Gary Robinson's Rants

Christmas

At this time of year, I think of the John Lennon lyric, "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?"

This year I feel very good. My sister and her husband and son are visiting, Goombah is having an exciting start; my wife and kids are happy and healthy.

I hope you, Dear Reader, are happy and healthy and I wish you a wonderful Christmas with family and friends, and an exciting new year!

And for another view of Christmas, which I have held in some years:

Now that Christmas is at our throats again, let me extend my sincere hope that my readers can survive the nightmare of the next few days with as little psychic, gastro-intestinal, and familial anxiety as possible.[Andrew Sullivan]

Diesel soot major global warming factor

This is both fascinating and a seemingly very important discovery.

NASA scientists say soot, mostly from diesel engines, is causing as much as a quarter of all observed global warming by reducing the ability of snow and ice to reflect sunlight. [CNN]

Goombah back

Goombah's servers should be back operating normally now -- let us know if you have any problems. However, we will focus for a while now on making sure we don't have outages related to disk space again. As pointed out earlier on this blog, there are reasons we consider this to be the 0.22 beta! :)

Testing NetNewsWire for posting

I had a lot of problems using NetNewsWire for posting to TypePad before, but there's a new release of NetNewsWire, so I'm trying again.

Update: Nope, NewNewsWire is NotReadyForPrimeTime yet when it comes to TypePad posting. It is (at least) unable to download my category info from TypePad. Back to using TypePad's web interface.

Oooops

We ran out of space on the server for Goombah, and that precipitated a further snafu which will make the server-based aspects of Goombah (including blogging) unavailable at least until tomorrow.

Sorry!

Blogged songs

I've blogged some songs on my Goombah blog.

Real sues Microsoft, alleges monopoly abuse

"We're accusing Microsoft of engaging in a broad range of predatory practices to protect their operating system monopoly and to try to create a new monopoly in the digital media space," said David Stewart, deputy general counsel for RealNetworks, in an interview.

RealNetworks accuses Microsoft of unlawful tactics including product bundling, restrictive licensing, exclusive dealing, predatory pricing, refusing to sell unbundled operating systems and discriminatory disclosure and withholding of information needed to interoperate with the Windows operating system, according to a copy of the complaint.[MacWorld]

Good for them! Based on history, of course, it seems unlikely that the courts will offer any significant relief no matter how well Real proves its case.

Two major music rulings

A US court said that the recording industry's methods to find music swappers are not allowed by the law.

In a separate ruling, the Dutch Supreme Court decided that the popular file-sharing program, Kazaa, is not breaking the law. [BBC]

iChat room

As an experiment, I'm starting an iChat room named "Goombah" for people who want to discuss Goombah. From the File menu in iChat, select "Go to chat..." and enter "Goombah". Also you should be able to click this link although that may bring up the your AIM client rather than your iChat client, if you have an AIM client.

It looks like we'll hit 500 users today or tomorrow, which is as many as we plan to accept for this beta phase, so if you want to check it out, now's the time!

Goombah updated

We have a new update to Goombah out as of last night. (For any new readers of this blog, Goombah is our product for creating communities of people with similar tastes for purposes of recommendation and discussion, based on music listening history data stored in Apple's iTunes software on OS X.) We also have a new release notes page.

One thing to check out is the Adventurousness slider in Goombah:Preferences:Options. This is an important feature (and one we should perhaps make more prominent in the UI). Slide it to the left, and you'll get recommendations that have a broad consensus of approval among your neighbors. As you slide it to the right, recommendations will be more and more weighted to being sensitive to the tastes of individual people -- the farther you go, the more influence is derived from a single person playing a song more frequently than she plays other songs.

That brings me to another point -- Goombah is not based on music ratings. It's based on a probabilistic analysis of the frequency with which you play various songs. So there is no effort involved in using Goombah -- if simply looks at your iTunes data to see what you've been listening to, and finds others with similar tastes.