Dendriet, Haags netwerk voor electronische muziek

While PC users need to spend processing power on virus guards, we Mac users live in the wild. "OSX users are unprotected" is what I read somewhere. Are we?

It seems there was a osx virus active two months ago. You needed to have either 10.2.5 or .6 installed in order to be able to run the virus, and it is likely to have been killed in the security updates :-(. The virus was an applescript that got installed through "safari" and sent 100 spams through "mail" on restart. I restart my osx ibook say... at least once a month. So this must have been one hell of an active virus...

So... a virus in 2004... That makes a total of 1 (one) this year. If we needed to express this rise in % compared to the figures of the last decade, we would have a astronomical figure. From 0 to 1 is a nearly infinate rise. Still, selling anti virus software for the mac is a fraude, afaic, until there is really something to chech for. Until then, a virus checker may only be installed on OSX for religious reasons, and is thereby the OSX counterpart of ''Atheism'' in terms of functionality.

PC people have to face 800 virus releases per month, of which 2 manage to infect millions. What are the disease, the symptom, and the cure in this case? PC users seem to feel the virusses are the disease, and the virus checker is the cure. I am of the opinion that the the OS is the disease, the virusses are the symptom, and the cure is to switch to something unix based. (N.B. FreeBSD hasn't had a single security leak in 7 years.) The virus checker is not the cure for Windows at all. The need for a virus checker that needs to be upgraded for every single brand of virus that came to excisting, THAT equals being unprotected. See the news items about virusses of our ISP xs4all: (nl) (en)

Here's a list of Linux distributions that can boot from cd, and leave your windows installation alone. And if you are reluctant to switch OSses, please do see that Windows is not your PC as such, but merely a program to access your hardware. It's a sonic+graphic representation of the data on your harddrive, cd, or webpage. It's virtual. It's not immoral to kill virtual entities. In fact, I think you should. Enter the next level. The odd thing about this get-a-better-OS-game is that the next level is easier. "Tsssytsyk, you got the body armour."

(as the commenting system doesn't load in this windoze computer, I'm commenting on the mustard Here). My Grand dad was Gerrit Krooshof. He died in 1980 I believe. But not to long ago, I got a phone call from Gerrit Krooshof. Straaaange. He must be a far relative, as all Krooshofs decend from one Krooshoff born in 1720. We had a look in the family tree, but we couldn't find my roots in those of Gerrit. It was this Gerrit Krooshof that invited me over to the 18th century roots of our family, here in the far east.
So here I was between the hintschijf (K3) and the golden oldies. I took editing as a theme for my 45 minutes of relative fame. While taking a route from dusty basslines of Curtis Mayfield, to Invader Zim (poop dog in the house) to Snoop Dogg and Pharrell, to my own montage-music, I raised some eyebrows here and there. I continued with Jay-Z+Beatles=grey album (with the single one track of that album that actually brought something new in the coarse of editing), then to India for a Bollywood production, working my way up to "Toxic" by Britney Spears, which combines all these themes in a single number one hit. Yet I ended up being fully out of range here.
I explained our music as the live variant of this edit music, as we play normal instruments, yet we will not pop out of the PA unedited. And I explained our computer music in terms of a struggle writing software and making equipment that allows fast editing and avoiding the office interface.
Gerrit Krooshof's attitude towards radio isn't that far from our attitude in weblogging. It's the realtime variant. Friendly guy. Nice afternoon.
Er hangt hier een briefje: "Wilt u de consumPties die u aan de gasten presenteert in de agenda vermelden?" Bij deze. (het programma wordt NU afgekondigd, so Ernst, you can start editing my typos :-)

Note from the editor: consider it done Dave... (only one "P" has been added to the text by the way.)
Dave: funny. And I found an obsolete "D".
Ernst: ooops sorry !

Well it is about one hour after it was gonna happen (sorry man).

Dave, our great dendriet guru and webmaster, was going to be a guest in a radio show at radio Borculo.... (what?). Yeah beats me how he ended up there, but then again with Dave: expect the unexpected!
What/where/how he was invited for (it), I don't know... I only know that the man running the show is called Gerrit Krooshof, and no he's (according to Dave himself) not related to our Dave....

Update: I have found a Webpage for the program Dave was on. The radiostation is called Radio Berkelstad.

There's a site called 'zoekmp3.nl', and they tell you that you can only add mp3s to their database that aren't copyrighted. I can tell you exactly how much mp3s that is:
None at all.
Every work is copyrighted. If I write something, nobody else can call it their own. Nobody can use it without permission. Stemra, Riaa and publishers are nothing more than companies that give user permissions in bulk. Their user permission statement is on every cd that you bought. It says that you cannot play it in public, and you cannot copy it.
Public performance needs a seperate permission. The Buma is the bulk permission deal company in the .nl. They arrange deals for 95% of all music. They control the prices.
Copying is another issue. The stemra user licence simply says you can't copy. This is overruled by the law, that states you can make a copy for home use and for backup.
There are no clear rules for copying for other people, or backing up for yourself and sell the original. So p2p is in a no-where land.

Since we didn't sell the exploitation rights of our works to the BUMA, we should make our own user licence. We can add that to our mp3 section, and into the mp3 tags.

By downloading or playing this music file, you agree to the following:

- It is legal to download this music file.
- It is legal to make copies for backups.
- This licence may not be removed from the tags.
- It is not legal to lower the quality of this file (keep frequency response and bitrate as it is)
- If you sell this music file, you ought to send us 50% of the profit.
- Sharing this file over a p2p network is legal. If you make money by doing so, you owe us 50%. Contact us via http://www.dendriet.nl dendriet-NOSPAM@dendriet.nl
- This music file cannot be included on any commercially released album without our permission. Contact us via http://www.dendriet.nl dendriet-NOSPAM@dendriet.nl
- If you use a sample of this music file, you ought to send us a high-resolution copy of your music and you owe us a fair deal of your profit, depending on how much your music relies on ours. Contact us via http://www.dendriet.nl dendriet-NOSPAM@dendriet.nl
- If you used a sample of this music file in your music, you ought to release your music under this licence as well. You cannot release it under a RIAA or a BUMA/Stemra licence, or a licence similar to those.

Please comment on the above. I must have overlooked something.
We can add the licence to the mp3 tags.
The email address mentioned doesn't exist yet.

The current user licences for music recordings are not up to date anymore. We survived the "hometaping kills music"-era by adding a tax to empty disks and cassettes. But this is not the solution anymore.
- a tape had a more or less fixed length, but the amount of music that can be stored on a cd depends ultra (Dave's humour is so special... Ernst) on the compression method: from 1.25 to 10+ hours. How do you tax that?
- with the coming of iPods and big external HD's, I notice a lot of people use a dedicated HD for media files.
- I would oppose paying tax on an HD, as i use them mostly for my own work.

So,
I wondered, would it be a good idea to charge uploaders, c.q. limewire/kazaa users as if they are local radiostations? Each limewire/kazaa user can be said to have 2 listeners on any given time. These listeners are hometapers, that's correct. So work out a fair charge for p2p activities, and give these people an option to decriminalize themselves.

The dock is not a very good program launcher. It's to small, magnification sucks but is needed for better feedback to tell you where your mouse is, icons keep changing screen-position according to the amount of open apps, it's not a good idea to use the dock as a launcher and a place to minimize documents into. That said, it's easy to make a wishlist.
- a classic apple-menu with subfolders as a launcher.
- a minimize-in-place feature
- the dock can then be cleared totally, so it will be a good program switcher.

I tried "Himmelbar" today. It says it restores the olschool apple menu. People on the web said they liked it. I don't. I have the feeling that this program was spammed into versiontracker by it's developer. In order of increasing annoyance:
- It's at the wrong side of the screen, which is stupid because the subfolders open the wrong way. I prefer reading english from left to right.
- Its icon looks german to me as it seems somebody shot a hole in my menubar. The icon casts a shadow on application windows.
- By default the program adds ALL apps that live on your computer into 3 folders in the menu (applications, utilities, develloper). Deutsche Gruntlichkeit in action.
- Its rootfolder can't be configured!
- It doesn't show aliases. Meditate on this one if you do not immediately see how utterly stupid this is.

There are some alternatives, but they need panther or have comments like:
"Great software! It does what I want, but it keeps crashing the finder."

because: http://www.greytuesday.org/ and these are sort of open source remixes. I'm not sure wether we should host the grey album. Certainly not on my school's server.
What do you think?

We didn't decide to have this site hosted by xs4all for no reason!
http://www.webwereld.nl/nieuws/17427.phtml (thanks, Ernst)
(BTW, I did a suggestion for a better, locally hosted, weblog script, so hopefully xs4all will also be the motor behind this weblog.)

While Stg. Brein, our little RIAA, could use this site to spot illegal mp3 files, they just want to shut it down. Is it illegal to link to sites that link to illegal content? Does it matter why you link? Is it illegal to point at coffeeshops?
http://www.nu.nl/news.jsp?n=279401&c=50 (I know. Linking to nu.nl is lame, especially on a english log.)

This is not an error, there's nothing wrong with your screen. This, ... is Dutch.
Webwereld schrijft: Van Dam: "Wat nou als ik achter mijn deur een stapel cd's en een brander neerleg en vervolgens de deur openzet? Is dat dan openbaarmaking?" Donner: "De voordeur openzetten is geen openbaarmaking." Van Dam: "Als je dat doortrekt naar internet, is het gebruik van Kazaa en eDonkey dus ook toegestaan."
Later kwam Donner op zijn eerdere uitspraak terug. "Ik begrijp inmiddels waar het bij Kazaa over gaat. Als je de deur openzet en iedereen uitnodigt om binnen te komen, kom je in de buurt van openbaarmaking." via ijsqueen

Do you know?

Today I spent my time (actually my employer's time) at the more than 500 years old village church in Rhoon (just outside Rotterdam, under the toxic smoke of Pernis). I was there to attend a recording session of Berio's violin duets, for my work at NDT. The recording engineer brought along an interesting assistent. His name is Fokke van Saane. Everywhere the guy comes he records impuls responses !!! He collected quite some HERE. They are all usable in Altiverb, and probably some of you (Dave?) are already using some of his IR's......

And don't forget my radio madness tonight at 23.00 at Tonka.

Jürgen Michaelis has written a nice article about neural sound synthesis, and has also made a hybrid (part analog, part digital) neural sound synthesis device (unfortunately no sound example). It may be a nice method for cool dsp complexity!

Everyone who knows me a bit knows I have a knack for extreme music.... And maybe Norwegian Black Metal in particular, I could not resist posting this here.

Just a reminder: 23.00 the 10th of february..

"ctrl-t versus e. vanderloo
the two sonologists meet again to heat up the hague with a open ended live improvisation.
Listen to it on 104.2 fm (only in The Hague) or via the live stream from http://www2.radiotonka.nl/."

Check the archive of this radio show.

I was browsing for images to illustrate my point of view in a conversation about how just and tempered tuning systems collide. (zie alhier (Dutch)) I came across John Gzowski's selfmade guitars. It's a pity he has such short sound examples of his instruments and music, but I did find one big file. It has nice music and beautiful moving images of ice dendrites.

Bram, the brain behind Bittorrent, writes interesting articles about maintainability of program code (which is also important for us, when we write in pseudo-intuitive languages like Max/MSP) and happens to have an interesting peer: Raph. Raph has some interesting posts about processors, AltiVec and SSE2 , not from the consumers- but from the programmers point of view. Raph also discusses what is good about bittorrent, it's legal issues, and how the code can be used in other applications, like in rss. (And he has a different association with the name Quake... A more peaceful one, at least.)

Sony and BMG's scary music-industry-juggernaut that is about to appear is having a slight delay......Sorry in dutch

Some people think coffeeshops (that have grass as their major trade) are legal in the Netherlands. They are, but they are not. They have what we call an illegal backdoor. If this raises any questions: the Dutch coffeeshops law is comparable to the Canadian P2P laws. The Dutch law on downloading is different from the Canadian. Need I repost that link?

It took the music industry 7 years to figure this one out. Coca Cola started selling mp3 files in England last week. Earlier in this log, we stated that the RIAA made such agressive advertisements because is not so much the violations of copyrights that matters to them, it's the frustration of control over the market slipping out of their hands. Via initiatives like OD2 and iTunes, and now Coca Cola, it seems the music buisiness is grabbing a hold again. But Pepsi made a move that revealed the true face of "The Industry": The are giving mp3's away! So the goal is to sell coke, not music... Or in Apples case: selling iPods. In the end it comes down to "selling".
The price of an mp3 at the BUMA seems to be negociable, but no less then 20 euro cents. That is appearantly affordable in a pepsi marketing strategy. Musicians in the UK are complaining in the fora and newsgroups. "I never new that signing a record deal includes promoting coke".
Source in dutch: 3voor12

Meanwhile, Yeahronimo (who sells mp3's in .nl for 1 euro or over) has 4 albums in their electronic section: a clownsband, ELO, Kraftwerk and Johnny Cash. Need I comment?
Do like their styles menu? (hint: it has 3 entries for R'n'B: "Pop/R&B", "R&B" and Rnb. You can safely check out the menus without being zapped to other pages.)
Do you feel their mood-list is complete?
What do you think about their pricing?

Today at nu.nl. Maybe peer2peer activities are not as evil as the big record companies thought to start with...

The website of Tatiana Koleva (an excellent percussionist) pointed me to this beautiful place called Grasland.

Yesterday while going to Steim in amsterdam (for the F. Lopez lecture-see a few posts down) I ran into Mr. Jan T. (a.k.a ctrl-t). He invited me to join one of his radio sessions for Radio Tonka in the Hague (104.2 FM for you locals). The session will be on tuesday the 10th of February at 23.00 central european time. The session will probably be completely improvised on two laptops...most likely another supercollider vs. Max/MSP meeting..... Tonka also provides a stream on their website.

With mereley one download per band for free, this site is not as revolutionairy as advertised.
UPDATE: this site is the only music-audio streaming site that I visited in the last few days, and so I suspect this site of doing the following: My iTunes master-playlist was loaded with over a 100 entries of streaming songs. They were added randomly: The range was wide, from popular to classic. It also included stuff that I particulairy hate, like Vivaldi's quatro stagioni pizza and a certain Bach piece that reminds me of cheese commercials. So: Betterpropaganda is bad. Annoy customers, and you will loose them before you won them.
@apple (in vain): don't make programs scriptable over the www, please!