Pickabar Blog

I’ve just achieved one of my life goals. How often can you say that?

Pickabar readers, your host is now a published author! My article “Using WSDL to Combine Multiple Web Services” will be published in the March issue of MSDN Magazine. It’s also the preview article for the March issue, so you can read it online by clicking on that first link. The article is intended for software developers, so the less geeky elements of the audience probably won’t get any value out of it.

Many many thanks go out to Stephen Toub (MSDN Technical Editor extraordinaire) for encouraging me to write the article, and helping me to actually get it done. I’d also like to thank Tim Ewald who, while he was an instructor at Developmentor, gave me the first push towards looking behind the web service protocol curtain.

…and the replacement on my life goal list now that I’ve checked this one off the list? Get something published that my non-geeky friends will actually understand .

The Guardian has an article on the artificial intelligence based software called Hit Song Science:

[HSS is] a piece of software…developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music. It isolated and separated 20 aspects of song construction including melody, harmony, chord progression, beat, tempo and pitch and identifies and maps recurrent patterns in a song, before matching it against a database containing 30 years’ worth of Billboard hit singles – 3.5m tunes in all. The program then accords the song a score, which registers, in effect, the likelihood of it being a chart success.

Music is at it’s root, mathematical and to some extent predictable. A key change from major to minor makes most western ears sad, and the reverse uplifts us. On the other hand, I’ve always thought there was something mystical above and beyond the habitualized responses and strict musical rules that make up the craft of musicianship.

This kind of automated evaluation based on historical trends can never predict the next big groundbreaking revolution coming along. I can just imagine the next Beatles getting turned down for a contract because of a low HSS score. I can’t even imagine what kind of a score someone like Muddy Waters or even Jimi Hendrix would have gotten.

Maybe this type of thing is as inevitable as auto-tuning software that can turn no talents into pop stars, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing. I’m sure version two of the software will come with a Producer-O-Matic plugin and a direct integration with ProTools. Laugh all you want, predictability is the life blood of corporations. Artistry just gets in the way of that predictability.

Yes folks, music is just a commodity. Or at least that’s the way the music industry would have it.

And with the $119 Million dollar signing of Beltran, as well as the earlier acquisition of Pedro Martinez, the Mets are serious contenders again. Mets leadership has given fans a reason to believe that the downward spiral of the last four or five years is finally reversing. They’ve also done a lot to ensure some actual viewership for their upcoming Cable TV station. It could be argued that the team would have been smarter to spend that dough on Vladimir Guerrero last year, but there’s no point in naysaying on a day like this.

Now, how about a decent first basemen?

It’s only mini-camp and I’m already starting to get excited about the season!

The pickabar post stream has hit some hiccups, sorry folks. The European trip, the Tsunami disaster and a bunch of other stuff has me feeling too emotional to finish a lot of the posts I’ve started. In the meantime, here’s some links to steal away your free time:

One of the first pieces of news Sarah and I received when we got back from NYC was Gothamists post about the passing of Jerry Orback, better known to most as Lennie Briscoe. Lennie was great in his early days on the show as Chris Noth’s partner, but I’ll always remember him as the archetypical wisecracking ex-drunk jaded detective he blossomed into when he moved out of the straight man role. Ironically, Sarah had just opened one of her late christmas presents…a Lenny Briscoe T-Shirt that I’d originally read about on Gothamist.

EverythingNY linked to a site that has photos of every Starbux in NYC. At this point Starbux is starting to drift from pure retailer to real estate company, a la McD’s.

Blogcritics says that CNN is killing Crossfire, and the president of the network says he agrees with Jon Stewarts dead on criticisms of the show. BTW, I watched Tucker Carlson’s PBS show once to gather anti-conservative pundit ammo and came away genuinely astonished at the nuanced take on the news of the day that he put forward. Nothing like Crossfire at all.

Microsoft purchased Anti-Spyware company Giant and has already released the
first beta of a forthcoming AntiSpyware product. I just ran it, and it didn’t report any spyware threats on my PC which I guess is good news. My friend Ray got a new PC and had six or seven pieces of spyware by the time I got him to install and run ad aware. Spyware programmers…definitely the dark side of the geek force.

The Pioneers “Long Shot Kick De Bucket” is one of the first songs everyone hears when they get into late sixtees rocksteady/early reggae. I’ve loved it for years, but I’d basically guessed what the song was about until I found the lyrics on the official site of The Specials. Now I just need to figure out the bass line…something something something G, same thing same thing same thing A?

The other day Scientific American had an episode that included info about software from MIT called Hyperscore. Hyperscore lets you create music visually w/o having to know anything about standard notation or arrangement. I get the impression it’s targeted towards kids, but it’s a lot of fun for anyone who’d like to play at being Beethoven without years of music school.

More aborted post recaps to come!

I’d planned on blogging during the trip, but I’ve managed to avoid jumping back onto the old superhighway until now. Expect the flurry of posts (remember those slide shows your neighbors used to force your to sit thru?) to begin on Monday…