Posted by Damien Pollet Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:19:28 GMT
As reported by Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, Apple announced today that the iTunes music store would soon offer high-quality, DRM-free tunes and videos, starting with the EMI catalog. That’s really great news!
From the PR point of view, I now wonder what Steve Jobs’ thoughts on music post was really… stating his opinion in public to push the majors, or more a kind of early announce to prepare our minds?
Posted by Damien Pollet Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:12:09 GMT
I’m rediscovering my iPod!
I played iPod-surgeon, tinkering with the poor guy’s innards to install a replacement battery. It has a little mark on one side because I’ve been a little heavy-handed with the bundled plastic tools, but overall the operation was easy. And now I can listen for more than 3 albums on a single charge, isn’t that great? In fact the kit specs say that the new battery has 30% more capacity than the original one, so one charge should last a full working day playing music.
Now, since after all I’m following Yann’s example, I wonder if I should start to smoke, just so that I can stop after a while and believe I have new money to spend on geek gadgets :)
Posted by Damien Pollet Wed, 13 Dec 2006 02:15:54 GMT
James Robertson already nicely answered this guy about Cees’ comments on Java, so I…must…not…troll…further…phew.
But I couldn’t ignore this:
6 months isn’t really enough to get properly comfortable with all aspects of a language.
OK, so let’s make my timeline of things with Smalltalk:
It’s been a little bit more than six months now and think I can say I’m properly comfortable with all aspects of the language. In fact I’ve also looked into all this machinery that looked like a mysterious black monolith before: the metaclass hierarchy, what exactly is a virtual machine doing, how are exceptions and continuations implemented, at the runtime objects like CompiledMethod, the bytecodes, etc.
Even with Python or Ruby I wasn’t drawn in the language like with Smalltalk. Both have really weird design decisions, like meaningful spaces, and the general procedural-with-OO-afterthought feeling for Python, or the inheritance and interpreter kludges in Ruby. Smalltalk and in particular Squeak does have ugly code (Morphic anyone?), but it’s just library code. The language itself has a beautiful ideal and it’s so light and fast while being so dynamic, you just have to go and look how that miracle happens.
Posted by Damien Pollet Fri, 24 Nov 2006 09:56:18 GMT
On Smalltalk is a great blog on Smalltalk and Seaside by Ramon Leon. Go read it now!
…and since it was kinda asked for in the comments, I’ll complete this post with my partial list of other blogs from the Smalltalk community. First there is a planet-style meta-blog that already aggregates most of the blogs in this list, and the weekly squeak news. Then, from my Smalltalk RSS subscriptions, the most notable entries are blogs by:
To more precisely answer Sébastien’s comment, the recent community news I’d note would be the open-sourcing of Strongtalk, the Squeak license changes to APSL 2 then Apache, and that Smalltalk in general is indeed benefiting from the current momentum in dynamic languages, thanks to Python, Ruby, and again Seaside.
On the Squeak side, 3.9 final was recently released, and it’s a great step from a happy mess to an environment more suitable for serious playing, especially with traits, the cleaner closure compiler, Damien Cassou’s image for developers, and Craig Latta’s promising spoon…
Posted by Damien Pollet Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:56:41 GMT
There has been cool stuff with fonts recently: the free fonts manifesto, Vitaly’s list of good free fonts, some updated instructions on how to install fonts for LaTeX…
Soooo yes, I admit it, I’ve been playing again with fonts under LaTeX… well okay, that was more like frustrating myself with baroque software and misleading documentation—I must have something like a Marvin in place of a standard subconscious… (who said Bender? I heard you!)—but hey, in the end it worked, so let’s call that play, huh? :-)
Posted by Damien Pollet Sat, 05 Nov 2005 23:25:00 GMT
We saw Bumblefoot at “Le Floride” in Nantes last night! This time everything went normally, unlike a certain concert in Paris last spring where his fretless guitar was “lost” somewhere under the stage. Dude… But this time, wow. Some guys in straight jackets were pushed on the scene, untied by the local medics, then played a normal performance ;-) that rocked!
That was the fifth date of the european tour for the release of the new album entitled “Normal”. The lineup is Dennis Leeflang (drums), Joe (bass) and Randy (guitar) from The Nerve. After the concert, we learned that it was only the fifth gig Joe and Randy were playing with Ron! Gr8K also tried to talk Ron into coming here in Rennes, arguing that Matthias Eklundh already knows the place… goody-goody, we’ll see what that becomes ;-)
Update: finally got my hands on a scanner, so… be the truth about my secret identity revealed!
Posted by Damien Pollet Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:57:00 GMT
This weekend I stumbled on the Assembly 2005 demoparty. And there was this really nice surprise from ASD, entitled Iconoclast, which got the 1st place in the demo compo. Really stunning graphics, not only impressive but just beautiful, progressive rock/metal music instead of the usual techno/trance/indus… Go ASD!
Sadly the demo is win32, but the code is available and there is a video for those who use serious OSes :)
update (nov. 2006) the video link seems dead, see here or go to scene.org and search for iconoclast.
Posted by Damien Pollet Mon, 09 May 2005 10:30:00 GMT
Jad Zooïd is a jazz-rock trio from Rennes I discovered at the music day 2003, then saw again one year later at the Jazz à la Harpe festival 2004, where they kicked some a**es until late in the nightmorning, as if Médéric Collignon hadn't done so enough just before.
Well it seems they have an album in the works!
Posted by Damien Pollet Wed, 04 May 2005 00:51:00 GMT
...comes from works such as Linda's.
