Random Musings

Techcrunch reports that Yahoo has acquired Webjay. Yes, I know that I’m late on this but I didn’t have time to write what I wanted to write yesterday.I think that my thought are a little better thought out now as well. I never really saw this coming, but it makes a lot of sense. If any of you use Yahoo! Music to listen to music you know that you can customize what you want to listen to. This is what Webjay is, just in a little different format. It seems that Webjay could easily integrate current users playlists into their own radio stations. I can also easily give Yahoo users a way to find new music.

I’m also hoping that, because of some of the playlists that I’ve seen on Webjay, there will be a more diverse selection of indie and alternative tracks in Yahoo Music. They already do a pretty good job of this, but I still get repeats somewhat often — both of songs and artists, and not ones that I usually want, like Top 40 stuff.

Yahoo! continues to impress me which their aquisitions. Last year they snatched up the likes of Flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming.org and others. They are probably becoming the tech company that I like to follow the most. While I do still like Gmail for my email, I go to Yahoo! for everything else. That proabably makes sense thought, since Yahoo is more of a portal and Google isn’t. I also am finding it interesting that they have acquired two companies (flickr, del.icio.us) that have really pioneered using tags.

…And I can be done with the semester. Althought, with the end of the semester comes the seemingly inevitable late nights and even longer tests. I guess the good thing is that I only have two or three tests on finals weeks, and I can be out of here towards the beginning of the week. I’m also looking forward to see two other friends of mine that will be home from college for the first time since the left.

I may have found a bit of a problem with Netvibes. For some reason they don’t seem to support a “Forgot my Password” function like everyone else has — or am I missing something. Needless to say, because of this I now have to try and remember all of the feeds that I had on the start page. This has, however; forced/convinced me to move to a desktop RSS reader. Netvibes was getting a little long to have to scroll all the way down to see all the feeds.

To jump a little off topic, why does it seem that nobody will allow you to cancel your account. I have a Yahoo! account I don’t need, a Xanga one seeing as they don’t want to send me the password I forgot, one for Tagworld — the MySpace of Web 2.0 it seems, potentially horid layouts and all — and probably numerous other accounts I have forgot about over time. It’s not like they contain sensitive information that I don’t want to be in databases, I just don’t need them anymore and I don’t want them out there. It just ….annoys me.

And to round out the rainbow of topics on this blog…NPR has streams of concerts prefromed at the 9:30 Club in D.C. For the most part they are good, and have really cool bands, but some of the streams stop giving me a error saying that the network has problems. Other than that, really cool stuff there.

So I’ve been surfing around, trying to find some things of interest to bide my time since I have nothing else to do I what do I discover; why it’s a website with a listing of current public beta and alpha sites. There can be some interesting things in here. I really like Streampad, which I am currently trying to listen to. The interenet on this campus sucks, it keeps on having to buffer so all I get is a note or two and then silence while it buffers. That get’s old real quick. Anyway, from the site.

Streampad is your destination for music on the web. You can listen to your own library streamed from home, live concerts*, and other great music from around the web… Inside you’ll find mashups with del.icio.us, google maps, amazon, and the internet archive.

So far I’ve listened to parts of a Jack Johnson and Ben Kweller concert and the quality, as far as I can tell, it quite good. I’m looking foward to downloading the client and seeing what it can really do.

I also signed up with Tagworld and have been looking at that as well. Needless to say, I’m not very happy with it. I don’t like the choices for the layout, the ads that are REALLY obtrusive, or the fact that I have to side scroll on almost all of the pages I visit. Combine this with the fact that this is really just another MySpace or Xanga, except that it supports Flickr and tags; well it’s just not really needed.

Well that\’s all for now. I’ve got more I could write, but that would lead to a really long post that I don’t feel like writing right now. Some other time I guess.

We are presently negotiating with some of the major record labels to resolve a dispute over licensing music for LAUNCHcast. This is why the catalog available for your station is now 150,000 songs, and you\’re not hearing all artists you might have rated highly. However, please note that you still have access to the entire catalog of 225,000+ songs by listening to fan stations of your favorite artists via the artist pages.

Yahoo! Help - LAUNCHcast

As I said last post, Yahoo! Music was really drving me crazy with it’s song selection. So I went searching around to see if there was a reason I wasn’t getting to listen to the artist I ranked — other than the fact that I wouldn’t use the paid service and I was over my “monthly bandwidth”. Well there was. This just annoys me. The record industry makes enough money as it is — I’m talking about the companies and the executives, not the musicans — they don’t need more. Didn’t they also want more money from Apple as well? Talk about a monopoly.

… of the semester. I just got back from fall break and am procrastinating doing my accounting homework. Which isn’t that hard, but incredibly time comsuming and I just don’t have the concentration to do it all in one sitting. It was nice to go home and see some friends and all, but I am glad to be back out here. This place has been more homey that home is, but I guess that’s too be expected.

I would really like to know what the fasination with Facebook is. Our campus was just added to it and by the response it got you would think that it was the best thing since sliced bread. Now I can understand being somewhat excited that we now have access to it, but seriously people, I think some of us go a little overboard with it. Repeat it with me, “Facebook Friends are not a benchmark for popularity, and neither is the amount of groups you are in.” In my opinion it’s interesting but nothing to get too excited about.

Flock has been publicily released. I’ve got my copy, now I only need to actually use it some time.

I really like the Yahoo! Music player. It has some really nice options, such as ratings, moods, and your own station. The only bad thing is that they limit the bandwidth usage, and the playlist is seems, for non paying customers. While it doesn’t cost that much, I can’t even spare that much a month. I’m barely making due as it is, of course that’s probably because I still don’t have a job. The only other major gripe I have against it is that you have to use IE to launch it. Bummer

I wish I was at the Web 2.0 conference this week. But alas I have school…boring, dreadful school. Even thought I’m unable to be there I still have found quite a few interesting “Web 2.0″ projects and sites lately.

• Netvibes - Web based RSS Reader with AJAX.
• Flock - New browser from some former Mozilla folks. A LOT of hype is surrounding this.
• Wink - a social search engine that creates a TagRank by aggregating user-generated tags from across the Web
• Zimbra - Collaboration suite for email and the like that seems to be impressing a lot of people at Web 2.0

The software on that list that I like the most so far is Netvibes. For some reason it just works really well. You can add whatever feeds you want on the same page. It also has a button so you can update each feed individually and it automatically updates. I am also anxiously awaiting the release of Flock. It supposedly incorporates blogging tools, tags and other stuff to smooth out some of the hairy parts of the web.

UPDATE: Techcrunch is running a two parter on the companies at the Web 2.0 conference.

Well I’m back and the computer is running better. Now to continue with what I was going to post.

I’ve seen a couple of articles lately on how contirbution to an open source project can and should help get you a job. I’m glad about this because I have precisely no experince yet but I am looking for an OSS project to work on (feel free to leave comments if you now of any that need help).

While the posts are from different views, one from the potential employee and the other from the potential employer, they both have a big thing in common. A candiates participation in OSS can help decide if you should hire him or not. Now I just hope that companies that I apply to feel the same.

I went through the process this summer of trying to find part-time employment doing telecommuting work and it was horrible. I sent out resumes to all the companies that had postings I was fit for and yet none of them replied. Even after sending numerous follow-up emails.

That was frustrating, mainly because I didn’t know why they didn’t want to talk to me. Did they not like the fact that I only had an Associates, that fact that I had no experience, what was it? Oh well, I hope that the next jobs I apply for take OSS participation into account.

That by the end of this semester I’m going to be tired of using C++. I’ve got a Data Structure’s class that is going to be long and tedious. Not to mention that the teacher tends to make me feel quite sleepy during his class. Otherwise there are only a couple of classes that I’m not too sure about.

Principles of Accounting I - While the class doesn’t seems hard, I’m not too keen on the teacher. She also tends to put me asleep.

Principles of Composition II - Ugh. I’m not a fan of english classes. I don’t really mind writing, but I really don’t like being graded.

Those are really the only two classes that I not too sure about. I also don’t like my Personal Finance class, but that’s because it’s from 4:00 - 4:50 PM.

On the computer side of things, this looks really nice. A lot like Basecamp (as far as project management goes), but it’s free. I haven’t been able to try it yet, but maybe for one of my software projects this semester I’ll set something up for it.

I figured since I don’t have a job right now the least I could do is post every once and a while. It looks like CISCO is trying to get in to the application market. C|Net is reporting that

At its Cisco Networkers customer conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Cisco detailed the first products from its Application-Oriented Networking (AON) unit, a widely anticipated initiative meant to move the company beyond its core Internet routing business and into messaging middleware.

It seems that they are going to rely heavily on XML for this. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.Continuing with the computer news, Linus Torvalds has an interview over at the Silicon Valley blog. It a good article, a little long for my liking though. He talks about how he doesn’t see Microsoft going away anytime quick, it just has too much market share. He seems to think that is going the way of IBM.

In many ways I think MS is in the same situation that IBM was in two decades ago, losing control of the basic market — and thus the dominance of the market — but not necessarily going away or even necessarily shrinking.

It looks like the recording industry is after the ISP’s again. Only this time it’s worse and all the ISP’s in the world are being affected. According to this article at The Register, the IFPI is drafting a “code of conduct” for ISP’s.

Here’s a sampler. Under the new code, ISPs would put in place filtering technology to block services and/or sites that “are substantially dedicated to illegal file sharing or download services”. They would retain data beyond what law enforcement agencies require, with the aim of helping track down copyright infringement. They’d hand that data, plus your identity, over to the IFPI or MPA if there was even a complaint - not a court order - against you for, you guessed it, copyright infringement. (And you’d have signed or clicked something agreeing to allow that.)

What is the worlds recording industry coming to. I really hope that this is shot down hard and fast. It’s way more than what needs to be done. You know what, one thing that I never really liked about the RIAA and MPAA getting involved is that they aren’t the artists and, as far as I know, don’t really represent them. There have been numerous artist that have said that they don’t really care about downloads. And you know who does make the big money off of records; it’s not the artists, but the record companies that stand the make/lose the most. That’s what get’s me, they act like they are looking out for the artists when they are really just trying to hoard more money than they will ever need. I could go on about the money aspect but I’ll save that for another post when I have more time and have thought it out more.