The Evil Sysadmin

Over the last few years, streaming music has grown in popularity as more and more people get high-speed Internet connections at home.  The convenience of opening up a web browser and hitting “Play” is hard to argue against.  No more sorting through CDs, or a massive MP3 collection.  And as time goes on, the sound quality has improved to the point where there’s little discernable difference to the average user.

The next step beyond just having online radio stations of preset playlists was to let users select exactly what they wanted to listen to, or be able to intelligently suggest similar music based off a small amount of user input.

At the moment, there are many online radio services from folks like Yahoo, Napster, Last.fm etc.  But this article is about two services that compete on a more direct level:  Pandora and Deezer.

Pandora

http://www.pandora.com/

Pandora grew out of the Music Genome Project, an effort to classify music using over 400 attributes to describe songs, and then use a complex algorithm to analyze and sort them.  The result is a system that can take one song, or artist and suggest other similar songs.  In general it’s very accurate and is a great way to discover new artists and music.

The service has thousands upon thousands of songs and artists in its library.  There are only a few bands I haven’t been able to find in the service, but that’s mostly because they’re semi-regional and not big enough to show up on the radar.  In general, I’ve been very happy with the suggestions the site gives me, and have found new artists I really like (Great Big Sea… go listen to them… now).

The big down-side is that you have very little control over what you’re actually listening to.  You can have the site build you a playlist based off of The Goo Goo Dolls, and you’ll get a few of their songs mixed in, but you don’t get to choose which or how many.  You also can’t go back and replay a song you really liked, you have to wait for it to come up in the rotation again.  Also, you can’t move around within a track.  It gives great recommendations, but you have to take what they give you.

This is because of copyright and royalty issues supposedly, so I can understand the limits to an extent.  The lack of control is made up for by the great suggestion system.

Pros:

• Huge selection
• Great suggestions
• Good sound quality
• Simple interface
• Buy music directly from iTunes/Amazon through the site

Cons:

• Virtually no control over playlists
• Can not replay select songs
• Virtually no options.  It would be nice to have more control over how songs are selected for me

Deezer

http://www.deezer.com/

Deezer is the new kid on the block so to speak, formerly blogmusik, this French site has evidently struck deals with music labels to overcome some of the limitations faced by Pandora.  With Deezer, you can play specific songs, build your own playlists song-by-song, or go with their own suggestion system “SmartRadio”

Where Pandora is super-simplified, focused on getting you listening to music as quickly as possible, Deezer aims to give you a lot more control, with a lot more options.  While this is overwhelming at first, it only takes a few minutes to figure out all of the basic features.

Deezer’s strength comes in its ability to search for artists, albums or individual songs and then playing exactly the tracks you want.  You can also play pre-built radio stations, or use their SmartRadio recommendation service.  Also, you can add your own MP3s to the service, further expanding your choices.

Deezer strikes me more as iTunes for your web browser, with access to a ridiculously large music catalog.

Since Deezer is a relatively new service, their catalog seems to not quite be as extensive as Pandora, and their suggestion system isn’t anywhere near as good yet (but I imagine it will improve with time).  There are also a few features that don’t work quite yet, such as creating a playlist. 

Pros:

• Select individual songs, artists etc.  Play exactly what you want to play
• A lot of choice
• Good sound quality
• Good selection

Cons:

• UI can be overly complex
• SmartRadio suggestions are very hit-and-miss
• Selection seems more limited than Pandora
• Some features don’t work yet
• Half the pages on the site are still in French

Now, I’ll admit that I’m definitely on the outside looking in of the blogging/web 2.0 community.  While I manage very large sites with a ton of users and reach, I’m still on the periphery.  Why?  Well, I live in Michigan.  Not exactly a state known for it’s thriving IT industry.  If you go beyond IT services that support manufacturing companies, you can probably count on one hand the number of companies doing anything significant with online communities or digital media.

Yes, I’m a bit of a victim of geography here, and even though it’s all online now, it’s all IM, Twitter, email and blogging, proximity is still important.  So when I see events like Gnomedex coming up, I’m interested because it could be one of the few opportunities I have this year to actually network with other people working in my field.  And in this nebulous profession, professional networking is king.

Gnomedex struck me as an interesting conference to attend with its focus on blogging, podcasting and other personal media, the stuff that’s really sweeping the ‘net at the moment.  The really interesting tech and approach to information distribution that will become pretty standard for regular users in 5 years is what this conference focuses on now.  And there are some pretty impressive names attached too, with folks from CNN, Amazon’s AWS initiative, Google and a selection of people to know around the blogging world.

I’d love to go.  It would be a wonderful opportunity to meet people, get some new ideas for JoeUser/WinCustomize/ImpulseDriven.  Plus I think it would be a blast.

But I won’t be going.  Why? 

It costs a damn fortune!

The conference, just to get in the door, costs $600 (if you’ve attended a Gnomedex in the past, you get a $50 discount).  Now, that’s a pretty hefty price to begin with, but what if you’re from out of town?  Well, then you have to factor in plane tickets and a hotel.  I just did some quick checking via travelocity, and looked over the hotel list close enough to the conference so I wouldn’t have to rent a car…

Leave August 21st, return August 23rd:

• Plane Ticket: $373
• Hotel: $389 (before tax, this was one of the cheap ones)

That brings the base cost of the conference to $1,362.  Funny enough, that’s how much I paid in taxes this year.

Unfortunately this doesn’t include the incidental costs like dinners, drinks with folks you meet at the conference, or anything you may need to pick up while there.  From what I’ve been told about Seattle, and about these sorts of conferences, I could probably safely add another $300 or so to the bill.  So now at a conservative estimate I’ve passed $1,600.

Of course I could do things like find someone to split a hotel room with, and probably just not do the dinner/drinks thing, but after a point the cost cutting gets in the way of what these conferences are about: meeting folks in the field.

I could probably swallow the travel costs if the conference pass didn’t virtually double the cost.  It almost seems like the pricing is setup to keep out people who aren’t either on that side of the country already, or who don’t have a corporate card to cover the costs.

Maybe someday there will be a tech conference here in the midwest….

Yeah, right.

Alright, so the whole podcasting thing is a few years old now, and I’ve definitely missed the boat in terms of gaining fame and fortune by broadcasting my voice across the Internet.  However despite my lateness to the craze, here I am, with a podcast.

The WinCustomize SkinCast is a brief 15-20 minute podcast covering the happenings in the Windows Skinning world, with an obvious focus on WinCustomize.com.  Every week, Spencer Scott and myself will ramble on about whatever’s new and interesting in the community.  From time to time we hope to involve others from the site, take questions, do mini interviews etc.

Yesterday we posted Episode 1.  You can listen to it here

As you can tell, it’s rough around the edges and there’s a lot of room to improve and grow.  Hopefully next week’s episode will turn out much better.  Feel free to leave feedback/comments below!

DeskScapes 2.0 lets users of all versions of Windows Vista, not just Ultimate, use animated wallpapers. The 2.0 preview released today for free download allows users to take the software for a spin and see what they’ve been missing. It comes bundled with three professional quality animated wallpapers; Silent Hill, Watercolor and Cube.

read more | digg story

Windows Live Writer is one of a number of blog writing/management tools out there, and personally, it’s my favorite.  It’s completely free to download and use, works with both Windows XP and Vista.

Grab Live Writer here.

Essentially what Live Writer is, is a word processor for blogs.  Type and format until you’re blue in the face.  Spell check, save a copy to work on later, insert rich media easily etc.  It makes writing long and complex blog posts incredibly easy.

Plus, it does auto-thumbnailing of images if you have somewhere to post them.

Configuring Live Writer is the only tricky part, and to do that you need only a few bits of information:

1. The URL of your blog (i.e. http://zoomba.joeuser.com/ )
2. Your login information (username/password)
3. The JoeUser MetaWebBlog API File:
   http://www.joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

Now, once you have Live Writer downloaded and installed, it’s time to start it up and configure it to connect to your blog.

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Configuring Live Writer

When you start Live Writer for the first time, it will ask to create a new weblog account.  If it doesn’t, just go to the Weblog menu and select "Add Weblog Account" from the bottom of the list.

You’ll see this window:

To start, you’ll want to select "Another weblog service" since neither of the other options applies.

Click next.

Now enter the URL for your blog, and your login information.  I suggest you check the box to save your password.

Click next.

It will briefly try and detect some settings.  You’ll then be told to select a provider.

Select Metaweblog API from the drop-down list, and enter this into the Remote posting URL field:

http://joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

Click Next.

Now it will try and detect your blog theme  and ask you if you want to create a temporary post.  Click no.  JoeUser does not support this feature.

And you’re done!  Just make sure you have your JoeUser blog selected from the Weblog menu before you start writing blogs to publish.

Using Windows Live Writer

Using Live Writer is incredibly easy.  You can almost treat it as a regular word processor.

Here’s a quick look at the major parts of the Live Writer interface:

The most important parts are the Publish Button, the Writing Area and the Category List.

The first line you see in the Writing area is your blog title.  Live Writer unfortunately doesn’t support subtitles like JoeUser does, so you’ll have to edit those in on the site later if you want to include one.

Write your blog, format it however you like, go crazy.  When you’re done, make sure you have a category selected from the list, and then hit publish.  After a few seconds, the post will be done and you’ll automatically be taken to your article on the site.

It couldn’t be easier!

You can also edit previously posted articles by selecting them from the "Recently Posted" list on the right bar.  It will download your post from the site, allow you to edit it in LiveWriter and then update it.

It’s important to note that this will only work with articles originally posted via LiveWriter.

Well, those are the basics.  Later on I’ll put up a tutorial on advanced topics like uploading images, special formatting settings etc.

I missed my Friday Fidget last week, but I blame that on simply being insanely busy.  You see, we launched Sins of a Solar Empire at the start of the week to retail and digital distribution.  This means there was a fairly constant flow of work related to Sins that needed to be taken care of, on top of everything I do on a daily basis already.  This week things were starting to calm down, then we decided this coming weekend was the perfect opportunity to do our massive database migration.  No rest for the weary.

Anyway, on with the Fidget…

Introduction

Sins of a Solar Empire is an incredibly robust RT4X strategy game that allows you to grow your empire and conquer the galaxy. Games can last hours, weeks or even months. To start you off, Sins comes with dozens of pre-built maps, 3 sizes of randomized maps and a sophisticated in-game map generator that lets you define virtually every aspect of a map. Set your preferred planets, stars, distances etc and have the game automatically generate a map based on your choices. You can even share and distribute the map to friends, either via the Sins of a Solar Empire site, or directly in online multiplayer matches.

Unfortunately, the in-game designer doesn’t give you complete control. You can’t choose, for example, where you want a planet to be placed, or what you want it to connect to. You can’t set how many militia forces are stationed there, or whether or not it’s a homeworld, or if it’s a pirate base. If you want to hand-craft your map, the in-game tools won’t meet your needs.

Galaxy Forge is the answer to that problem. Part of the Forge Tools suite used by Ironclad Games to develop content for Sins of a Solar Empire, Galaxy Forge is a map editor tool that allows you to place stars, planets, travel lanes and more. You can build a map to your exact specifications. Do you want a multistar map with strategic choke points and no pirate base? No problem, just create it in Galaxy Forge and load it in the game. Galaxy Forge is a WYSIWYG editor, so placing planets, phase lanes, stars and more is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse.

While Galaxy Forge is incredibly easy to use for the amount of control it gives you, it’s not fully an end-user-friendly tool. So, to get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible creating great maps to share with the community, I’ve created this short guide to building a complete map from start to finish..

WARNING: The editor has no undo feature, so be careful when you move elements or make any changes. Save early and often to make sure you don’t accidentally delete something you’ve spent hours tweaking and customizing.

The other night, I turned on the State of the Union Address to hear what the plan was for our nation going forward into the last year of the Bush Presidency.  I expected a little bit of reflection on the last 7 years, and a strong push for something new in the final year.

I also expected some amusing verbal slips

Unfortunately, it feels like I got neither.  From what I could tell, there were three primary topics:

1. The Economy
2. Education
3. The War on Terror

Now, I know everyone is all in a fuss over the housing market and a potential recession.  The stock market yo-yo last week should be enough to put anyone on edge.  So, in light of all of this I expected some attention be paid to the issue, and the proposed stimulus package.  I did not expect it to dominate the first 10-15min of the 50min speech.

I was also disappointed with how he approached Congress regarding the bill.  The attitude of "Pass it like it is, or I will veto it", while showing strength and determination, doesn’t strike me as the best way to deal with an opposition led congress.  Starting off on the offensive and with a very "My way or the highway" tone isn’t going to help get the bill through, and smacks of earlier attitudes along the lines of "You’re either with us, or against us."  While I agree that the bill should not be laden down with extensions to this, provisions for that, and overall general bloat, there has to be a better way to approach Congress on the issue.

On the economic front, I did like his demand that all special interest spending must be voted on in congress, and not just added through quiet loopholes, and his promise to cut 151 "wasteful or bloated" programs from the 2008 budget.  While it seems odd to have a President who has spent so much money to talk about fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget, I still commend him for making the attempt.

But lacking in the talk of the economy was any mention of what could be done to stimulate businesses, the flagging manufacturing sector, stem the tide of jobs going overseas, help strengthen the falling dollar etc.  The focus was entirely on getting a few hundred dollars to each tax payer, in the hope that they will continue to be irresponsible with their money and spend it instead of saving it. 

Briefly Bush also talked about education and No Child Left Behind.  Considering I’ve heard nothing but negative reports about NCLB, from both sides of the political spectrum, my guess is he’s grasping at straws with that one.  I don’t know enough specifically about NCLB since it went into effect well after I was done with school, but I remember the attempts to start standardized graduation testing etc, and it was garbage then, I don’t imagine it’s any better now.

Then we had the rest of the speech dominated by the War on Terror.  I’m sorry, but I’m more or less immune to anyone’s attempts to drum up fear or anything much more than apathy for the Peace in the Middle East process, or the spread of Democracy.  They’ve beat on that drum so long and so often that the words have lost pretty much all meaning.  They could be 100% true, and it wouldn’t matter.  It’s the issue that gets tossed up to distract from all other issues.  The fact that it dominated this State of the Union address just goes to further reinforce that.

The speech wasn’t about new things, it was about old issues.  It wasn’t about what we were going to do different or try and change, it was about how we were going to keep hammering away at what we’ve been doing.  To me, it shows a final resignation, like they know this last year is a wash, so they’re going to coast through, despite the strong rhetoric trying to make us feel otherwise.

And worst of all, he actually managed to pronounce most of the words correctly!  So it wasn’t even an entertaining speech.

Since I don’t often have time to blog anymore (though you could argue that with all the time I spend on forums and writing content for WinCustomize that I post more now than I did when I was actively blogging) I wanted to find a way to do at least one regular bit every week.  So, instead of one blog on one topic, I’m going to do one post with a bunch of mini-blogs.  A hodge-podge of topics floating in my head.

The idea is to do this every Friday to wrap up the week…

What I’m Playing

It’s been a busy week, so I haven’t played many games overall, but I’ve managed to fit a few hours in.  Here’s what I’ve played:

• World of Warcraft
  Yes, I resubscribed.  I would like to get my paladin to 70 before the Wrath of the Litch King expansion comes out later this year.
• Burnout Paradise Demo
  This is a great demo for what looks to be an entertaining game.  It’s like a mix between GTA and demolition derby.  I might get the full game later when I have some extra time and money.
• Sins of a Solar Empire
  With just two weeks to retail release, I’ve been testing Sins both in the office and at home.  LAN games of Sins are incredibly fun.  I can’t wait for more people to get their hands on the game.

The Fox/EA Fiasco Continues

Turns out that after that disaster of an interview, EA (parent company of Bioware) got a bit peeved.  They actually issued a statement against Fox for their horribly inaccurate story, asking for a correction on the show.  Fox has thus far blown them off (well, they invited EA on the show, but won’t apologize first). 

Gamers have even gotten in on the act and taken it upon themselves to go after Cooper Lawrence’s book on Amazon, giving it 1 star ratings and reviews like "I haven’t actually read the book, but books like this are filled with graphic sex that could ruin a child’s life"

Amazon can’t keep up with the bad reviews, and Fox doesn’t seem to be budging yet.  Next week should be interesting.

Bye Kucinich & Thompson… is Rudy out next?

The race for the White House narrows some more.  Both sides this week lost a candidate, though you could argue that neither had a snowball’s chance in hell anyway.   The top three remain the top three on both sides still. 

Though on the Republican side, things are shaky for Mayor Rudy.  He staked his entire race on kicking things off in the Florida primary.  For the most part, he’s ignored the rest of the states with the hope that a win in FL will start the stampede.  Well, in polling today he shows a very distant third.  If he loses Florida, will he have any hope period?

And once Rudy’s out, will Bloomberg jump into the fray as an independent?

The democratic race is still as boring as ever.

We’re From the Government & We’re Here to Help…

ZOMGWTFBBQ!!!!1`1!!1  Housing market continues to crumble, institutions who made bad loans are still suffering, and on the whole the US economy is suffering from a series of incredibly stupid decisions.  People had a little bit of money and they over-spent, and now we’re all in the shitter because of it.  And it looks like we may take a few other countries down with us.

What’s the solution to a problem created by terrible personal financial decisions?  Why, we’re going to drive the country further into debt with a tax rebate check.  Me, I’ll be getting a whopping $600.  What do they want us to do with this money?  Pay bills?  Put into savings?  Pay off debt?  NO!  If you are responsible with that money, then the terrorists win.  Take that check, go out and spend it!

Well, that’s it for this week.  Time for the weekend!  Maybe I’ll get to play a few games, read a book or two and relax for a bit…

It’s a time-honored tradition, handed down from generation to generation.  Our parents had to deal with this, as did our grandparents, and great-grandparents.  The specifics change, but it’s the same story time and again…

<Insert Media Here> is corrupting the youth of today!

What do I mean by media?  Well, how about tv, movies, radio, comic books, books, video games, board games, music, plays? The list could go on and on.  There’s always something that folks want to point their finger at and blame for all the ills of society.

These days, it’s video games.

The worst part of it is how people who oppose new media the most vocally are usually those who have never actually experienced whatever they’re protesting.  Take for example the following video clip from Fox News discussing the Xbox 360 game Mass Effect.  It’s an RPG (role playing game) where you take on the role of a military commander to try and stop some really dudes from ruining the galaxy.