Yesterday @simcup wrote on twitter about that he is currently downloading the whole Jamendo catalog of Creative Commons music.

Although I already knew Jamendo it never occurred to be to download their whole catalog. Since I am a fan of choice I immediately thought about how I could download the catalog too. Since the only clue was a cryptic uri-like text how to achieve that it suddenly sounded like a great idea to write a universal tool and release it as open-source. This tool should allow users to download the whole catalog and keep their local jamendo mirror in sync with the server. So anytime new artists, albums or tracks are added the user does not need to download them all again.

So the only thing I had as a starting point was that cryptic uri pointing me to something I’ve never heard of called Rythmbox. Turns out that this is a GNOME music player application which has Jamendo integration. After some clueless poking around I decided to take a look at the source of Rythmbox, especially the Jamendo module.

This module is written in python and quite clean to read. And just by looking at the first lines I came across the interesting fact that there is a almost daily updated XML dump of the Jamendo catalog available from Jamendo. Hurray! Since Jamendo wants developers to interact with the platform they decided to put a documentation online which allows anyone to write tools and stream and download tracks. After all the clues I found I finally ended up on this page.

So there are the catalog download, track stream and torrent uris necessary to download the catalog. Now the only thing that is needed is a tool which parses the XML and creates a nice folder structure for us.

Parsing XML in C# (my prefered programming language) is easy. Basically you can use a tool called XSD.exe and let it generate first the XSD from the XML and then ready-to-use C# classes from that XSD.

After doing all that actually reading the whole catalog into a useable form breaks down to just three lines of code:

Isn’t it great how modern frameworks take away the complexity of such tasks. At this point I’ve already parsed the whole catalog into my tool and only wrote three lines of code. The rest was generated automatically for me. The best of all – this also works on non-windows operating systems when you use mono.

When the XML data is parsed and available in a nice data structure it’s easy to iterate through all artists, all albums and all tracks and then download the actual mp3 or ogg. And that’s basically what my tool does. It takes the XML, parses it, and downloads. It will check before downloading if the track already exists and will only download those added since the last run.

Additionally since I am deeply involved into the development of the GraphDB graph database at sones I want to make use of the Jamendo data and the graph structure it poses. Since the directory structure my tool is generating is only one aspect how you could possibly look at the data it’s quite interesting to demonstrate the capabilities of GraphDB based on that data.

The idea behind the graph representation of the data is that you could start from almost any starting point imaginable. No matter if you you start from a single track and drill up into genre and artists, or if you start at a location and drill down to tracks.

So what the Downloader does in matters of GraphDB integration is that it outputs a GraphQL script which can be imported into an instance of GraphDB.

The sourcecode of my tool is available on github and released unter the BSD license – feel free to play with it and to contribute.

Source 1: http://www.jamendo.com
Source 2: https://github.com/bietiekay/JAMENDOwnloader

Am kommenden Freitag soll das Space Shuttle Endeavour zum letzen Mal und ein Space Shuttle zum vorletzten Mal abheben. Da will man dabei sein

Ich habe glücklicherweise gerade die Herren (und Damen?) von SpaceLiveCast entdeckt. Offenbar machen die schon eine ganze Weile Livestreams zu den verschiedenen Raumfahrt-Events.

P.S.: Wenn ich einen Wunsch frei hätte, wäre das, dass die Seite einen Video Podcast Feed anbietet….(wird Hilfe benötigt?)

Source 1: http://spacelivecast.de/
Source 2: http://www.raumfahrer.net
Source 3: http://spacelivecast.de/2011/04/29-04-ab-1900-uhr-sts-134-letzter-endeavour-flug/

In the dusk of Flash it’s nice to see that HTML 5 and JavaScript are here to bring small and fun games to our browsers.

“Z-Type was specifically created for Mozilla’s Game On. I immediately wanted to participate in the competition when I first heard of it, but the deadline seemed so far away that I didn’t bother to begin working on a game back then. Fast forward to this tweet announcing that the deadline was only one week away – it took me by surprise. I still hadn’t even began working on anything. The thought of just submitting my earlier game Biolab Disaster crossed my mind but was immediately dismissed again.”

Great sound, great graphics and in the higher levels quite difficult.

Source 1: http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/

Thank goodness I can uninstall X-Lite! At sones we are using a SIP based telephony solution. And therefore some times a SIP softphone application is needed along with the obligatory hardware SIP telephones. Till today the only half-working software I knew for that task was X-Lite. But a colleague told me today that there is a better software which not even looks better but also works better than X-Lite.

It’s called “Ekiga” and it’s a GTK based open source application which can run on Windows and Linux. It looks clean and therefore nice and works great.

A special tip from me: Abort the Welcome Wizard because the only thing it does is registering you with ekigas’ own services.

Source: http://ekiga.org/

After the last Open Movie Project “Bug Buck Bunny” – Sintel is the next short movie available for free download. Get it here.

“Sintel” is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.

“Sintel” commenced in May 2009, with producer Ton Roosendaal establishing a core team consisting of Colin Levy (director), David Revoy (concept art), Martin Lodewijk (story) and Jan Morgenstern (composer). In August script writer Esther Wouda was approached as a consultant, which resulted in her taking the responsibility for the entire screenplay. Esther then worked in close cooperation with Colin, David and Ton to deliver the final script early November. Meanwhile, Colin and David realized the first storyboards.

Based on a public call for artists – with over 150 respondents – the Durian artist team got established in July 2009. They first met in a pre-production week in Amsterdam in August, and all decided to join the project per October 1st. With the final movie budget still unknown, the target then still was to finish the film within 7 months, with a team of 6 artists and 2 developers. At that time the team still had the hopes to be able to realize the script in a 6-8 minute film.

In november, the Netherlands Film Fund approved on a substantial subsidy for Sintel, enough to extend the project to 10 months, with possible 1 or 2 extra artist seats in the final months. It was also by this time that breakdowns and animatic edits showed that the script had to be revised to become more compact, with a story structure using a flashback.

In the months after, Colin’s work on the Director’s Layout – 3D animatic shots – and final designs on the grand finale gradually made the movie longer, from 9 minutes in november, to almost 12 in May. Proper story telling, to absorb an audience with convincing characters and action just takes time!

With the highly anticipated extra funding from the Amsterdam Cinegrid – also funding a 4k resolution version – Ton finally could extend the team with 5 artists and a developer in March 2010. With 14 people the film then was completed for a first screening on July 18th in cinema Studio K in Amsterdam.
Three artists then stayed in Amsterdam working on final shot edits, lighting design, compositing, and on the impressive 2 minute film credits. The movie ended up with a total duration of 14m:48s, 888 seconds!

Watch it now:

Source 1: Elephants Dream
Source 2: Big Buck Bunny 
Source 3: Sintel
Source 3: Sintel Download

Since there are still 9 days to go till SXSW 2010 it’s a pleasure to give out a link to the completely unofficial torrents which old all mp3 files of almost all songs which are to be presented at this years SXSW:

“The SXSW® Music and Media Conference showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over eighty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW® Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature.”

Source 1: http://www.sxsw.com/music
Source 2: http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/2010

That’s great news for everyone interested in science and history. As it turns out Google and PopSci just made their entire 137-year archive available online… good times!

“We’ve partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”

Source: http://www.popsci.com/archives

“12 months,
a core team of dozens (with a network of thousands)
spanning 3 continents,
4 languages,
5 specialist teams,
countless sleepless nights…

It’s finally here.

Filmed in Sacramento, Portland, and Victoria by the Nine Inch Nails team, edited and produced by their fans, The Gift is a stunning work in 1080p High Definition video with 5.1 Surround Sound, multi-language subtitles, and artistically-driven ethics.”

You’re reading it right: the final production is ready to be downloaded. I am downloading it right now.

It’s a complete Nine Inch Nails live concert in full-hd. Free for all / Not for sale. Get it while it’s hot!

Source: http://thisoneisonus.org

Great stuff ahead – this is just the thing I would want to write if it’s not been written already. This tool is free and open source and it’s the perfect workaround for those usual cases when you want to download a podcast in your holiday and your apple branded device tells you “You can only download files up to 10 Megabyte over 3G connections” – You take your notebook, log into 3G, create a WiFi Hotspot with this tool and off you go.

“Over the last week some of you may have heard about Connectify. It’s an app that unleashes the “Virtual WiFi” and Wireless Hosted Network features of Windows 7 to turn a PC into a Wireless Access Point or Hot Spot. Well, I looked into what it would take to build such an app, and it really wasn’t that difficult since Windows 7 has all the API’s built in to do it. After some time of looking things up and referencing the “Wireless Hosted Network” C++ sample within the WIndows 7 SDK, I now have a nice working version of the application to release. I’m calling this project “Virtual Router” since it essentially allows you to host a software based wireless router from your laptop or other PC with a Wifi card. Oh, and did I mention that this is FREE and OPEN SOURCE!”

“The Wireless Network create/shared with Virtual Router uses WPA2 Encryption, and there is not way to turn off that encryption. This is actually a feature of the Wireless Hosted Network API’s built into Windows 7 and 2008 R2 to ensure the best security possible.
You can give your "virtual" wireless network any name you want, and also set the password to anything. Just make sure the password is at least 8 characters.”

Source: http://virtualrouter.codeplex.com/

This is just beautiful:

“Und ein weiterer Schritt im Free! Music! Contest wurde getan: Der Sampler steht nun zum Download zur Verfügung! Da die Rückfrage kam: Natürlich sind alle Stücke unter Creative Commons lizenziert.

Fast vier Stunden Musik waren eingereicht worden und am Ende stand eines fest: Mit einer einzelnen CD wären wir nicht in der Lage gewesen, die Qualität der Einsendungen entsprechend zu würdigen. Also verzichten wir auf ungefähr 70% des Gewinns und haben dafür 100% mehr feinste freie Musik. ”

Track-Listing

Source: musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de

…switch this website to another weblog software in the future. The dasBlog development isn’t exactly what I would call fast-paced. It even seems that there was no movement at all for the last year at all regarding new features.

I took a short look at a current WordPress installation we did for our Developer Website at sones – and I have to admit that feature-wise this WordPress is way beyond anything I could achieve in dasBlog anytime soon.

Additionally the fact that the skin of this site seems to be broken (especially for older browsers) I would have to do a skin-redesign – turns out that this is way easier in WordPress than it is in dasBlog.

While trying out the new Mozilla Weave I came across the nice interface the guys built into their sync service. Funny messages included.

Source: http://labs.mozilla.com/weave/

One of our two DSL lines in the office is provided by QSC. So far the decision to go with QSC was one of the best since I deal with Internet providers. These guys at QSC are just brilliant. Great support, great service, great pricing!

They even sent me a notice that there will be a planned maintenance downtime in more than a week. They do the maintenance on a saturday morning. When it’s unlikely that anyone will miss the uplink. (Since we got two, we won’t actually miss it… it’s just slower)

If you got it, it’s easy. If you’re starting from scratch it ain’t as easy. We were in need of such a Username+Password Authentification so I started googling around.

I found several articles but had to mash it all together in a trial-and-error session. Now that I am enlightened I want to share my knowledge:

Step 1: Implement an UserNamePasswordValidator class and override the Validate method.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IdentityModel.Tokens;
using System.IdentityModel.Selectors;

namespace sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting
{
    public class UserNamePasswordAuthentification: UserNamePasswordValidator
    {

        public override void Validate(string userName, string password)
        {
            if ((userName != "Username") || (password != "Password"))
            {
                throw new SecurityTokenException("Validation Failed!");
            }
        }
    }
}

Step 2: Edit the App.config file to enable the previously implemented UsernamePasswordValidator.

    <bindings>
      <basicHttpBinding>
        <binding name="CustomAuthentication">
          <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">
            <transport clientCredentialType="Basic" proxyCredentialType="Basic"/>
          security>
        binding>
      basicHttpBinding>
    bindings>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="SecurityBehavior">
          <serviceCredentials>
            <userNameAuthentication
            userNamePasswordValidationMode="Custom"
            customUserNamePasswordValidatorType="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.UserNamePasswordAuthentification, PandoraDB_WebServiceHost_UsernamePasswordAuth"/>
          serviceCredentials>
        behavior>
      serviceBehaviors>
    behaviors>
    <services>
      <service behaviorConfiguration="SecurityBehavior" name="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.PandoraDatabaseHost">
        <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomAuthentication"
          name="ep1" contract="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.IPandoraDatabaseHost" />
      service>
    services>

In this example the ServiceHost will use no server SSL certificate and therefor allow normal http access instead of just using https ssl. You can configure that behavior with the <security mode=”TransportCredentialOnly”> line. Just change there and define an apropriate certificate and you’re good to go with https / ssl.

I’ve seen the launch of PopFly two years ago. And now I am going to see the landing

“Unfortunately, on August 24, 2009 the Popfly service will be discontinued and all sites, references, and resources will be taken down. At that time, your access to your Popfly account, including any games and mashups that you have created, will be discontinued.”

Now somebody please tell the world that the code of popfly will be released in some way so that other people can learn and work with it. That would be great. Oh if we just wouldn’t have that many lawyers on this planet.

Source 1: http://popflyteam.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!51018025071FD37F!336.entry
Source 2: http://www.popfly.com/

Oh dear. Another hyped protocol/platform from Google… oh wait. It’s not from Google. It’ all started in Xerox PARC…

There are several papers that describe what Google now claims to have developed…

left: Xerox PARC Paper; right: Google Wave

Conclusion: Go and read old Papers. As it turns out almost all newly hyped things have been described in papers from years ago.

Source 1: http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform
Source 2: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/215585.215706

I had to transfer some data the last days and I wanted to do it fast, encrypted and using only one tcp port. SFTP is one of those protocols that come in handy in these cases.

Since the machine that would host the SFTP service is a Windows machine I reached out to find a free, reliable and easy to install and use SFTP Server.

I found Core FTP mini-sftp-server. It’s a small download of just one .exe file. When you start it up it’ll show the dialog above. You can configure username, password, port and path. Click “Start” and off you go. Works as advertised.

Source: http://www.coreftp.com/server/

“”Being a geek means being so interested in something that you don’t care whether or not it’s cool.”

THE SOCIETY FOR GEEK ADVANCEMENT was founded upon the principles that we should all embrace our inner and outer geek and have fun while doing it. As individuals who love learning, innovating and believe in possibility as well as change, the second step of responsibility is to “be the geek that keeps on giving”. As a member of SGA, we work together as a global community to provide the tools and help others realize their true potential too!”