AlexHopmann.com

This year Kat and I skipped Coachella- I think we were feeling a bit over busy, and the Coachella lineup looked a bit disappointing. But the Washington state based Sasquatch festival had expanded to three days and had a great line up, so we planned another long weekend with rafting in the morning and shows at night.

Saturday we got there in time for the New Pornographers. Actually we had a few minutes to spare and stopped by the Xbox / Rockband tent where they were running a competition. Unfortunately you needed 4 people to enter and we failed to put together a team that could get decent scores.

Finally we ran off to see the New Pornographers. The show was great, although speaking of Rockband it was too bad they didn’t play Electric Version which is in the game.

Modest Mouse was great, but unfortunately they scheduled it at the same time as the Breeders which was a pretty painful conflict for me. We left Modest Mouse only to stand around for 15 minutes as the Breeders were late to get their set going. I was also a bit apprehensive since the new Breeders album is not that great. Luckily it was worth the wait- the Breeders show was awesome and everything had a great energy.

Finally we went back to the main stage to see R.E.M. Of all the bands that I’ve followed so much, R.E.M. is pretty much the only one that I had never seen live. The set was very good and it was really fun for me to see them finally. I loved that they did some good obscure stuff off of “Fables/Reconstruction of the” and Harborcoat. On the other hand they didn’t play anything from Life’s Rich Pageant or
Murmer which was a bit disappointing. Still, it was great to see them and I enjoyed it a ton.

On Sunday we got there just in time to see Mates of State. The set was pretty good but I really didn’t recognize anything. Before festivals like this I often try to use them as an excuse to check out new music and try to listen to the bands ahead of time. I had been listening to Mates of State a bunch but still didn’t recognize anything.

After Mates of State we got our spot and I went back to the second stage to see the Kooks. They were VERY late. Crazy late. At least 45 minutes and maybe more. At a club that may be fine, but at a festival where you have to make difficult choices being that late is just unprofessional and rude since people are skipping other shows to sit in front of your stage and wait for you to play. Sometimes there are big equipment failures and I understand that, but this just seemed like a normal lazy setup. In the end I only saw 15 minutes of the Kooks who are a decent Kaiser Chiefs/Strokes style band.

Death Cab for Cutie was good, although as Pitchfork mentioned it feels like it would be much cooler to see them in a club- they have a hard time translating to the huge stage. Of course they are so popular now that is probably difficult- it was packed for them and many people started leaving before the Cure I think.

Finally I thought that the Cure were great. I was prepared to not be that into it- there are really only a couple of songs that I like that they have done post-Disintegration. They played a bunch of post-Disintegration stuff (including both of the songs that I do like) but they also played a TON of stuff off Disintegration that worked really well, and the second encore that was more than half of their first album was great. Doing it as just a 4-piece band helped them stick to a more focused sound and I think was pretty key to it being a good show.

Finally we skipped the third day- we were pretty tired and were not excited about the thought of driving back late at night in Memorial Day traffic. I can see some of the good thoughts about expanding to three days but for me its just too much and I’d rather they stick to just the Saturday/Sunday and give everyone Monday off to relax without missing any great shows.

The Gorge is as always a beautiful venue, Late May is a bit early for this area of the country since the weather is often sketchy. It rained a bit this year but at least no hail and it wasn’t freezing like last year. I also noticed what felt to me like a bunch more obnoxiously drunken people around. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention but I saw more staggering, puking, people doing wacky drunken things than at previous shows, and finally some jerk started yelling at Kat during the Cure because she was “in his way” and threw a beer and pretty much ruined the show for her. Very disappointing that people were getting that out of control.

FBCal is one of the most useful Facebook apps yet. It just creates an iCal feed from your friends birthdays and/or your events in Facebook. You can subscribe in iCal, Windows Calendar or Outlook. Slick, and very useful.

The hard drive in my Dell laptop started acting poorly so I’m trying to replace it with a solid state drive. Being too cheap to go spend $600 on an “off the shelf” SSD I’m trying to make one using a CF->SATA adapter and a 32GB CF card. Total cost $160.

The only catch is it doesn’t work so far. The Vista install dies part way through “uncompressing files”. Same with XP. At this point I’m wondering if the problem is my CF card (RiDATA 32GB 233X) or the adapter?

Any thoughts? Anyone get this working? There is a really cool looking adapter that lets you use 3 CF cards, but its $180 and its only from geekstuff4u where the shipping to the US is another $45. I can’t find that part from any US place.

A couple of weeks back Bertrand Paré, DeepRockDrive’s interactive director did this cool intro video that we run at the beginning of shows explaining how things work. We put together a version that folks can preview online and I think its pretty cool-

Facebook has some really nice developer pages that let you track the stats of your application. They show you total users, active users each day, daily adds, removes, blocks, and more.

The only catch is that the stats appear to be wrong half the time which limits their usefulness quite a bit. At DeepRockDrive our “daily active users” is frequently LOWER than our daily application adds.

Even worse the total user count which should be a pretty easy statistic swings wildly all over the place. On Tuesday it said we had about 15,000 users. On Wednesday morning it was reporting over 20,000 users, but only about 1,000 new ones??? And today its down to 12,000. From some other stats I suspect the 15,000 number is the closest to reality, but it does undercut my confidence in the overall stats.

Stuff at DeepRockDrive has been pretty exciting lately- bigger and bigger shows, some VC visits, scaling up the new site, and all that. But today we just came across something that was pretty amazing.

We have had people post videos of our shows for quite a while. All in all there are 30+ videos of the Sunday Marie Digby show but today we found a few videos on YouTube of people watching the shows. NOT the show itself, but fans enjoying the shows, clapping, waving hands in front of the screen…

http://youtube.com/watch?v=mSEa_1w9Wh8

http://youtube.com/watch?v=esIRYCvfok0

Whoa…

Blaine Cook, the former CTO of Twitter writes about scalability. Twitter has often been pointed to as an example of the kind of problems that a Ruby on Rails application will often encounter when trying to really scale big. He points out that languages don’t scale, architectures do.

Which is right. The problem isn’t Ruby. Its Ruby on Rails. Ruby is just a language. Ruby on Rails is an architecture that makes database interactions sometimes _too_ automatic. Unfortunately Blaine’s post seems to miss this distinction.

Its possible to build scalable applications with Ruby on Rails, but for all that Rails advocates making writing web apps the right way “on rails”, it leads you down some poor paths with respect to scalability. I know some great developers who understand enough about how the inner stuff works that I’m sure they can make scalable Rails applications, but I’ve also seen most that aren’t.

Facebook just announced Facebook Connect which lets you use Facebook to authenticate on your own site. Except that, uh, its already possible to do that with the existing Facebook APIs, although other than our implementation at DeepRockDrive I haven’t seen many other sites do this. I suppose the Connect stuff makes the approach a bit more smooth and supports it more officially, but its all there already.

For us supporting Facebook authentication was a no-brainer. We care about getting a ton of people to our site to see our cool interactive shows. If we can skip a whole registration process and all that mess and have them just click the Facebook icon, and it works, perfect.

I’ve been having a ton of issues with Visual Studio 2008 since it came out. I mostly use it as a text editor at the moment for editing my PHP files. I know this is a bit of a wacky scenario, but you can open a web project, get a good view of your directories, and I’m very used to all its shortcuts, etc (I feel lost in Eclipse, other editors).

One of my favorite VS features has been the fairly powerful “find in files” command. I’m sure Eclipse has something equivalent, but I haven’t found it yet. Unfortunately this has been routinely crashing in VS 2008, to the point where I have a copy of VS 2005 open just to search in my project. Then today Visual Studio 2008 crashes just opening one of the PHP files in my project.

I’ve seen a bunch of reports of similar things on the net, although most seem to be issues with 64-bit systems. Searching around a bit I found Scott had posted a link to a hot-fix patch roll-up. The good news is that it looks like it fixed my “find in files” problem, but it doesn’t seem to have fixed the problem opening that one file. I’ll post more as I figure it out later.

Update- After editing that problem file in VS 2005, the crash went away in VS 2008- so far the patch is a big success. Also, Scott Guthrie continues to score points in the “most responsive and helpful Microsoft person ever” category by jumping on my post with an offer to help. Given his 5-gold stars (I’ve been playing too much Rockband) and 1million+ score in that contest, I’m sure no one can catch him anyway.

I mentioned last week that I was going to have a hard time playing with Mesh because it won’t run with UAC disabled. First of all, Microsoft did post an explanation of why the current version requires UAC. I understand the explanation, but it is one of the typical cases where teams have to build on this internal technology and that one and this other one, none of which are ready for prime-time and all of which aren’t necessarily focused on actually providing user value…

In any case, I did install it on two XP machines. I’m about to shut it off. I noticed one of them was running a bit slow lately and checked the task manager. Mesh is using 490MB of memory, and has consumed 9 hours of CPU over the past couple of days. And in case it wasn’t clear, I haven’t really been asking it to DO anything…

I’m also mildly annoyed that the process is named “Moe.exe” so it took a small amount of digging to figure out what it was that was consuming all my system resources. They also have a second process called MoeMonitor.exe that somehow has consumed over 1.25hours CPU and 33mb RAM. It appears to be responsible for the task-bar icon.