And here it is: RIVE 024, gdbodycount by Eucci & Co.. Since we erased our angry live/jam session (on accident), this was compiled instead. One of the things that was going through my mind as we redid the ELW entry, "one minute no silence, one minute suspended detonation", was a phrase from Nurse With Wound, in the liner notes to the terrific "A Missing Sense" release:
Swansong is a vocal piece which was spewed out after watching a documentary on the American A-Bomb tests off the Bikini Islands which left me sad, helpless and fucking angry - an ocean of death."fucking angry - an ocean of death." That phrase has been in my mind most of this week, as I found myself increasingly frustrated and even furious at the path this administration is taking. (Also, etched into the vinyl of the original release of Swansong was the phrase "You bastards won't be happy until everythings dead!"). As I've mentioned this week - when your leaders or those who whisper constantly in their ears churn out phrases like total war and bring to memory images of Goebbels, Goering, and similar: you've got a situation. This is not a defense plan - we have all but declared war on the world itself.
Direct links:
Cycling '74 announced final versions of Max/MSP/Jitter for Mac OS X. Finally - the really beefy audio tools are making their way to OS X. Part of me is still waiting for Supercollider 3 to get a little more wrapped up though.
Funnily enough, earlier this evening I was back in OS 9 land working on some wrap-ups to rive-024 (to be released online very shortly), although most of the time was spent in Pro Tools. I haven't spent nearly as much time in the generative environments as I did a couple of years ago when I started Eucci as a branch of the ELW. Last night, in fact, it felt good to have the pedals out again for a jam performance. Mmmmm... 46 minutes of high pitched slow moving live music using nothing for a source but the number 2 key of a telephone... (really!).
According to the Detroit Free Press, the hottest rumor is that Saddam made a deal with the U.S. months ago to get out of Iraq safely. This smells of conspiracy theory, but it's a fun one (and just about as plausible as anything else right now).
It'll be interesting to see how strong this rumor gets. The strength wouldn't necessarily indicate that there's any truth, but it would indicate even more distrust of the American government.
Thanks to Evan Simpson (a former Zope Corporation colleague) for pointing me to these postings from Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
Loss, a thoughtful and saddening reflection on the looting of history in Baghdad. A poignant quote from the New York Times article cited:
Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President Bush. “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history,” he said. “If a country’s civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation. If we had stayed under the rule of Saddam Hussein, it would have been much better.”
And this is evidence of...?, citing an article in The Independent about the libraries of Baghdad being burned. From the Independent article cited:
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan’s grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?To which Teresa responds with chilling speculation:
And why shouldn’t he [Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting the weapons all moved to Syria]? With so many records destroyed, in the library and elsewhere, we can claim anything about Saddam’s regime; and who can prove us wrong? If we really wanted to know about weapons of mass destruction, we wouldn’t have blown Chemical Ali’s house to smithereenies. That’s where those records were kept. Or if we did happen to blow it to smithereenies, we would have gone in and secured the site and whatever remained. It wouldn’t have been difficult; a reporter for the Daily Telegraph walked into the house while it was still being looted by local peasants and little kids. But we didn’t do that either. Nor did we secure the government offices and the homes of other high officials to see whether their paperwork held any clues. Darned if the looters didn’t destroy all that data too.
It's so much easier to rewrite history and reshape the world in our image if we destroy the past so people won't have to know the potentially terrifying future that awaits them.
APE is the rebranded (and apparently aggressively refactored) AdaptableStorage Zope product by Shane Hathaway. APE uses many of the patterns outlined in Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" that deal with mapping objects to relational databases. I don't have the time to go into it now, but I want to point to this outline about the system.
A nice thing about APE, like the Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF), is that storage is heavily abstracted away from the persistent object itself. This actually allows for different storage mechanisms, such as the file system (making human-editable files) or other database systems such as MetaKit.
A recent comment on my earlier "Quick Look at WebObjects" post asked for a comparison of SQLObject and the EOF. I hope to get to this soon. I haven't actually used SQLObject, but it looks to be a useful lightweight system. It uses metaclasses to facilitate the mapping. But it really seems to be a simple (but I imagine very usable) solution. APE, Modeling, EOF are all full scale persistence systems. They all do things like faulting/ghosting (delayed fetching of objects), and should allow for conflict resolution, verification, serializing, etc. They move this code away from the object itself, which is the right thing to do in my opinion. Just like I flinch whenever I see HTML in a print statement (HTML and programming code DO NOT MIX), I flinch whenever I see words like column, table, etc in a business object.
Roundup is a good example of a system written with database abstraction in mind. It can store its data in DBM, MetaKit, Berkeley DB, SQLite, MySQL, etc. And you can (fairly) easily move from one storage system to another (basically, one just has to go through an export/import step, by my understanding). Advantages? I can tweak and work with my schema for my customized Roundup application and not worry about the database underneath. When performance becomes an issue, I can move on to a system like MetaKit or SQLite and have zero impact on my application.
Sometimes, it goes the other way around - needing to design an application around existing database data. Sometimes, that's the tricky one.