Oren’s Weblog

My opinion – we’re enjoying a new golden age of music. The proliferation of available music production and distribution tools driven by the Internet have unleashed a complete torrent of creativity that may very well be unprecedented. The problem now is not seeking out rare finds, but trying to figure out which of the gazillions of options to spend precious time and attention on. Luckily, we’re also seeing great people stepping to the fore to help find good music. My favorite resources for finding new tunes lately have been the ever wonderful John Gilbreath, now on radio five mornings a week at KBCS, and two great NPR offerings, the Blog Supreme jazz blog and the All Songs Considered web site and podcast. I spend a fair amount of time listening to Accujazz Radio on the web, which has a great selection of different jazz channels to pick from. I’ve also used the lists on emusic a lot. Other great local sources to follow have been trumpeter and bandleader Jason Parker’s One Working Musician blog and Twitter feed, and all the good work happening at KEXP.

So that’s how I find music, but what have I found that I liked this year?

• Allen Toussaint – The Bright Missisippi.

  The New Orleans r&b icon goes further back to the sources of New Orleans jazz and finds the spirit still burning bright.

• Visqueen – Message to Garcia

  Lots of late ’70s New Wave influences get modernized in Rachel Flotard’s fine return to power-pop-punk form. I hear echoes of Blondie, the Ramones, Joan Jett, and the Cars, underneath the fine writing and singing. This one I find addictive.

• Jason Parker Quartet – No More, No Less

  Local trumpeter, blogger, and tweeter Jason Parker put out this fine release this year, and it’s been in heavy rotation in my household ever since. Nothing revolutionary or outré, but fine jazz from some of Seattle’s best young lions. Support your local jazzers!

• Miguel Zenón – Esta Plena

  OK – so he’s both a MacArthur (who said he’s “at once reestablishing the artistic, cultural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st century”) and a Guggenheim fellow, on the faculty at the New England Conservatory, and he’s not yet 35 – you can tell he’s a real slouch. Zenón’s Earshot concert at the Triple Door was a 2009 highlight for me, and this album where he delves deep into the plena rhythm of his native Puerto Rico is at once modern and traditional, and swings hard with sweat, brains, and joy.

• Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society – Infernal Machines

  When I was a kid in the ’70s Don Ellis was the hip big band. This is much (MUCH!) better. Darcy James Argue is reinventing the big band tradition, with a healthy dose of indie rock and a steampunk aesthetic that is intensely appealing. He writes a great blog, too!

• Ben Allison – Think Free

  Fine moody, cinematic jazz from bassist and composer Ben Allison along with a good crew of co-conspirators including violinist Jenny Scheinman, who’s showing up everywhere these days. I also like his Think Free Project, where he’s encouraging musicians and film makers to use his compositions as a springboard for creativity and asks them to post the results.

• Chick Corea and John McLaughlin – The Five Peace Band

  Fusion Lives! The old guys can still play rings around most anybody, and are clearly having a ball with an all-star band composed of Kenny Garrett, Christian McBride, and alternating drummers Brian Blade and Vinnie Colaiuta. Better than a quadruple shot Americano!

• Booker T. – Potato Hole

  Speaking of old guys, Booker T. is another one not content to rest on his considerable laurels. He gets together here with the Drive By Truckers and some lead guitar from Neil Young and produces a fine modern set of greasy, soulful instrumentals.

• Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood – Live from Madison Square Garden

  More old dudes! I’ve always had a weakness for Steve Winwood’s soulful voice and great songwriting, and it’s great to see him get back together with Clapton in what is essentially a Blind Faith reprise. The songs are mostly terrific and the band is in a solid classic groove. Get your ’60s nostalgia on!

• Mark Isham + Kate Ceberano – Bittersweet

  This was a discovery from eMusic. Mark Isham is a West Coast jazz and film musician who plays trumpet, and Kate Ceberano is an Australian pop singer. In an era where every pop vocalist seems to feel the need to issue an album of jazz standards, this one stands out for its smoky atmosphere and understated elegance. If you walked into a nightclub and heard this you’d have a very fine evening indeed. Okay, they’re both Scientologists – what’s up with that, anyway?

• Fly – Sky & Country

  Lyrical, spare, almost introspective chamber jazz that stakes out its own territory. Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier (who’s one of my favorite current bassists), and Jeff Ballard explore the sax-bass-drums trio format, which I know from experience is not easy. Beautiful music that deserves more than a casual listen.

• Passion Pit – Manners

  Fun! Poppy! Synths! Beats!

• Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics – Inspiration Information 3

  The London-based jazz-funk-hiphop collective perhaps best known for being DJ Shadow’s backing band get together with esteemed Ethiopian musican Astatke and cook up a hard grooving melange that is a blast to listen to, but hard to not move to. Pan-global-funkalicious-jazzy-afro-jazz!

There’s lots more from 2009 that I haven’t caught up with yet – Bill Anschell and Brett Jensen’s duo offering, Phoenixs’ Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca, Vijay Iyer’s Historicity, Henry Threadgill’s Zooid – This Brings Us To, Vol. 1, and so much more – and here comes 2010! So much music, so little time. What are your 2009 faves that I should check out?

Here’s the score from the predictions made at our 2008 New Year’s Eve Party for the year to come – I’m scoring on a 0-10 scale:

Tom – one car company will go under. – Score: 0, but only because of federal intervention.
Ed – Keith Richards will die. Score: 0 – Keith Richards will outlive us all.
Jeannie – Economy will not recover. Score: 5 – Depends on who you ask (or whether you’re currently working).
Michele – Sara Palin will disappear to raise her grandson. Score: 5 – she disappeared from the Governor’s office, only to return in our nightmares as a trashy book author and darling of the lunatic fringe.
Michele – Michael Jackson will die. Score: 10. Wow. Prescience in our midst.
Oren – Seattle will have another snow event this winter. Score: 0. What a stupid prediction.
Tom – BB King will die. Score: 0. BB King will live almost as long as Keith Richards.
Michele – Katie will decide to go to grad school. Score: 0, as far as I know.
Chris – We’ll pay less for gas (on an overall average) than in 2008. Score: 10, check it out here.
Manny – They’ll discover that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are one and the same person. Score: well, come on now.

And finally – the prediction on how many games the Mariners will win:
Oren: 80
Tom: 74
Marcia: 76

Score: The M’s did better than any of us dared to predict, finishing the year at 85 wins and 77 losses. Just wait till this year!

Check back in a few days for our 2010 predictions!

I’m posting this mostly for my own reference, but maybe it will be of use to others too.

I’m teaching this quarter in the Information School at the UW (INFO447, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, syllabus here). Three times during the quarter the students are giving presentations using the Ignite! style of presentations (five minutes, 20 slides, slides auto-advance every 15 seconds). I needed to be able to randomly mix up the order of the students in the class so they wouldn’t come in the same order each time.

I started with a class list file that has the names of the students, one per line. Here’s the shell script I used to output a randomly ordered (or unordered) list of those names. It outputs a file named the same as the input file, with “.new” appended to the file name. I run it from the terminal on my Mac. It gives an error message (“line 12: syntax error in expression”) but the output file is there just fine. I have this saved as shuffle.script.


#!/bin/sh

for i in "$@"
do
perl -MList::Util -e 'print List::Util::shuffle ' $i > $i.new
if [[ `wc -c $i` -eq `wc -c $i.new` ]]
then
mv $i.new $i
else
echo "Error for file $i!"
fi
done


The class list file I have has the names in lastname, firstname order. I wanted to show the names in the more friendly firstname lastname order. Here’s the one line awk script that reorders them based on where the comma occurs:


awk -F"," '{print $2,$1}'


I save this as reversenames.script. To execute it from the command line, use reversenames.script < yourinputfile

Stack Overflow DevDay 21 October 2009 – Benaroya Hall, Seattle

Joel -

How much we get interrupted by our computers that want us to make decisions – especially Windows, which wants to know whether we want to make the decision we just made?

Sometimes software makes you make decisions that are just stupid – like on Rhapsody where the only way you can search is to choose which index (artist, song, etc), unlike iTunes.

Can’t even turn your computer off without deciding from among six different ways.

The debate between simplicity and power – simple apps that are highly simplified and do one thing well, obeying the 80/20 rule, vs. the Powerful software with lots of capabilities, features, and options. Example: the Swiss Army Knife that comes with a saw so small that you can’t use it for anything, vs. the hardwood floor nailer that only does that function.

Features lead to choices. Choices are the negative side effect of features. Quotes the famous experiment from Stanford where they set up sample tables at a deli one with 6 flavors and one with 24 flavors. 60% stopped at the 24 flavors, while 40% stopped at the six, but the opposite is true of actual purchases. Book – The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz.

37 Signals advocated less choice, simpler apps in their book Getting Real. Do less than your competitors – solve the simple problems and leave the rest to Microsoft.

Every time you have option in a dialog box, you’re asking someone to make a decision. People don’t like to make decisions – e.g. look at Tools/Options in any big app. The only reason those boxes are there is so you can accidentally get one wrong, so your computer will behave strangely until you get a new one.

The end result is these decisions make people feel stressed out and blame themselves.

Why is simple so popular?
When you’re a two person startup, the only thing you can advertise is “simple!”

Everybody tells you they love the simplicity, but…
They’re surprised by what your version of simple doesn’t include.

At Fog Creek they’ve discovered that the more sales you have, the more features you have – because you have customers that are asking for features, and when you give them what they need, they like it. Everybody only uses 20% of the features, but everybody uses a different 20%.

Conclusion – Powerful software does sell more and make more money.

What do people care about? Specifically, your users.

Long tangent about all human motivation coming down to DNA wanting to replicated itself – your use case should be there’s a 22 year old student living in a dorm room – how will your software get him laid?

People want choices and features that support their work. When you’re a programmer on a team you think it’s important – you think the user thinks about the same things you do, which is completely untrue. The computer does not have the ethical right to set the agenda for users. You are not in charge of what your users do. You do not have the moral right to put up a modal dialog box – ever.

Good design is making decisions. When you make the right decisions, that is good design.

Definition of Elegance. Example of iPhone silent ring switch, vs. Nokia’s 4 choices that require menus to set. By eliminating two choices you eliminate all the mnus etc. Lots of choices are disappearing – Apple’s driving a lot of that. Elegant takes a lot more work – especially user interfaces. Example of Amazon 1-click. Worth doing – give people the power in a simple way.