Last.fm

17/02/2005 03:30 | Categories: Links, Music | 0 Comments 

I recently discovered Last.fm, an online radio station with a twist: you can build your own profile and then your "personal" radio will only play songs from artists that are in your profile. You need to play a few songs and add a few albums/artists/songs in your profile before you can enjoy your personal radio (about 100 I think), but then it works wonderfully.

Even though you select the artists that you like, last.fm is a radio in the sense that you do not choose what's going to be played next but instead, the system will choose a song from one of the artists available in your profile, so you never know what's going to play next. But you do know that you're going to like it! :-)

If you don't feel like listening to your personal station, you can also tune in to any other user's personal station and listen to different music. The difference between the "personal" radio and "profile" radio is that the "personal" radio is the radio based on your profile and taste while the "profile" radio is a radio based on somebody else's profile and taste... Another additional difference is that the personal radio is only free of charge during the first month after you sign up for the service. After that, you need to make a donation if you'd like to continue using it... I like it so much that I think I will pay for it. Plus, I can add a link to my personal radio here in my blog and you will be able to listen to my songs, for free at 128kbps. How does that sound? :-)

What I like most about last.fm is that it is a fantastic way to discover new artists and to find people with similar tastes. For example, the system will from time to time play songs from artists similar to the ones in your profile but that are not part of it. Another way to find new stuff is by looking at the "Recommended" section or even better, the "Neighbours" section. "Neighbours" is a list of users that the system has found share a similar taste to yours and you can visit their profile, make them your "friends", send them a message, etc. It could also be a nice way to meet new people!

I really really recommend it! And while you sign up, you can also listen to my station :-) (just click the "listen" button)



Internet Seminar

17/02/2005 02:12 | Categories: General | 3 Comments 

Sometimes working for a big company has its advantages and today it was one of them. My company organized something that they called an "Internet Seminar" and invited people like Joi Ito (Technorati, Six Apart), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), or Rod Smith (IBM Vice President) amongst others.

I wasn't unfortunately able to attend the morning session which included Rod Smith's and Ilkka Raiskinen's conference because of some training. I would have very much liked to attend Mr. Smith's conference since he was going to cover some topics related to open source and open innovation and of course those are always interesting for somebody like me!

I joined the seminar after lunch and the first presentations came from SunRocket's COO, Robert Mainor about SunRocket's VoIP solution. It was interesting during the first half while he was describing how they are positioning themselves against traditional carriers and what technologies they are using. I was in fact very surprised to hear that they're using off-the-shelf solutions for most of their infrastructure and even some open source components, but then he went on to talk their pricing plans, how much better they are the competition, etc. I found that the second half was still interesting but not enlightening.

Then some VP from one of our business unit spoke about the VoIP market, how our company fits in there and what are our solutions. Also interesting but I didn't find it so exciting either.

After the coffee break, I had the chance to listen to Joi Ito. A funny coincidence is that when I arrived to the conference hall, everybody was already sitting and I ended up sitting next to some japanese-looking guy. Little did I know... It was Joi Ito himself :-) I also noticed that he uses a Powerbook and that the lucky fellow has a PSP. I want one too! ;-)

His presentation was about the "creative youth" group of people, who belongs to this group and how some companies do not know how to market products for this market group. He's got quite an easy-going style plus he spiced up the presentation by showing a few funny ads related to the topic he was talking about. He also talked about blogs and how sometimes, word of mouth is a much better way of marketing than old-style TV or magazine ads. I really enjoyed his conference... This was the second or third time that he had been invited by my company to give a presentation/conference so I will make sure that I am there next time he comes!

After Joi Ito, Timo Soininen from Sulake spoke about how their company managed to create a successful brand and an online community for teenagers from the ground up. He played a couple of demo videos, but even though it looks cartoonish and it is mainly targeted at people between 10 and 18 years (that's the average age of their users), I need to give their Habbo Hotel a try! It looks cute :-) Oh and for the record, this guy was also using a Powerbook ;-)

Next on the stage was Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. I already knew pretty much everything that he talked about but it was nice to see the guy there trying to describe what a wiki is and how the Wikipedia (and related projects) work. Oh, and did I say that he also used a Powerbook? Do you still think that it is a coincidence? :-)

And last but not least, Andrew Odlyzko from the Minnesota University and a former AT&T employee spoke about the future of internet. He basically said that the future of internet is voice and he actually had a couple of good points about it and basically dismissed everything related to real-time data streaming (video, for example) and the use of QoS for this kind of communication.

All in all, a very interesting day. I learnt lots of new things and I am here already hoping that my company will do something similar soon!



ticktackticket.com and U2 are a bunch of suckers

15/02/2005 05:51 | Categories: News, Music | 4 Comments 

I was really happy when U2 confirmed the dates of the Vertigo tour 2005 and that they were stopping by in Barcelona on the 7th of August. I was also looking forward to getting my hands on a few tickets... What I didn't think is that it was going to be a nightmare and that it would make me hate anything related to U2. Forever.

It all started when I was told that by joining U2.com, I would have access to the pre-sale where each member was given a unique 6-digit code that would allow to purchase up to 6 tickets per person before they were available to everybody else. I happily gave them my credit card and joined the club, only to realize later on that I should have joined U2.com not later than the 24th of January in order to get access to the pre-sale (I joined on the 31st) The bastards did not have any warning anywhere to be easily seen in U2.com so here I was, with 40$ less in my account, full access to a lousy site for U2 fanboys and without my pre-sales code.

In the meantime, I must have not been the one who was bitten by this because all the U2 fan forum in the net were ablaze with comments from very unhappy fans about this policy, and about how badly ticketmaster.com had dealt with the pre-sale (see for your yourselves) Ticketmaster.com was the on-line ticket seller chosen by U2 to take care of selling the tickets and organizing the pre-sale rounds but it was really, really pathetic. Many fans who had correct pre-sale tickets could not get their tickets because their system kept saying that the pre-sale ticket had already been used, others couldn't even reach the site and lost the pre-sale, etc. Word reached U2 and Larry Mullen sent an open letter to all the U2.com members "basically" apologizing for this cock-up and even offering a full refund of the U2.com membership to all of us who signed up too late for the pre-sale. I say "basically apologizing" because the bastard, always so nice to the fans who have made U2 what they are nowadays (a bunch of greedy assholes), had the bollocks to say this:

By the way, a note to those so-called U2 fans who are quick to accuse U2 of unseemly behaviour, I've only got two words for you...
How dares he? This last sentence was clearly uncalled for and they absolutely deserve all the criticism they've got.

But so far, I kept thinking that I would probably be able to get a few tickets through ticktackticket.com, the Spanish site choosen by U2 and ticketmaster.com to sell tickets for the Spanish performances. How little did I know! These guys turned out to be even worse than ticketmaster.com and proved themselves completely uncapable of running an event this big.

The sale started on the 10th of February at 10:00 Spanish time but the site had already been pretty much unreachable for hours before that. After about 20 minutes of clicking the "refresh" button from my browser, I managed to reach a page where I was allowed to choose the kind of ticket I wanted and type my credit card number. Once ready, I clicked the "Submit" button but that was the end of it... I spent about 45 more minutes trying to refresh the page (who knows, maybe that was going to be my lucky day after all!) but nothing happened. The result is that I lost over an hour of work because of this shit. And top of all that, I still had no tickets (and I wasn't going to get them at all anyway) I knew that there were going to be some hiccups because this is the event of the year in Spain but I didn't think it was going to be impossible.

Since I didn't know what to do, I spent some of my time analyzing the web page that customers were greeted upon being lucky enough to reach the first step of the ticket purchasing process. For starters, it didn't work with anything else other than Internet Exploiter. Second, the size of the page altogether was 25Kb!!! (I will upload it here tomorrow, it's not accessible anymore but I kept a copy in my work laptop) This is a clear hint that people at ticktackticket.com do not know jack from shit when it comes to designing small pages to be served as fast as possible. If you're getting 1000 hits per second (assuming that your fat pipe can take that much) we're talking here about 25Mb per second (!!), and the page did not really have too much meaningful content. It was full of non-accessible content and a lot of javascript code for validation. I haven't had time to work on it but I'm guessing that the following ideas would have helped:

So in my opinion, the page should have been almost text-only and using pure XHTML markup, with as little javascript code as needed in order to run the credit card validations and so on. Just for the fun of it, I am going to recreate the same page trying to make it as small as possible and see how far I can get. And I think it's not going to be too difficult...

I'd love to comment on the next step of the process but you know what? I never got that far. As far as I could see, the next step consisted in sending all the information to a servlet which apparently processed your data and assigned you some tickets. The only thing that stinks here is that it looks like the servlet was running in a Linux machine... What the hell, if you're going to run this kind of high-demand applications in Java (which is a very suitable language and platform, btw) why don't you shell out for a nice Sun server with either 4 or 8 processors (at least!) running the latest version of Java where Sun has already done a great job to optimize the VM for multi-processor systems?

The problem is that the less-than-capable people behind ticktackticket.com couldn't care less. They knew that they were going to sell all the tickets in one way or another so the reliability and availability of their web site was probably the least of their concerns. In the meantime, many Spanish fans are not happy.

And before anybody tells me that this isn't U2's fault, let me tell you something: it is. Bono and co. might not know much about high availability systems but they've got advisors and people who know so I'm going to blame them for being so badly-advised, for pretending that nothing's happening and for on top of all that, reminding us that they've got two words for us.

What a coincidence, I've also got two words for you...

UPDATE:this is my local copy of ticktackticket.com's page that I saved in my work laptop. Look at the size of the javascript code or at the amount of useless markup and judge for yourself how inept and uncapable these guys are.



Open source messaging platform

09/02/2005 18:09 | Categories: General, News | 2 Comments 

Outside the needs for a free and powerful web-platform and a free operating system, there are other things which are badly needed: a free messaging platform modelled after things like Tibco/Rendezvous or IBM's MQSeries.

I doubt that a project like this will get any attention because it's not interesting to all those so-called "geeks" that are happy playing with their Apache setup in their linux rig but it could help to save millions of dollars in licenses once it reaches a usable status.

My main concern at the moment is the license (the crap article from eWeek doesn't say much) but at least companies like RedHat, SuSE, some important banks and even Wall Street are behind the initiative so this could end up being something good...


FetchArt for iTunes

07/02/2005 06:42 | Categories: General, Links, Apple | 1 Comments 

I found this really cool tool called FetchArt that works as an iTunes script. Just select some songs from your library, and from the scripts menu, select "Fetch Art". The tool will automatically check with amazon.com if the song is available there and if it is, it will download the artwork for us. Once it has fetched the artwork, we can select one or more song to which the artwork will be added... It really is a great addition :)


Gmail invites

02/02/2005 16:59 | Categories: General | 1 Comments 

I've got 6 gmail invites left and I don't know what to do with them :) If interested, leave a comment here (and an email address where I can send it!! -- but no worries, the email address will not be displayed to the public)


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