This service rocks. It’s free, has a pretty good range of music, and is guaranteed to make me buy more music (on CD, because all electronic music download services are still either illegal or stupid).

The Flash player kicks butt (there’s a desktop one coming soon), and intelligently hooks into the webpage’s markup to update the title with every new song. It’s gold. Song Title by Artist from Album Name. It says Album Name! I’m sitting here scribbling down must-acquire ‘90s music.

It uses AAC2+ apparently… all I really know is that it sounds great and is stupidly easy to use.

Brilliant.

But possibly unsustainable… none of my money is going to them. They’re launching hardware devices, so this might just be a ploy to get people to buy them, but I’m more interested in who’s doing all the work. There’s absolutely zero crowd-sourcing going on here that I can see… which means that “Related Artists” list is all professionally programmed. I know the Top Stations are, but the artists bit is going a little far perhaps…

Triple J Unearthed and Myspace and PureVolume, etc., all do it the other way around, which seems infinitely more sensible… but you need critical mass to get there, I suppose.

One to watch. And listen to.

I bought a Switchfoot CD today. And enjoyed it. Their music works a lot better as an album than as standalone songs, especially that horrific title track. I don’t understand its appeal at all. The rest is quite pleasant (and surprisingly, to me at least, overtly Christian — probably because they somehow get by without mentioning Jesus or Christ or anything like that on their website)

Almost sarcastic in places, which isn’t quite what I was expecting. I like that sort of thing. Meh.

Also been listening to Sarah Blasko the last week, trying to figure out all kinds of clever links to the poem on which the album What the sea wants, the sea will have is based (Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner). So far I have nothing. Except a burning question as to the hierarchy of the two — is this like “the film based upon the book”, wherein the more artful form is generally taken to be that which was prior? Or is there something else afoot, when one can extrapolate an entire album from a relatively straightforward (though admittedly textually rich and voluminous) poem?

There is a certain frustration deciphering contemporary works that isn’t there with those of dead white men, simply because with one there is the possibility of exertion to obtain a straightforward answer. That, of course, would be admitting defeat — and I probably wouldn’t like it as much as the frustration, anyway.

What the sea wants is, by the way, a prime example of why not to buy albums off electronic music stores. The album is physically superb (though there are dodgy jewel case versions floating around — the cardboard one is the good one) in terms of its packaging (yay for UV spot printed birds & comprehensive liner notes & photos in a separate booklet!) and content.

Also speaking of competitive advantages of… everything vs. online music stores… the $10 Switchfoot CD is not, in fact, a CD. It’s a SACD. Presumably Hybrid goodness because it played in an anachronistic CD player I’m using when in transit at the minute (yes, you read that right. I can’t get a portable device that works with this lossless stuff, it’s ridiculous. And if you dare suggest I buy an iPod, the latest Bond movie has a method of torture that you may be interested in–saw that film tonight with people, was good times–though that scene had every male in the building cringing massively). I wasn’t sure if it would even work — because, yes, I check the packaging that closely before I buy stuff — more for watching out to see if it was infested with crappy doesn’t-really-work-properly copy protection rubbish than anything else. But it did. I don’t know if it’s any better, but I’ve only really listened to the SACD version at work on a crappy Dell computer. It has bad AC’97 audio which = lots of line noise, etc.

Onboard audio can be okay for playback (my Venus is but it bloody well should be given how expensive it was), just that computer wasn’t. And it’s time for me to sleep now so I’m not about to test, or then I’ll have to rip as well and inevitably wind up discovering some new and exciting set of codecs that are better for SACD for x reasons, and so forth, then it’ll be 2am again and… general badness ensues.

I’ve already sat up and read the Wikipedia article and lamented the copy protection measures in place. Sigh. *feels like a geek… at least I’m not playing Wii ;-)*

Yet, increasingly, our surfing habits are defined by this bizarre social concept that seems to be shaping certainly acquisitions and web-two-point-oh-bubblism, wherein websites serve users by connecting them with one another, not on the basis of them knowing what they wanted, but rather in a bizarre a priori manner whereby degrees-of-separation (MySpace) or user-supplied-already-knowns (LiveJournal, Xanga, etc.) define connectedness and displayed content.

Search is no longer the macro-inter killer app, but an intra-site facility applied to microcosm — often based on “transparent” technology that has, on the basis of known knowns (in the words of a certain Rumsfeld), already done some of the hard work for users (I should say people, but don’t out of habit: it is an industry hazard) without actually asking them anything. This is where location– and organisation-based matching (cf. MySpace, Facebook, etc.) come in.

But none of this data is intelligently searchable by generic engines.

None of this data (in the case of Myspace especially, horribly marked-up doing-everything-wrong-with-the-web technically entity that it is) is available for indexing by search engines because it’s not abiding by any defined semantics. There is not, for example, any overwhelming use of microformats — hCard, etc. — for defining contact details in any common sense. Yet these things are searchable within a given website.

And, what’s more, these things are searchable with great precision within (social networking) sites. This is because of a very well defined internal semantic (not the “semantic web”, but internal data structures) and an enforced obedience to these structures that was never a part of pre-SocNet sites.

SocNet platforms are radically different from web 1.0 systems in that they are (ironically) vastly more constricting. As “web 1.0″ I would cite Geocities and free web hosting services, portals, and all-things-to-all-people content networks. Now, we’ve got blogs (precisely defined websites), MySpace (chiefly SocNet profiles with bits on the fringes common to the users, and now with enough impetus to appear unstoppable), Flickr (free — and fee-for-service that people actually pay for — web hosting, precisely defined as photo hosting), and, strangely, a portal (Yahoo!) still on top of Alexa 500 rankings. A portal that owns both Flickr and Geocities, but has changed the model of the latter to place greater emphasis on fee-for-service hosting. But I digress into strategy — the point is not that, but rather in the way social data is stored.

Flickr is meta-data rich. It uses a well defined system based on EXIF, intrinsic semantics (title, description, tags — tags that get used properly, unlike Facebook which doesn’t bother to make such things clear — I want Facebook to flop, by the way, because it annoys me, so don’t expect nice things to be said about it. It’s a poor closed-system imitator, albeit with a stupidly effective advertising model everyone else should be wishing they came up with first but haven’t seen in order to copy… because it’s a closed system (or used to be) exclusive in scope. Which makes it very effective SocNet/Web 2.0, by my own definition, so I don’t really have a basis for complaint.) and extrinsic semantics (groups, pools, etc.).

Profiles, unlike ‘pure’ SocNet (Myspace, Facebook), permit anonymity, but allow disclosure of as much as is desired: at any rate, that is not the purpose of the site. Myspace/Facebook’s raison d’etre is profiles. (Well, and that and cash-cow-marketing-tool of the *R**IA’s of the world) Accordingly, its profiles have very definite semantics even whilst the rest of the site may not (I speak of Myspace more, here). Myspace gives core “Details” profile info individual fields, whilst allowing a diverse “Interests & Personality” information in freeform textareas that are designed to entice users into participation (and, possibly, aiding more fuzzy searches — but mostly I think it’s just compelling content, as there is no immediately obvious way to search that data).

“Interests & Personality”, along with blog content, seems to be the only freeform contributed material available on the site. Want music or a video with your profile? You’ve got to browse to the band’s site, load the player (no go in Opera with Flash at the minute, it seems), and then select “Add” on the track. They (yeah, it’s kinda big-brotherish) know exactly what song you chose, what band it’s from, what genre, etc. — that is to say, unambiguously and certainly beyond a probably-common song title. This isn’t an upload-yourself-and-we’ll-manage-rights kind of thing. The officiality gives that internal data structure that much more depth: but, again, the point is that the data is internal and not open.

This, it seems, is the defining quality of SocNet. That’s what makes the ideas of open federation advocated by Google Talk earlier this year so bizarre for the rest of us. We don’t particularly care, because closed systems mean innovation (because we can define new data for ourselves to work with) and/or extensibility that isn’t possible in an open platform (if, for example, not all federated partners agree to a spec extension — take, for example, Google Talk’s own Jabber base and proprietary VoIP on top of that). Openness is in Google’s interests, because it’s so dependent on things being open for its core business (search). But real people want services that work, not services that push them to another site. I’ve never trusted sites that bounce me off to Google for their site’s search, even if it’s one of those crappy co-branded things. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you make someone inspect your website from an inferior perspective when all the information is stored in a database, with the possibility of more semantically meaningful search open internally only?

Google won’t deal with your internal search needs. It’s not designed to. It does a great job of dealing with publicly indexed materials completely aside from SocNet services. SocNet sites thrive on and are empowered by strong intrinsic semantics that make clever profile-based (or UGC–based) search possible, which builds loyalty etcetera in a way foreign to informational websites. SocNet is experiential and (surprise surprise) social — it doesn’t have to be about anything.

Content was deposed as king sometime in the middle of the first decade of the twenty first century, and with that regime change his deputy, Search, was also shuffled to a somewhat less prominent position. Somewhere out of sight, Search’s identical twin, Query, is the real power behind the throne: it uses unindexed data and makes clever links to bring people closer together in a way that traditional search engines had never even envisaged.

I picked up a perspex case and an absolutely kick-arse Pioneer DV-344 DVD player. It’s region 4 only, which sucks, and no RGB output, which also sucks — there’s YPbPr though. On the good side, a 118dB SNR with 0.0016% THD means it sounds pretty darn good. Only stereo analogue output, but I don’t care too much about that… there’s optical digital output if surround is required. Seeing as I fairly literally ‘found’ this, there’s no remote… which is a little bit of a bummer but whatever. I mostly wanted it for CD playback (*listens to Steve crying* — shut up, it sounds freakin’ excellent) so it’s no biggie. However, on the video playback side of things, it’s absolutely wonderful for events in that it doesn’t have any stupidly conspicuous Pioneer splash screens, etc., instead sporting only text-based “Play/Pause/Stop/Open/Eject” titles. The default background colour is black. So that’s rather magnificent. It doesn’t even have a screensaver so it’s quite safe for use pretty much everywhere. A thing of beauty indeed.

Speaking of things of beauty, Selo’s computer (3800+ DC 939, Asus A8N-SLI, 1GB Kingmax DDR400 (512MBx2), 6800GS PCI-E, Lightscribe DVD-RW, 120GB, 300GB, 19″ Fujitsu 8ms) is hawt. Heh, especially the Leadtek 6800GS ;-) Gonna need that Fujitsu screen to cool things down eh? Okay, enough of the airconditioner jokes! It’s actually quite good. But his case is pretty banged up after being wedged in the boot of a BMW for a couple of months (seller = affluent IT support dude that sells few-months-old hardware for cheap!)

Anyway no photos yet because my camera is on loan to Budd who will return it soon (or else :)) and then there’ll probably be a couple. Something rather shiny should be arriving later this week for me, and there’ll be probably photos aplenty of that.

In other acquisitive news, I came by a Sony 4x4” PVM-411CE for cheap (timecode screen burn, really minor) last week and it’s doing fantastically. It’s the reason I’ve actually been able to see DVD output from this player thing and hopefully it’ll mean I need to carry (and, as a prerequisite to that, beg/borrow/steal) less TVs for various applications.

Woot. The best bit:

Schools, universities, libraries and other cultural institutions will in the future be free to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes.

Dubious bit:

In a big win for recording artists, the laws will include the removal of the legislative 1 per cent cap on copyright licence fees paid by radio broadcasters for playing sound recordings.

Dubious because I’m really uncertain as to how that’s going to pan out… I’m thinking it’s actually going to further inhibit the scope of the music we hear on commercial radio! Non-commercial radio… well, who knows? Is that a “cultural institution”?

We’ll see how it pans out. I’m now keen on getting an MP3 player/phone that plays MP3s (and has at least 512MB on an SD card, none of this super-tiny-memory stuff you find in phones). Orange stop operations at the beginning of August, I think, so I’ve got until then…

I worked with someone the other day who tried to use a DVD player for audio CDs at a show and I made them drive back to the warehouse and pick up a real CD player on the spot.

It’s just not good enough. Their insides and processing isn’t suited to reading and decoding CD audio, and they DO sound different (in a worse way).

*giggles*

Stupid DRM. My computer, of course, gets around the copy protection on this CD instantly. My DVD player (which I use as a CD player: shut up Steve, CD players don’t sound a-few-hundred-dollars better, so I don’t care! ;-) ), on the other hand, can’t play the damn thing. As of right now I’m ripping it to my computer (losslessly with FLAC) and will have a prestine, non-DRM copy on a burnt CD for my use in a matter of minutes.

And if a friend ever asks if they can borrow my Yellowcard CD (bought on a whim knowing only one of their songs, I’ll add), I’ll be sure to lend them the version that works better: The one I burnt myself, without your stupid-arse software all over it.

Oh, yeah, and I’ll hesitate to purchase EMI CDs in the future. All other DRM-encumbered crap I’ve bought in the past has at least had the courtesy to work in my DVD player (this one made detection take ages, then picked it up as a VCD with wierd timecoding) — this is the barrier at which point it becomes infinitely easier to use Peer-to-Peer than buy things that look like they might be interesting in a CD store.

With physical media, I can (read: should be able to) toss it in anything and expect it to work instantly (no ripping required, etc.).

And, you know, if I wind up using Peer-to-Peer for this kind of stuff, my lossless (yeah, that’s CD quality, not MP3 junk) audio collection will be shared back with the rest of the world. Yes, even the CDs you make it harder for me to use legitimately. I will figure out a way to get them onto my computer (or someone else will with another CD), and I will use sharing networks if scumbag content providers provide me with sufficient impetus to do that.

(Incidentally, if anyone wants to borrow a non-DRM-encumbered Yellowcard CD…)

So, one of the readers, Phil “Mumbles”, discovered a tool that works for this stuff. He’s sent me the file after having cut it down from 8MB for a few apps to under 300KB for the just new sound convertor tool.

You can download it here — please post if it works or doesn’t work with your MP3 player/recorder so that other people looking for information on their device can find it.

One closing note from Phil:

and BTW,

It appears to hang if you don’t let it run its course (gives a not responding msg). the “hang” grows accordingly with the .act file size.

Cheers

Phil

Dean picked up my post via Technorati, a blog search engine that uses RPC update services to track what people are talking about in real-time. I was suitably impressed by this diligence and apparent desire to hear what the market has to say about their product: could this be the same company whose birth was so marred by a spat of cyber-squatting, in what Dean Jones was reported to have described as a fit of “youthful exuberance”?

Apparently so. Ansearch’s beginnings, though marred by dubious practices¹, received praise from various quarters of the mainstream press — or, at least, those quarters not controlled by News Corp, whose domains had come under threat. However, the Internet community responded quietly, and those voices that were heard were mostly of disdain at Ansearch’s domain practices.

Strangely enough, my original post wasn’t about any of that. I hadn’t heard of Ansearch until I read an article on them in the SMH — an article which reads a little too much like a rehashed press release for my liking: the telltale sign is in the closing sentence “Ansearch is the search engine division of Optum Ltd.” — if it were filed in the Business section of their paper, I’d understand, but it wasn’t.

I wandered over to their site, played around for a bit, and decided their offering was mediocre. In hindsight, it probably didn’t help that I wasn’t shopping for anything in particular — according to a ZDNet article, “In the short term [Ansearch] is focusing very heavily on the commercial end of the market.” — but at that point in time, I also don’t think they’d tuned their listings particularly well, as a search for DashLite turned up my WordPress hack over commercial listings for the actual Dashlite brand I inadvertantly used.

I say “at that point in time”, because it appears to have substantially improved since, as per Jones’ claim: “Much has changed since your first article on us some 6 months ago.”

Much improved, it seems, on several fronts. Their core offering has shaped up nicely, and some facets of my initial complaints regarding accessibility have been met. Their ancillary product offerings seem to have developed nicely: Ansearch CEO Jones claims “Each of [our properties] goes through up to 7 stages ranging from an initial, simple SERP/Directory style page through to a more involved service, mini portal, search tool, etcetera.” He went on to say that these ancillary properties (such as http://www.picsearch.com.au/, http://www.videosearch.com.au/, http://www.thefreedictionary.com.au/ and http://www.messengers.com.au/ amongst several others) are currently being actively separated from the core Ansearch site (he described it as “quarantining”), and the exact direction of a number of these projects would become clear over the coming months, with the appointment of a full time manager of these online properties.

I’m a tad concerned about his description of their strategy with regard to these — he said this would become clear over the months to come, and I’m hanging off two words here: distributed portal. Whilst I can see this as being of value to users (especially for generic, non-brand-specific/legally dubious domains such as jokes.com.au and the ones listed above), it doesn’t seem to fit Ansearch’s core strength as I perceive it: as a commercial portal, and not as another Google. “We are not aiming to be another Google… we don’t have their budget and, to be frank, there are enough people trying to clone them: why build another?”

In fact, Jones suggested that Ansearch’s strengths lie in that it is not the ubiquitous search behemoth, and that its index is “something unique… something faster… [and] against the so called “arms race” of search (my SE has more links than yours etc…)”. I’d agree this is indeed a strength, and also a reason for them not to try and be a portal. Australia already has Yahoo! and NineMSN for domestic portals, and I’m struggling to see what Ansearch will do to differentiate themselves in this: but I’m happy to be surprised!

Ansearch apparently holds an index of only 500,000 websites considered by its metrics to be “most popular”. I argued that this was potentially a bad thing as relevant content might lie outside this realm: for example, this website performs well when people search for reviews of the HP 2610 or information about Apache on Ubuntu linux or ACT files from MP3 players that record audio, but isn’t included in Ansearch’s core index.

Which is perfectly valid, for a commercially-focussed site, I just think they could be missing out a little bit. They can leverage on my content for their advertising impressions and potential clickthroughs, because they have more valuable content showing up in their listing alongside advertised products. If someone reads my HP 2610 review after having found it in Ansearch, and decides they’d like to buy it and remembers having seen a “Buy HP printers!” ad on Ansearch, they’ll most likely click “back”. It’s abstract, behavioural stuff, but valuable nonetheless.

Whether it’s valuable enough for them to bother is another matter. “We spider our own content… something that over time will be done daily,” says Jones. “Having only 500,000 websites will allow us to index sites more often, and as is the case with the ‘site info’ pages, provide far more info on these pages.” Which is a value-add, and worth preserving. If that’s all resources permit, I think they’re doing the right thing as is. Jones openly admits Ansearch’s index of popularity “has a commercial flavour to it” — and rightly so. Given their much-touted gender and age demographic based search feature, this makes sense.

Their index of popularity seems to be fairly slow-moving. “Monthly we add around 20,000 sites… and take out 20,000.” I’d guess this would be the lowest 20,000 that gets shuffled, and this seems to make sense. One has to wonder whether all the higher-ranking pages can have substantially fresh content month after month, but presumably they do — it’s one of the things the SEO experts have always cried from rooftops.

It was interesting to hear Jones speaking about these people, too: amusing, even! Web developers the world over often join in speculation as to what exactly makes search engines tick, such that we can boost our clients (or employers) website’s performance. It seems the reverse is also true: search engines all over the world similarly speculate as to what those horrible developers are doing to screw with their indexes day in and day out!

I don’t say this in jest, and I believe they’re right to complain: “The larger SE’s are having a very tough time coming up with clever ways to index content to counter SEO… only to have SEO’rs quickly find ways around it. Cat and mouse…” I think “counter SEO” was a poor choice of words, given that relevant content should hopefully still be rewarded, but his point stands.

Just as interesting is Ansearch’s strategy to avoid falling prey to dodgy SEO tactics:

By only indexing the root page, we remove almost all SEO trickery. This works in 2 ways. Firstly, people rarely put spam on their home page — that is, doorway pages, link farms, etc. usually reside away from the main index… and, secondly, it deletes multiple results from the same website. It also stops the site owner/webmaster from saying they are relevant to 100 or 1000 keywords or phrases.

Kids, we just found a new argument against clients who love their splash pages!

Content rich front pages aren’t, however, an absolute solution (at least, not in Ansearch’s index). According to Jones, Ansearch’s policy of “ranking sites in true usage popularity, both on and offsite” is “SEO proof… or at the very least, extremely resistant.” I’d agree it’s a powerful metric, but my reservations above still stand.

One caveat of Ansearch’s algorithm that appears potentially exploitable is its failure to exclude content in the from indexing. I don't just speak of standard meta author/keywords data, but of something else.

As highlighted in the screenshot above (click for original page, link may expire), Ansearch’s listing is including content between <style> tags. This presents potential for SEO abuse², as most browsers happily overlook errors in CSS — and <style> tags can be placed towards the top of a document: if we are to believe the SEO myths, increasing their relevance in engines. Of course, it’s entirely possible the content bears no weight at all — but the question of why it is stored in their index at all remains unanswered.

This is another reason to reward websites that use semantic markup properly, though at this stage that would exclude disproportionate amounts of the web, so I understand engines’ hesitance to embark on anything like this. It’s not something a lot of sites use”, says Jones, before continuing “but it will be used more and more in the future.” Well, so much of the web community hopes.

This formed part of Ansearch’s defense for not having embraced semantic markup from the outset. According to Jones, it’s built on a technology developed for a pre-April 2000 (dot com crash) search engine — so that partially excuses the markup at launch time. Jones’ first comment on their failure to use semantic markup was simply that “The majors [Google and Yahoo!] don’t use it” — something I’d dispute the validity of, as Ansearch isn’t a “major” player, and, as has been established, is chasing a fairly different market sector. Their core business is search, but it’s a different breed of search conducted in a different way: and semantic markup and accessibility is a different way. Encouragingly, Jones sees the potential for embracing semantic markup in the future on both technical and commercial grounds: “It makes sense to use it and as it does open us to a wider audience with various devices used to browse our site.”

He didn’t cite the “reduced bandwidth expenditure as a result of lightweight code” reason, presumably because their host, OzHosting/Destra charges only for the link, not for transfers over this, on their dedicated server range.

Irrespective of their reasons, the future of Ansearch in terms of markup is promising:

Our long term goal is to have Ansearch website designed without any tables and heavily styled using the CSS, which eventually will gives us more control on how we present our site to different media types.

Ansearch has gone through several minor enhancements over the past 6 months with the releases of versions 1 to 1.3. We are currently planning a major update for version 2.0 and the issues [of semantic markup and separation of presentation and content] will be addressed.

But as we know, markup isn’t everything: content is what ranks well in search engines erm… content is what draws an audience. Ansearch’s exploration into the development of portal environments is something to be watched with interest over the coming months, as well as its other business aspects, including an advertising network known as Soush that remains slightly enigmatic, and the mysteriously named “Factory” division.

An announcement is expected to be filed with the ASX later this week outlining something of Ansearch’s future direction: At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that the future is a positive one, as Ansearch distances itself from its much-criticised practices at launch, to a diverse range of product offerings that uniquely fulfil the needs of Australian Internet users.

Update: A followup to this has been posted, in response to a criticism that this review was overly technical in nature. Read on!

Notes

¹ Justified with the catch-cry “MSN do it, so we can, too!” — to which the only sensible reply is, “yes, but MSN do it with Internet Explorer, and as soon as you go and write your own web browser, feel free to hijack as many unused pages as you want.“
² I notified Ansearch of this shortly prior to publication in the hope that, if this is indeed an issue, it will be resolved before this post is noticed and widely acted upon. One hopes this potential problem disappears quickly.

I also wrote briefly of how Tori told me about a very cool media service called GarageBand, which publishes music from independent artists free of charge, even going so far as to offer (shock, horror) un–DRM–encumbered MP3 downloads of the vast majority of tracks.

So where does Flash fit into all of this?

Well. About that. GarageBand has this nifty Flash player thing going, which is very cool, except for when you’re using Firefox: every time I have it running whilst trying to do anything in the background (that is, within Firefox, in another tab or something), the audio buffer dies until whatever I’m doing in the background has started to render (or maybe resolved a host, or something… whatever).

Opera, on the other hand, handles this flawlessly. The window pops open, Flash loads faster (notably, using exactly the same plugin as the Mozilla family, if I recall correctly), and I can do whatever I want in the background without it skipping a beat. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a browser should be.

Tori pointed me to some music on this website today and it’s surprisingly good quality… at least, so far as I can judge — which is confined to “well produced” and “that sounds good/nice”! At least some of it is under Creative Commons licensing, which is interesting. Good stuff.

Oh, and a tip: Personally, I think the best way to listen is to go to a genre you’re a fan of and start a player with all tracks and just keep clicking “Next” if you don’t like a particular track. Of course, you can download all the material as well, but if you want to use it like streaming radio then that’s the way to go.

“The way a contemporary composer transforms an older text inevitably reflects the way that values in society have changed over time.” Discuss in relation to Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. 1485 words.

The transformation of a text into a new one, whether through appropriation or extrapolation of the original work, inevitably involves the reflection of a different social paradigm that is itself a product of the context in which it exists. The impact of society and cultural influence upon a text’s composition is profound and, without a doubt, may be viewed as reflective of the period in which it was created. This notion may be applied not only to the contemporary transformation, but also to ‘original’ compositions, which are similarly reflective of the values of their period.

In this way, it is possible to determine the societal values implicit in each of the studied texts, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s transformation, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Separated by several centuries of social change, turmoil, and general upheaval, it should come as no surprise that the values presented within both these texts are hardly congruent. Hamlet is a renaissance figure, a thinker, an intellectual – and resolutely out of place in the context he finds himself. Torn between his conflicting compulsions to enact revenge in accordance with the expectations of the time and his own sense of morality, Shakespeare’s protagonist is depicted in his demise, a spiral of ‘madness’ either contrived or genuine (“When the wind is southerly,/I know a hawk from a handsaw.” 2.2.347). This may be perceived as dissonant with the accepted values of the period, but for closer examination of the catalysts leading to Hamlet’s condition – in typical Elizabethan style, the cause of such turmoil and unrest is no internal condition, but rather the disruption of an established order – the great chain of being.

Shakespeare’s preoccupation with royalty and the lives of those conventionally considered ‘powerful’ presents a stark contrast to the message of Stoppard’s later work. Stoppard takes the royalty, these ‘powerful’, and places them in a role of illusion. The Players in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are these royalty. They are the embodiment of figures from Hamlet, and hold to the values of that period – values critiqued by Stoppard as being outmoded, irrelevant after hundreds of years that saw industrialisation, the rise of ‘freethinking’ intellectual movements, and the demise of absolute values in favour of the individualistic paradigm of which his play appears to be a proponent. This concern is enunciated through ongoing conflict portrayed between the blurred collective identity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and these “actors” – Guildenstern’s recurring criticism of these actors is that they are “the opposite of people”, and this is a criticism that is sounded in response to the different values they are seen to embody.

Indeed, Stoppard’s assignation of the roles of the original cast in veiled form to these derisively-termed “actors” is itself a device to further this criticism. They are presented as having foresight, with quips such as “I should concentrate on not losing your heads” used throughout the text – this dramatic irony foreshadowing the subsequent demise of Stoppard’s unwitting heroes. Viewed in terms of the contextual insight this grants the responder into the period of both texts composition, this presents a disparity in basic belief systems – the players, the remnant of Elizabethan values in this play, are shown to believe in predestined fate, holding faith in an omnipotent directional force guiding events. Conversely, the protagonists of this transformation question meaning and the nature of meaning, question their direction, and, whilst appearing to at times accept the concept of fate, generally reject the idea that this fate holds any inherent direction. In this way, the values of the text may be, perhaps, considered more nihilistic than existential, although this of course remains open to debate.

As a product of its time, however, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead serves to communicate rather clearly the dramatic change in values between Shakespeare’s period and its own. Nietzsche’s famously decontextualised line, “Gott ist tot” (God is dead) is perhaps reflective of the predicament experienced by Stoppard’s protagonists when viewed against their actor-counterparts in Shakespearean setting – in context, Nietzsche speaks not of the literal death of God, but simply of the apparent decline in humanity’s recognition of God as a reckoning force in their lives. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

This decline in recognition of the supernatural as a key influence upon humanity at a broader societal level may be viewed as (at least in part) responsible for the change in attitudes displayed between the ‘original’ and appropriated/transformed work. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet revolves around a concern which has arisen as the result of death. Death, not as an abject and pathetic end to reality – although pathos may be a device used by the bardic playwright. It is more than this – it is a catalyst, a driving force for the events of the text. Hamlet may be read as a revenge tragedy, and, in this reading, the consideration of the responder is drawn to the plight of the protagonist, Hamlet. He despairs not for his temporal loss, although that may be a part of it. If that were the extent of the protagonist’s concerns, Claudius would be killed without such extensive procrastination on Hamlet’s part.

In his famous soliloquy of Act III, Hamlet declares in response to the question of killing Claudius or his own suicide – “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all” – He dare not act for fear of damnation. The origins of this morality are important, though not relevant to the present discussion – of greater relevance is the very notion of damnation. Hamlet believes what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not in Stoppard’s creation of some centuries later – consequence in death. “Here one minute and gone the next and never coming back – an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced…”

Stoppard’s protagonists, therefore, cannot understand the apparently ridiculous preoccupation with death held by the players. It is biological. Stoppard reduces it to natural process through the creation of dialogue which discusses death at this level alone – “Another curious scientific phenomenon is the fact that the fingernails grow after death, as does the beard.” This line fits into dialogue as another expression of futility, as Stoppard’s protagonists are also chief protagonists in this work. It is primarily existential in nature, and such trivialities serve to reinforce this notion that meaning is shaped by the individual.

This trivialisation of death throughout the work builds to a great display of poignancy in Guildenstern’s emotive, dramatic display of angst at the players’ portrayal of this phenomenon. Stage directions call for scorn, derision. It is melodramatic, even. And, chiefly, it is a parody. Guildenstern stands, takes to the leading player with a knife. He is convinced he has killed him. The blade goes “in up to the hilt”, and the player falls, Guildenstern making his final statements with conviction – after this point, he is “tired, drained” – “If we have a destiny, then so had he – and if this is ours, then that was his – and if there are no explanations for us, then let there be none for him –”

The player rises. It is a defeat of the melodrama, of the poignancy of death. After this point, that notion is utterly defeated in this work. “Deaths for all ages and occasions! Deaths by suspension, convulsion, consumption, incision, execution, asphyxiation and malnutrition –! Climatic carnage, by poison and by steel –! Double deaths by duel –! Show!” The melodrama of death is sarcastic only in this work – and, according to the stage directions, in perfect conformance with the closing scene of Hamlet. The transformation does not substantially alter the content here, but rather the portrayal of the same. Stoppard’s masterful use of dramatic devices and irony serves to create a work entirely different in nature to Shakespeare’s text; this is not achieved solely through the foregrounding of minority characters.

Stoppard’s work is seen to convey the values of its time and, through this, demonstrate the changes in values witnessed between Elizabethan times and the 1960’s not through vivid exposition and melodrama as seen in Guildenstern’s emotive declaration against the actors, but rather through subtle dramatic devices and techniques. Comment on death, amongst other themes, is delivered instead through crafted silence, confusion, inaction. “And he disappears from view. Guil does not notice.” “Our names shouted in a certain dawn … a message … a summons … there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.”

Stoppard’s protagonists fall to the unguided arms of fate, and are projected on a course towards their inevitable, inconsequential demise. “And [Guil] disappears.”

Reflection of change is inevitable, as Stoppard’s message is shaped by a social paradigm foreign to the original work, and this disparity in values is inherently conveyed through transformation.

Update: The software listed here doesn’t appear to be working for newer hardware. There is updated software available in a more recent post, here.

I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to do a direct digital transfer of voice recordings made on my little MP3 player thing. Turns out it is. This applies not only to my Pavo PM-505, but also to BenQ’s Joybee range (obviously only those capable of voice recording), and any other player which saves files with an .act extension. The utility I’ve found also handles .rcd and .rec files, however I’m uncertain as to what players save files with these extensions by default… I know I could set mine up to save with different extensions if I fiddled with configuration files, but I haven’t, as I see no point in this.

As you may have imagined, I’ve come across some software which is capable of converting these formats into something rather less obscure, namely WAV or MP3 file formats. The software, named “Sound Convert Tool 2.0″, is available freely for Windows systems from a Geocities website, at http://www.geocities.com/sound_converter/. In the interests of longevity, and given the ability of Geocities to come and go faster than Cities and Thrones and Powers according to Rudyard Kipling, I’ve mirrored the application here. (418.4 KB ZIP archive)

If you’re the rights holder to this application, and would prefer this utility wasn’t hosted here, I’d request you contact me and I’ll take it down. There is a notable absence of any and all attribution on the Geocities page, so not only did I have no-one to contact, I also don’t even know for sure that the Geocities page was the original place this software was published. Dubious ground, and if you know any better, please, get in touch to clear things up.

The readme is fairly self explanatory, and it converted a recording slightly over an hour long (one hour and three minutes twenty-five seconds, to be exact) to MP3 format (which involves converting to WAV, then encoding an MP3) in probably around five minutes… I wasn’t clocking it, though. Tis nifty.

Other manufacturers who may have branded this equipment: JP’s, JNC, Acer, BenQ, Pavo, iRiver, EFX, .BXCUTE, Digital, DX, Speed, Datum and probably others. Yes, that was blatant Search Engine suckery, but there’s a distinct lack of clear information out there regarding this conversion, and these MP3 recorder type things are popping up everywhere. If your player/recorder isn’t there, and records ACT, REC or RCD files, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

I had, of course, planned (and publicly announced) my intent to buy memory sometime this morning… so that part is okay. I failed to clarify just how many different pieces of memory I’d be purchasing. I bought the cheapest possible 512MB stick of DDR-RAM (PC2700) that my favorite stockist had in store, despite it being cheaper next door.

I walked into Computer World, to the desk of someone who was desparately trying to look busy (as they do in that place, in an attempt to avoid actually having contact with customers), and lent across his work area asking “How much is your cheapest 512MB stick of PC2700 RAM?”. He answered, somewhat reluctantly — “$125″ (this is Australian dollars, for any foreigners who think this is ridiculously cheap/expensive: exchange rates are crazy things). I said thankyou, turned, and left the store. Just to clarify for those who haven’t been reading my online ramblings for too long, that store was the bane of my life for a few weeks over warranty issues… I’ll now never buy anything from them, but maintain that they are a useful resource for bargaining leverage at other stores. Like the most excellent THX (or TX, they seem to be having an identity crisis at the minute) across the foyer.

I went next door, and asked the same question… they were, of course, far more helpful, so no leaning-across-desks was required. The price was $139, from memory.

“Over there can do it for $125, how much lower can you get it?“
“Hang on, I’ll check for you.” She looks at the screen for a few seconds. “Sorry, the lowest I can go is $130.“
“That’ll do!” I shout, ever eager to avoid the perils of Computer World after-sales, should something go awry. To me, avoiding those people is worth far more than five dollars, any day of the week.

The inevitable question cropped up, as it always seems to in retail, “Is that all” or “Can I help you with anything else?”. In recent times, I’ve been more and more dissatisfied with my clunky Walkman in which the tape player doesn’t work, and I use exclusively for listening to radio. Not only that, I never did own a portable CD player, so all my music stayed at home, and the radio went with me. Motivation for an MP3 player? You bet.

The MP3 player part of my spending was the “impluse” element… I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but if there were something with a nice feature-set, I’d buy it. My requirements were simply that it be solid-state, compact and DRM-incumbency free… and preferably under $150. With this in mind, I was expecting to get some MP3/USB drive thingo with 128MB of storage, towards the $100 mark. Admittedly, I ended up spending more ($149 — right next to my limit!), but it hits my requirements pretty nicely… not only can I carry my music (and 256MB of it, no less!) with me, I can also get FM radio on this thing. That’s okay, but the “killer feature” on this thing is that it doesn’t need external batteries.

I know, I know: if it’s anything like an iPod’s battery, it’ll bite me in two years. Big deal! I think I’ll have moved on from 256MB in a few years, but that’s a problem for then. Right now, I can have 12 hours of usage between recharges via USB. How cool is that?

I’ve got three gripes with the thing right now:

1. The interface is seriously crap.
2. From the speed of transfers, I’d guess it’s only USB 1 — no blazingly fast uploads, which is a shame
3. Tuning digital radios really gets to me. I need knobs and dials!

Of those three complaints, only the first is significant. I’ve taken to dumping music in the root folder, because it’s easier than screwing in the menu until I figure out how to change folders for playback. Admittedly, I’ve only been using it for a few hours, and I’ll probably get used to it later, but it seems a tad prohibitive. That’s what you get when there’s only a five buttons (“Menu” and playback controls), I suppose.

The worst thing about the design is the positioning of the 3.5mm audio socket. It’s designed so that when a cable (or headphones, whatever) is connected, it’s amazingly difficult to press the menu button in a natural fashion. Whilst human physiology would dictate our fingers press buttons from the side, the positioning of the button is such that you’d need to stick your finger through the audio connector to get to the button comfortably. It doesn’t look so bad, but believe me, it’s irritating.

It also does 20 hours of voice recording (in what format, I have no idea), and yes, it is tiny. I just grabbed a ruler (I don’t think dimensions were listed on the specs sheet, which is generic to the firmware and whole line of models in different form factors), and it’s about 56mm x 38mm x 11mm — about half the size of my phone. What can I say, I like small tech!

This computer is noticeably more snappy with three quarters of a gig of memory… I like it! I’ve got the GIMP sitting editing about 10 moderately large files, with two windows of Firefox filled with tabs, a WISH app, my email client, an RSS reader, and my code editor of choice open, and it’s still zipping along. Sweet.