It didn’t take long for Spotify to start downgrading a perfectly decent service:

Next week we are going to be making some changes to our music catalogue that we feel are important to communicate clearly. Unfortunately we are going to be removing a number of songs from our catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for you.

Why are we doing this?

The changes are being made so that we implement all the proper restrictions that are required by our label deals. Some tracks will be restricted from play in certain countries, this means that if you share tracks with friends who are in other countries it’s possible that they won’t be able to listen to them. The reason for this is that our agreements contain strict rules as to what tracks can and can’t be played in various countries that we are now capable of implementing. These restrictions are a legacy from when most music was sold on tapes and CDs and they have continued over into streaming music, our hope is that one day restrictions like this will disappear for good. [...]

Spotify are at the mercy of the record labels, so it’s understandable that they’re being forced to respect the licensing agreements they’ve made. If anything, I find it astonishing that they’ve got this far without implementing the requisite infrastructure to manage their obligation to respect the territorial limits they’d signed up to.

(All of which is not to say that the record labels are doing the sensible thing; merely the predictable one.)

And when there was only one set of footprints…

What real life bad habits has programming given you?

Programming has given me a lot and it still does every single day. But I have however also gotten some bad habits from the mindset that I have put myself in. There simply are some things that are deeply rooted in my nature, though some of them I wish I could get rid of.

A few:

• Looking for polymorphism, inheritance and patterns in ALL of God’s creations.
• Explaining the size of something in pixels and colors in hex code.
• Using code related abstract terms in everyday conversations.

How have you been damaged? :)

It’s scary to contemplate how many of the responses posted to that question strike a chord with me.¹

[Via ranchero.com]

1. Of course, the other way of looking at it is that programming appeals to me because I possess certain pre-existing personality traits, as opposed to programming having caused me to develop the behaviours in question. Chicken, meet egg. ^

Another day, another trailer for Coraline. This one’s much creepier than the last one, which is all to the good IMHO.

If the film is half as good as the trailer, Neil Gaiman looks like having a very good 2009.

[Via Chocolate and Vodka]

You might imagine that combining Doctor Who, Eminem and Yakkity Sax would result in a terrible mess.

I might imagine that combining Doctor Who, Eminem and Yakkity Sax would result in a terrible mess.

Happily, CollegeHumor proved us all wrong.

[Via MetaFilter]

You Can Shave the Baby.

For the love of $DEITY, why?

[Via GromBlog]

This post at The Big Picture left the best until last:

The setting sun glints off the Amazon River and numerous lakes in its floodplain in this astronaut photograph from August 19, 2008. About 150 kilometers of the Amazon is shown here, about 1,000 kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

Damn, that’s pretty.

This hydrofoil, custom-built for a Siberian governor, looks like something out of a Gerry & Sylvia Anderson production.¹

1. Well, the exterior does. The interior is just hideous. ^

It’s sock-puppet time again: the Seventh Annual Web-Goddess Oscar Contest is open for business.

Over at scans_daily, some rather nice art from Frank Miller before decline set in.

For my money, the last two pieces – the She Hulk-meets-Sin City spoof and Miller’s art for Denny O’Neil’s The Philistine – are the pick of the bunch. No question about it: when Frank Miller was good, he was very good.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Here goes…

• Social networking
• Snowflake on black
• Splashes of Light
• Space Elevator
• T-1
• Black box
• Small
• Japanese girl walking home from the shops, Asakusabashi, Tokyo
• The Rorschach Light¹
• Visiting winter

1. Is it just me, or does that thing look like a special effect from a future episode of Doctor Who? ^

David Mitchell asks: “Who can fail to have been impressed by the spectacle of President Obama’s inauguration last week?”

[...] I’ll tell you who – the Queen. I bet she sat there watching it on an unpretentious four-by-three portable, while she sorted dog biscuits into separate Tupperwares, muttering: It’s bullshit, Philip! No carriages, no horses, no crown – it just looks like a bunch of businesspeople getting in and out of cars. It’s as if the Rotary Club’s taken over a whole country. And the new one’s not even the son of one of the previous ones, unlike last time. I thought they were coming round to our way of thinking at last.

And she’d have a point. It might have been considerably grander than a new prime minister pulling up outside Number 10 and waving but, compared to the coronation, it looked like someone signing for their security pass and being shown where to hang their mug. [...]

A tale of airline catering gone wrong: Which one is the starter, which one is the dessert?

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

Spotify might just be the best online music streaming site on the planet. It’s free (provided you don’t mind the occasional audio advert between tracks), fast, user-friendly and has a pretty decent selection of both new and back catalogue material. I’ll grant you that for some users the lack of a mobile phone client at the moment is a drawback, but as I don’t own a mobile phone – and wouldn’t want to rack up the bandwidth charges for streaming all that music if I did – I’m perfectly happy with the desktop client.

So far, I’ve been using Spotify as much to hear music that I have (or once had) in analogue formats as to listen to new material that I probably wouldn’t go out and buy just yet. I’ll be interested to see if that pattern holds over time; there’s all sorts of music I’m not going to buy all over again but am happy to be able to listen to now and again, but then there’s always something new(ish) that I’d like to listen to a few times before deciding whether to buy it. I wonder which impulse will win out.

Naturally, good as Spotify is there are a few improvements that could usefully be made (IMHO):

1. Get this menu item working. In the end I’ll want copies of music I really like in a format I can play when away from my desktop computer, so if they add links to the iTunes Store and Amazon’s MP3 store then I foresee many, many impulse buys.
2. I hope they’ll re-skin their client so that it looks more like an ordinary MacOS X program: I know some people like the matt black look in their jukebox programs, but I’d like the option of not causing myself eyestrain reading all that light text on a black background. Make it skinnable and everyone’s happy.
3. I like that the Spotify client works with Growl and Last.fm, but I missed the ability to display song lyrics while I played tracks that I enjoy when I use iTunes.¹ I’m sure that Spotify will eventually incorporate most of the bells and whistles that users have built up around their current jukebox software, but it’s a shame that most of us will end up with two parallel music libraries and their associated ecosystems of utilities. Not enough of a shame to make me consider dropping Spotify though.

Spotify is officially in invite-only beta mode; I’m sure that the company would be horrified if anyone were to follow this link to get straight to the signup page without an invitation.

[Via Feeling Listless]

1. In fairness, iTunes itself only holds the lyrics: it’s DesktopLyrics that displays them in a translucent window over my desktop. ^