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Pizza Party is a command line Unix program that lets you order pizza from Domino’s. Don’t miss the video.

HTML tags illustrated through pictures.

Who needs watches, anyway?

Yeah, I’m bailing out. The RPM Challenge was a fun idea, but I started too late and had trouble figuring out how to record. Also, this wasn’t the best month for attempting an album, what with all the schoolwork and various personal issues.

In any case, I hope to start recording some songs soon, even if it’s not at the rate of ten per month.

Today’s Tufts Daily reports that the university will ditch the soon-to-be-extinct Ctrax digital music service in favor of Ruckus.

Ruckus allows anyone with a .edu email address to sign up, download a program, and then access their database of 2.5+ million songs for free. The catch is that the songs are heavily copy-protected, so you can’t burn them to CDs or put them on MP3 players.

Digital rights management is often misused and usually ineffective. There are songs in the iTunes store that are copy-protected against the wishes of the artists themselves. To be fair, though, it’s tough to complain too much about DRM on files that you didn’t pay for.

There is, however, another catch, which Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman elaborates on:

Unfortunately for many Tufts students, neither Ctrax nor Ruckus works with Macintosh computers. “Apple continues to control the production of chips in a way that anything other than iTunes is not going to work with iPods,” Reitman said.

Uh, really?

Apple doesn’t still “control the production of chips” — they switched to Intel processors almost two years ago. It’s not true that “anything other than iTunes is not going to work with iPods,” and even if it were, it wouldn’t have anything to do with the brand of chip inside the computer. Besides, the iTunes-iPod thing isn’t a Macintosh problem; you can’t put Ruckus files on your PC-based iPod either, because the problem is not the operating system but the DRM.

But iTunes isn’t even the issue here. The point is that Ruckus doesn’t work with Macs, and that’s because they simply haven’t written the software. Apple certainly isn’t preventing them from doing so, though, by “chips” or any other means.

In any case, this Mac user just opened Windows in Parallels and ran Ruckus from there. The interface was a bit awkward, and covered with ads, but the service worked as advertised. The audio files are impressively high-bitrate at 192kbps, and the sound quality was decent (I listened to the new Norah Jones album and some Stevie Wonder). I wouldn’t use it as my regular media player, but for trying out new music it’s perfect.

The DRM is almost charming in its ubiquitousness. Each song individually requests authorization from a central server, a process which is indicated by a small key icon in the download window and a message in the status bar. This authorization, for some reason, has to be repeated once a month, and the renewal date is listed in the library window alongside the artist, album, and song title. The message is unmistakable: “You don’t own this music, and don’t you forget it.”

Of course, with something like Audio Hijack, the DRM could be circumvented pretty effortlessly. Luckily Ruckus doesn’t have to worry about that, since Apple’s chips prevent Mac users from running their software…

I said I would be keeping a log on my progress in the RPM Challenge, and I haven’t been. So, here’s a quick update.

I, uh, just figured out how to record things about an hour ago.

I had some trouble, you see. I tried two different microphones, all sorts of positions, three instruments, two cables, two rooms (on two floors), all of Logic Express’ software plugins, and almost every other variable I could think of, but all of my recording attempts were marred by an incessant whine. I could have just plowed ahead and recorded the damn thing anyway, but it was loud enough to be distracting. Hell, it was loud enough to give me a headache.

Tonight I finally figured out the proper mix of preamp gain and normalization that makes my guitar sound okay. Or pretty okay. I’m no recording engineer, but I had the eureka moment I needed to finally get this thing off the ground.

Now, you may have noticed that today is February 19th. I’m supposed to have my album in the mail by March 1st. That leaves ten days to write and record nine songs, which is a fairly terrifying prospect.

How am I going to do that? Well, I’m going to fudge it a little and use ideas that I’ve had kicking around for a while. All of them are incomplete — chord progressions without melodies, verses without bridges, that sort of thing — so I don’t feel too bad about it. And it will allow me to retain my sanity.

More soon.

This will be of minimal interest to anyone outside the Boston area, but when has a limited audience ever stopped me before?

Sacco’s Bowl Haven, a candlepin bowling alley in Somerville’s Davis Square, has an online coupon for a free shoe rental. There are no restrictions on its use, so you can have everyone in your party print out their own. You can bowl three games for less than the price of a single ticket at the Loews on Tremont Street.

This message brought to you by College Students for Inexpensive Entertainment.

And now for something completely different: a robot-controlled saxophone playing John Coltrane’s Giant Steps solo.

Back by popular demand: talking Tufts buildings!

Professor Shelemay and some other area music leaders were here last weekend for the Music Futures symposium, a celebration of our brand-new Granoff Music Center. Frankly, much of it was a waste of time. There were two panels — one made up of Tufts music faculty, and the other made up of the visitors — and both made lot of vague comments about “the promising future of music” without offering much in the way of concrete ideas or suggestions. Some of the best comments were from Maure Aronson, executive director of World Music, who took us to task for not integrating our music curriculum with performances despite being right next to Boston. Despite the occasional incisive comment, it was pretty clear that we really just wanted to show off our shiny new building and were not particularly interested in what anyone had to say. I suppose that’s fine; the faculty is proud of the new facility, and rightly so. I just hope there’s more opportunity for serious discussion in the future.

Version 1.0 of Adium, a wonderful free IM client for Mac OS X, has been released.

You may have heard of NaNoWriMo, an annual contest that challenges participants to write a 50,000 word novel (or novella, if you like) entirely during the month of November. It turns out there’s a similar contest for musicians: the RPM Challenge, which asks that you write an album of original material (defined as 10 songs or 35 minutes) entirely in the month of February.

You can see where this is going.

I’m on board. I found out about the challenge on Metafilter, so I’ve named my little experiment Cruise Elroy after an old question of mine that stumped the community. Tonight I plan to get to work and crank out my first tune.

Unfortunately, I don’t know very much about recording. I started to put together an amateur home studio after taking a class on digital music last semester — I have Logic Express, an M-Audio preamp thing, and a V-Tech dynamic microphone — but I haven’t done anything with it yet. In other words, don’t be surprised if I turn out a bunch of solo guitar tracks that sound like they were recorded underwater.

Anyway, it should be fun, and I’ll try to keep a log of my progress here.

Today Dinosaur Comics, one of my all-time favorite websites, is four years old. There are almost 1000 strips!