The Beta Blog

Beverage Review/Health Status Update

It turns out that "Very Berry" Airborne mixed with orange-flavored Metamucil is actually quite tasty when served cold.

Ten Best New (to me) Songs of 2009

Last week while driving to Canada, Debbie and I did the year's-best thing and talked about what we thought were the best songs of the year. But being brilliant, Debbie extended the list to include songs that were new to her--that is stuff she hadn't discovered 'til this year. Which made for a great conversation topic throughout the week.

Anyway, Debbie's list is here. This is mine.

Songs are listed in no particular order, and I added the rule that no two songs on the list may come from the same album. This is because some of this years' discoveries are entire albums and I wanted to represent them here.

And so:

FM - Phasors on Stun.
Classic Canadian 70's non-Rush prog rock. The linked video is of the band's 1976 performance on TV Ontario. Sound quality is kind of bad but I like it better than the album version. As a bonus, it is also (probably) the only existing footage of Nash the Slash performing with his face actually visible.
Arcade Fire - Wake Up.
This was the year I finally got around to listening to Funeral and yeah, it's pretty amazing. Really, any song of that album could go here. Wake Up is the one I liked best at the moment.
Holy Fuck - Frenchy's
Once again, the real discovery is the album and the band--most of LP would have sufficed. Holy Fuck and Shout Out Out Out Out are both doing something that has started to fascinate me: Techno without computers.
Shout Out Out Out Out - Remind Me in Dark Times (WARNING: Both links play music on loading).
Again, Techno Without Computers, but catchy(er).
U2 - Unknown Caller (and a live version here).
This is the token entry from No Line on the Horizon. As a lifelong U2 fan, I'm pretty much required by law to give this album a nod. That being said, it's their best work in years and some song on the album needs to go on the list. Unknown Caller was going through my head at the time.
Hollerado - Do the doot da doot do (MP3 download link)
Exhuberant Canadian indy rock. The entire album is available on their website.
Lady Gaga - Paparazzi
Really well-crafted dance pop. Plus, adding a popular new artist makes it look like my tastes are refined rather than just old.
Billy Idol - Wasteland
Remember how, at the start of the 90's, Billy Idol jumped on the cyberbandwagon and released this horrible turd called Cyberpunk?
Remember how it plunged into a well-deserved abyss?
Well, it's actually not that bad. It helps that the days when people took 90's cyberculture seriously are long gone and that Industrial music is (alas) mostly dead as well. These days, the little bits of Industrial influence work pretty well if you don't try to pretend that Idol rocks as hard as KMFDM.
Just skip over the spoken bits and don't listen to the lyrics too carefully and you'll be fine. Wasteland is probably the best song on the album but there are other gems there as well.
Rx - K Y Re:amin
From Bedside Toxicology, Ogre's post-Skinny Puppy project with Martin Atkins. It's kind of uneven, but K Y Re:amin is an awesome song.

And that's it. I slapped this list together pretty quickly so I've probably forgotten a song or two but it's close enough.

2010 promises to be more interesting. We've been moving Debbie's CDs to the apartment.

Testing: software update

I've made some significant changes to Infernal Icecube and am now switching to the new version. Any changes you see here are due to that.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Update: seems to be working. I've gotten ii to use git instead of rcs so I can distribute my blogging across computers. I'll publish my changes once I've convinced myself that there aren't any obvious bugs.

Another Project Announcement: nest

nest is a Git front-end designed to organize a collection of unrelated (mostly textual) projects. It maintains a central project collection and creates working copies of individual projects as needed, possibly on other computers via ssh. Projects and working copies are all Git repositories and so can be cloned, pushed and merged between computers. nest will also (optionally) create a local backup/cache of the whole collection on any computer you use it from, so if your server catches fire, you can restore your work from the cache on your laptop.

I've been using it for about three months now and it hasn't eaten anything yet, so I'm calling it done and releasing it.

The project page is here.

To use it, you'll need git (and to know how to use it), perl, ssh with ssh-agent and a sufficiently Unixy OS. (Cygwin and MacOSX ought to be sufficient but I haven't tried it so YMMV.)

Random Python musing

It occurs to me that from an advocacy point of view, Python's significant whitespace is kind of brilliant.

It's a defensible design decision, in that the designer has traded a certain amount of source-code fragility for improved readability. If you want the readability enough that you're willing to be a bit paranoid about what happens to the whitespace, it's a worthwhile trade. If not, then it's not.

In other words, it's a matter of personal preference.

But that makes it controversial. Invariably, when someone starts complaining about the language, the first thing they start with is the most obvious--the indentation--and the discussion immediately degenerates to something with the calibre of emacs versus vi. Five hundred posts later with nothing resolved beyond "I like it" and "I don't like it", everyone gets sick of the whole thing and Python's real shortcomings are never discussed.

Brilliant!