Crude Technologies

Proving again that everything new is old, the hit single "They" from Jem's recently released album "Finally Woken" is hauntingly familiar. The background chorus repeats a twelve note phrase, and once you hum along, you can't get it out of your head. You know you've heard it before, but where?

Turns out I'd heard the song itself during a rerun of the pilot of Grey's Anatomy, but that's another story.

Jem, a DJ from Brighton, UK, who decided she could spin a few hits of her own, started with a solid musical foundation. For "They", Jem sampled an early sixties French acapella ensemble known first as Double Six and later as the Swingle Singers. They, in turn, were performing scat (singing without lyrics) jazz vocal arrangements of Bach's Prelude in F-Minor. My mother is a francophile and my sister is a concert level pianist, so I'd heard the melody from both sources when I was young.

Have a look at the Swingle Singers history, and pick up at least the Keyboard Classics album. Listening to the artistry of several of the songs on this album will give you chills, and all of them are a welcome alternative to the 150 channels of sameness on my XM Radio.

Whether you'll enjoy Jem's album depends on whether you like Euro pop. Here's a more in depth discussion of the song "They" and its Bach background.

While you're listening, brush up on your mathematics of music and geometry with Godel, Escher, Bach.

Posted by MST at 03:13 AM | Permalink

Extreme concurrency database transactions tend to be disk limited. To solve this, we've been using solid state SCSI drives for years though they're incredibly expensive. There's finally a cheaper but still reliable choice, a SATA solid-state drive from Gigabyte, a leading motherboard manufacturer.

There's a detailed review at AnandTech.

In the ISO file copy test, the card runs at 100MB/s (aka 1 gigabit). They tested many scenarios, and I noticed that the biggest gains were when files had to be read/written from different parts of the disk at same time, aka random accesses. Well, of course.

People forget that disks have moving parts. It takes a disproportionate amount of time for a disk head to move from one piece of data to another somewhere else on a disk. If you haven't seen the inside of a hard drive when it seeks, picture changing songs on a record player. You have to carefully move the needle from one groove to another, and drop it in precisely the right place. Hard drives have to do exaclty the same thing every time you access a different file, or even if one file is "fragmented" or scattered across the disk.

AnandTech notes that most users will not see an advantage. High-concurrency database users or high concurrency hosting providers are not most users. Imagine trying to play two songs at once on a record player. Most of your time would be spent in silence, moving the needle back and forth, with occasional bursts of music when you find the right spot. When a server tries to deliver two different media files to two different users, that's what's happening inside. That's why it's so hard to build a streaming media storage server that works for real-world traffic.

One catch with this i-RAM --- the battery backup is only 16 hours. In a datacenter, this is less of an issue, since the card doesn't require battery backup when the computer is "off", only when the computer or card is unplugged.

The reviewer said that Gigabyte is making "1000" of these. That's not many. Maybe Gigabyte is talking to the wrong market.

Posted by MST at 11:21 PM | Permalink

As a software development manager, I've always felt source code could use a bit more of standards. That was with professionally trained C++ programmers. Then we began helping customers migrate home brew sites written in open source languages like PHP and I realized most of our time was spent just sorting out how to read what had been done before.

For whatever reason, Scandanavians love standards. Fredrik Kristiansen of DB Medialab in Oslo has helpfully looked at Todd Hoff's C++ Coding Standards and made a rather nice set of PHP Coding Standards I wish every high-schooler would adopt.

Going forward, our pricing for site migrations will take code consistency into account. Quoting from Fredrik's document:

When a project tries to adhere to common standards a few good things happen:

• programmers can go into any code and figure out what's going on
• new people can get up to speed quickly
• people new to PHP are spared the need to develop a personal style and defend it to the death
• people new to PHP are spared making the same mistakes over and over again
• people make fewer mistakes in consistent environments
• programmers have a common enemy :-)

Posted by MST at 12:40 PM | Permalink

There's been a sea change in web design since 2004, but most people haven't even noticed. From personal blogs to major portals, web designers have been getting the memo, and putting in a huge amount of work to upgrade their HTML behind the scenes.

Netscape 1.1 introduce the TABLE tag, and web design hasn't been the same since. In the late nineties most of a web designer's time was sorting out how to slice beautiful photoshop designs from marketing into workable HTML tables. Tools of the trade included an intimate knowledge of borders and padding, top margin differences between browsers, and the omnipresent "single pixel gif trick".

Eventually, IE3 and Netscape 4 picked and chose bits of an upcoming Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) W3C proposal. The bits they chose in common freed designers from embedding colors and font faces in their HTML, while the other bits broke layouts horribly. Recent web design software such as Adobe GoLive CS and Dreamweaver MX gave a nod to CSS2, but largely as an unwieldy afterthought. Most designers persisted in thinking of CSS as a skinning language, suitable for changing colors, textures, and fonts, but not the overall look and feel; and tables lived on.

In the meantime, someone wrote the memo. Maybe it was Jeffrey Zeldman, reknowned for promoting CSS standards, who posted From Table Hacks to CSS Layouts: A Web Designer's Journey in February 2001.

One of the earliest converts can find is Drew McLellan. His Turning the Tables: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Web Standards is dated 3 June 2001. As Drew points out, "the longer we delay moving to these new technologies, the longer we have to put up with bad browsers and bad working methods."

Adventurous (and masochistic) designers everywhere began to circulate the idea, largely by agreeing "To Hell with Bad Browsers" and counting on IE5.5, Firefox, and Opera to make these standards based designs accessible to the rest of the world.

So who's gotten the memo? As of summer 2005, it's hard to predict without checking the source code. AT&T and Sprint got the memo, but not Verizon. MSN got the memo, but not Yahoo. Even within a company like Google, grounded on web standards evangelism, some divisions got the memo but not others.

The most powerful demonstration of why CSS2 design is a good thing can be found at:

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Every page uses the same HTML, and changes only the style sheet. Yes, you read that right. As you browse from design to design, the HTML does not change. This is a godsend for the automated publishing world, and any company not moving to this approach has only themselves to blame for the loss of productivity and stagnation of design that results from comingling layout (marked up with tables) with content (marked up with semantic HTML).

If you're a web designer, check out http://www.quirksmode.org/ and if you work in a corporate environment, look at how the New York Public Library presents CSS at http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/.

Posted by MST at 11:29 PM | Permalink

Ever wondered what to do with that old record collection? Sure, you could find a turntable, buy a $500 needle, record into your Mac, and clean up the crackles and pops with software. Or you could just slap the things on your scanner.

In A Virtual Gramophone, Ofer Springer writes that he's done just that. He says by scanning an LP from several different angles and applying a software algorithm that tracks the variance in reflectivity along the tracks, he can reconstruct the source music. Sort of.

Human visual pattern recognition far beyond the capabilities of a computer. You'd think if a scanner and software could read music from a vinyl LP, then humans should be able to as well. Or, at least, humans named Arthur B. Lintgen, M.D. I remember him from the "That's Incredible" TV show in 1981, recognizing Beethoven's 5th from across the room. Sadly, his later explanations sound as though most of his vinyl vision was informed guesswork.

Posted by MST at 01:34 PM | Permalink

Standing in a good transept or dome will give most tourists chills. Every schoolkid can remember a field trip to the domed capitol building of one jurisdiction or another, listening to the tour guide explain how standing just here you can hear someone whisper just there.

The final result may not raise the hairs on the back of your neck, but this explanation of How to Build a Ceiling Dome would make Michelangelo proud.

If that's too much trouble, then look for one of these famous domes or transepts on your next trip, and see if someone can hear you whisper.

Posted by MST at 03:33 PM | Permalink

Guy Negre claims to have invented a "zero pollution" car which involves no combustion and can be filled up at your local gas station's air pump.

According to the MDI's Air Car press release, the car can reach 68 mph and travel 124 miles or 8 hours per charge. When recharging the tank, the car needs to be connected to the an outlet for 3 to 4 hours or filled from the air pump at a gas station for a couple minutes.

Next time someone raves about the eco-friendly Smart car built by Mercedes and Swatch, available in the USA through ZAP World, tell them about the car that runs on air.

Posted by MST at 12:29 AM | Permalink

Well, not "shares" so much as misplaces. Ameritrade Inc. has advised 200,000 current and former customers that a computer backup tape containing their personal information has been lost. MSNBC reports.

Posted by MST at 05:17 PM | Permalink