Friday, July 29, 2011

All Is Not Lost, Or Is It?


I have mixed feelings about this ... musical mediocrity aside, OK Go is a group who has done some entertaining and novel dance and video pieces. And their latest project is particularly interesting to me, from my Web development perspective, as it exploits HTML5, the "latest and greatest" so-called Web standard. Trouble is, it isn't yet really standard, and as OK Go's piece shows us, we are still cursed with browser incompatibility. Try it. And discover that it runs only on Chrome. Not a big problem for me, as I have five browsers right at hand here on most all of my machines (where I usually spawn an alternate browser from a Firefox display by using one of several "view this in ..." Firefox extensions). But I'll bet it is an inconvenience or even a show-stopper for many others. Ten years ago, I said that surely browser wars would subside by now ... but they may as bad or even worse now. . At least nobody is using the accursed ten-year-old IE6 still ... or are they? Job security, I guess.

The defanged version here:



While we are at it, let's revisit an earlier OK Go vid or two.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Music of the Day

Kim asked me thia morning for ideas on suitable music for today's forthcoming get-together with family and friends. So I turned to my FLAC library, fed from my basement Linux music server to my chairside MacBook on to an HRT DAC then to NAD amp and finally out through vintage Polk tower speakers. As my default screen interface is in alpha order by artist, I immediately saw Allen Toussaint and played his West End Blues several times during breakfast. This led to the revelation that I should just queue up my entire Louis Armstrong collection (starting with the great Essential Louis Armstrong compilation -- Columbia Legacy remaster K 89280-S1) for the day. Trouble is, I keep finding myself unable to treat it only as background; I am continually diverted from my other tasks leading up to our celebration and find myself stretched out in front of the stereo in listening mode.

Here's a taste from a live performance in the early 30s: