My ratiing: ***** Simple Things Group: Zero 7 Genre/s: Acid jazz, lounge, blues, electronica. Label: Palm Pictures (Audio) Released: 2001
One of the few good things about aging is you begin to receiverecommendations for music and movies from your nephews, nieces, and other young people. Typically, this turns out to be material that I would have never come across by myself just because my contemporaries are plugged into very different things. Zero 7's debut album Simple Things is a great example of what I mean. It was recommended to me by my very cool niece who lives and works in NYC. None of my friends have heard this album or even heard of this group. The first time I listened to this album I thought of it as interesting rock music. The second time I listened to this album I enjoyed it too but I remember it as a blues album. The next time I listened to it we were driving somewhere long distance and I had the late-night shift. I put it on at a low volume in the car. It just blew me away. The lyrics are superb, the vocals (Mozez, Sia Furler, Sophie Barker) are gorgeous. Mozez's voice reminds me of Roland Gift's (Fine Young Cannibals), Sia Furler's voice is like Chrissie Hynde's (The Pretenders) but with just a little hint of Janis Joplin in it, while Sophie Barker's is more conventional but beautiful.
The best feature, though, of Zero 7's music is the electronica. The multi-layered melodies are lush, fully developed and well thought out. I love electronic music and these guys blend their electronic keyboards with the percussion and the vocals beautifully. Of coursethere are a number of tracks that are purely instrumental and these are the tracks that blew me away on my long distance drive (listen to Polaris in the dark to experience what I mean). Maybe the most unusual aspect of the album is the number of genres that it spans. I saw somewhere that Zero 7's music is classified as acid jazz. The term "acid jazz" evokes images of dark, smoky jazz clubs with people on acid listening to jazz (well, at least to me). But if this is mainstream acid jazz I'm blown away by it. I don't think this is mainstream acid jazz...surely mainstream acid jazz doesn't have this stylistic quality to it with the blues-like singing, the electronica, and the laid-backness of a couple of the numbers. Anyway, what does it matter? Enjoy the music.
My rating: ***** Book title: Snow Crash Author: Neal Stephenson. Genre/s: Science-fiction, cyberpunk, drama. Publisher: Bantam-DoubleDay Published: 1992
Neal Stephenson can be credited with writing the first cyberpunk novel ever with Snow Crash. After reading this novel, you'll wonder if Stephenson had a time-travel machine because he foresaw the coming of the world-wide-web in such a big and accurate way -- after all, the novel was published in 1992 which means that it was written prior to 1992. The net wasn't a big force prior to1995 and it wasn't a force at all in 1992 or even 1993.
Snow Crash is actually a virus but of a different sort: people get infected byit if they view it on their computer screens. It looks like "snow" (hey you RGB people -- you know what I mean!) but it has a horrible consequence -- death! The hero of this novel loses an old friend to the virus. Thus begins his quest for the search of the origins of the virus and its perpetrators. This is an amazing book because it's not really your traditional science-fiction with nebulae and space travel and so on but it's stuff that computer geeks (such as myself) can really relate to. One of the virtual reality simulations that is described here runs on a UNIX box -- I got a real kick out of reading that. The book is destined to be (some say it already is) a classic because it spawned a whole new type of literature. Get it and enjoy it (and once you are done, get Stephenson's other books).
I'm about to finish Glyn Moody's book "Rebel Code" that documents in fine detail the origins and the development of the free software or the open source movement (free software and open source are not necessarily the same thing as Richard Stallman has pointed out). This book is very well written as it gives a human dimension to the motivations, frustrations, challenges, triumphs and successes of the people behind open source. Programmers are usually not glamorous, but this book brings alive the world of software in a way that makes it general-interest reading.
I will write more about some of the specifics in the book and what I liked and didn't like about it. Right now let me just state that this book is quite a comprehensive account of the origins of the movement with Richard Stallman's work at MIT and why he felt that it was important for software to be free and the source code to be open. The book documents the creation of the major pieces of open source software like emacs, gcc, GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl, Tex, and GNOME and the role of the internet in the collaboration between people from across the world.
If you're interested in the software industry you can't miss this book. I highly recommend it to others too just to get a feel for the world of software programmers. Maybe you'll get the bug for open source software like I'm getting and switch to open source.
We as a society are generating and saving more data. But we are also inventing new ways of seeing and hearing what the data has to tell us. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have built what they call the "Allosphere" that allows them to visualize and to hear what the data can reveal that traditional methods of analysis may not. The Allosphere is a two-storey tall anechoic (sound proof) and opaque chamber that contains projectors and speakers that are fed an audio and video stream produced by the many software tools that they are using. The principal faculty member behind the project, Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, presented this 6-minute video at the TED talks that gives several examples of how researchers are using the Allosphere to gain new insights.
Bob Glickstein's book Writing GNU Emacs Extensions appears to be written to get you going right away on customizing emacs. I was able to successfully implement my first customization within a half-hour of starting the book. One of the annoyances of emacs is the number of CTRL-key combos you have to press to get stuff done. For example, to save the current buffer (roughly speaking every window in emacs is an emacs buffer) one has to press CTRL-x CTRL-s. I was able to assign an additional sequence of keys to save a buffer:
1. Check if the sequence of keys you want to use is assigned (or "bound" in emacs terminology) to a function. To do that: M-x describe-bindings [return]will bring up a buffer that contains all the current bindings. Search through this to find the key sequence you are interested in. I want to bind M-s to the function that saves the buffer. Currently, I'm not using that key for anything.
2. Edit your personal .emacs file which will be in your home directory and insert the following code in it -- for clarity on a line by itself: (global-set-key "\M-s" 'save-buffer) The above line of code has three tokens in it. The first token, global-set-key, is an emacs function that sets key bindings globally, i.e., in all modes. The second token, "\M-s", is an argument to the global-set-key function that says "I want to bind this key sequence" -- in this case it's the Meta-s key. Note how the argument is enclosed in quotation marks and the M is preceded by a backslash. The third token is the second argument to the global-set-key function that tells the function what it is that should be invoked with that key sequence. In this case it's the emacs function save-buffer that saves the current buffer (I was able to identify this function by searching for C-x C-s in the buffer that contained the current binding descriptions). Note how this function is preceded by a single quote....this is required because we don't want to evaluate this function now, instead we want to pass it as an argument to the global-set-key function.
3. Save the .emacs file, quit and reinvoke emacs to have the key sequence implemented.
My favorite editor right now is emacs. It is available on many platforms (Unix, Linux, Mac, Windows, etc.), it is free (as in free beer) and it is highly customizable. Although I've been using it for a number of years now, I haven't taken advantage of the customization. Since I have a few peeves with it, I'm making a serious attempt at learning how to customize it. My starting point: Bob Glickstein's book "Writing Gnu Emacs Extensions". It looks like I'll have to learn the basics of Emacs LISP....my attempts at learning LISP haven't been too fruitful, but this may very well be the hook to learning the basics of LISP (technically not LISP but Emacs LISP).
