links for 2008-08-27
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The Times catches up to the fact that beer comes in high and low alcohol varieties. Which is not to knock the article: there's a bunch of session beers they list that I am quite curious to try.
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Putting Hillary's convention appearance in context.
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How to guide.
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"In its fight against the American Issues Project, Mr. Obama’s campaign is essentially arguing that the group should fall under more strict election laws because its sole purpose seems to be to defeat Mr. Obama at the polls; issue groups are allowed to run some political advertising so long as affecting an election is not their primary purpose. Under election laws, Mr. Simmons would not be able to exceed a donation of $42,000 to the group and others like it." –About damned time they stood up. So why didn't Kerry do the same in 2004?
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Now can we put all the talk of PUMAs behind us?
Ubiquity: it’s big, big, big. For geeks, anyway.
So OK, it’s amazing. The ability to highlight text and type commands like map, wikipedia, and translate isn’t a game changer–Microsoft’s Smart Tags in IE6 (which appear to be making a comeback in IE8) did the same thing, putting the commands into a tag with a dropdown menu on the web page–but the ability to put the results back into the web–replace an address with a Google map, inline translation–to affect the DOM of pages you’re viewing right now is.
Which makes me wonder: what’s the security model for Ubiquity? You clearly have to opt into downloading a Ubiquity command, but what guarantees do we have that it can’t do something malicious? Like, say, cross-site request forgery?
The other question, of course, is: outside the universe of people who care about things like Quicksilver, will anyone care? It’s probably too early to say, but it’s already made me more productive–every link in the article above was looked up via a search through Ubiquity with no tab switching, no leaving the Wordpress popup, nothin’. There are some things that could be done to improve the process–I’d like a command that starts with a Google search, then ends with the URL on my clipboard or even inserting the link right into my WordPress text edit window–but that’s what “teaching Ubiquity new commands” is all about, I guess.
Grab bag: BGP, OpenTape, convention, Blogcritics
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It ain’t the DNS, kids. Learn the acronym BGP, and start agitating for a fix for this.
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Looks like an invitation for your own personal RIAA takedown notice.
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Interesting article highlights some of the capabilities and limitations of using Silverlight to talk to Java on the back end.
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Encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the 24 hour news channels. Talking over the speeches and then complaining that they can’t hear the Democrats attacking loudly enough.
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Wow. Congrats to Eric and Phillip. I haven’t written anything for BC in a long time, but this is certainly cool news.
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I haven’t downloaded any Tetris for my iPhone, but this thoughtfully written article uses two different versions as an object lesson in what makes a good iPhone app: solid user experience, quick start, and pause are important for all apps, not just games.
The Virginia Glee Club: A Shadow’s on the Sundial (1972)
There are a lot of bugs in the UVA library’s onsite access to digitized back issues of the student newspaper the Cavalier Daily, but you can get to the content by searching to find the article you want, browsing to the year that it was published, opening the file containing all the content for that date, and viewing source (the content is contained in the XML). For those who might not want to go through the hassle, here’s an excerpt from an article that appeared in the February 29, 1972 issue of the Cavalier Daily:
Profits from A Shadow’s on the Sundial, the Glee Club’s recent recording, will also go toward the tour. The record contains several traditional settings of English, French, and Italian madrigals, some of which will be sung in Europe. Two more serious works included are Francis Poulenc’s Lauds of St. Anthony of Padua, which the Club plans to sing in Padua, and Dietrich Buxtehude’s Cantate Domino, “Sing To God The Lord”.
“From Rugby Road to Vinegar Hill” (two verses only) and “Glory, Glory To Virginia” combine in a pleasant medley, offering a sharp contrast to the above pieces. Also included among Virginiana are new arrangements by recent Glee Club directors of “The Good Old Song,”, “Virginia Yell Song,” and “Ten Thousand Voices.”
A recent addition to the collection is “Vir-ir-gin-i-a,” by Professor Emeritus of English, Arthur Kyle Davis, Jr. Setting verses to a chorus by G.F. Handel, Professor Davis dedicated his new song on April, 1968, to the Jefferson Society. He sang the first performance of it on that occasion.
Portions of two other compositions that the Glee Club has come to regard as their own have been included. One is Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom which was dedicated to the Glee Club in 1943, having been composed for the Two Hundredth Birthday of Mr. Jefferson.
The other composition was written by former Glee Club director David H. Davis, entitled Summer Songs. The title of the album, A Shadow’s on the Sundial, is taken from the name of the concluding Summer Song in the group.
The album represents a lot of work on the part of the Club members. It seems the incentive involved has produced what many consider to be one of the best albums ever put out by the group. The album can be purchased for $5.25 at the corner stores, Newcomb Hall Bookstore, Stacy’s Music Ship, and HiFi House or through any member of the Glee Club.
With the group preparing to record a new album honoring the legacy of Songs of the University of Virginia, I thought the discovery of this description of Shadow was interesting.
Breaking: Technorati acquires Blogcritics
Congrats to Eric Olsen and the rest of the Blogcritics crew. Putting the site together was a lot of work and keeping it running has been even more, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Tanglewood Beethoven weekend roundup
There’s a brief roundup of reviews, among other things, of this weekend’s Beethoven concerts below. The reviews do a good job of pointing out something that we all felt through the residency: this was no quick dash through familiar repertoire. Both conductors brought an insistence on careful preparation and respect for the material, and I think the end product showed it.
Some more thoughts on the two pieces. As choral events, they couldn’t be more different. Our conductor likes to point out that many call the Mass in C “Beethoven’s Haydn mass,” and the nature of the commission–for Prince Esterházy on Haydn’s recommendation when the older composer grew unable to write another mass for the Princess’s name day–reinforces that. So does the Mass’s structure: traditionally set, with many quiet moments throughout, it’s no Missa Solemnis. But the uncertainties of the Credo, the leaping harmonic language used to set “God from God, Light from Light,” and a host of other clues show us Beethoven wasn’t phoning this in. It may have been a commission in a traditional manner, but Beethoven’s result was anything but traditional. For me, the work is a window into a search for faith. Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos did it justice by ensuring that the performance exposed the conflicts as well as the clear statements of faith and allowed the searching structure of the piece to be heard.
The Ninth Symphony, written almost twenty years later, continues that search. Twinned as it is with the Missa Solemnis, the work represents the summation of Beethoven’s faith journey. The Missa Solemnis carries the questions raised by the earlier mass to dark places, and ultimately finds, at best, unsettled comfort in traditional religion and religious forms against the drums of war and the awful finality of death. By contrast, Symphony No. 9 confronts war and death head on, tries on chaos, stern struggle and romantic religion, and ultimately finds all of them lacking, choosing instead to take a simple drinking song about the brotherhood of man and rise to the stars with it.
My instinct all weekend was to take the late eighteenth century Enlightenment questions of the role of religion in the fate of man into both the Mass and the 9th Symphony. (It helps that I was finally reading the Jefferson Bible all the way through.) But you don’t have to look very hard to find Beethoven struggling with the same questions that Jefferson seemingly effortlessly addressed through his bold redaction, namely: how much of our received religious tradition is “real” and how much of it has real value? The Ninth’s unity of humanism and religious expression in a divinely inspired joy that enables us to reach to God is of a piece with Jefferson’s insistence on the greatness of Christ’s teachings quite apart from the question of his godhead.
…And so, somewhat to my surprise, we’re at the end of another Tanglewood season, the end of another summer. I have no idea how that happened so quickly. It seems just yesterday that we were setting our clocks ahead, and now the days are getting shorter and the kids are getting ready to go back to school.
And we’ll be returning to the basement chorus room at Symphony Hall. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be in the first performance of the season, the Brahms Deutsches Requiem with James Levine back at the podium, but I sure hope so.
I collected all my photos from Tanglewood this summer, including the ones I took last weekend, into a Flickr set for posterity (also linked from the photo above). The big difference this year is that all the photos were taken with my iPhone, because my good camera has been missing somewhere since the middle of the summer (alas). I like the iPhone better as a camera than my two previous camera phones–the image quality seems better and less smeary–but it suffers the same issues as they do, namely uncertain color balance when shooting in bright light.
Grab bag: Beethoven Tanglewood reviews and more
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Some fairly cogent writing on the relationship between the consumer culture and the falling fortune of classical music.
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“For its part, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus sang with impressive heft and clarity, outdoing its fine performance in Friday’s Mass in C.”
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“Choristers are so familiar with the piece that, in rehearsal, those who have not sung it before are hauled to their feet and applauded.” — This makes more sense if you know that the reviewer is a chorister herself.
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God help us (irony not intended) that we have come to this: we have to explain to kids that science and faith are different things that ask different questions.
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The article references a new blog I’ll have to check out: http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/.
links for 2008-08-24
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Exceeding the credit limit on McCain's war history as an excuse for his behavior?
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Text, video, and highlights from the VP announcement. Favorite is from the linked story: "John McCain will have trouble deciding which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at."
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Yes, yes, yes.
Beethoven 9th rehearsal: snapping back heads
The fourth movement was a lot of fun to sing. It was sometime around 12:30 when we hit the big fugue in which the tenors enter on a fortissimo high A, so I was finally in voice (when the rehearsal began with warmups at 9:30, I didn’t have much above an E), and I saw quite a few heads in the crowd bounce in shock when we nailed the note. It should be fun this afternoon.
Grab bag: A good day for politics
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Amazing Lego recreation of the Olympics venues. 4500 minifigs!
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Interesting long-form piece about Biden from last year.
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Certainly a candidate for funniest album title of all time.
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It’s Biden time. Guess we’ve forgiven the “articulate” thing.
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“scheduled for day three at SorCon include a panel discussion on rapid-fire dialogue, an American President debate on what sorts of policy deals would cause the president’s girlfriend to break up with him in the modern day, and a seminar on how freebasing cocaine can improve your screenwriting.”
links for 2008-08-22
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Interesting critique of the "speech bubble" treatment in the dashboard. I've always thought it's an effective way to highlight something happening in a hidden part of the interface — look over here! I have x things to show you! — but the comic is right, the metaphor is awkward.
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"The worst thing that can happen at a convention is that it can in fact turn into an actual decision-making convention. The worst thing that can happen at a convention is that it can be real. That is almost always a harbinger of bad things to come."
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?.jpg for fun and profit.
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Neal Stephenson goes Gene Wolfe? There's more than a little sense of some of the deep wordplay that characterizes Wolfe's speculative fiction in this dictionary excerpt. Should be fun.
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Iterative testing uncovers XSS vulnerabilities in the default ValidateRequest filters in ASP.NET AND identifies HTML interpretation bugs in IE7 that are fun and entertaining. Remember, kids, always {canonicalize and whitelist your inputs|whitelist and encode your outputs|avoid IE}.
The ineffable and the effable
Tonight we’re singing Beethoven’s Mass in C, which is one of those undeservedly underperformed works — at least, compared to the rest of the Beethoven corpus. Compared to the average early English sacred work, it’s practically ubiquitous.
It’s an interesting setting of the work for an interesting time. Beethoven wrote the work in 1807, and it’s hard not to hear the work through the filter of the political and cultural upheavals of the epoch. What role did the mass text have, what resonance and relevance, after revolutions ripped apart the old fabric of monarchies? You can hear some if Beethoven’s response in the setting of the Credo, which opens on an agitato string accompaniment and a low murmured “credo” from the chorus; as our director has remarked, it’s more question than declamation.
And yet there are oceanic passages throughout that speak to a deep tradition–the sacred chant and response of the Benedictus are probably the clearest connection to the old traditions. It is a work that repays close study, and performance.
Getting attention
What the comic points out is that this makes perfect sense for comments (a speech bubble with the number of comments is a congruent metaphor). But indicating the number of plugins needing updates is a little different–should your WordPress plugins really be talking to you?
I think the first treatment of this concept that I saw was Apple’s new mail count in Mail.app, but they didn’t treat it as a speech bubble (there was no “tail” on the little red badge showing the count). This treatment is probably the more portable UI convention.
Back for Beethoven
At least the weather is cooperating. It’s about 68, and the skies… Well, see for yourself.
links for 2008-08-19
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Partial release notes for new Delicious 2.0 features.
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"I don't care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn't matter …" Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes, meet the Long Tail.
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Interesting roundup of SSH clients currently in the App Store for the iPhone. So you can interrupt a phone call to restart your servers (or vice versa).
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A welcome reversal–but there's no definitive word that the MBTA won't pursue further chilling actions, nor that they will actually fix the broken system.
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In a list of possible Republican VP candidates: "Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent." Heh.
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Dave sez, let's stop splitting hairs and look at the real choice before us.
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For those occasions when it's after midnight, the network guy at the motel has gone home, and the router craps out…
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Reasons to love Harper's Weekly: their version of the story reads, "Nils, who shat himself during the ceremony, was, read the proclamation from King Harald the Fifth, 'in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood.'"
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Toys and tools released at DEFCON. If you don't know what a VOIP fuzzer is, you probably won't enjoy this list.
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Rand's latest kind of unifies GTD with Steven Covey's stuff. Interesting read.
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You know, maybe we shouldn't be allowing just anybody to have student names and birth dates without proving that their sites are secure. I'm just sayin'.
