2007 January (2)

Gernika January 15, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : Music , 1 comment so far

The song of ‘Gernika’ which I recorded over the holidays and reviewed with friends from a mailing list is now as finished as it will ever be in its present form and can be listened to or downloaded from a page on this blog, where you will also find background story, lyrics, chords, a translation into Basque language and more. I hope you’ll appreciate the song or at least find it interesting or informative or something.

The version on Sellaband is slightly lower quality due to upload limitations and because Myspace has an even smaller limit, I had to split the track into parts one and two.

So we’re just waiting for Paul to come back from his honeymoon and update Splinters…

Nationalisation of the telecom and power companies by Chavez in Venezuela January 11, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : politics , 1 comment so far

An in depth article published on Socialist Party Australia’s blog (comments switched off) analyses Hugo Chavez’s declared intentions to move towards a “Socialist Bolivarian republic of Venezuela”.

“The nation should recover its ownership of strategic sectors,” Chavez said. “All of that which was privatised let it be nationalised.” The scorn poured on Chavez in the international press is a measure of the fear of Imperialism for a radicalisation in Venezuela and its effects on the rest of Latin America.

The announcement to nationalise Electricidad de Caracas, CANTV and place the lucrative oil projects in the Orinoco basin under the control of the government comes after the re-election of Chavez for a third term last December.

Polls quoted in The Chicago Tribune suggest the masses are behind him, but will he move decisively enough to overpower reaction?

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted three weeks before Chavez was re-elected Dec. 3 found 62 percent of those asked supported nationalizing companies when in the national interest–a result that paralleled Chavez’s victory with nearly 63 percent of the votes.

Song review process January 7, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, Music, blogs and community , add a comment

A few days before the end of the year, I put out a call on this blog for people who would be willing to help criticise my new song, Gernika. Then after a day or so of nobody from the blog responding, I posted a message to the stormcock mailing list community where I know there are lots of musicians with similar tastes, worldview and backgrounds. Within no time I had the five volunteers I wanted, (two of whom responded on the blog) and then after I tried to close down the call, another four.

The question posted to the list was slightly different to that on the blog

I’d like to ask a favour of a couple of volunteers please.

All you have to do is listen to a draft version of a song I’m
intending to submit to Splinters later, and let me know what you
think. The feedback might help me decide what to do differently in a
final edit, or re-record the song, or even rewrite it. If you can
respond with any kind of feedback over the next few days that would be
great. Just let me know and I’ll send you the mp3.

Cheers, and best wishes to all for 2007.

After discovering that emailing a >10 mb file doesn’t work for everyone, the first two reviews I got back were brilliant. My days at ultraversity had led me to expect that I might eventually get one or two useful commments, but a lot more just saying stuff like “nice song, well done” or “It won’t open in Word, what am I doing wrong?” but my sophisticatd music loving peers were quite comfortable with the idea of writing serious critique, often quite specific, even including concrete suggestions. Ten individual responses rolled in. I felt that the encouragement, confirmation and multiple ears inspired me to strive quite a bit harder for a higher standard than I would have done on my own, re-recording the main guitar and vocals in a way that could be mixed more flexibly and performing multiple passes of tweaking the sound levels. As is often the case with peer review, the reviewers seemed to appreciate the process as well.

So all in all I spent the best part of two whole days during the break and about two weeks elapsed time on this. I was uplifted by the process and I’m pleased with the result which is a single 8 minute 35s mp3 file and a blog page ( to be released in about week’s time)

As I wrote to sum up:

This whole process of getting feedback from stormcockers has been
pretty amazing as far as I’m concerned. I had no idea that so many
would be willing to listen carefully and write detailed intelligent
critiques together with positive and precise suggestions, some of
which I took onboard.
….
Thanks again to all the people who helped with this, making it not
just a contribution TO splinters but to some extent OF the group, and
I feel that’s something which could be repeated or developed perhaps
as a theme within Splinters 4. With today’s software we could also
construct multi-track music out of asynchronous performances from
around the planet, with each producing their own version of a final
edit, which could be very interesting.

PS

This may become a bit of a pain, but the correct title of the song is
“Gernika” - the local name of the town, not the painting.

Old blog migrated January 7, 2007

Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , add a comment

One of the things I got around to over the break was to migrate my previous blog into distributedresearch.net. The old blog was on a Movable Type installation set up by Tom Smith and hosted at the now defunct ultralab. It was unavailable for a week or so and who knows when they might switch everything off forever, so the migration was well overdue.

First I tried to export the entire text using MTs inbuilt export. This created an enormous file which was 98% unpublished spam trackbacks, so I wrestled with the despamming interface for some time and tried again. Once the offline period started I had to make do with what I had, which involved some manual text editing.

Then I installed Movable Type on my server, spent some time trying to get it to work with the particular version of PHP here and gave it up as a bad job. In comes Wordpress 2 instead, which happily imported all of the posts and comments, and can be maintained or even developed if I feel like it. All that remained was to start moving across the image and movie files where they had been uploaded to MT, and then edit the posts to point to the new location.

Perhaps the SH-Autolink plugin would do the lot in one go, or a global find and replace within the MySQL database.

Anyway, the new version of the old blog is now at http://distributedresearch.net/blog2/