. verture [prik] net .

Dumbfounded - Jam Session 2.0

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:54:28 +0100

You'd probably know this piece of piano better with Roisin Murphy's sultry voice on top of it, off the Handsome Boy Modelling School track, but this is a pretty insane cook-up of Galt McDermot's piano loop.

Oh internets...

Some eclecticism allowed

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:09:27 +0100

Without further ado, I present to thee, my year of music 2009. Every track is there for a reason, and all 325 minutes and 26 seconds count.

It's a top 71 list of stuff that rocked my socks in 2009. Warning: people might sing in a language you don't understand, or not sing at all. Some tracks might also be more than 40 years old, and use whiskers.

Just saying.

Many will expect to get it free

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:34:40 +0100

Bono wrote an op-ed in NYT on the 2nd of January, 2010.

It's modern times, and as he wrote in his op-ed exactly a year ago, Frank Sinatra told him that [...] being modern�s not about the future, it�s about the present.

So when you in your list item entitled "Intellectual Property Developers" urge, what seems to be, lawmakers to regulate global piracy, you are not living like Frank Sinatra told you to, if you want to be modern.

Many will expect to get it free.

Even though I think you already know (I mean, seriously, you can't be that gullible), I'll try to be really helpful and try to explain why this might be. Many will expect to get it for free, because it's cheaper, easier, and infinitely more convenient for many, to download it illegally, than it is to get it, and pay for it, legally. I can already download an entire season of 24, maybe not in 24 seconds, but possible in 2.5hrs (btw, that's beautfully written, the "24", and 24 seconds. Man, that's deep, really illustrates time-space compression). Buying means I have to leave the house, or purchase it online, and wait for it to get delivered to me. Boring.

I don't get this, isn't this basic economics? The transaction costs associated with purchasing a legal version are now so much higher than downloading it illegally. Bono, this will not change. You refer to China as a good example of how to track content. Hello? China? Great example for... police state? A place where the state hires people to write pro-governmental propaganda on public forums? A place where journalists are arrested and sentenced for speaking their minds about the government? Bono, take a step to the side, I believe you are standing on your balls. Just saying.

Thing is, I wouldn't mind paying for it, if I could get it conveniently, and instantly. I would imagine many people share this view. But instead of making that option available, the industry insists on being backwards and incompetent by incriminating anybody who would like to own their content quickly and easily. Normally, when there's a high demand for something, eventually somebody will say "hey, I bet we could make money from this". Unfortunately, nobody has figured this out in the industry yet, and what you should be doing with your influence is to set an example, and urge the industry to get their head out of their derrieres, and realize that disruptive technologies disrupt business models. Their business model is currently non-functional in the longer term, but instead of realizing that, and trying to mitigate it, and listen to their consumers, they are behaving like the newspapers, and you, asking for the government to regulate it.

Get a helmet Bono, and tighten it real carefully, because I'm afraid this ride only just started.

I recently had a very lively discussion with a couple of friends about how we would like our films delivered in the future. A subscription service for, say, Universal Films catalogue. Imagine that. Everything they ever made, streaming, to your device of choice, at any time of the day. How much would you be willing to pay pr. month/year/day/movie for having this available?

Am I being completely naive, thinking that there's actually quite a large amount of people who would be interested in paying such a subscription? Considering the hype surrounding Spotify in 2009, I would imagine a similar service for movies would be equally hyped. Tie it up with some nice IMDB data, possible their recommendation engine, and you'd be gunning for a pretty sweet deal I think. Would advertisers like it though?

Stevie on the Talk Box

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:21:32 +0100

What makes this clip worth it all is at 0:17, where Stevie removes the tube from his mouth to smile at how funky that shit he's playing is.

Ain't no Sunshine

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:46:50 +0100

First things first. Watch this.

I know what you are thinking right now:

If I could be just half as cool as drummer James Gadson on that first pan of the camera, life would be all sunshine.

Right?

Bill Withers first album featured the fine group of gentlemen you see in this clip (James Gadson on drums, Benorce Blackmon on guitar, and bassist Melvin Dunlap). They were also part of The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, whose fine contribution to music made it possible for NWA to sample their track "Express Yourself" for their hit track in 1988 with the same name.

Bill made history with this track landing him a grammy award for best rhythm and blues song in 1972, and in 1974 he was part of the delegation of afro-american musicians who went to Zaire (now DR Congo), as part of the music festival accompanying the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali — The Rumble in The Jungle.

Also. Orange turtleneck. Bill, you fashion icon you!

Ikscheltaschel's Putuni video

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:11:06 +0100

Ikscheltaschel. Of course, their videos are just as weird as themselves.

Go trainers, role playing, and sweat bands!

Instantly made me think of this.

Espectacular!

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:07:11 +0100

I was in Brazil recently. It was good, and I fell in love. No wonder this country produced all these beautiful kinds of music. I got high on the intake of p�o de queijo, a�ai-drinks, and meat fests. Good lord what goodness. A dangerous mix, but good.

Spent some time in Rio de Janeiro, the most violent city in the world, with 5000 murders committed just last year. You'd think that spending a week in a city like that would confront you with some of that ugliness seeping through the cracks somewhere. But for 168 hours I didn't see any of this ugliness. Mind you, I didn't look for it either. Reading this article in the Guardian upon returning makes you feel like YADT (Yet Another Dumb Tourist), who only helps maintain a status quo of the social situation. FYI, I did not purchase any illicit favors, or get high on South American drugs, but that doesn't make you feel any less of a tourist ass.

Also spend time not in Rio de Janeiro. Equally "espectacular", but that's another post. Pictures in abundance

When you whisper Jennifer

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:59:53 +0100

From the comments on youtube:

Is this one of the sexiests tracks ever or what? Her voice turns me on, and i'm a straight girl

Jennifer Charles, need I say more?

How to buy tickets from irishrail.ie using Firefox

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:43:13 +0100

In case you are an annoyed non-Windows user of the Irish Rail website, here's a little guide on how to purchase tickets using Firefox.

Install the User-Agent extension and restart Firefox
Change the user-agent string to Internet Explorer 6.0
Make your reservation online
Notice how clicking 'Purchase' doesn't give you an error message?
Print the confirmation email
Bob's your uncle

Why am I writing this post?

I've been buying tickets from Irish Rail for the last two weekends. The first time around I tried three times to purchase the tickets online, but was met with this error screen every time I clicked the 'Purchase'-button at the end of my reservation.

I got curious. I was using the recommended software for the platform (Firefox 3.5.3 on Mac OS X), yet it still didn't work. Could Irish Rail really be checking the User-Agent string at the very last step of the purchasing process, to give me the error message?

Yes, dear reader, they do. I followed the above procedure and I could purchase the tickets. 2 things wrong here: 1) giving the error message after going through the reservation process, while already knowing that the browser is not supported at the beginning, seems pretty user-unfriendly and, 2) it's obviously not a browser issue, since I could buy the tickets, so why check for the user-agent string in the first place?

There are around a million other things wrong with Irish Rail's website, but they are covered better in this article by Paul Fitzsimons.

While their website might suck, I've had no problems with their real world service. It's actually quite good.

Rumba from Timbiqui in the style of Quantic

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:31:28 +0200

If anybody ever had any doubt about Will Holland's tireless effort to get involved in as many and as versatile music projects as possible, this should silence them:

The Sounds of VTech / Memoria de Justinho by Quantic and his Combo Barbaro

Quantic y su Combo Barbaro plays Memoria de Justinho, a rare Afro-Colombian treat.

Dear Mayer

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 20:22:27 +0200

Mayer Hawthorne plays Crawdaddy in Dublin on the 31st of October. I think you should come along.

My site got hacked

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:54:15 +0200

That statement is getting more and more common, and it's now the 2nd time my site has been the target of it. First time was 2 years ago, when the ftp on the server it was hosted was breached, and some industrious hacker injected code into a bunch of sites, to get links to some other sites. Dreamhost took a good beating on that occassion, and learned some valuable lessons.

Earlier in the week I was checking my Webmaster Tools Account and noticed that I had a lot of very strange incoming links all of a sudden:

I looked at a site search for my site:

That didn't look like posts I had written, in fact, they were full of gibberish. Here's a screenshot of the cache of one of them.

Here's what I managed to figure out about this case:

One file (config.inc.php) was modified to include the path to a file called sessions.inc.php. The modification date was not changed for the file, so it didn't look like it had been tampered with
sessions.inc.php was created on my server and contained some of the content on my site, which had been base64-encoded
Other hacked sites had a bunch of links to my site, with funny strings in the URL
The funny strings are also base64 encoded, and they seem to contain the actual content
going directly to the pages won't yeld anything, as the content will only show for GoogleBot

In most cases, having your site hacked comes from running a standard installation of one of the popular blog tools or CMS'es out there (Wordpress, I'm looking mainly at you). The recovery method is to clean your site, and update to the latest version of that tool, which usually has some security patch to apply. The issue in this case is, that I always have the latest version of my blogging tool, since I wrote the damn thing myself.

I'm not saying it's pretty, or a great piece of software, but I wrote it myself hoping that it would help me avoid being a victim of automated hacked attempts. This incident makes me curious, and I see a couple of possibilities as to how this happened: Either my attempts at being non-standard are part of the checks that an automated script looking for vulnerabilities can deal with or, somebody actually did this personally, after having found a possible vulnerability in a script of mine.

Obviously, there's a third option as well, that my homegrown CMS just isn't up to par on the security front. I should probably spend some time securing it after this event.

Liquid Stones

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:23:23 +0200

there was a stone on the beach
there was another stone as well
actually there were a lot of stones

static

by the break of the waves they met
on the tender shores of slight autumn
lively breeze on their crystalline surfaces

motion

by the bubbly saline surroundings
they found comfort in the tumbling
in the valleys they found safety

and lucidity

waves went out of their way
a physical anomaly
became meta normality

for a while

Yoyo, it's a theme

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:04:56 +0200

Bowie and friends, doing their free jazz thing. I do think the horn arrangements are pretty fantastic on this track, not to mention the ad libing and crazy sounds in the background.

You can also find it on my Year in Music mixtape for 2009.

I get scared in Sweden

jonas.voss@gmail.com (Jonas) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:57:10 +0200

I get scared like in Sweden.
It�s kinda empty, they are all drunk, everything works. If you stop at a stoplight and don�t turn your engine off, people come over to talk to you about it.
You go to the medicine cabinet and open it up, and there�ll be a little poster saying �In case of suicide call��
You turn on the TV there�s an ear operation.
These things scare me. New York, no.