If you’re a Coltrane fan, check this out. Thanks to my friend Vic Atkins for the link.

Via Slashdot, a story about how the digital fingerprint used by CDDB to identify the title, artist and other information about music tracks in iTunes was used to uncover a musical fraud:

The recordings of a British concert pianist who found fame in the last years of her life have been exposed as hoaxes – by Apple’s iTunes music player.

Joyce Hatto died in June 2006, having become a cause célèbre with fans of classical piano in the last years of her life. A series of recordings showed her masterful command of a wide range of composers including Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Dukas and more.

Last week, a critic at the Gramophone magazine got [a] surprise when he put a Hatto recording of Lizt’s 12 Transcendental Studies into his computer. The iTunes player identified the disc as being recorded by another pianist, Lászlo Simon. He dug out the Simon album and found it sounded exactly the same as the Hatto one.

iTunes had stumbled on a hoax. To identify albums it calculates a ‘discid’ from the duration of the tracks and then connects to the Compact Disc Database online. The Gramophone critic tried another disc – Hatto playing Rachmaninov – and again iTunes identified it as belonging to someone else. Again, the named recording – by Yefim Bronfman – sounded no different.

I’ve seen a good deal of research in recent history dealing with the automatic detection of plagiarism, or of the unauthorized use of digital images on the web. I would guess that the RIAA and their cronies even use technology along these lines to track down copyrighted music and movies available for download (illegally) on file-sharing sites. But this particular application of the web, and how it all came about by accident, is just fascinating to me.

When you’re applying for a new account name or screen name, and the system keeps telling you that your various requested names have already been claimed — even after you just start making up nonsense words in desparation — do you ever have the suspicion that they’re just screwing around with you?

I’ve posted this question to the mailing list but I might as well ask it here too, in case any of my three or four readers know the answer. Suppose I have a method that will yield to a block if one is given:

def try(x, y, z)   # ... do some other stuff first ...   yield self if block_given? end

Such that you can call it like so:

obj.try(1, 2, 3) { |recv| ... do something with recv ... }

Now suppose that I create an alias to this method, for the purpose of overriding how it’s called, e.g.

alias old_try try def try(hash)   old_try(hash[:x], hash[:y], hash[:z]) end

If someone calls this new and improved version of try and provides a block, is there any way for me to somehow pass that block down into oldtry without actually modifying the method signature for oldtry? I had thought maybe there was some trickery I could do with the binding for the “outer” method call (i.e. the one to the new version of try) but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I usually don’t notice these things, but today’s IMDb Daily Poll question caught my eye:

Who would win in a fight: Abigail Breslin or Dakota Fanning?

For awhile I thought I was the only one who found Dakota Fanning annoying and — dare I say it? — a little creepy, but it seems like I’m seeing a lot of Dakota backlash lately. How did her managers manage to let things get this way? By the way, if you missed seeing Amy Poehler in the “Dakota Fanning Show” on SNL last week, catch it at YouTube.

P.S. I voted for Dakota. I mean, I loved Little Miss Sunshine, but if push came to shove I could see Dakota fighting dirty before Abigail.

Merlin Mann has just announced his involvement (as a member of the advisory board) with Stikkit, which looks like a really interesting new web application. I am still watching their screencasts and trying to figure out how (if) I could make use of this, but I’m already especially interested in how they extract data (like contact information, event dates, and such) from freeform text. I do wonder how robust it is and how easy it is to correct Stikkit when it makes a bad guess about what kind of information you’re entering.

Anyways. Have you played around with Stikkit yet? What did you think?

On Tuesday night, we took the hotel desk clerk’s advice and had dinner at Pub 199 in Mt. Arlington, NJ. Calling it a “pub” is misleading, or maybe “pub” just means something different up north, but it was a pretty big place. The walls of the dining room were covered with all sorts of (dead and stuffed) critters. Sorry for the crappy picture quality, but all I had with me was the camera in my phone.

The food was good and reasonably priced. (I had the deluxe cheeseburger with fries, which I believe cost $7.00). One important thing to note is that they don’t take credit cards — cash only.

They get you with a series of little lies, because they know that you’d never accept the cold, hard facts all at once. So instead of telling you that you’re not going to get home on time, the gate agent starts out telling you that your airplane has just now landed from Jamaica, and they need to let those passengers off the plane, and do the security checks, and get the crew on board, and defumigate all of the pot smoke, and whatever else it is that they do. You should be able to begin boarding after that. Estimated arrival time in Huntsville has been delayed from 9:30 p.m. to 9:55 p.m.

So I’ll get home 25 minutes later than planned, no big deal. Once you get on the plane, the pilot announces that due to all of the weather delays, there “fifteen or twenty” planes ahead of us in line, so it will be another 25 minutes or so that we’ll sit on the runway before we can actually take off. Didn’t you know that there were fifteen or twenty planes ahead of us before you made us all cram into the plane? But, OK, another 25 minutes. That’s not such a long time, is it?

We finally take off, and the pilot announces that the flight time should be about 30 minutes. And technically, that may be true, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be getting in your car to drive home in 30 minutes, it means that, best case, the plane will be on the ground in about 30 minutes. And then you’ll sit on the runway for awhile, while the pilot drives around looking for an open gate. And then there’s baggage claim, where you wait for twenty or so minutes until the realization sets in that your suitcase just isn’t there, and so it’s off to stand in line and file a claim. Finally, you get on the road around 11:15 p.m.

At least I didn’t need anything out of that suitcase. The man in front of me (who spoke with a comical Johnny Wishbone-like islands accent) was traveling to Huntsville from out of town and had nothing but the clothes on his back. I do hope that Delta eventually found his luggage.