This talk got me pumped today.
Category: Blog
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Location aware web applications
Firefox 3.1 will have geolocation support, allowing some interesting new web applications to come to the web platform. I really like what this will do for devices like the n810. They also announced alpha1 of their mobile brower version, fennec. Sadly its incredibly slow, something that hopefully will be fixed as the browser matures for the first real release.
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You know you developing on Windows when…
Your editors notion of running the program is to “start debugging” 🙂
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On the Death Magnetic production part 2
Following my first blog post, two interesting things have happened.
1) Lars Ulrich responds, and its almost as painful to read, as the production of the record is. Just listen to this:
Of course, I’ve heard that there are a few people complaining. But I’ve been listening to it the last couple of days in my car, and it sounds fuckin’ smokin’.
2) BBC has picked up on the problem, and is putting it into the spotlight. They talk to a mastering engineer and several people who have bought the album.
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On the Death Magnetic production
Earlier this month Metallica released their new album, Death Magnatic, to great reviews and so far it has sold more than 500.000 in the United States alone. So what is wrong with this rose red story? Sadly the new album has become the one of the latest victims of the loudness war. At first, people just thought it was the quality of bad 128kbit rips that made it sound so bad, but as the cd started arriving in the hands of people, the sharp reality that this was indeed the final mix hit people smack in the face. And is not pretty a pretty sight (death magnetic at the bottom if you were in doubt :)):
So far Metallica has been completely silent about the whole deal. Luckily people soon figured out that the mix was much better on the Guitar Hero 3 version and in short order someone figured out how to rip the sound of the game. All was not perfect though, some people claimed the Guitar Hero 3 was too flat and missing some of the “oomph” of the original mix. But it didn’t take long before someone fixed that, and a guitar hero version 2.0 was born.
So is this what the world has come to? That you have to be a filthy pirate in order to enjoy the latest album of a band you have been listening to for the last 15 years? A petition has started online to get Metallica to release a fixed version of the album. But until that day comes, I’ll be happy to call myself a pirate.
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Adding some metal to ubiquity
The other day I was reading about this new project from mozilla labs called ubiquity. A command driven interface for the browser. The ability to mark something and just type: map this, define this, or imdb this is really powerful and saves a lot of mouse wanking. What is really interesting from a technical point of view is the fact that new commands are written in javascript. They have a guide for writing these and a rocking realtime editor (requires ubiquity).
I often find new artists or albums and want to check them out. Now since it’s mostly metal I listen to, there is this great site metal-archives.com with a bunch of reviews. The reviews really helps finding out if the music is worth listening to or not. Sadly I couldn’t find a command for this, so I wrote one. It’s one of the most pleasent programming experiences in a long time. With this command you just type: metal metallica and it will bring you to the metallica page on metal-archives.net (in a new tab of course).