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• Maceo Parker with the WDR Big Band, in Dudelange (July 14th) : A really different performance from Maceo, with a tribute to Ray Charles. As always, it was a blast. Bassist Rodney ‘Skeet’ Curtis lays down basslines like nobody else and the Big Band was one of the best I’ve seen.
• Goldfrapp tonight at the Neumunster Abbey : We bought our tickets yesterday even if we don’t know Goldfrapp very well, mostly because the venue is nothing short of amazing! Check it out…
• The Mars Volta, 3 hours of show at the Atelier, next Sunday : will we survive more than one ? ;-)

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The latest MAMP (1.7.1) uses MySQL 5.0.41, and MacOS X Leopard (10.5) uses Python 2.5.1 . As I couldn’t find a prebuilt MySQLdb binary for those versions, well, I had to compile my own.

So let’s go for it :

• Download an old copy of mysql 5.0.41
• Download the latest MySQLdb


$ tar zxvf mysql-5.0.41.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-5.0.41
$ ./configure && make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

(now MySQL is installed in /usr/local/)

$ tar zxvf MySQLdb...
$ cd MySQLdb…

• In the MySQLdb folder, edit the file _mysql.c
  • Delete the following lines :
    

    #ifndef uint
    #define uint unsigned int
    #endif

  • Replace 2 occurences of “uint” by “unsigned int”
• Then edit the site.cfg file, and set the mysql_config variable to “/usr/local/bin/mysql_config”


(Still in the MySQLdb folder)

$ python setup.py clean
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ sudo rm /tmp/mysql.sock
$ sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock


And that’s it! You should now be able to “import MySQLdb” in python. Good luck!

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Basically, the trick is to use URLs like :

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=665788844

and never move away from “home.php”, always change the signet part only.

I think Joe Hewitt has much to do in this update because he’s the creator of the Facebook iPhone frontend, which can be considered as a closed-source fork of iUI. For those who don’t know him, he was hired to Facebook when they bought his stealth startup Parakey, and he’s also the creator of the almighty Firebug. So he’s the kind of guy who gets it right when it comes to browser stuff ;-)

I think the main reason of that change is the Chat function which was added to Facebook a couple of weeks ago. I was amazed at how they managed to reload it at each pageview and still provide a “good enough” chat experience. Still, like many others, I noticed a few issues and my guess is that they decided to solve them once and for all by avoiding to reload the page constantly, just like Gmail.

Are we at the dawn of a standardization of this kind of navigation paradigm? It sure looks so. Its advantages compared to the “regular” way are worth the added complexity if you’re big enough.

Another detail worth mentioning here is that the Facebook implementation is quite neat, as all the links to “regular” pages like www.facebook.com/notifications.php are still valid but as they use progressive enhancement, they just can turn on the advanced navigation feature at any time on the client side, and take you to www.facebook.com/home.php#/notifications.php instead.

So congrats to the Facebook team for this update, they must have begun preparing it a long time ago… What’s next?

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We have some very exciting projects going on and I can’t wait to be there with the whole team again.

As I can’t really survive without a few concerts planned for the future, I’ve already booked several of them next month ;-)

• Fred Wesley + Pee Wee Ellis at Jazz à Vienne, June 27th. Tribute to James Brown!!!
• Rock Werchter Festival, with among many others: Radiohead, Justice, Sigur Ros, Lenny Kravitz, R.E.M., Ben Harper, Moby, Beck, ….
• The Mars Volta at the Atelier, Luxembourg, July 20th. I’ve read “3 hours of concert without an opening act”. Not sure we’ll be able to make it through that! :)

I’ll also go to a bunch of concerts of Jamendo bands: I have found a couple of really good bands lately that I’ll feature soon with our new widget. More on that later!

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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…

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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!

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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.

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• 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.

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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…

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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?

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We’ll be announcing an opening party soon :)

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