scottandrew.com

Lanois!

I'm all charged up to go to South By Southwest Music 2003 now that it's been announced that Daniel Lanois will be giving the keynote this year (hey look, they've finally gotten his website together). I've bought certain albums based solely on the fact that Lanois produced them, or had a hand in the production.

Add to this the fact that confirmed performers for 2003 include Julie and Buddy Miller, Lucinda Williams and Willie Nelson, and you've got one very happy me.

No word yet as to whether yours truly will be performing at SXSW 2003 as part of the regular showcases. Usually they use acts like me to plug the gaps in the coffeehouse shows; I figure I'm probably in the will-call pile along with a zillion other hopefuls. Eh, the fact that I was able to get a package out at all is enough of a victory for me.

Oh yeah, and then there's that whole interactive thing, too.

Microquake

I just felt this puppy roll under my feet a few minutes ago. Strange. It feels and sounds just like a strong winding slamming the side of the building, and then the shock waves ripple underneath.

Where Have You Been?

- Attended the Peter Gabriel show in San Jose. High points: a subdued version of Mercy Street (from So) that began with a startling bit of acapella chorus, followed by Growing Up (from Up) during which Gabriel chased guitarist David Rhodes around the stage while inside a huge, bouncing hamster ball. And man, that Tony Levin. He's my hero.

- Had a late dinner with some of the mod_pubsub organizers in Sunnyvale last week (we decided to call it the first "mod_pubsub Users Group" meeting). I'm considering writing up a "busy developer's guide" to mod_pubsub, similar in format to Eric Kidd's XML-RPC how-to. Applications are already starting to sprout, like Mike Dierkin's AmazonPop, which displays the top salesranked Amazon items as a list that updates in realtime -- watch for a few minutes and you'll see items climb and fall. I'm conceiving a browser-based outliner tool for workflow that, instead of polling a file every few seconds, instead pushes node-level update notifications to the client. The developer list is growing, and includes some fairly notable members.

- Braved the nasty weather to attend the Creative Commons launch party at SOMArts in San Francisco. I'm licensing the Walkingbirds' MP3 files under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which permits file sharing and allows derivative works (such as the one I did with Shannon) with attribution and for non-commercial purposes. Essentially, it's a KaZaa-friendly copyright. CC has a great short movie (1.5 Mb, Flash) that explains how their licenses complement traditional copyright.

...and thanks to everyone who wrote in about my problem with Microsoft's XMLHTTP object. Apparently, it's a semi-documented bug. A lot of good workaround suggestions, but unfortunately none of them worked.

readyState

Microsoft's XMLHTTP object is an ActiveX component that lets you perform HTTP requests. The object has four different states that it cycles through when performing a request. One of those states is called "interactive" and is decribed as such (from the MSDN documentation):

(3) INTERACTIVE
Some data has been received. You can call responseBody
and responseText to get the current partial results.

...meaning that at that point you should be able to examine the contents of the response so far. Let's try this, shall we?

var xmlHTTP = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
xmlHTTP.onreadystatechange = handleStateChange;

function handleStateChange()
{        
    if (xmlHTTP.readyState == 3)
    {
        alert(xmlHTTP.responseText);
    }
}

xmlHTTP.open("POST","/some/uri",true);
xmlHTTP.send();

Execution of this code produces an error in the handler:

The data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available.

...which troubles me greatly. Waiting until readyState is 4 (complete) works perfectly, but there's an added complication: the URI /some/uri establishes a persistent connection, which means that unless the connection is terminated by the script or the server, readyState will always be 3 (interactive). According to the docs, I should be able grab the incomplete response from the server at this time, but apparently not. Possible reasons:

• the MSDN documentation is a big fat lie incorrect
• the XMLHTTP object has a huge buffer to fill before it will make the response available
• the object needs to see some sort of delimiter, like a null byte, as a signal to make the response text available
• I'm horribly misunderstanding the whole thing

UPDATE 3/4/2004: many. many people have written me to ask if I have found a workaround since I first posted this. I'm sorry to say that I have not.

Reactive Endpoints

So I've been keeping one eye trained on some of the blogfeeds coming out of the Supernova 2002 "It's All About Decentralization, Baby!" conference this week. Some of the details of Jeremy Allaire's remote video presentation (via Flash, no less) caught my attention. Allaire's all hot for "rich clients" -- consumer-end applications that leverage Web services and broadband. This is how Flash MX is being positioned. Flash began as a cool way to do vector animations in the browser; now it's got scripting, a GUI library, socket connectivity and XML capabilities to boot. Flash is now a platform that can now bore a hole through the Web to your desktop, bypassing the inconsistencies of browsers and whatever OS-lock might exist. A lot of people knock Flash because of the way it's been abused. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it now.

Not that I'm chucking it all for ActionScript. In fact, I'm doing more DHTML work now than I ever have. But it's got me thinking about how what were once mute clients are evolving to stateful, reactive endpoints. That's something we DHTML twiddlers have been talking about for years now, beyond mere GUI: the concept of browser-as-runtime. Mozilla has it. IE has it. Faith in the browser as a application platform is starting to make a comeback, as evidenced by the works of HakmanPeachey and Muse.net. It's pretty exciting.

Meanwhile, word of the mod_pubsub project is starting to percolate through blogspace.

Sounds Like...

Something interesting: the top search terms used by visitors in the "Sounds Like" field of the CDBaby search engine. Well, interesting to me, anyway.

Radio

Apparently, a Walkingbirds tune has been getting some sort of airplay at an NPR affiliate in Pennsylvania. WVIA FM looks like they play a lot of MP3 material combed from the Web (although mostly local to PA); I'm trying to contact someone at the station and confirm, maybe send them a thank-you note and a promo CD. If I'm lucky, maybe someone reading this can hook me up.

The record is now available at CDBaby as well as Mixonic, and I'll post something here once Amazon starts to carry it. It is with great nail-biting trepidation that I point out that you can write a review of the Walkingbirds at the CDBaby site.

Meanwhile, I'm looking for more weblogs written by musicians, preferably struggling, unsigned ones like Shannon and Mark so I have a wider circle to commiserate with. Send 'em my way and I'll post a list here.