Blue Sky On Mars

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about new musical instruments and how instruments have changed over the recent decades.

Just spotted on Freshmeat: SDBA Revolution, a framework for making IM apps just like you would make web apps.

It seems like an appropriate time to be looking at the music business, with the annual attention-grabbing Grammy awards. I haven’t watched the whole show (but my ReplayTV did), so I don’t know yet if the new NARAS president made comments similar to those made last year. There’s no question in my mind that the music industry will have to come up with new models.

Maybe China is one place to look for new music industry models. Though it’s sad to think of corporate sponsorship as being the way to get quality music made, apparently there are ways to make it work. Robbie Williams’ new contract is cited as an example of the new style contracts making it to the West. Moby has famously made a small cottage industry out of marketing his songs for use in commercial areas.
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There seems to be an ever-increasing number of articles on the sorry state of the music industry today. For example, the NY Times says that CDs may be reaching the twilight of their market. It has this interesting quote as well:

Most analysts and industry executives agree that selling music online is the future. But they say it will take at least two years for companies to devise a business plan for it that makes financial sense.

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In a week, I’ll be starting a new job with JSTOR. This should be a fun move and a fun job. When starting a new job, it’s always interesting to take a look at the technologies in their area and wonder “do they use that?” or “have they tried this?”. I’ve had a few thoughts along those lines. I just saw a mention of the DjVu format (which has a free implementation).
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Through some strange turn, I suddenly found myself reading about Java GUI programming. I’ve been considering writing a small, fun program and debating about doing it in Java or Python. Python has some advantages: smaller memory footprint and runtime size, faster development time, more fun :), wxPython provides native look and feel. Java has some advantages over Python: huge collections of libraries that are fairly well structured, Eclipse IDE, GCJ to compile to native executable (apparently not for Windows yet). It’s that last one that’s the kicker. Generally, I’m a fan of native widgets, because I want my programs to look like Windows programs if they’re running under Windows. Swing does this to an extent, but SWT/JFace actually uses native widgets, just like wxPython. GCJ cannot compile Swing apps yet, but you can compile SWT apps using GCJ.
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My last entry was October 30th. That’s most unfortunate, because there are all sorts of interesting things that have happened in the world and interesting things that I’ve found online. Just the other day, I found a fairly cool piece of software, but now I have no idea what it was called. And, it wouldn’t be easy to figure out search terms to locate this particular program. Had I just blogged it, I would’ve been able to find it trivially.
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