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The music critic Ivan March has selected the new Alan Bush Claudio CD as his Critic's choice of the year in Gramophone Magazine, December 2002.In the November 2002 issue he reviews both the Claudio CD, which features the Violin Concerto and Dialectic, and Chamber Music Volume 1 by the Summerhayes Trio.He says of both discs "I cannot recommend them too highly".

MusicWeb also has two other reviews of the Claudio CD, both very favourable.
Rob Barnett's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Sept02
Peter Grahame Woolf's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Oct02

There is also a review in the orchestral section of International Record Review, December 2002.

  Listen to tracks from the Claudio CD
The Violin Concerto CD can be purchased from Claudio Records

Also on MusicWeb, Chamber Music Vol. 1 was featured as recording of the month for November 2002.
See the review by Rob Barnett at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Dec02

There are other reviews of the CD in International Record Review (December 2002) by Piers Burton-Page and BBC Music Magazine (December 2002) by Michael Oliver.

Piers Burton-Page writes "...a superb CD...these new recordings of his chamber music, convincingly played, excellently engineered and attractively presented...should be on everyone's shopping list".

Michael Oliver says "There is very little British Chamber Music of the Thirties that approaches the intensity, passionate eloquence and intellectual rigour of his Concert Piece, very little from the Forties that can be compared with his Three Concert Studies for exciting economical power and an expressiveness all the more profound for its restraint".

  Listen to tracks from Chamber Music Volume 1
Chamber Music Volume 1 can be purchased from Crotchet Records

Wednesday 26th November 2003 at 7.30pm Bowdon Rooms, The Firs, Bowdon, Manchester.

Nicholas Ward

The Northern Chamber Orchestra, led by its Artistic Director Nicholas Ward, will perform Alan Bush's English Suite for String Orchestra in Manchester on 26th November, in a programme of music for strings spanning 200 years. Formed in 1967, the NCO has a formidable reputation throughout the North West of England. Playing without a conductor, the ensemble members are all distinguished musicians who play as principals with other orchestras and regularly appear as soloists.

In 1994 the NCO recorded Bush's English Suite - one of his more important works - on a CD for Redcliffe Recordings, Music by Alan Bush. You can listen to the Passacaglia movement on the Listen section of the website.

• Microsoft Media Player shreds your rights: 'Think DRM was bad already? Think I was joking when I said the plan was tostart with barely tolerable incursions on your rights, then turn thethumbscrews? Welcome to Windows Media Player 11, and the rights get chippedaway a lot more.'
• Microsoft DRM To Get Even Tighter: 'I think I'm going to wait for Windows Media Player 12 to come out, whichreportedly will include DRM that doesn't let you listen to your music atall. All the major recording labels are on board with this format, so we mayfinally get a realistic alternative to iTunes without the clumsy Mac-likeinterface. Plus, it won't cost much more per track than the average iTunessong now. There will also be more visualizations included to help youimagine what the music you're playing actualy sounds like.'

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The ability to install an iPod in a BMW has been around for a few months now and I hadn't given it much attention or thought until now.  Mainly because I now have a car that the technology supports.  So here's a mini review...

Installation: No idea if it's hard or easy, but it didn't take long for the dealer to do the work.  When it's complete there's a normal looking iPod cable in the glove box that disappears deep inside the car.  Other than that there's no indication that it's been installed. Once connected the iPod also gets charged, so after driving for a while you can take your iPod out fully charged.

The system is limited to playing five playlists on the iPod with a sixth option of playing everything.  You need to setup the playlists ahead of time and give them names that start with BMW1, BMW2 etc...  Easy enough to do, I created smart playlists to find all content that matched a certain genre, artist or was created in the last 60 days.  With those set up all I had to do to get everything to work was plug in the iPod.  The car believes the iPod is a CD changer and so changing to the right mode on the stereo starts the iPod playing.

Control: The iPod is controlled from the stereo controls in just the same way as that the radio and CD player work.  The preset buttons move between the playlists with just a brief pause for the iPod to find the right playlist.  Once it's playing it can be fully controlled from the controls on the steering wheel.

There are some limitations though.   Being limited to playlists is not a major problem, but if you want to listen to a specific album or song it could be difficult to get to it.  None of the details of the song are displayed either on the iPod or on the stereo when it's playing which may be a problem for some people.  For me, I almost never look at my iPod when it's playing anyway, so not being able to see the track info isn't a problem - it's a nice to have feature, but not a deal breaker.  A limitation introduced by BMW is that shuffle or random mode isn't remembered when changing playlists or when changing modes.  This appears to be a 'feature' of the stereo system as a whole and isn't unique to the iPod.  Lastly I've noticed a slight background hiss, but I've yet to determine if that's from the files on the iPod itself (192kbs transcoded from lossless WMA9) or part of the system.  I can only hear it when changing tracks or during quiet parts of a track, but it needs more investigation before I know where the problem is.

Ultimately though, I really like it.  Having all my music available in the car is great compared to the six CDs I was used to that I rarely changed around.

Questions to ask before hiring a web developer. 

SEOmoz recently posted some questions that they would ask when interviewing web developers. Figured I'd have a go at the questions and let you know where I stand:

1. What Industry sites and blogs do you read regularly? I consistently read Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny , Jim Boykin , and Brue Clay . I also have some other favorites like Shoemoney , 9-rules (Design) , Aaron Wall , SEOmoz , Devlounge , and Stuntdubl .
2. Do you prefer to work alone or on a team? Alone, unless I can find a competent team. I've known too many "experts" that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
3. How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand? What, you mean people don't normally do that? We do everything by hand because of the control it gives over the code.
4. What is the w3c? World Wide Web Consortium. They are the group that is trying to bring standards to the web (although there are way too many that don't listen.)
   
5. Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code? Yes. and Yes to a point. If we don't put an alt tag on every image, we are still good people.
6. What are a few of your favorite development tools and why? I like Textpad for coding, Photoshop for image editing, and HeidiSQL for database interaction.
7. Describe/demonstrate your level of competence in a *nix shell environment. (not really necessary in my opinion, SQL knowledge would be a bigger requirement)
   % If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
   Too many ('s.
8. What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning? Right now I'm looking more at DOM scripting. With AJAX going mainstream and more and more UI's expecting more dynamic interaction, I expect to learn even more about javascript (DOM) and CSS interaction.
9. Show me your portfolio. OK. Take a look at my portfolio .
10. What size websites have you worked on in the past? Everything from one pagers to 100% user defined dynamic websites with hundreds of pages.
11. Show me your code. OK. Right click, view source.
12. What are a few sites you admire and why? 2Advanced. They have amazing flash design. 9rules. Great community. Good Organization. Nice clean straightforward look.
13. Fix this code, please. Haven't I already told you about all the "expert web developers" I've interacted with (or that my previous clients had interacted with before they found me.) Been there, fixed that.
14. I just pulled up a website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.
1. Did you type the URL correctly?
2. Do other pages from the same site show up?
3. Are other site that are on the same machine available?
4. Does it show up in a different browser?
5. Can you view the source?
15. What is your favorite development language and why? PHP. Open source. Simple, yet powerful. Good documentation.
16. Do you find any particular languages or technologies intimidating? I never really cared for C (I liked C++ much better). I'm quite interested in what the "up and coming" technology is. I just find there isn't as much time to explore all of them to figure out which one is going to be beneficial.
17. HTML, CSS, WYSIWYG? Hyper Text Markup Language. Cascading Style Sheet, What you see is what you get (plus normally a lot more code than you wanted)
18. What web browser do you use? Firefox 2.0 for normal browsing. IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox for most testing.
19. What are a few personal web projects you've got going on? Constantly updating, tweaking, and improving the websites I oversee.

Roughly eight years ago I bought myself a welder.  I was restoring the 1950 Bantam Jeep Trailer I had purchased and it needed a new floor and some other things welded up.  The costs for hiring it out were roughly half of the cost of a small 110V MIG welder so I figured it was time to make the investment in a new tool and new skillset.

Since then the welder has proven quite handy - I was able install the new floor in the trailer, and have also been able to create a tandem bike for my kids:

And a piece of artwork for our mantle:

Over the years I’ve also used the welder to make repairs and add-ons on the 1964 CJ6 Jeep that I’m working on, as well as small repairs for friends, relatives and neighbors.

So - what I’m thinking now is that if this web development gig doesn’t work out for whatever reason, I’ll be able to go apply for any welding job because I have eight years of experience welding.

Wait - why are you rolling your eyes like that?  And what was that small huffing sound you just made?

Well, OK.  You’re right.  Picking up a small welder and dabbling in it periodically doesn’t really add up to 8 years of experience that an employer would be interested in, does it?  I have a friend who is a certified welding inspector - he owns a business that does metal fabrication so he employs professional welders and has to inspect their work.  He likes to wander around my projects and point out which welds would and wouldn’t be acceptable to him - and I usually feel good if I shoot 20%.

Yet - I see this pitching of hobby work and playing around as “experience” in the web design and development world and it seems like people fall for it in a way they wouldn’t with my welding experience.  A few weeks back I was contacted by a person who just took on a internship with a client that I had done a site for.  The project included a new custom design and deployment on a content management system so all content on the site could be updated or changed without them needing to know HTML.  It was the perfect fit for them as a business because they are small and not in a field of business where they’d naturally have people on staff with web skills. The site was immediately beneficial to them - with their previous site you couldn’t Google their name directly and get their site in the results, and the new site got them in #1 spot for their own name in short order.

However it was the classic case of having all the available tools at hand and never taking the time.  The site has sat, relatively unchanged, since we launched it roughly 4 years ago.  Then here comes the new college intern who assures me that he has been “designing websites for about 8 years now” so I wouldn’t “need to be concerned that he would end up damaging the site.”

Right.

I went to look at it yesterday and sure enough - the main navigation has been moved, the nice little main nav icons that tied into the company’s business area (and they paid for) are gone, and in the place of the main nav is now a “doesn’t quite fit in that space” blurb for “latest news”.  Latest news - for a company that had nothing new to say over 4 years time.  All the new content could have been integrated without requiring the design changes.

Specifics aside - what bothers me is my former client probably heard the same “8 years experience” line and, even though it’s coming from a college senior and therefore means that this persons “experience” started in roughly the 8th grade, gladly handed over their most prominent piece of business marketing to this person.

So business people - listen up:  Periodically noodling around with web technologies as a hobby doesn’t equal “experience”.  Sites built out of that context are rarely based on any real-world constraints of time, budget, or business requirements.  When someone uses the word “experience”, what they should be implying is “I spent a considerable portion of my day for that period of time working with this stuff” and (ideally) “people paid me for it”.

You wouldn’t look at my welding projects and hire me on to do structural, mission critical welding.  Don’t do the same with your website.

Technology writer, Peter Svensson, wrote an interesting story called "Will video break the Internet?". From a technical point of view there are many factors to consider. If a large number of web "surfers" were using the Internet as their primary way to watch TV, there would be a problem. More capacity is clearly needed, especially as HD-TV becomes more prevalent. The pessimists -- and some telecommunications operators -- see rising fees to pay for the bandwidth expansion. Optimists know that various technologies such as multicasting, caching, digital video recorders, etc. are dramatically improving the Net's ability to deliver video content and in parallel the cost per unit of technology continues to decline. History would suggest the optimistic view is the right one.

During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta there was a bomb blast. Native Atlanta ex-patriots living in Japan and Germany and other parts of the world wanted to get as much news coverage as possible about the status but had few choices (there were no blogs then). The Internet Technology team at IBM in Southbury, Connecticut was running a large web infrastructure for the Games at the time and one of the engineers, Andy Stanford-Clark, got the idea to "stream" a local Atlanta radio station over the Internet using an IBM technology called Bamba. It was a very successful project but only a handful of people could listen simultaneously due to the limitations of the technology and the Internet. Some people thought that if there were large numbers of listeners "audio would break the Internet". Today millions of people consider audio over the Net as commonplace. (Listening to crystal clear classical music from KUSC-FM in Los Angeles through my Sqeezebox as I write this). Based on the tens of millions of daily visitors to YouTube, it is clear that video has also become commonplace. Another leading indicator is what is happening on campus. A number of universities have decided to use the Internet to deliver cable TV to their dormitories.

One of the issues Mr. Svensson raised in his story is "net neutrality", a term that means different things to different people. The fear is that the really large telecommunications companies that provide parts of the "backbone" of the Internet may decide to not only raise fees but also to be discriminatory. In the extreme it would mean that Verizon would block access to Google because they made a deal with Yahoo! or visa versa. The telcos have never been successful in getting into the content business so a new angle for them might be to make deals with content providers that would make their video move through the Internet backbone at a higher priority in return for fees. These fears have gotten the attention of lawmakers who are now talking about legislation to insure net neutrality. Legislation is the worst possible way to address the issue.

What is really needed is more competition. In Japan, the Internet service available to consumers is significantly faster than in the U.S. and significantly less expensive. For example, Yahoo! Broadband offers 8 million bits per second for about $20 per month. Up to 100 million bits per second is available. What technical breakthrough have they had? None. The breakthrough was to separate the various infrastructure elements of Internet service and allow "Adam Smith's invisible hand" to go to work. More competition means higher speeds and lower prices. In the U.S. we have legions of lawyers and lobbyists at work doing their best to gain protections for themselves and to slow the spread of innovation such as municipal wireless and voice over IP. Will video break the Internet? No. The biggest threat to freedom of choice for content at competitive prices is a lack of competition.

Misguided or overly-prescriptive legislation can have unintended consequences. It can often fix one problem and create two new ones or add yet another layer of protectionism. Mike Nelson, former Director for Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission (and former colleague at IBM), says "a lack of competition which lets companies exert monopoly or duopoly power is probably the biggest damper on innovation". Not all legislation is bad. It is possible to use it to increase competition and decrease regulation, to fund e-government pilot projects, "connect the unconnected," or fund university education and research.


Other patrickWeb stories about Internet Technology
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