Music tastes and online info

My favorite flavor of music is called "Progressive Rock."

If you know what it is already, then you know what it is. If you don't know what that name means, a short description is that it is rock music that has/is progressed beyond simple 2-or-3-chord songs.

Generally it's roots are classical music rather than pop songs. It's longer, more complex, listening rather than singing or dancing music. The focus is much more the unstrumental composing than the lyrics; lots has no lyrics at all.

And it is generally best described by a list of the performers. The category is broad and there are flavors of Prog Rock I'm not keen on (in general, newer and kinda derivative). So: ELP, Yes, early Genesis. The style originates about 1968.

My favorite online source for info is the Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock. I was casually involved with that back in the 90s, before it was even an online source. My participation was slight in the early-mid-90s, but it was there, when there was really just the alt.music.progressive thing (or whatever it was, been years). The web has improved the amount of info, but things have splintered. Things like FreeDB are good, but have zero meta-info beyond album name, track names, and track lengths--and zero cross-linking.

Anyway. GEPR. There was once a book of it. I bought that, it's a great item, but such a thing is out of date the day after it's printed.

The GEPR website has languished for about six years now. Fred Trafton was running it for years, still owns it, and hasn't had time for it, endangering the value and life of the content (granted, the Wayback Machine would still have it all if Fred didn't at least renew the domain name).

So he and I were having an email chat a few weeks ago. I argued that it needs converting into a Wiki existence, so that others can participate, and he doesn't have to worry about maintenance. I offered to do a chunk of that initial setup. In particular, to scrub the existing website and strip out all the raw info from the web-pages (regrettably, there's no database in the background, just hand-managed HTML, and aging HTML at that).

So I've been working that. Did a large data-mine off another (actually dead) website a few years ago, so I knew what I was up against in attempting it. I don't expect or intend to achieve a perfect extraction, no way that is even worth my time to attempt; because it's hand-made HTML there are a lot of little tiny variations all over, and I'm not writing special handlers for each one.

At this point I'm approaching 2/3 completion. Some of that is done via correcting HTML flaws in the source rather than writing special-case handling for singletons.

The hard thing about doing this kind of extraction is that people who make pages like this treat HTML as a structural content organizer, rather than just as visual markup. And then they aren't consistent about what they do, so the structure is casual rather than strict. This is possible because web browsers tolerate a lot of slop in the HTML. That's really not a good thing any more.

The extraction is going into a database now.  Once I can read everything I want from the HTML into the DB, then I have to make a simplistic form for getting it out again, so that I/we can test to be sure there's no content-rip disasters in there.

Then I have to figure out how to dump that database into something that is wiki pages. I really have no idea how I might do this. Maybe I don't even want to do that, exactly. Maybe I want to push the DB into a wiki DB.

My involvement here is to get to the point where there's a wiki full of as much content as I can manage without spending forever on it. I don't want to own it after that.

EMail programs

It is possible to use your web-browser to do your email work. I am currently doing this with Chrome and GMail. Can't say I like it, but it more-or-less works. I regularly press control-R to reply, only to have the browser window refresh itself because I forgot that that was what control-R does.

I used to use Seamonkey. That's a Mozilla product, and I was using it because of the set of tools it integrates, and is the real successor to Netscape's unified product (whose name I now don't remember, sorry Jamie...Communicator?)

Anyway. Mozilla products have problems these days (see earlier blog on this topic). There's something wrong on there somewhere that causes/allows memory leaks, and those always turn into problems at runtime eventually; not a BSOD or equiv, but exhausting memory, VirtMem, disk space...

Mozilla's alternative standalone email is Thunderbird, but it's still Moz, which means that the HTML rendering engine inside is the same as Firefox and SeaMonkey. Which means it is going to have the same mem-leak issue. So I can't be using this.

(fwiw, Chrome has some memory issue, too, I don't yet know quite what, but the way it runs means that if a window has a memory problem the others are not affected--Mozilla craters in toto if any one window is the source of the leak)

So I gotta try some other tools. I've used Outlook, not really interested in that. Going to start with things listed here:

http://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-email-client

The real question is what HTML engine is in use?

On my Macs I'll be using Apple Mail. That integrates nicely with my phone, ipad, and the multiple machines I use.

I liked Seamonkey. I just can't deal with the memory leaks.

I'd take suggestions for email programs from readers...

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Update: Opera Email is working pretty well for me. It's not as fancy as I'd like, there are some behavioral tweak I ought to be able to do, but can't. The alternative would be for me to write my own email program...which, now that I think of it, might be an interesting thing to do.

A new toy

I got a couple of new toys in the past week.

The first is an HP 9050DN printer. Why? Because it will print 11x17 double-sided. I am doing some documents work these days where the target is 11x17 and although I'm not do the final deliverable printing, it's darn sure good to be able to proof things at final size. Already I've caught a couple of changes that need to get made that I wasn't seeing otherwise, and I receive one of the final printed copies. This is a "on-loan" item, paid for by the group I'm doing the docs for.

The second toy is much more interesting, and a lot less common:

a laser cutter. (yes, that's two laser things in the last week)

It's a VersaLaser VL 200. 25 watt, 12x16 cutting area. Bought it from the guy who was actually cutting for me 10 years ago, for $4K.

Why? you ask. Well, because once I am well familiar with how to use it, I can make things for myself better/faster/cheaper than paying someone else to do it.

(OK, thought you were retired and therefore a cheapskate, you also say. Well, yeah, kinda true, but this has been in the works for months, or years if you go back to the larger one I almost bought from him over 2 years ago. Plus, I am getting a new big riding lawnmower tomorrow. Expensive week.)

What will I be doing with this? Model railroad stuff is the target. I'm figuring if I use it to design/build 100 things that averages $40 each, which is a pretty good deal.

Expect new blogs on this topic over the next months. And I hope some magazine articles that pay $ which will help with the cost.