Jamendo & Magnatune

Thanks to Laurent I found Jamendo, a distributor of Creative-Commons-licensed music, and from there Magnatune, with similar goals. Magnatune artists get 50% of proceeds from sales of their work. Here's a Bach cantata from Magnatune:

JS Bach Cantatas - Volume IV - Early Cantatas for Holy Week by American Bach Soloists

The quality of the music is good, but there's an annoying voice between each track that tells you the album and artist name, which you knew already. I hope the paid version excludes this.

I'm going to explore these sites some more. It might be time to bid farewell to the iTunes Store, and all those Big Record Labels and their fascist anti-piracy methods with it.

Ban Censorship Now!

An Irish ISP, eircom, has agreed to ban any website the IRMA (Irish Recorded Music Association) chooses to block.

I had thought censorship was one of those nasty deals you get in China and Iran, but now it's thriving in Ireland. Please support http://blackoutireland.com/ even if you're not Irish. I hate to fearmonger, but this is coming to an ISP near you, wherever you are, in the near future if it's not stopped now.

Personally, I'm not interested in illegal music (my musical preferences aren't the kind that go with P2P), but it is not acceptable for a private corporation to decide what sites I may or may not use. Now I just feel all icky and horrible when I enter a music store. All those shiny CDs are whispering "censorship, censorship" at me.

Go and prosecute the criminals, leave the rest of us alone!

Blogger: break "convert line breaks"

Blogger's "convert line breaks" setting seems to cause a lot of pain, and what's more, it doesn't even seem to work. I get gratuitous <br/> in my code despite having set this setting to OFF. The issue and some workarounds are discussed on Rob on Programming, The Real Blogger Status, and MLA Wire.

The trouble is, if you've chosen to edit in "Edit Html" mode, it's reasonable to suppose that you know what you're doing, and you want the html code of your post to be exactly what you write. In other words, I can take care of my own <p> and <br> tags.

Blogger doesn't think so. And here's my revenge - I added this to the "style" section of my template:

  br { display: none; }
  br.forReal { display:inline; }

This way, I never have to think about Blogger's thoughtful, kind, but misguided insertion of line breaks again. And when I want a line break for real, which isn't very often (I'm more of a <p>...</p> person), I just

  <br class='forReal'/>

So I can make a table thusly*:

<table style="width:auto;" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" border="1">
  <tr>
    <td>foo</td>
    <td>bar</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>toto</td>
    <td>titi</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Which looks like

foo	bar
toto	titi

Slight problem: it has probably gone and damaged all my old posts. What a pain!

* I know, "thusly" isn't a word. I don't care.

Exceptions In Java [Must Read]

Exceptions were a big improvement over the old-fashioned C way of returning error codes, but then the debate raged over Checked vs Unchecked Exceptions, vs "Huh? Checked? Whazza?". Java offers all three varieties so you can never hope to port exceptional experience from one project to the next, because there are at least as many correct ways to do things as there are gurus. However, at least now there's a step in the right direction; with Björn Andersson's Java Exception Explanator a lot more of this makes sense. Check it out. Here's a teaser:

AccessControlException : You have lost control of Microsoft Access. If you cannot regain control or stop the program in some other way, you should cut the power to your computer as fast as possible.

ps. thanks reddit

Don't Forget To Flush

So, instead of being asleep like an honest citizen at 2 o'clock in the morning, here I am trying to make hibernate save my collection of Strings.

(I would hate not to be a developer: who else deals with Collections of Strings, I wonder?)

The mapping is perfect, straight from the documentation, to tricky stuff, no funny cases:

    <set name="categories" table="resources_categories">
      <key column="resource"/>
      <element column="category" type="string"/>
    </set>

Except, when I populate my category list, and try getSession().save(newResource) ... it doesn't save my Strings!

After a little more googling than I would have hoped, I bumped into this - http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=951848&blah blah... where the hibernate team says you have to flush in this case. You don't have to flush to save most other things, but if it's a Collection of Strings, you have to flush.

So this works:

    getSession().save(newResource);
    getSession().flush();

- no changes to the mapping required.

Another Smug Mac User

Today I got even smugger, if you can believe that. To cut a long, long story short, Sabrina, my beloved, a victim user of Windows Vista, was getting "Local Access Only" while connected to our trusty router that has always worked before, in our heterogeneous network of Mac, Ubuntu, and Various Windowses. The solution, in the end, was simple: "ipconfig /release" followed by "ipconfig /renew"*, but the path was labyrinthine. Innumerable fora record the despair and frustration of countless vista users facing the dreaded "Local Access Only" message

At the risk of repeating myself: the Mac is the first computer I've had that Mostly Just Works. The biggest annoyance with this thing is the no delete key - but there is a partial solution - KeyRemap4MacBook

But Vista? How can they break DHCP - something that's been working for over twelve years? How do people who are not technical deal with this?

(*) In case you came to this post in despair and frustration: here's how to run ipconfig

1. Hit Start -> Run
2. Enter "cmd" and hit return. A "command prompt" window will appear
3. type "ipconfig /release" and hit return - this should get rid of any out-of-date connection state
4. type "ipconfig /renew" and hit return - this gets you new connection state
5. close the "cmd" window

Theoretically, and with a bit of luck, and assuming nothing else is wrong, and possibly after a slight delay, you'll have your internet again

Homer vs The Bible

Many years ago I engaged in a weekly debate with some Christians on the Lewis Trilemma - the liar/lunatic/son of god question. Both sides fought nobly and I came out at the end of it with my atheism reinforced. The Christians (who were all charming people btw) probably came out with their religiosity reinforced, so it was pretty zero-sum in the end.

Many, many arguments were advanced by the Christian side to support their beliefs, but by the end of the year their reasoning boiled entirely down to this: When I read the Bible, I hear the Voice of God speaking to me.

That's all. The final, irreducible argument. It doesn't leave much hope for people, like me, with a little god-deafness problem. It also doesn't leave much hope for them, if they happen to hear the Voice of God saying different things to each of them, as appears to happen a little too often. The rascal!

Anyway, along the way we had some entertaining digressions. For example, if you consider ancient Greek texts, Homer's Iliad, or the New Testament, you will notice that there are only a few extant ancient copies of Homer, with a large number and variety of errors. The New Testament, on the other hand, has a larger number of extant ancient copies, with far fewer transcription errors. This, apparently, demonstrates the accuracy and reliability of the New Testament. See http://www.clemson.edu/spurgeon/books/apology/Chapter4.html for an example of this kind of reasoning.

Homer was around a long time before the NT, and his/her/their works were primarily transmitted orally. The surviving documents are older, so it is unsurprising that there are fewer of them. Most of all, part of the fun of reciting a good story is embellishing it, and the early transcribers of Homer doubtless succumbed to this desire. The transcribers of the Good News however had entirely different motives and risked hell were their labours imperfect.

In other words, both Homer and the Bible come with a Creative-Commons license - but the Bible invokes the "No Derivative Works" clause. It doesn't make the Bible right any more than a commercial license makes a software product superior.