives. Still useful for some questions.
dbXML general - The old dbXML users archives. Still useful for some questions.

Xindice Software

This is a list of all known software that works with Xindice. If you know of something
that is not on this list, please let me know about it.
kstaken@xmldatabases.org

Tools

Xindice - The Xindice server software.
Xindice XML-RPC - An XML-RPC implementation.
Labrador - A web services framework that can also be used to access Xindice via XML-RPC.
PHP Xindice - PHP client and admin tool.
CFXindice - Cold Fusion client for Xindice.
Apache Cocoon - Cocoon 2 contains some XML:DB API hooks to work with Xindice.
Xindice HTTP - An interface to retrieve documents from Xindice via HTTP.
Xindice Browser - A Java/Swing browser for data stored within a Xindice database.
YAB - (Yet Another Browser) - Another Java/Swing browser for data stored within a Xindice database.
Attrezzo per Xindice - Xindice administration tool designed to run within the Eclipse IDE.
XinCon(Offline as of 3/4/2003) - WebDAV server and web based administration tool for Xindice.
Xindice.Net - Tools for working with Xindice within Microsoft's .Net environment.
Xindice Installer(Offline as of 3/4/2003) - Windows installer to make setting up Xindice on Windows much easier.
XML-SimpleDB - Perl implementation of the XML:DB API that works with the Xindice XML-RPC interface.
Xindice for Zope - A bridge to Xindice from within the Zope environment.
SiXDML - Simple XML data manipulation language implementation for Xindice 1.0
XinCJ - C++ API for Xindice

Java Web Services Developer Pack - Contains a UDDI implementation built on top of Xindice.
Discussion Forums - A port of the Jive discussion forums software to the XML:DB API.
XMLBlaster MOM - XMLBlaster has a Xindice driver for use as a persistence layer in their messaging system.
CocoBlog - A weblog system built on top of Cocoon and Xindice.

1GB RAM

Today I finally broke down and upgraded my powerbook to 1GB RAM. Mac OS X just gets too sluggish once it starts paging and 512MB wasn't enough to keep it out given my usage patterns. So far it's been great with no page outs at all, we'll see how it goes after a few days when the buffer cache starts filling up. I'd assume it doesn't page out in that scenario, at least I hope so. Have to keep an eye on Safari though, seems to leak memory pretty badly.

The Mac OS X VM system explains the phantom performance increase people think they see each time an OS upgrade or any other change happens that requires a reboot. It's not that things are necessarily faster, it's just that OS X hasn't reached the point where it is paging data out of memory yet. My system is quite snappy when it's not paging, but once it starts paging stuff out it begins to feel like mud. It's kind of disappointing as I've never noticed the VM system so obviously affecting performance during routine paging on any other system. Obviously, if it gets to the point of thrashing it's always noticable, but otherwise, simple paging usually isn't this bad.

Apple needs to start shipping systems with 1GB standard, especially desktops that have cheaper RAM.

About This Site

Inspirational Technology is a product of Kimbro Staken. I'm an independent software developer specializing in development services for Mac OS X and can be contacted at kstaken@xmldatabases.org.

In the past I did a lot of work with native XML databases and this has had significant influence on my way of thinking. In particular, I'm interested in how the use of XML semi-structured data can be used to improve the usability of computers. It may seem strange to talk about databases and computer usability in the same breath, but hopefully some day I'll actually be able to explain what I mean. Or better, show what I mean, through some real world software. It will take a while to get there though.

In the past, I co-founded the Apache Xindice native XML database project and the XML:DB initiative. With XML:DB I led the effort to create the XML:DB XML database API and wrote the API reference implementation and the implementation included with Xindice.

Here's some links to things I've worked on in the last couple years. Almost all of it revolves around native XML databases in one way or another.

Software:

Xindice (Formally dbXML)

Xindice XML-RPC Interface

Xindice HTTP Interface

XML:DB API Reference Implementation

Jive XML Database Port

FreeDB CD Database to XML Data Generator

Sherlock 3 Google Channel

Writing:

Introduction to Native XML Databases (xml.com)

Introduction to dbXML (xml.com)

An Introduction to the XML:DB API (xml.com)

Xindice Users Guide

Xindice Developers Guide

Xindice Administrators Guide

XML:DB API Specification

XML:DB API Use Cases

XUpdate Use Cases

ICEPick Peer to Peer Personalization

Presentations:

Old Sites

Until I get around to importing all the old posts from Radio here are the links to my old sites. There were a few things there that people still reference.

XML Database JuJu
Bright Eyed Mister Zen
Mac OS X Web Services
Xindice Realm

Relaunching (again)

Well, it's time to relaunch this blog once again. I think this is about the fourth time now, I tend to lose momentum for a while and kind of get out of it. Last time, I got tired of Radio always consuming resources on my machine and started shutting it down making it inconvenient to post. Switching to NetNewsWire for reading RSS feeds put another nail in the Radio coffin and made it's resource consumption even more annoying. So it took me forever to get around to setting up another system. I also wanted to have a more dynamic system with comments and such that actually update counts when people post.

This time I'm moving from Radio to Movable Type and using NetNewsWire Pro to edit the posts. We'll see how it goes, at least I keep trying.