Josh Reisner

So! I had a nice trip down to rural Georgia for an iPhone App development class last week. Turns out Objective C is really hard! And the PHP ‘programming’ I’ve been doing all this time is kinda lightweight in comparison. Ha! Whatever.

Anyway, I decided to drive down there and of course music was a major concern on the 15ish hour drive. I did bring some CDs, but after getting bored with listening to Fantasies over and over and over I was happy to check out satellite radio for the first time, and in particular, Sirius XMU. It’s really nice to listen to the radio when there is actually good music and cursing and no commercials. (I’m not recommending paying $8/month, which is what they’re asking for online access. They should offer a lower price just to get one channel!)

I prepared this handy list of observations about XMU:

• Most underplayed song: ‘Fuck You’ by Lily Allen
• Most overplayed song: ‘Train Song’ by PJ Harvey and Ben Gibbard
• Most overplayed artist: Cursive
• Least explicable song (played frequently): ‘Reasons to Quit’ by Phosphorescence
• Least explicable artist (played frequently): Glasvegas
• Best DJ: Aquarium Drunkard (Guest DJ)
• Best XMU DJ: Jenny Eliscu
• Most annoying DJ: Jake Fogelnest

Here’s a song I liked that I discovered through XMU.

Ida Maria – Oh My God

Go check out Joshua Gee’s new blog! It’s got all kinds of scary information about vampires, ghosts, BATS and more!

Well so I’m coming around on Fantasies. Maybe this isn’t the album I had expected given the detailed artistic progression I had mapped onto them, but there’s a lot to like here. Go give Gimme Sympathy a listen on their website (second track in the player) and tell me what you think. I still stand by my feelings about this song in my earlier WTF post (great, but could rock more), but like I said I’ve pretty much changed w/r/t the album as a whole.

Sorry this is turning into The Metric Blog. Should be back to normal by November!

This song, on Grow Up and Blow Away was originally recorded and released DIY in 2001, but only officially released via label in 2007. I think I need to re-orient this album in my mind as having actually been in 2007, since Fantasies seems to expand on it more than on 2005′s Live It Out.

Metric – Soft Rock Star (Jimmy vs Joe mix)

If you like to rock, and aren’t afraid of a little a lot of confetti, you should go check out Ok Go at one of their upcoming shows. I went to one last night in Williamsburg, and it was a pretty much a blast. They’re huge now. I mean they won a Grammy, after all.

I miss the days though that they did audience-picks-the-cover at the start of the show. In honor of that…

Ok Go – Antmusic

Well, this is hard to post since Metric is clearly my favorite band of the last few years, but their new album Fantasies leaked onto the internets yesterday and it doesn’t sound great.

I wish I could say why, exactly. In their own words, according to Prefix Magazine,

Vocalist Emily Haines has stated that she set out to write “genuine” and “simple” lyrics, while Metric’s guitarist Jimmy Shaw describes the sound on Fantasies as “very big,” and “very dreamy.”

It just sounds empty to me (not in the same way as the great opening song Empty on their last album) and the production seems flat and ordinary, like they were overthinking everything and making bad decisions. For example, I cannot fathom not including the amazing Waves that’s available with their limited deluxe edition. Maybe it was finished too late for the album?

I’m holding out some hope that this was a demo that leaked, because I think a lot of this could be fixed with a remaster. The basic songs are good. Gimme Sympathy, for example, is fantastic. But it sounds like they weren’t having any fun at all recording it. It sounds rushed! Maybe this was the “especially intense experience for us making this record” Emily refers to in her post from 11/5.

But this song in particular is highly fixable. They might need to re-record the drums and the guitars, but just bring them up a lot. And then bring them up some more. Slow down the tempo a bit. Do it with about half as much keyboard, and no backup vocals.

Thank the lord this blog is not popular enough for them ever to see this post. I bet it’d be the most irritating thing ever! Particularly if this *was* a demo that leaked.

Anyway, I’m still looking forward to getting it when it’s released at the end of the month. I’m definitely still glad I paid for it; I think it’s clear judging from my last.fm that I owe them some money!

Just to follow up on my earlier debacle/discovery with PostCommitWebHooks, an Italian PHP coder seems to have picked up the script I posted to the Google thread and added to it considerably!

The script I wrote listens for updates from Google’s server and maintains a record of those updates. This coder’s script takes those updates and gets the actual changed files and maintains a local copy.

I can already think of a nice way to extend his update: write a script that presents that local cache of files as a single ZIP you can download. I suppose the reason they don’t offer that is because they want you to connect over SVN. But I think a lot of people might want to use the code but don’t want to bother checking it out, at least at first.

Anyway, moral of the story: open source is great.

New Metric album Fantasies is available for preorder. Way better than iTunes.

I think it’s ok to post this mp3 because it’s been available for free for some time from their site. Right?

Metric – Help I’m Alive

Finally, there’s a definitive list!
Via The Daily What

So I must have spent six (not kidding at all) hours today figuring this out, so I think it’s worth posting up here in case it spares anyone else similar OCDishness. I was working with Google Code today, trying to see what is what, and I came across a service called PostCommitWebHooks, which uses a new technology called Web Hooks for sites to update one another when something mutually-interesting happens. It employs an update mechanism called JSON (XML I hardly knew ye!) with HMAC hashes and whatever else, basically I was way out of my depth.

But this Google support page seemed so straightforward and clear-eyed about the whole thing that I thought it can’t be that bad. Of course the examples are in Python and Java and I wanted to use PHP but this individual was trying it too a month back and well ok.

So I got the thing set up, and Google’s site was talking to my site, and passing me the special HTTP_GOOGLE_CODE_PROJECT_HOSTING_HOOK_HMAC variable (not important). But the problem was the $_POST variables I was getting were empty. As in zero. And $_REQUEST didn’t have it, and there were no $_FILES, so where was the JSON? And that’s when I googled some a lot more and came across a thing I’ve never ever seen in all Seven Years of coding PHP, which is the existence of something called raw POST data. All you need is this:

file_get_contents(“php://input”)

This will show you the JSON data that Google is posting to your page. I know. I make it seem so easy!

Here’s a really useful way to read the web: a bookmarklet called Readability. With it, you can turn the most gunked-up ad-ridden website (eg WaPo) and strip it out so it’s like an e-book.

You can refresh to get out of readability mode.

Via Kottke.