Author: bakert

I can’t remember how I heard about The
Decemberists. But they are one of the truly original bands recording in the
world right now. I’ve made it something of a mission to get other people
listening to them. Especially as they seem to be quite SO unfamous – the
closest thing they have to a world tour is a handful of dates in the UK.

The Freebutt in Brighton where I saw them is not a large or famous venue. The
level of advertising given over to them was verging on the nonexistent –
standing outside the venue I couldn’t tell that they were on that night. I
missed them at the Water Rats in King’s Cross on Friday (that will teach me to
have so many different email addresses) so I couldn’t miss out on their next
nearest gig. I just couldn’t miss renditions of lyrics like:

“We will remember this when we are old and ancient.
Though the specifics might be vague
and I’ll say your camisole was a sprightly light magenta
when in fact it was a nappy blueish grey.”

The lead singer (Colin Meloy) wouldn’t look out of place in Weezer but
the rest of the band would have. The tiny drummer (Ezra Holbrook) who (I think)
supplies the voice of the widow in ‘The Chimbley Sweep’, the burly beer-sipping
guitarist (Chris Funk) and a double bassist (Nate Query) so gentle he had
trouble getting back to the stage through the crowd for the encore. And seated
somewhere I couldn’t see but only hear due to the crowd was Jenny Conlee on
accordion.

They played note-perfect renditions of a selection of their songs changing
things only to add a wry twist. Even the atmospheric screams and falsetto
voices were inch-perfect. The one significant change from the recordings was
during the climactic rendition of The Chimbley Sweep when a series of traded
riffs between Meloy and Funk turned into a tongue-in-cheek Hendrix-like playing
of the guitar behind the head and string snapping crescendo.

Meloy supplied a little banter between songs. After playing the new song he
said with a tiny hint of self-congratulation, “That was about a Spanish princess
on her way to her coronation, this is about architects” and introduced The
Chimbley Sweep as being, “about my childhood.”

After much clapping from the crowd Meloy returned for an encore, being joined by
the rest of the band in fits and starts through the three songs. He sang
Morrissey’s Everyday is Like Sunday (sounding strange with his so very American
accent wrapped around it) and two Decemberists tracks with perhaps even more
vigour than in the main show.

If you’re reading this for a recommendation then go see them and get their
albums too. Great band.

Set list (from memory, missing some and bound to be wrong):

• This Soldiering Life
• Infanza
• Here I Dreamt I was an Architect
• Grace Cathedral Hill
• July, July
• Billy Liar
• Los Angeles, I’m Yours
• Legionnaire’s Lament

Encore:

• Every Day is Like Sunday
• Red Right Ankle
• I Was Meant For the Stage

I’ve expanded Boggle to take text entry, be playable over a LAN/the internet and do all the scoring, etc.

List of the most important added features:

• Network or internet play for an unlimited number of players.
• Full scrabble words type dictionary.
• Results so far totalled and displayed.
• Alter the size, font and colour of the dice and save as themes.
• Alter length of a game.
• Computer opponents (actually they are far too good to really play but they tell you what words you could have got).

I’ve written a graphical Boggle simulator in Java which is available for download.

Been listening to the b side version of “Fit But You Know It” by the Streets a lot (featuring Kano, Donnae’o, Lady Sovereign, Tinchy Stryder). Check it out, I think it actually might be better than the a side. Can’t find the lyrics anywhere on the web so here’s my best stab, mail any corrections to streets@bluebones.net:

Updated 19 July with the correct lyrics from Funmilola Thomas.

Fit But You Know It

I’ve got zillions of 500 errors in my log files (well, a handful each day). All are from Internet Explorer 5 on Windows NT (specifically the User-Agent is “Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+NT)”. I’m pretty certain that the problem is ampersand character entities in anchor tag href attributes. It seems that IE5 is barfing on & being used in querystrings rather than just an ampersand. But of course the W3C’s HTML validator won’t have anything but the character entity without telling me off. Is there an answer?

Fucking fantastic. Mind you they could have played a bunch of Wham! covers and I think I would have enjoyed it.

Set list (NOT in order):

• Caribou
• Nimrod’s Son
• Holiday Song
• Bone Machine
• Broken Face
• Something Against You
• Gigantic
• River Euphrates
• Cactus
• Vamos
• Debaser
• Tame
• Wave Of Mutilation (LP)
• I Bleed
• Here Comes Your Man
• Dead
• Monkey Gone To Heaven
• No. 13 Baby
• Hey
• Gouge Away
• Velouria
• Subbacultcha
• Winterlong
• In Heaven/Wave (UK Surf)
• Into The White

That’s 8/18 from my perfect Pixies setlist. Plenty enough to keep me grinning all night.

Not since Elvis has one for the money been so good.

As part of their “Copyright versus Community” event I saw Richard Stallman and Cory Doctorow talking (separately) about various copyright issues.

Stallman lived up to his reputation as an uncompromising proponent of free software (he invented/popularised most of its basic ideas, after all). He gave a simple but effective critique of “Open Source” as opposed to “Free Software”: in a nutshell, that Open Source advocates claim open source is the best way to develop software but that they do not have any ethical objection to closed source. On the other hand, Free Software advocates see closed source software as inherently wrong. So if you develop some closed source software and it is better than the open source software then the Open Source advocates have no objections.

He managed to fit all the cranky behaviours he has become famous for into a two hour stretch: talking about how GNU/Linux should always be called “GNU plus Linux” and not just Linux; correcting each and every use of the phrase “open source” where the speaker meant “free software”; that “piracy” is not the right word for “sharing” or “helping your neighbour”. He even managed to get in a row with Cory Doctorow before his speech about whether it was useful to umbrella patent and copyright issues (he thinks not, Cory thinks so). This is a man that will not bend, even a little, from what he sees as right. You could say that’s unreasonable, but have you given us Emacs, gcc and all the rest?

Cory Doctorow was full of energy despite having jumped off a plane from Barcelona an hour before. He has a great turn of phrase and peppered his speech with neologisms, refusing to talk down to his audience. You could tell he was a writer from the delight he took in really using language. He gave a very interesting speech largely about the history of the “copyfights”. A copyfight being defined here as a situation in which a new democratising technology comes up against the power of vested interests (the printing press versus the Church, player pianos versus US government, VCRs and later P2P filesharing versus the entertainment industry).

The speech was full of vivid anecdote and with real detail behing the arguments. He is clearly a great force for the EFF and I’m glad that he is now their “man in London”. He also showed a real sense of humour. He reminded me of the page in Paul Arden’s It’s Not About How Good You Are, It’s About How Good You Want To Be: “Energy. It’s 75% of it. If you haven’t got it, be nice.”

Ravensbourne College is some kind of “design school” and I think very technically slanted. One guy was drawing a desert nightscape in Photoshop on his laptop while listening to one of the talks. Their domain is rave.ac.uk which shows some kind of “trendy” thinking. Quite how they managed to get these guys down there I don’t know but it was a worthwhile afternoon.

A colleague of mine last Summer decided he would learn C# rather than Java because, “that’s where all the jobs are.” I disagreed and showed him the jobserve listings for that day that seemed to prove him wrong. “Well, that’s where all the jobs WILL be.” he replied. Thus was born jobfight.

I think enough time has gone by (10 and a half months) to have a look and see if we can discern any trends. The graph belows shows the statistics I have gathered on UK programming jobs for the keywords “C#” and “Java”:

It seems that Java is growing faster in terms of total number of jobs and at nearly the same rate as a percentage of the existing jobs.

Paul Graham thinks Java “[smells] supicious”. One of his reasons is:

4. No one loves it. C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers love their languages. I’ve never heard anyone say that they loved Java.

But I think some people do love java. In fact if you put “I love Java” into google you get approximately 2,530 results. “I hate Java” did get 768 results though. This got me thinking about how some programming lannguages are loved, like Perl in 1999 (before the backlash about it being “write-only”). PHP, then Python and Ruby emerged in a similar way from the hacker community and also seem to be loved. I decided to extend my unscientific test.

Some languages had to be excluded from the test because their results were just noise: Icon, Joy, Eiffel (apparently there’s a band of that name). Sisal, T-SQL and Intercal (at least) don’t really have enough information even for this rough test (a very small number of “I love”s and no “I hate”s making them appear to be the most popular languages).

Ruby’s outstanding result should not be taken too seriously as it was definitely more polluted by noise than a language like Smalltalk (no one says, “I love Smalltalk” unless they mean the programming language). Nevertheless a quick skim through the results seemed to show that most of them related to the programming language.

Three of the top five languages by love/hate are the “community” languages Ruby (1), Python (2) and PHP (5). Perl, however is way down at 10 (below Java). Of the other languages in the top five, Smalltalk was developed by a small group at Xerox Parc and the rapidly expanding C# is, of course, a Microsoft creation (unless you count the 10 years of prototyping done by Sun).

The languages that inspire much more hate than love are the perennial whipping boys VB and VBScript as well as JavaScript (hatred due at least in part to the terrible environment in which it usually operates – incompatible browsers) and (hilariously) C++ in which an awful lot of desktop apps are written.

Java comes ninth. That’s above Perl in tenth, C in twelfth and Lisp in fourteenth – three of Paul’s “loved” languages.

PHP has the most people willing to proclaim their love (4,070) but also a significant number of detractors (772). In fact, by volume Java lovers are the second largest group (2,530). Java has obviously picked up a lot of adherents since April 2001 (when the article was written).

If you liked this you will probably like the follow up, Does Anyone Love Java?

You may also find my jobs by programming language page interesting.

So you cancel a print job using Document, Cancel. But it just won’t disappear and nothing will come out of the printer (all queued behind the “deleting” job). Simple answer: restart the “Print Spooler” service. Either in Administrative Tools (Control Panel or Start Menu) or using net stop "Print Spooler" then net start "Print Spooler" at a command prompt. Easy, but it was driving me mad.