Sylvain Zimmer

… of one of my favourite bands: Mig

Of course it had been a while since they had given any news but still… it really hurts :-(

All we’re left with now is Dhikrayat and Yamatna…

J.S. Bach’s last unfinished fugue from The Art of the Fugue has always fascinated me. (Listen to it on Youtube)

Lately I’ve been reviewing many theories about the mysterious abrupt ending at bar 239, one of the most interesting being the thesis of Indra Hughes.

It struck me that there wasn’t any organized place online to collaborate on the matter. As of May 20, it has not even its own Wikipedia page ;-)

So I’ve decided to do something about it!

I’ve just registered www.contrapunctus14.org which I’ll be opening it in the next few weeks. Here is a tentative feature set:

• “Learn more about XIV”: mp3s, videos, articles, …
• Endings: Attempt to build an exhaustive archive. upload CC-licensed mp3s/sheet music, comment, vote, … A kind of very vertical Jamendo ;-)
• Forum

Hopefully this place will become a reference on the matter, with the ambitious goal of using collaboration and free exchange of ideas to maybe, maybe converge to a consensual ending of XIV.

I’m quite sure it won’t happen but the quest is infinitely interesting in itself ;-)

Feel free to contact me if you want to participate in the launch of the project!

Funny coincidence (even if there seem to be people on strike every day here) : I’m flying from Paris to Brisbane for the second time and once again, big demonstrations all around the city. Luckily there’s no strike at the airport!

I’ll spend my flight reading the seemingly excellent book Collective Intelligence. I’ve only gone throught the first chapters but it is already one of the best books I’ve read from O’Reilly.

jscrypt: the best (well… at least the geekiest) way to chat with your buddies about your top-secret projects you don’t want Gmail or Facebook to know about ;-)

I’ve planned 3 concerts for my 2 weeks in France this May:

• Maceo Parker in Kaiserslautern (Germany), May 2. When seeing him in New Zealand a few weeks ago I promised myself I’d invite all my family when he comes near France again because I wanted them to see a P-Funk concert at least once in their lifetime… So I took 7 of them to Kaiserslautern! The show was really awesome and their concensus was that the trombone player is really cute. I guess ;-)
• Morcheeba tonight @ the Atelier, Luxembourg city. I’m still not sure I’m a fan of Mocheeba but I hope I’ll make my mind tonight ;-) I just learned they changed their main singer 2 times in the past few years so maybe it won’t be the same as before. Anyway…
• California Guitar Trio with Tony Levin @ New Morning, Paris, May 14: Not sure either about the guitar trio but any side project of bass guru Tony Levin is of interest!

So that’s a pretty good program before flying back to Australia on the 15th! No Jamendo artists in there but hopefully I’ll go to their gigs regularly next year in Paris.

Adobe just announced they are to open source the Flash format and lifting licenses fees.

This is really big news for the web… a few thoughts on that:

• Will the search engines now be able to access Flash content more easily, and include it in their index?
• Will Gnash develop more quickly now, or will Adobe GPL its runtime making Gnash irrelevant?
• Against the Flash+AIR juggernaut, does Silverlight still have appeal for the developers?
• How long before Flash on the iPhone now? ;-)

Exciting times…

I’m going to the first WordCamp (WordPress meets BarCamp) in Paris this Saturday. I’m primarily interested in evaluating a wordpress-mu install for Jamendo and I hope to find some advice there ;-)

To become familiar with MU I’m currently trying the latest release candidate which is synced with the wordpress 2.5 tree.

I’m wondering what would be the best choice for the blog URLs :

• www.jamendo.com/blog/XXX ?
• blogs.jamendo.com/XXX ?
• XXX.jamendo.net ?

The real question behind this choice is: what’s the right tradeoff between security and integration into Jamendo?

We’ve just moved into our new office in Luxembourg City. Everyone (including myself!!) is thrilled with having our own place and it’s a great, great step in Jamendo’s history. Check out the pictures to see how awesome the office is!

We’ll be announcing an opening party soon :)

Once more, I’m trying to start blogging again ;-)