Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

I used to be a DJ / Gig’s Music Theater

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Some of my long-time readers (and family and friends) will already know that prior to moving down to Seattle, I spent around eight years of my time in Anchorage DJ’ing for a number of dance clubs. From City Lights, to The Lost Abbey, to Gig’s Music Theater, to The Eclipse, and finally to Studio 99, I spun practically every possible genre — alternative, industrial, punk, goth, 80’s retro, new wave, disco, swing, techno, house, trance, and even (though I grumbled a lot) the occasional top-40 and R&B — and had an absolute blast doing it.

I finally got tired of letting my old domain sit inactive after moving my weblog to TypePad, and have resurrected djwudi.com as a monument (however small) to my years as a club DJ. In addition to some oddly third-person ramblings about my career, there are no less than (though no more than) eleven different mix sessons posted and available for either download or streaming audio listening. Ten of them are even worth listening to — the eleventh (Difficult Listening Hour 03) has some truly horrendous trainwrecking going on, and I only leave it posted out of my anal-retentive need for a complete set.

Anyway, feel free to stop by, download or stream the mixes that are there, and (hopefully) enjoy! Who knows — I may not have a club gig anymore, but since I’ve still got my equipment and a ton of music, there’s always a slim chance that there may be more in the future…

As an added bonus, I’ve resurrected the last archived version of the Gig’s Music Theater website that I maintained for the club. This archive dates from March 30, 1998, and serves both as a nostalgic remembrance of one of the best all-ages clubs in Anchorage’s history, and as a monument to my web design and coding skills at the time. ;) Hopefully some of Gig’s old patrons might get a kick out of this (especially the pictures in the ‘Scene’ section)! I also have an archive of old flyers for Gig’s that I made, though I’ve mentioned those before.

Congratulations NASA: Spirit has landed!

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It’s official: Spirit (the first of two rovers sent to Mars) has landed successfully!

First pictures from Mars Spirit Rover

MSNBC: NASA rover sends snapshots from Mars

The first of NASA’s two Mars rovers landed safely on an open stretch within Gusev Crater on Saturday night and sent back screenfuls of black-and-white images, marking a successful start to NASA’s first ground-level exploration of the Red Planet in more than six years.

FOXNews: NASA Rover Lands on Mars, Begins Transmitting Photos

Within hours it began sending back photos of the Red Planet. Among the first was a tiny black and white image showing a sundial on the rover. Another showed the Martian horizon and portions of the lander.

Susan Kitchens was blogging the event live from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium at the Planetary Society’s “Wild About Mars” event. Part one contained all the pre-landing events and addresses, and part two covers the landing.

8:32 deceleration going as expected. parachute deployment soon w/in a minute.

1000+ mph…. 300 mph. Parachute detected! applause here in the room….

heat shields off! altitude 8000′ feet

airbag in approx 25 seconds.

we got radar lock (YES!)

retro rocket firing.. await word to confirm!

awaiting word that we are on the ground. wsigns of bouncing on the surface!!!!!!

applause!!!!!!! we got bouncing word. we heard we do not have signal from spacecraft. Rolling….spacecraft has to survive all boucning for landing to be a success…

vehicle could bounce and roll up to a kilometer from its initial impact point. Awaiting word.

the way that canberra is processing might be producing noise that makes it hard to hear actual signal. [heh. signal? noise? say it ain’t so!]

We are trying to get direct signal, and will keep doing so until earthset. Then there are two orbiting vehicles that can pick up signal and then relay it on to us. Donna is telling us about Pathfinder’s lack of telemetry, and the fact that this mission has lots of telemetry, so we’ve got lots of data.

If it bouncing around, and landed in a position so that the antenna is in right position. Bags have to deflate, and the petals open (and right themselves)

May have a data packet that might indicate someething from vehicle, but need a bit more time. Positive confirmation of signal. We’re down! (applause here, but no reaction in teh control room onscreen)

Awaiting semaphor tones from landed vehicle. That’ll take a lotta processing to come across.

Stanford University reports that it might have received signal from Rover independenbly

SIGNAL!! Applause. applause applause and handshakes. (applause here too! lots.)

Lots of very relieved, happy people onscren at flight control.

And, of course, there are lots more links available in this /. thread, and this Google News query.

Wild 2 comet nucleus

Meanwhile, the Stardust comet-chasing mission is also successfully sending back images from the Wild 2 comet!

NASA on Saturday was hoping to receive the last of dozens of close-up photographs a spacecraft took of a distant comet, but officials did not expect to release more photos to the public until Monday.

The Stardust spacecraft took 72 images of the dark nucleus of comet Wild 2 during a daring flyby Friday that occurred 242 million miles from Earth. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration hoped to receive the last of the black-and-white images by late Saturday.

NASA so far has released a single black-and-white photo of the comet nucleus, thought to be just 3.3 miles across. It showed what looked like a giant frozen meatball pocked with sinkholes.

Too, too cool.

Madacy != metadata

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I’ve babbled before about my anal-retentive obsession with metadata when it comes to my music collection. Today, I remembered one of my major frustrations: the Madacy Music Group.

I’ve been slowly working my way through re-encoding my music collection. I’d had it all ripped to my old computer as .mp3s, but now that I have my G5 with the extra storage space and processing speed, I decided to re-encode everything as .m4a. Less space, better quality, and all that. While I could have just pulled all the .mp3 files over and done a mass convert to .m4a, I wanted to get the best quality possible, which necessitates encoding from the original CDs. No problem — it’s a big project (with upwards of 1200 CDs to go through), but worth it in the long run.

As I’m going through, I’m ensuring that each imported CD has all the correct metadata for each track — title, artist, composer, and year of release — which most of the time isn’t a problem, as all this is generally listed in the CD booklet that comes with each album. However, over the years I’ve occasionally ended up with albums from Madacy, who seem to specialize in ultra-low cost compliations. I’m not sure how I end up with them, as they’re generally not something I’d go for (cheap in more than just price), but I’ve got a few.

The thing is, apparently one of the many cost-cutting measures that Madacy employs is simply giving as little information as possible about the songs included on their compilations. I just ripped a 3-disc set of Irish folk music where the only information given for any of the 44 tracks was the title — no performing artist, no composer, nada. Grrrrrr.

I know this kind of stuff (especially to this extreme) matters not a whit to most people, but dammit, it matters to me, and having to deal with a company this shoddy about their releases is just frustrating.

NetNewsWire display bug

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NetNewsWire display wierdness

Has anyone else seen this particular NetNewsWire bug? Every so often when working my way through my feeds, I get a weird display glitch where a section of one post will be repeated over and over in the viewport, with each repetition getting slightly more blurred. A quick click in the display port clears up the display, but eventually this will pop up again. So far, I haven’t been able to pin down any one thing that triggers the glitch — sometimes it won’t happen for a while, other times it happens just about every time I use the space bar to move to the next article. Very odd.

This is under NetNewsWire 1.0.7 (it happened with 1.0.6 too), using the “combined” view and the spacebar to move among unread posts, on a stock dual 2.0Ghz G5.

It appears that I’m not the only one seeing this…I’ve added my own bug report too.

From vinyl to .mp3

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The New York Times has a decent overview of how to transfer vinyl recordings to .mp3 (or AAC, or whatever your digital format of choice may be). This could come in very handy at some undetermined point in the future, whenever the family record collection swings my way again (currently I believe it’s in Fairbanks somewhere with Kevin’s stuff, though I’m not entirely sure).

(via Paul Beard and Cory Doctorow)

Update: MetaFilter links to another site looking at the same process: Converting Tapes and Records to CD.

Blog of the Month

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This was nice — I got picked as “Blog of the Month” by AndrewBlog:

This is a beatiful blog with amazing content and a superb layout. Michael Hanscom is bringing blogging to the next level with this site. He has a firm commentment to his blog (this is the guy whogot fired from Microsoft for his blog).

Thanks, Andrew!

eWeek best and worst of 2003

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eWeek’s Steve Gilmore just posted his round up of the Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in ’03. Apple or Mac-dependent software got no less than three mentions in the “best of” category:

iSight/iChatAV — Apple finally does IP videoconferencing right. Cleverly embedded inside the Mac’s new Panther OS X operating system and its iChat instant messaging client, iChatAV leverages your AOL Buddy list for point-to-point videoconferences around the world. The secret sauce: sophisticated noise-canceling algorithms that erase distracting echoes and eliminate the need for headphones.

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Hydra — An OS X open-source project that allows networked sharing of document creation and editing. Another Mac technology that leverages the powerful Rendezvous system service, Hydra was used to great effect at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference to generate real-time transcripts of conference sessions.

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NetNewsWire — My RSS weapon of choice on my platform of choice, the Mac. Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with it. And I’ll stay married to it as long as author Brent Simmons continues to add information router features — persistent storage, embedded browser rendering, enclosures, a plug-in API for services from Technorati, search engines and rich media renderers.

The “worst of” list, while fairly solid, didn’t catch my eye quite as much until I got down to item number seven…

Microsoft firing of contract blogger — This poor soul made the mistake of posting a picture that suggested something other than an official Microsoft policy position. Someone should have fired his boss for putting the lie to the warm and cuddly notion that the “new” Microsoft is listening — watching — Big Brother style — is more like it.

I had to laugh. I’m never, ever, ever going to live this down!

Forget about all this selling your soul to the devil crap — he’s so incompetent, he couldn’t even get a wish to be “famous” right, and I ended up with “infamous” instead. Can I get a refund on this deal?

(via Scoble)

I need a new router

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I’ve got \$75 of gift certificates to Best Buy thanks to a promotion through work, and I need to get a new router — but I don’t know quite which one to go for. Anyone have any suggestions?

Here’s the deal. Right now I’ve got a Linksys BEFSR11 firewall/router, but I’m really not happy with it at all. Ever since I bought it a few years ago, I’ve had to constantly struggle with it occasionally locking up. It appears to still be functioning, the lights still flash as if traffic is passing through, but no data will actually move from my LAN to the ‘net at large until I reset the router by unplugging it for a few seconds. I’ve upgraded the router’s firmware a few times over the years as updates have been released, but it’s never cured the issue.

I’d avoided the hassle for the past few months by taking the router out of the network — my PC was having issues, which dropped me down to only two functioning computers, and as I’ve got two IP addresses available, that worked fine — but after spending some time resurrecting the PC yesterday, I needed to put the router back into the mix. Sure enough, not ten minutes after it was back on the network I lost my connection. Grrr.

So, I need a new router, and I don’t want another Linksys. Nor do I want a Belkin, after their little destination hijacking spam trick two months ago. I don’t need to spring for a wireless router (three desktops in my apartment, none of which have wireless access cards, and I’ve already got Ethernet cable strung around the baseboards), so that should save a few dollars.

Looking at Best Buy’s Networking section online, they seem to concentrate on products from D-Link. Anyone have any experience with their routers, good or bad?

TypePad User Group

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It’s plug time!

I’ve been hanging out on the TypePad User Group for a while now. It’s a great little resource for TypePad users — entirely unofficial, but a good place to go as a first resource for figuring out issues with coding and maintaining TypePad weblogs.

We’ve noticed that while there are a lot more TypePad weblogs popping up, it’s lost some of the “community” feel that it had in the beta test days, and it was suggested that…well, I’ll let authenticgeek speak for himself:

I think this forum is an awesome place to get info about TypePad.

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There is just one small problem, TypePad is growing at such an huge rate and we’re not getting as many new users as we should be. Sure, it’s not a requirement to show up here if you’re on TypePad but I think there are people out there that should know about this place that don’t.

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Any ideas for how we can better get the word out to new TypePad users? We could even talk to Ben/Mena about possibly getting an official link here from the TypePad site since I’m sure they don’t have the time to answer so many little questions about CSS and whatnot.

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I’m going to make another post on my blog to remind people (the few who read) about this place. I urge other members (especially people with massive hits ahem djwudi…) to do the same and submit any other means for spreading the word.

See? They just want me for my potential hit-generating ability…;)

All joking aside, it is a good place to go for information, questions and answers. Feel free to drop on by.