Oh hey, I’m in the post that the SMH article quotes from ernie‘s site.

Comparison Review: Ety ER6 vs both 4p and 4s

This Neil Gaiman Interview by Dan Epstein is great stuff. A lot of upcoming stuff, comics and moviewise gets mentioned, sounds really cool.

This morning I was doing some browsing in IE with my proxy accidentally off, no sooner than 5 clicks in, I had a gaggle of pop-ups, pop-unders, and pop-oncloses jumping up and about. I’d been browsing with Mozilla so long that I’d forgotten how it’d gotten out there. I can’t really imagine how all these people can stand browsing the web nowadays. I guess most of them don’t know better. Remember when there was a time before popups? (Am I dating myself here?)

I just registered for the O’Reilly OSC. I’ll be attending the PostgreSQL Performance Tuning,

Introduction to XSLT, Template Architectures with Smarty, and Advanced PHP tutorials.

Damn, blogger just ate a big rant that I wrote up over that new WaSP Wired News Article. If I feel up to it, I’ll write some of it back up, but it had to do with web standards being an issue from way back (anyone remember Wilbur and the HTML 3.0 mess?), browsers still being a problem (try to write XHTML 1.1 and dealing with the 16% of visitors still using Netscape 4), and the irony that there are more bugs, hacks and workarounds with CSS2 then there ever was with tables. But that yeah, I agree with the vision, the article and the arguments brought up just rubbed me the wrong way. And having just gone through interviewing for a web designer/developer, yeah, there’s a disproportionate amount of people in the industry who don’t know anything about the web whatsoever.

I ended up spending most of tonight doing system maintenance instead of coding, but I was able to find after some false starts, I found a great tag decoding library called getID3. It only took me a few minutes to get up and running and processing. I have a test script up. If you upload an MP3, it’ll spit back some information. I’ll be working on it in my spare time, it doesn’t look like it’ll be too hard to turn this into a tool that will edit your tags and roundtrip the file. (Not very practical, more a proof of concept than anything).

Bush Admits Dangers Of Pollution — And Refuses Action – ahh, heart-warming.

Spoke too soon… MusicBrainz is a collaborative open database which stores music metadata. This project allows the internet community to uniquely identify a digital piece of music and look up related information such as title, artist, album, etc. MusicBrainz allows users to look up information about CDs as well as individual MP3s/Ogg Vorbis files. Looks like the project is a bit stalled right now, but it does have ambitious plans to become a comprehensive geneology, tracking influences and participants. Interesting. Currently supported by FreeAmp

MusicBrainz Metadata Initiative 2.0, Aaron Swartz’s article, MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service (PDF)

Others: MusicDB, Open Music Database (planning),

I was thinking about it, and it’s strange that while there’s freedb, there doesn’t seem to be an open source version of MoodLogic‘s MetaDB, because quite frankly their MoodLogic App sorta sucks ass. (It has some cool potential, no doubt, but at least for me, have been a bear to use and not worth paying $30 to buy ‘credits’ to find out how useless it is.

Hmm, crawling through the All Music Guide styles list (or better yet, music map) might be a fun thing to do as well. Hmmm…