We’ll be back to our program in just a couple of minutes…

Public radio listeners know it’s that time of year again, time to interrupt your favorite public radio programs for the spring pledge drive. But today I saw a tweet from one of the folks at APM’s Marketplace with a link to a YouTube video that’s sure to bring a smile to the face of any regular public radio listener.

Greg Studley (yes, that’s his real name) has put together a take off on Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire that replaces the names of celebrities in the original song with the names of people you hear across public radio networks (definitely NPR and APM, and I think even PRI although I don’t catch any PRX names). He even drops in Donnie Baseball, although I’m not aware of anything he does with public radio.  [My bad. I'm always confusing Don with Dave on NPR.] (If you go to the YouTube page for the video you can see all the names he drops.)

After hearing it many times I have to admit it’s kind of lame and the singing isn’t the best, although it still beats some of the vocals I had to record as a studio engineer back in New Orleans. What do you guys think of it? The only other problems I have with it is that after repeated plays of the video (I really want an MP3 of it one of these days) I had to go see Billy Joel’s original as well as the cover by Guns N’ Moses. Although it’s pretty ironic that I found the video yesterday, the day that WBUR, my local NPR station, officially started their spring fundraiser. Please consider supporting them as they try to completely do away with their summer pledge drive for the second year in a row. If you do you can get chances to win some pretty nice swag.

I just found a new Must Have DVD and CD

I was looking through the On Demand listings today and didn’t find any TV shows or movies I wanted to see so I turned to the music listings. What I didn’t expect was to see an excerpt from a killer concert combining one of my favorite classic rock bands and a youth orchestra.

Concert.tv has let me see some great footage from some of my favorite bands, but when I found a 18 minute clip from Styx and a Cleveland orchestra I wasn’t expecting to get my socks blown off. What I found as a video made with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra (CYO) from a 2006 show. The concert was released as One With Everything in CD and DVD versions in November of 2006 with a Blu-Ray disk coming out earlier this year. The clip from concert.tv only has three songs (Blue Collar Man (Long Nights), Too Much Time on My Hands, and Boat on the River), but I was already sold. I had to watch it again just so I could enjoy watching the young musicians get into the songs while playing. I’m not saying that it’s odd that orchestral musicians don’t like rock and roll or that I’m surprised to see a group of high school students enjoying Styx so much, I just got a kick out of watching the players. It’s clear that they were having a blast.

It turns out that Liza Grossman and the orchestra are no strangers to working with big name artists in the rock arena, having already worked with Ray Manzarek of The Doors, Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young), Jon Anderson of Yes, Pat Benatar and her husband Neil Giraldo, as well as Styx and others. The orchestra has also premiered 46 world premieres and has received the Northern Ohio Live Award of Achievement in the Classical Music/Opera category.

If you have any interest in classic rock music, orchestral music, young musicians or any combination of these to visit the CYO website. After you find out more about this great bunch of musicians click on the “listen+ watch” link on the lower left and get ready to both see and hear just how good they are. Plus you get to see a clip of Lorelei from the One With Everything DVD. If you’re like me you’ll want to fly, not surf, over to Amazon and buy the DVD, CD, or Blu-Ray of One with Everythingfor yourself. Even if you hate classical music I bet you’re going to love this performance.

Good news for open source loving musos

I have some things that I want to post from my usual sources (hopefully tomorow), but I saw this on Google News and I wanted to make sure it got posted before I forgot about it. Or left an icon on my desktop for so long it’s no longer newsworthy, but it’s practically the same things.

The good news was seen on Nillabyte.com, a tech news and rumor site, and it’s about the so-called fact that if you want to make music you have to use a Mac. This is ignoring all of the great software available like Cubase, cakewalk, etc., for Windows users, not to mention all the great open source titles available for Linux.

Karl Martineau over at Nillabyte has the tale of a music professional who switched all of his Mac live and recording gear over to Ubuntu.

Now if it only didn’t make me miss working as a soundguy.

Music Review: Marcia Ball’s ‘Peace, Love & BBQ’

I was browsing through the CD’s at the Boston Public Library and found some nice jazz, classical and classic rock to borrow to drop into my cd player, and I found a disk from an artist that plays frequently in New Orleans that is so good that I have to tell y’all about.

I first heard Marcia Ball not when I lived in the Crescent City but on a compilation of Mardi Gras music in Boston about 10-15 years ago. I loved her song “That’s Enough of that Stuff” and while i lost the cd in a move years ago I made a point of finding an MP3 of it a few years ago.

At the library I saw Marcia’s “Peace, Love & BBQ” and grabbed it just to check out more of her tunage. I was hooked from the first tune, “Party Time”, which was a perfect first tune from Marcia to hear after “That’s Enough of That Stuff”. The title track follows and cemented my love of her music.

“Miracle in Knoxville”, relating a story from Marcia’s childhood in Tennessee, grabbed me with it’s mellow blues, and “Watermelon Time” made me hungry for the produce that’s truly “Sweet as candy / Sugar on the vine.”

“Down in the Neighborhood” reminded me of The Radiator’s “Confidential” thematically and I was definitely bopping along with it. “Where Do You Go?”, with it’s Hammond B-3 foundation and the choral-like harmonies on the chorus sent my mind back to the gospel choirs I enjoyed as a kitteh in ‘Nawlins. “My Heart and Soul” set my feet a tapping, something I do fairly readily even when I’m mixing live sound.

I was totally unprepared for the duet with Mac “Dr. John” Rebenack on “My Heart and Soul”. I already knew I wanted to tell a special woman about the album, but when I heard this tune I knew I not only had to get it for myself, I also had to get it for my special someone, too. (Yeah, as an incurably hopeful romantic I’m a sucker for songs like this.) There are many killer lines I could share, but I don’t want to spoil any of them so I won’t.

“That’s Married Life” is the perfect follow up, humorous with it’s Cajun feel, and I dare anyone who loves to dance to a Cajun accordion player to stay in their seat when this song comes on. If my marriage had been half as much fun as this song I might still be in New Orleans with my ex rather than in Beantown.

Marcia goes mellow again for “Falling Back In Love With You”, and it’s a beautiful little ditty for those lucky enough to be with someone long enough to fall in love with them over and over again. She fires up a little boogy-woogie for those of us who seem to know hard times and seem to keep falling “Right Back In It”.

We get a reflective walk down memory lane to 1969′s Hurricane Camille for “Ride it Out” and Marcia breaks her fast/slow pattern that makes my one complaint of the album (it makes it hard to keep a mood for longer than a single song) to bring the disk to a close with “I Wish You Well”, an especially fitting close for an album that carries her thanks to “the people of the Gulf Coast, post-Katrina, post-Rita, who hold it together day-to-day.”

Survey says…

If I were reviewing new(-ish) albums on a regular basis, I’d have to give “Peace, Love & BBQ”

out of a possible 5 rockin’ Tuxes.

If you like the New Orleans music  of The Meters, The Nevills, Sachmo, Irma Thomas, etc., you’ll love this album. If you’re not a big fan of la musique de la Nouvelle-Orléans you should check it out anyway. Consider it an exercise in music appreciation. I have a feeling it may get a place in your music library, if not a place of honor. You can snag the MP3′s from Amazon, but I recommend that you get the physical disk. Not only will you get the liner notes but you’ll also have excellent source material for converting the songs to your favorite audio format.

Marcia Ball
“Peace, Love & BBQ”
2008 release on Alligator Records
www.marciaball.com

For those of you in the Boston area, you can see Marcia live at Scullers Jazz Club this Wednesday and Thursday, 1-2 March.

[UPDATED] Peng’s links for Friday, 27 March

Updated to include note about the PHP version of the Ubuntu 9.04 [countdown. -Peng]

I tried to post some links yesterday but as soon as I hit the save button to lock in some tage and my text I was rewarded with a 100% blank post. Hopefully this post will last long enough to publish it.

• Pavel Rojtberg: Giving Google Earth a native look & feel. One of the biggest complaints about Google apps on Linux (other than some apps actually not being native Linux apps because they shove an extra installation of WINE down our throats) is how butt ugly they are. Pavel walks us through what we need to do to get them looking like the theme we have selected.
• Jonathan Carter: The correct way to file bugs in Ubuntu. Filing bugs is important when you help test new releases, but I found out yesterday I was doing it wrong because I went straight to Launchpad to file my bug. Jonathan lets us know not only how do to it properly but also why the way I was doing it is a bad idea.
• Steven Harms: Thank You. Steven writes a wonderful post to the people who help make Ubuntu Linux such a wonderful distribution. As for me, I’m just going to say, “What Steven wrote.”
• Tiago Vaz: Some cool audio stuff for Debian. Usually when people write about cool audio tools for GNU/Linux they’re referring to media player apps like Amarok, MPD and Totem. But Tiago has good news for musicians, especiallt guitar players, as he tells us about some virtual processing gear.
• Steve Langasek: Ubuntu 9.04 Beta released. I know this should probably get a post of it’s own, but I’m tight on time since I needed to reclaim yesterday’s links from Google Reader. The first beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” is now available for downloading. I’ll snag it this weekend and post my thoughts about it.
• Nick Ali: Ubuntu 9.04 Countdown Banner. If you have your own blog or website you may want to snag the countdown banner to help countdown the says until Ubuntu 9.04 is released. Stefano Forenza also has the code on his site, as well as tips for people like Nanci and I who aren’t allowed to use any JavaScript on their blog. That was a pain in the rear the last two releases (Thanks, WP.com) and we’re glad the devs thought of us this time around. Updated 29 March: If you can’t use JavaScript grab the PHP code from Stefano’s post. It’s working fine on our blog!
• Daniel T. Chen: Lessons Learned at Jaunty Beta. Not everything went 100%smoothly with the alpha versions of Ubuntu 9.04, and Daniel clues us in on some of the things the dev team had to deal with.

That’s it for today. I may have some links to share tomorrow, but look for our report on how Jaunty behaves on our hardware this weekend. Until then, enjoy the weekend!

Peng’s links for Thursday, 8 January

Are you still writing “2008″? I caught myself writing the wrong year earlier today, so if you are doing it too don’t feel too bad.

I apologize for not posting much so far this year. We started the new year with my getting not only a new video card but having our router die and having to move to a wireless network here at home. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get Ubuntu to remember that I have a wireless USB “card” when I reboot but I’m still needing to open my AWN Terminal applet and run two commands as I get logged in after a reboot. I thought I had it fixed, but a reboot earlier today proved me wrong. I had some issues when I first installed my EVGA e-GeForce 6200 card but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that I forgot to disable the drivers for my current, very old, graphics card first. I was hoping to give the new graphics card another shot today but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. It’s now at the top of my list for tomorrow (after I check my email and news feeds, that is) so hopefully I will have some good news tomorrow afternoon.

• Ana Beatriz Guerro Lopez: New year’s proposal: look at your reported bugs. This post from Planet Debian is a great idea. If you’ve filed a bug online anywhere you should check to make sure the information is current. Some bugs may no longer effect you, and some bugs may still need more information so the bug can get resolved. You should take a look at bugs no matter where they were filed or what they were filed against, which means I should take one more look at my open bugs on  Bugzilla, even though I no longer use Thunderbird and I only keep Firefox around as an emergency backup in case something isn’t working quite properly with Epiphany.
• Jorge Castro: Resolutions and mean people. Jorge found someone who was giving Ubuntu a test drive for a week. Jorge does have some responses to things the person is writing, but he says he’s glad to see things like that because it reminds us why we do things to support open source software.
• Ubuntu Productivity: Best of both worlds . Geany, the text editor that so many of us love (it’s my preferred text editor of all sorts of plain-text tasks) is available for Linux and Windows, but not OSX. Jon Beebe found a way to get it installed on his other OS and he is kind enough to let us all know how he got it working with his favorite spotted kitteh.
• Vincent Fourmond: Switching to mpd. Vincent has discovered one of the best parts of using MPD: it isn’t the resource hog that other media players can be. Vincent’s post is short on details, but I couldn’t help sharing the good news that another user has discovered my favorite audio player, even if he prefers using a command line interface rather than my personal favorite front end.
• Felix Kaser: Announcing gnome-format 0.1.0. The GNOME devs are working on a new formatting tool for removable memory devices like memory cards and USB drives. Yes, Gparted handles that task already but gnome-format will be even easier to use.
• DesktopLinux.com: Vietnam mandates open source for gov’t servers, desktops. The minister of information and communications for Vietnam has asked both national and local government IS workers to get all their users on open source software by the end of June. It seems a tad soon for the deadline, but he’s mandated that all government workers use open source software by 2010 in some of the best news in a while for proponents of open source software. I bet the boys and girls in Redmond are trying to figure out who let this happen.
• Sven Muller: About Usability. Another resident of Planet Debian has a great post that I think you guys should read. Sven had seen a post by Sami Haahtinen about usability and while he agrees with most of what Sami wrote there’s one part he disagrees with. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better written post about making things easy not only easier for beginners but also keeping settings available for more advanced users. One of the problems I have with Epiphany is that several relatively easy tweaks I performed with Firefox are difficult, if not flat out impossible, with Epiphany thanks to the GNOME mindset of locking controls down and out of reach of users who could bork things royally by changing the wrong thing improperly.

There is one more bit of news I want to pass along. Back in June I started getting my Ubuntu-related posts syndicated on UbuntuWeblogs, also known as Planet Ubuntu Users. Tiago Faria, also known as Gouki, has added Ubuntu Universe, a new area on the UbuntuWeblogs, that will expand the posts of Ubutu bloggers syndicated to include non Ubuntu related posts. This means that if a person has their technical posts on Planet Ubuntu, UbuntuWeblogs or any of the Planet websites for the Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) teams. Gouki and I sent emails back and forth this morning, and it looks like I have come up with a way to get all of my posts on the new Ubuntu Universe.

For those on WordPress.com blogs with other authors, like Nanci and I have here, I’ll share how we got the URI to submit. Have the owner of the blog go into the blog’s Appearance screen, and have them put up a widget that will let users see the articles posted by each author. Grab the link for your posts and simply add “/feeds” to the end of the URI. That should give you an RSS feed for only that author’s posts.

Get Amazon’s MP3 downloader to play with Epiphany

Since I switched to Epiphany last month there are some extensions that I’m having to do without, but there is one thing that I realized I had to deal with, that’s making sure I could download MP3s from Amazon’s digital media store was easily as I could with Firefox. Firefox users know that it’s a piece of cake to register the downloads with Firefox so that in the future all you have to do is accept the download and your system would automatically launch the Amazon downloader to snag the tracks you just bought.

Alas, it’s not so easy with the official GNOME web browser. in true GNOME fashion there’s no handy dialog boxes for telling your browser what to use to open the .amz files, thereby giving you the chance to either save the file or cancel the download altogether, something you probably won’t want to do with tracks that you paid for. Luckily I’m not the only one who had to deal with this problem.

Sean Fulmer looked into it and has an easy way to let Epiphany know what to do with .amz files, and it’s as close as a sudo gedit command away. Please be careful making these changes, because once you put in your sudo password you’ll have direct access to configuration files. I’m not saying you should be afraid of the instructions I’m about to give you, but any mime-type you add to the <safe> section will tell Epiphany to let you open that type of files in the future, and it will be up to you to know that the source you get them from won’t send you malware. (Not that Windows malware will work on Linux, mind you.)

Open up a Terminal window and run

sudo gedit /etc/gnome/epiphany/mime-types-permissions.xml

When the file opens in your text editor go down to the <safe> section (I like putting it at the bottom) and add this on it’s own line

<mime-type type="audio/x-amzxml"/>

Then save your file, close Epiphany and when you open your browser back up you can buy any MP3 that Amazon sells without having to save the .amz file first before you can actually download your new music. This will also work with other file types as long as you know the specific mime-type to use.

Now if Amazon would only add Linux support to their video downloads….

Peng’s links for Tuesday, 16 December

Sorry about not posting my new links sooner. Yesterday was a very full day and today I was hunting down some things for Epiphany, and while I’m writing this in Epiphany (with an assist from the Fox) I’ll share what I found in a post tomorrow.

• Ted Gould: Where are my messages? The Ubuntu devs are working on a new combined applet for fast user switching, session management and IM status. Users of Ubuntu Intrepid will know that it’s already in use, but they’re making it even better for the Jaunty Jackelope.
• Daniel Holbach: Alberto Milone. I meant to post this sooner, but the developer of Envy is now a member of the Ubuntu Hall of Fame. Congrats, Alberto! You definitely deserve it.
• Mackenzie Morgan: Dear Phisher… Mackenzie has an open letter to an asshat that tried to get her in a fishing scam. You should read it, especially if you need a smile or a laugh today. I got both when I saw it.
• Leonardo Fontenelle: Student punished for distributing Linux. You nay have heard about the instructor who caught a student giving his friends CDs with GNU/Linux on them. The instructor confiscated the CDs, thinking that the student was promoting software piracy. Don’t just read Ken Starks’ original post about the matter, you should definitely read his follow-up, which includes the report of the instructor in question. Ken is refusing to name the instructor, and I salute his insistence on not identifying her for all of the people who would have tried to make the instructor’s life a living hell for their errant belief about the Free and Open Source Software movement. I’m linking to Leonardo’s post because he gave me the most complete links on the matter so I could have the full story. Thanks, Leonardo!
• Karl Lattimer: Free software developer punished for using free software. Karl posts his unfortunate experience in response to Leonardo’s post that had him getting told that his ISP refused to support him for using Linux. Woops!
• Dustin Kirkland: Ubuntu Allstars Bootlegged! Did you miss the performance of the Ubuntu Allstars at the UDS Jaunty? If you did you can download audio files of their perf for your enjoyment, and you can either download individual songs or a .tar.gz of the entire performance. The files are a tad on the quiet side, but crank up your volume and enjoy the show.
• Tom Dryer: Animated Wallpaper on your Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop. Do you wish you could have an animated background? You can, but you can’t have links on your desktop and you will need to have a bunch of CPU cycles you can spare for the job. Tombuntu has all the info you need, including (of course) instructions for how to do it.
• Jono Bacon: UDS Killed The Radio Star. No, he’s not channeling the Buggles, he’s instead celebrating the release of videos from the recent UDS Jaunty. They even have video of a presentation from out fav spaceman.
• TualatriX: Ubuntu Tweak 0.4.4 released! Believe it or not, but Ubuntu Tweak is even better than it was the last time it got updated. TualatriX has screenshots of the new features.
• Christopher Denter: Ubuntu Logo Similarity Contest. Christopher has noticed some corporate logos that are almost eerily similar to Ubuntu’s. Is it trademark infringement? Are there others?
• Bastian Venthur: How many bugs have you fixed today? It’s easy to criticize the software release process. I know I’m guilty of doing it when Firefox 3.x is concerned, but Bastien has a response for the people who complain about how long it takes without helping move the process forward. Patrick Schoenfeld has a response to Bastien that points out something that Bastien may be missing. For the Mozilla devs who want to belittle me for not being constructive in my criticism of some of the decisions the Firefox dev team have made, I finally saw the best way to follow the development process and communicate with the devs, and you really need a better way to let your testing community give you feedback on some of your choices. But then I haven’t enjoyed the same Koolaid you guys have so my opinion probably isn’t worth the energy it took to type this.

John Goerzen: If Programming Languages Were Christmas Carols

Now that the holiday season is upon us John posted an article that I saw on Planet Debian rewriting Chrismukkuh carols for programming languages. You should definitely print them out for your holiday caroling, especially when you fellow IT staffers are included.

(I got this last Saturday but I held it back for publishing until after turkey day.)

Peng’s links for Thursday, 10 July

I have a short set of links for a change. I was holding off posting it to see if I could come across more things I want to share but I’m not seeing any yet.

• moonbeam/ Ubuntu Forums: Regarding Significant issue with recent AWN bzr versions. If you get Avant Window Navigator from reacocard’s PPA you’ll see that the applets broke this morning. That’s because there’s an API change that required the AWN applets be updated. In a nutshell, if your AWN applets show as thin vertical lines, simply deactivate them and reactivate them. Thanks to reacocard for the update in his HOWTO thread.
• Tristan Rhodes: Reminder: Physical access = Root access. Tristan discovered how easily someone can access his Ubuntu profile if they have physical access to the computer. Let’s hope this gets fixed soon.
• Karen Anderson: Lightning Strike Leaves Through Woman’s Nose Ring. This is a story from my local CBS affil, but I just got it in my email and I had to pass it a long.

I got 35 updates, including some proposed updates, this morning, and I was hoping to be able to say that the LA Times RSS feeds no longer cause Evolution to crash, but I just checked and as soon as I tried to add the feed for the Times’ Dodgers stories Evolution crashes. Ouch! At least I did get some good news today. Somewhere between kicking Windows to the curb a year anbd a half ago and installing Ubuntu Hardy I lost several folders of music files, including all but two songs by Daniel Amos. (I know it’s a Christian band, but Terry Taylor and company make some killer tunage despite being Jesus freaks.) Today I wanted to hear “(It’s The Eighties, So Where’s Our) Rocket Pack” from their 1984 Vox Humana album but it was among the missing. I had a feeling I had it backed up so I fired up GNOME Disk Catalog and lo and behold, an entire CD of backed up Daniel Amos tunes from when I was a Windows user. I had to convert them all to Ogg Vorbis files again, but I am happy to say that I have ten complete DA albums available for listening to in Sonata. It just goes to show, making backups is a smart idea, even if you don’t think so at the time.