ProgProg

EDIT

Ok, from my logs this is a pretty popular entry page, and the Mainstream-o-Meter has been changing so some of my original post has been invalidated.

1. Firstly, the link has changed: it is now http://www.mainstream.vincentahrend.com/
2. Now your username can be part of the url. So I can directly link you to my results.

Last.fm users will also want to check out Sleeve Notez , which is a really cool site even though it’s only in alpha status. Basically once you’ve given it your last.fm account name, it will scrape all sorts of information about whatever you’re listening to.

So say you’re listening to the latest Porcupine Tree album: it will assemble the following: an artist bio from Wikipedia, photos from flickr, videos from Youtube, lyrics from Lyrc, other albums in the artist’s discography from Amazon, and more! Kinda like Amarok on steroids.

The only issue is that since most of the last.fm plugins have a time lag before they submit a song (typically 1/3 of the way in from my experience), it’s not instant gratification. But that takes nothing away from its coolness. In my opinion, last.fm + sleevenotez is the future of listening to music online.

Original Post

I’m rather late in coming across this, but the Mainstream-o-Meter is a cool miniature web app that uses the Last.fm API to determine how “mainstream” you are.

It basically works by taking your top 30 favorite artists, weighting them, and seeing how many listeners they each have.

My only beef with it is that it doesn’t encode your username in its querystring (the “ok” button triggers the javascript that displays your results), so I can’t just paste the url for my results here. Anyone interested in my results is free to plug in the username “kyougoh”.

Not that it is of any consequence, but I clock in at 11.08% mainstream. Which is kind of saddening, because I would have liked my favorite artists to have more recognition. One of my favorites, Power of Omens, has only 287 listeners. Anyway enough about that… what’s your score?

Found this list, and it’s hilarious.

The 101 Rules of Power Metal

You don’t even have to know what power metal is – you will get the idea about 10 rules in. Of course if you are familiar with power metal you shouldn’t read this while eating or drinking anything.

Here’s a sample:

• Let no sound be lonely. If there’s a guitar solo, harmonize it. If there’s singing, make it a choir.
• Whenever you short of ideas, pick up your Dungeons and Dragons books. You might as well be the first band to sing about owlbears.
• Your album cover should include at least one of the following: fire, steel, weird glowing magical items, irregularly muscular men, fists thrust into the air, weaponry, magic creatures (preferably dragons), or bright beams of light around somebody/something.

Like most lists this size it is somewhat padded, but the short read gives the list a good laughs per unit time ratio.

It always irks me when I try to explain to others why the band/music they listen to is unoriginal and they need to listen to better, more challenging songs. (Yes, the previous sentence shows what a likable fellow I am when I talk music). Anyway, I’ve tried a variety of tactics:

• “They only use 4 chords over the course of the entire song!”
• “This guy only knows how to use the descending bassline – all his songs have it”
• “Their drummer can only play the most basic fills, and never plays anything faster than an eighth note”
• “Song A is a total rip-off of Song B. Just listen to them one after the other.”
• “All they do is verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. And you only get the bridge in 2 tracks of the album, the ones that were designated as singles.”
• “Their guitarist is playing only power chords. And the finger movement involved in that solo is less than that of a hunt-and-peck typist.”

Unfortunately, without a portable keyboard I cannot succeed. It is much easier to show than it is to tell.

So I salute the comedian in this YouTube video. He has done an amazing job. He goes into a rant on Pachebel’s Canon in D¹, and then goes on to show a ton of songs that rip off the exact same chord progression as their main (verse or chorus) one. I’m sure there are a lot more than what he researched or could fit into his time slot. But it supports my message about the lack of originality in pop musicians very well.

Just about everything there is Top 40 music of course. And naturally you will find no prog rock or prog metal songs in there.

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¹ Famous song that is often heard at weddings.

So, the new version of Amarok is out¹. It’s an incremental release, so not so many new groundbreaking features. What is cool though is the addition of a music store. Now, Magnatune’s selection of music may not be too vast, but the store has a lot of things going for it:

For fans:

• No DRM. While not named so, this is the kind of digital music that deserves names like “PlaysForSure” or “FairPlay”.
• Offers lossless formats. Even to the extent of bandwidth-sapping WAV, which is sort of redundant since they offer my favorite (lossless) codec: FLAC
• You can listen to the complete albums in MP3 format before you buy
• 128k mp3s are distributed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license, which allows sharing and derivative works, so things like sampling the songs or remixing them are perfectly legal, as long as it’s not for commercial benefit.

For the artists, it gets even better:

• 50/50 revenue split
• Non-exclusive relationship

I want Magnatunes to take off. I really do. And hopefully exposure through Amarok will get them more customers. Anything that provides a viable, free as in libre alternative to iTunes.

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Warning: rant starts here

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I hate the iPod/iTunes². Its success has essentially proven that there is a huge market for music that is DRM encumbered. For music that is lossily compressed (true, this does not affect most popular music because they are engineered to sound good on the radio). For a device that can’t even play music gaplessly.

So the tactile feedback of the clickwheel is brilliant, the smooth exterior is very slick, the combination of iPiT creates an unparalleled user experience, yada yada. But you are talking about a digital audio player and a music store. The issues I point out about are flaws with what should be its core competency, its primary function.

Okay, truth be told, the iPiT hardware can handle gapless, as the Rockbox project proved. And if I am not wrong, iTunes 7 can finally do gapless playback. But all this just goes to show that the listening experience is not the main priority. But gee whiz, ya sure can choose the songs to listen to darn well, can’t ya?

Worse still, with the iPiT, artists find themselves making even less than before.

Check out other insider viewpoints on how the major labels work:

• The Problem With Music by Steve Albini (producer of In Utero)
• Courtney Love Does The Math. A stunningly eloquent speech. This is what she’s capable of when she’s lucid? I never would have guessed.

If growth in major label digital music sales continues to outstrip growth (if that) in CD sales, there will be a time in the not-so-far future when the Red Book audio standard may simply be phased out. While the weedy speech of EMI chairman Alain Levy is premature, it does describe a terrible future—one where music is neither DRM-free nor CD quality.

And that’s the direction the labels want to head. Selling digital music crippled with DRM is a wet dream for them now that they’ve overcome their initial technophobia. It is a product with no marginal physical cost of production that can be sold again and again (you have to buy the same song for each DRM platform you use if you switch, new firmware may not be backward-compatible, etc etc).

Every purchase of an iPod is a X-hundred dollar vote for DRM. Every purchase of a song through iTunes is a dollar vote for DRM. By casting your ballot this way, you are supporting the wrong side in our downhill battle.

The ever-increasing flood of dollar votes for DRM has to stop now before it is too late.

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¹ So I’m a couple days late with this, but give me a break – work is busy and I usually only get to catch up with news on weekends.

² I will constantly refer to the hardware DAP and the store as a single entity. They go together like Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office go together, ie a symbiotic relationship of mediocre components.

First post!

Not like there was anyone to snatch it away from me. But allow me the cheap thrill.

I guess I’m supposed to do an introduction here (convention over configuration!) . So, without further ado:

Why ‘progressive programmer’?

1. Progressive is a reference to the kind of music I love most – progressive metal and progressive rock. More on this later.
2. At the same time it is a tribute and homage to the Pragmatic Programmer, which is a book that greatly inspired me (and which has led to an entire publishing company).

Why ‘ProgProg’?

Because progressiveprogrammer.com was already being domain-squatted. Okay, so I’m not as original as I think. Anyway I was lamenting this fact to a friend and he was like “What about ProgProg?” And thus a future star yet another inane blog clogging up the Intarweb’s tubes was born.

Interestingly, unbeknownst to me at the time I registered this domain, www.pragprog.com does direct to the Pragmatic Programmer website¹.

So, what is a progressive programmer?

Prog metal and prog rock are best defined as genres where the musicians constantly push the boundaries of music, defying the “rules” of regular music so to speak. Be it through composition structure, executing a concept for an entire album, or sheer virtuosity and technical prowess².

Now I’m not deluded enough to think that I can push the boundaries of programming or computer science. I’m content to challenge my own limitations, and improve myself at my chosen craft – software development – day-by-day.

Wait a minute, aren’t “progressive” people hippie tree-huggers?

Well, I suppose the politically correct term is “liberals”. In the same way conservatives => right-wing neo-cons, and libertarians => anarcho-capitalists. Now that’s one analogy question you’d never see on the SATs.

Unfortunately, the term “progressive” does often refer to a liberal-minded person, so I have to include this disclaimer that I am not a liberal. I’m a libertarian. Same prefix, world of difference in meaning. Hopefully that’s the first and last time I have to talk politics.

And that’s all for now.

Don’t expect future posts to follow this FAQ format—I just thought it make for a more concise introduction, given my tendency to ramble³.

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¹ Don’t you accuse me of trying to capture traffic from typos—you’d have to be pretty damn uncoordinated to mistype an ‘a’ for a ‘o’ (hint: look at your keyboard).

² Because of this, many prog fans are total musical snobs, dismissing most other genres of music as unoriginal and lacking creativity. Think of them as the musical equivalent of LISP hackers.

³ Oooh foreshadowing. Now you’re just dying to read the next post, aren’t ya?