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Remote PC Support Tools Mini-Guide

Posted by monster in Technology

As someone who is known amongst friends to work in the computer industry I often get asked to help sort out people’s problems.  Talking someone over the phone to deal with problems can be difficult, and often it is easier to understand and solve a problem if you can see the machine which brings with it a host of practicality issues.  Remote management tools aren’t a new thing, but having one that doesn’t cost you anything to help friends and family with and works over HTTP/HTTPS without needing to know the IPs involved is important an relatively new.

 

MasterNewMedia.org has a nice little article with plenty of links to tools and services in this area with a review of what they offer which can be found at Remote PC Support Tools: A Mini-Guide, worth checking out. I’ll be trying out TeamViewer which is free for personal use doesn’t require client installation and a small app at my end to sort things out. Good security - the client has to send you details independently of the tool for connecting to them (they suggest the phone). The client tool doesn’t need to be installed - just launched via the website.

 

Fuel Prices

Posted by monster in economy

This month carries good news on fuel prices - they’re dropping!  Although the drop is being pushed by a price war between the supermarkets more than the drop in the barrel price.  This does make the price drops a lot more variable and this is reflected in the latest figures having the highest regional variation since I’ve started doing the measurements.  It is also worth pointing out, that the drop so far has only taken fuel prices back by a couple months rather than to last year’s price plus annual inflation.

 

Source figures courtesy of the AA.

The Times front page - Computer games industry threat to downloaders

Posted by monster in Technology

  This article (Computer games industry threat to downloaders: ‘pay up or we’ll sue’) makes up the front page of the The Times today along with a photo of Christine Ohuruogu the Team GB athlete.  It is surprising such an announcement made the front pages of the paper, but also the fact that compared to the downloading of movies and music the games industry has been relatively quiet about the illegitimate downloading activity.   It is interesting to observe that the print edition of the article acknowledges that often people will download games and never play them, begging the question as to what proportion of the downloads do actually represent lost revenue?

 

I hope that the games industry don’t make the mistakes that the music industry (particularly  the RIAA) have fallen into which has done the industry no favours at all.

 

Chemical Brothers iTunes EP

Posted by monster in Music

The Chemical Brothers have released an EP on iTunes called Midnight Madness which includes a Soulwax remix of Hey Boy, Hey Girl.

Jerry Wexler Dead at 91

Posted by monster in Music

After a hectic weekend, I’m catching up with news to discover the sad news that the great Jerry Wexler has passed on.  I’ll not write reams about his exploits, but recommend you read about them your self, but looking at his book - Rhythm & Blues (also called My Life in Rhythm & Blues), if you wan the shortened details then check out Stereophile: Jerry Wexler Dead at 91.

One Man’s Quest to Digitize and Publicize Rare Vinyl

Posted by monster in Music

Thanks to BOfH for bringing a very interesting article about a a music fan in the US who is bringing his collection of 78’s into the twenty first century by converting them to MP3. The full article can be found at Listening Post from Wired.com.  Clif Bolling has been ripping his notable collection of old 78s to MP3 and posting them to his website so that he could access the MP3s from anywhere he wants. Hits in the website had been low until information about Cliff’s activity hit Reddit and StumbleUpon at which point interest and the number of hits his site had went through the roof.

 

The interesting thing is issues of copyright, it would seem that concern was not over possible copyright breach; Cliff is working on the principle of no takedown notice must mean all is ok - a little naive, but given the likelihood that this material isn’t available anymore (some of the recordings at 70+ years old) it would be hard to prove he has inflicted losses on the record companies.  Given the copyright risk, it is strange to read that Cliff’s wife was more concerned about how the music might be perceived as the recordings weren’t subject to modern political correctness or legislation over sexism or racism.

 

It will be interesting to see if the interest in Cliff’s efforts result in the master recordings for some of this material are tracked down, cleaned up and made available through more legitimate channels.  In the meantime we can probably look upon Cliff’s efforts as twenty first century equivalent to the great archivist Alan Lomax.

 

New Paul Weller single from 22 Dreams

Posted by monster in Music

Paul Weller’s next single from the 22 Dreams album is going to be ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘. The digital release will be on the 18th and the physical formats will follow a week later.
The CD single is released with three tracks with a radio edit of  ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ along with ‘Push It Along’ and ‘Big Brass Buttons’ featuring Bobby Gillespie.
There will also be collectible 7″ vinyl options, the first coming in a Green Island Records 7″ bag with  ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ Radio Edit backed by ‘Push It Along’. The second comes in an Artworked 7″ bag with an acoustic version of  ‘All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)‘ backed by an acoustic version of ‘Pretty Flamingo’. You can order all the formats as part of a multi-buy special offer for just £4.99 exclusively from Townsend Records here.

 

New website borrows Radiohead’s ‘pay what you want’ plan

Posted by monster in Music

The NME has reported here that a new website has been launched following Radiohead’s recent experiment with In Rainbows model; namely, you decide how much you’d like to pay for the music.  The site is called Aralie.com.  But before you get too excited at the idea of being able to buy all of Radiohead’s back catalogue for not much money, the site wont have any major artists as it is currently aimed at Independent artists.

  I hope the site succeeds and that perhaps artists like Radiohead and Paul Westerberg sell albums through the site to help support them and get the rest of the record industry thinking, oh and new indie artists get more punters checking them out.

 

big Autumn album releases being announced

Posted by monster in Music

According to AlbumVote, U2 will be releasing their first new album in four years (the last being ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb”) in October.  Keane have also announced their next album called Perfect Symmetry to be released on October 13th 2008.  The next Verve release - to be called Forth is now well known about which is released later this month.

Other interesting looking releases coming according to metacritic:

• Ray LaMontagne - Gossip in the Rain
• Lindsey Buckingham (sometime Fleetwood Mac guitarist) - Gift of Screws
• Chemical Brothers
• Dido
• Jem - Down To Earth
• The Killers
• Massive attack
• Starsailor - All The Plans
• Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads (13/10)
• Snow Patrol

Counting Crows - official bootlegs

Posted by monster in Music

As the Counting Crows hit the road to promote their latest album, they’ve have decided to follow what is starting to become a well warn path of official live concert releases.  The are are available from livecountingcrows.com. The concerts can be downloaded in MP3 or FLAC formats, or purchased as CDs with prices at $9.95, $12.95 and $21.00 respectively.  It is intended that the site will make all future shows available via the site.

 

main site - http://www.countingcrows.com/

 

Lego Bohemian Rhapsody!

Posted by monster in Music

A series of music videos have been animated with Lego including Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody!  Complete with the Lego version of some of the famous visual effects.

 

It is certainly worth taking a look at.  Must have taken IrishVixen2008 hours of effort to animate. A mass of other videos in Lego can be found here.

 

Net firms in music pirates deal

Posted by monster in Music

According to the BBC News the largest ISPs have agreed to start clamping down file sharers with people being warned and then potentially having their either slowed down or cut off.  This includes Carphone Warehouse who originally had declined to tow the line as far as the BPI was concerned. 

The concerning thing is that there appears to be no means to dispute an accusation of file sharing. For example, if they pickup on a transfer of music that I legitimately own from my home PC to my work machine over the Internet how I can defend myself?

It will also be interesting to see if people start to migrate their Internet access away from the major players to smaller ISPs who are not currently party to the agreement.

How portable is Java?

Posted by monster in Work, Technology

The title is a bit of a trick question - if the JVM meets all the tests to qualify being called Java then it is portable.  However the website  JavaSpecialists  has a series of brilliant  articles about some of the depths of Java, with a rather interesting article called ‘Law of Cretan Driving’ which looks at the way 64 bit value are handled (such as long) within the JVM.  The article points out that it is not mandatory for the JVM to ensure that the bytes that are used to represent a long can not be manipulated by separate threads at anyone time. That is to say that any 64bit primitive such as a long is not guaranteed to be thread safe.  However problem is that primitive data types are generally considered by developers to be atomically safe - which isn’t necessarily the case. So we can find that a java application which is theoretically portable may actually not port.

Java Standard - http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#17876

 

A Whole Load Of Free Downloads

Posted by monster in Music

 XFm the British Radio station have got a page of free downloads ranging from Unkle’s remix of their song that has been included on the new X Files film soundtrack, through a new live Verve track along with a lot of other music in between.  To find more go to A Whole Load Of Free Downloads - Xfm

 

Paul Westerberg - $0.49 album - sort of

Posted by monster in Music

Paul Westerberg (solo artists and former key member of The Replacements) has released a new album with with a price tag of forty nine cents (twenty six pence).  Although iTunes has not cooperated with this pricing other online vendors such as amazon.com have.  To help with the licensing the album - all 43 minutes & 55 seconds is a single track.  This strategy has generated a fair bit of activity on the web for Paul with  lots of sites large and small blogging about it.  The initial release was US only, but today the track has become available to the rest of the world via Tunecore.com.  The fun things was that once I’d downloaded the track, I got an email on behalf of Paul that included the statement:

*A note from Paul:*
“WARNING: DO NOT LISTEN WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE. THIS PRODUCT  IS NOT FAULTY - ALL SOUNDS ARE INTENTIONAL AND VALID AS A WORK OF ART.”

 

PaulWesterberg.net also has details of the track listing here.

 

Tori Amos bootlegs go main stream

Posted by monster in Music

The official bootleg series originally only available through one of Tori Amos’ site (http://toribootlegs.com/) that had been recorded over recent tours have gone main stream with the bootlegs being available through iTunes (UK and US) and other download stores over the next few weeks.  This does mean that the bootlegs aren’t likely to be cheap to download.

 

In addition to this Tori has continued to plunder her live recordings catalogue with the release of live recordings from Montreux festival in 1991 and 1992. These recordings will reflect Tori around the time of the release of the amazing Little Earthquakes album.  The release will be both as CD and DVD on September 22nd in the UK and Europe and a week later in the US.  Spinner (part of AOL) also has information about this release here.

• Amazon Link here
• Tori Amos official site here.

Amazing Skyscraper Photography

Posted by monster in Photography

 

I came across some amazing photography, I saw a version of the image below in a magazine news letter.  The picture below is a genuine shot of the Dubai skyline taken from the Burj Tower which is being constructed. Once the Burj is complete it will be the world’s tallest building at around 800 metres, that is twice the height of the Empire State Building.  It is worth keeping in mind that the oil princes in Dubai are competing with each other for the tallest and most elegant tower blocks.

Look carefully at the clouds to the left of the buildings, the cloud is blowing in from the right and you can see how the buildings are breaking up the cloud and creating ’shadows’.

 

This photo was taken by a guy called Jack Frost who is a seriously talented photographer and has lots more amazing photography here and blog here.

 

SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM

Posted by monster in Work

  SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM is the latest evolution in the integration between jBPM which forms a crucial element in the orchestration of JBoss’ SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) stack.  We’ve produced some video clips complete with commentary together that show the core parts of the SeWhy for JBoss jBPM along with looking at SeeWhy in the broader context of BI (Business Intelligence) and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring). The SeeWhy page here has both low res streaming versions of the videos and downloadable high res versions.

If you’re interested in work flow and how you can monitor and measure its activity both in terms of IT operational performance and in the business context then the three clips will be ten minutes well spent.

 

Useful links …

• SeeWhy Real Time Business Intelligence - SeeWhy for JBoss jBPM.
• jBPM at JBoss.org

 

Paul Weller - Live EP

Posted by monster in Music

 

With Paul Weller having participated in the iTunes festival in London this year, there has inevitably been an iTunes exclusive EP announced that was released on Monday.  The EP features six tracks:

1. Peacock Suit
2. From the Floorboards Up
3. All I Wanna Do (is Be With You)
4. Out of the sinking
5. Invisible
6. Sea Spray

Initial comments on iTunes don’t look too promising though - the suggestion being aside from only a small part of the whole gig that the recording is extremely clinical in nature.

 

Another free song from Coldplay

Posted by monster in Music

To celebrate the start of their North American tour Coldplay are giving away another song from their website called Death Will Never Conquer - to download it you need to provide an email address on the coldplay site.

 

Note that the track is pretty sort and simple with pretty much Chris Martin performing solo at a piano.  The track is also only 128kbps.

 

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