taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Security: Ross Anderson, crypto and security guru extraordinaire, moonlights as – wait for it — a street bagpipe player:

I play the pipes (the Great Highland Bagpipe and the Scottish smallpipes). I played competitively as a teenager, and thereafter paid my way through university by working as a street musician in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark.

NOOOOOO! ANYTHING BUT THE BAGPIPES!!!

Only joking. But yes, he really does play the bagpipes. And that submission to the EU’s consultation on the management of copyright and related rights is worth a read, to get an idea of how the new increased enforcement of music copyright has had chilling effects on the viability of the UK’s folk music scene. (found via Karl-Friedrich Lenz.)

Tags: bagpipe, copyright, crypto, extraordinaire, great, guru, music, player, security, street

Linux: I’m really getting into KDE 3.2. I’ve been looking for a music player that is better at handling large collections of MP3s better than the venerable XMMS, without much luck:

iTunes is, of course, the ‘gold standard’, but is Mac/Windows only, so that’s not going to work on my Linux machine.

Rhythmbox is getting there as an iTunes clone, but right now is woefully incomplete. It fails to play lots of my music, has serious interface shortcomings — you can rate songs, but then there’s no way to use those ratings, and you cannot edit any of the tag metadata in the released version.

JuK is the new KDE music player app. Initially, I wrote it off — it uses the clunky interface of ‘one big list’, at first glance.

But after Rhythmbox managed to confuse itself sufficiently so that it would only open as a 3-pixel-high window (seriously!), I gave JuK another try. Summary: it kicks ass.

It turns out that the multi-pane ‘artists, albums, and tracks’ mode of iTunes and Rhythmbox isn’t actually necessary, since JuK improves on it using a very nifty dynamic ‘Tree View’ mode.

Another nice feature is the MusicBrainz integration; it has built-in support for querying MB’s servers to get correct tag data for your music. In fact, its tagging support is fantastic — this is unsurprising, as it looks like it started off as a tagging app.

Being a well-written KDE app, it exposes some nifty scripting support via DCOP, and a quick look-over with KDCOP reveals a nice set of APIs — for example, running dcop juk Player playingString tells me the name of the track and artist playing right now. I’m not sure if there’s a way to register for callbacks on events like ‘track change’ just yet, here’s hoping…

No sign of rating support just yet, though; my dream player would allow me to rate my tracks, and then make a dynamic playlist which selects tracks by rating, playing the top-rated ones more often and never playing the bottom-rated ones. Here’s hoping it’s in the pipeline ;)

All in all, though, it looks like I’ll be giving JuK a try.

Tags: app, interface, juk, kde, linux, mode, music, player, rate, rhythmbox, support

Gamasutra reports from GDC Europe. It’s good to see Systemic Game Design is getting a lot more attention these days as CPU power increases on consoles, instead of the random 3D graphics tweakery that predominates on the PC platform. Systemic game design is defined here as follows:

“Instead of hard-coding lots of features into the game .. the systemic paradigm tries to create global patterns which provide emergent gameplay, and the ability to create alternative strategies using the level’s resources. … In this way a player can come up with new ideas to solve problems by combining items in ways that perhaps even the level designers hadn’t considered. This improves the sense of immersion and freedom, while emphasizing player’s self-expression capabilities through the game. … An example of a systemic game is GTA3, where each mission can be solved in dozens of ways, as compared to old lock-and-key adventure games, where player expression and alternative strategies were basically non-existent. In a systemic game world, the player can use different methods to solve a problem. In a non-systemic game world, you must guess how the game designer wanted you to solve the problem, even if that way does not feel very intuitive, nor fun.”

Mmm. Grand Theft Auto 3. PS: GTA3 can also be found on my Amazon wishlist ;)

Tags: design, gamasutra, game, gta, level, player, problem, systemic, way, world

Found on /.: Nuon have released a free-as-in-speech SDK for third-party developers to develop applications which will run on certain models of DVD players. According to ‘What Is Nuon?’, the Nuon DVD hardware is essentially both a DVD player and an open gaming platform. Incredible! Looks like I know now what kind of DVD player I’ll be buying — the one I can write my own apps for ;)

Tags: dvd, found, gaming, hardware, incredible, looks, nuon, platform, player, sdk