Michael Levin's Weblog and Swampcast!

Here's a new Swampcast MP3 (22.5Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

Swampcast talks with Pandora CTO Tom Conrad.

Tune in to Swampcast and hear about the inner workings of arguably one of the most fascinating proof of concepts on the web today. The Music Genome project and Pandora. Listeners can actually train Pandora to play the kind of music they like. And, the audio is commercial free. I love it! Topics include:

• Pandora
• Music Genome Project
• Debian -- The Universal Operating System
• OpenLaszlo | the premier open-source platform for rich internet ...
• PostgreSQL: The world's most advanced open source database
• Flash
• Tom Conrad's blog

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-0356783a83b0c1e558ccfceed68434d0}

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast MP3 (12.5Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

Swampcast talks with Pandora founder Tim Westergren.

Today's Swampcast heads out to Oakland, CA to talk with Tim Westergren of Pandora. Tim's concept is based on what he calls "The Music Genome Project". That's Tim, second from the left. (the picture is from the Pandora blog) Topics include:

• Pandora
• The Music Genome Project

Note: This recording is stereo, so be prepared to hear two channels!

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast - MP3 (29.3Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic! Photo by Gus Freedman

Swampcast talks with Wikipedia Chief Architect Brion Vibber.

Today's Swampcast heads out to Sweden and catches up with Brion Vibber, the Wikipedia Chief Architect. Brion's been on the team for a long time. Tune in and hear what lies beneath the calm waters of one of the most popular websites today! Topics include:

• Wikipedia
• Wikipedia Internet Relay Chat

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast - MP3 (9.36Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

Swampcast talks with Dom DaSilva about Idea, JSh3ll, goings on in the Swamp, contests...

Today's Swampcast cruises out to the Orlando Ruby User Group meeting. You'll hear Dom DaSilva, intrepid developer and creator of JSh3LL, a cool tool that helps you work with Amazon's new S3 storage service. What's up in the Swamp? Well, you'll hear about contests, user group meetings and everything else. Topics include:

• Dom DaSilva's company website - SilvaSoft
• Orlando Ruby User Group website
• JetBrains is the company that makes Idea
• South Florida Oracle Users Group
• Refresh Orlando is a new Web 2.0 group
• OrlandoJUG
• GatorJUG
• Bruce Eckel's website

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast - MP3 (9.95Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

Swampcast talks with Graham Ullrich, FlyingCracker.com webmaster about mashups...

Today's Swampcast surfs to Crested Butte, Colorado and features Graham Ullrich, FlyingCracker.com webmaster. In this Dissecting the Frog podcast, Graham explains how to do a mashup on your website. You'll hear about XML, weather feeds, cool mixed drinks, PHP, webservers, Web 2.0, wild river rafting in the mountains and dangers of driving through mountain passes in treacherous conditions. What the heck is a mashup? Tune in and find out as Graham explains! Topics include:

• Graham Ullrich's website Flying Cracker dot com
• A Flying Cracker Mashup - driving condx
• Send email to Graham
• Phoogle Maps - a PHP utility for mashups
• Google Maps API
• Geocoder - find the latitude and longitude of any US address - for free!
• ProgrammableWeb.com: Mashup Dashboard
• ProgrammableWeb.com: How to make a mashup
• Notes from Bruce Eckel's Programming the New Web conference

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast - MP3 (19.5Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

Today's Swampcast features Dominic DaSilva, jSh3ll developer...

Dom discusses his company Silvasoft's new product, jSh3ll. Here are links to some of the topics mentioned:

• 
• Link to Dom's S3 utility jSh3ll
• Send email to Dom
• Link to Amazon's S3 storage utility and instructions...

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast - MP3 (8.19Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

Today we talk with artist JG "Greg" Freedman in this special Swampcast.

Gregg talks about art, life and doing what matters. In addition, these topics are mentioned:

• Greg Freedman's website
• The Nuvo article about Greg's work
• Send email to Greg

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast - MP3 (6.9Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

Canadian actress Marilyn Norry joins us for this special Swampcast.

Marilyn gives a look at her life as an active member of the performing arts community. In addition, these topics are mentioned:

• Marilyn Norry's bio at IMDB
• Flight 93 - the movie
• Gabriel Byrne
• Aaron Bushkowsky
• The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

UPDATE!

eMergent Films John Reneski has produced a film about Swampcast and podcasts called The Making of Swampcast

All right, folks... Prepare yourselves for another evening of excellent, podsafe music straight from the Garage. Blaine Transue brings us excellent, carefully harvested gems from his NPR-affiliate KSVY in Sonoma. And, I was just finishing up last week's Valentine's Special with Roy Martin's "It Hurts Sometimes". Who'da thunk that tune was from Norway? Thanks for the playlist, Blaine!

Looks like I'll be chatting with Blaine Transue, my favorite music podcaster, at "the Garage" next Tuesday. Click the image above for details. It's both simulcast on www.KSVY.org and available as a podcast at http://www.virtualgarage.us/music/podcast/vg/vg.xml Should be fun!

Here's a new Swampcast - MP3 (24Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic!

It's the first week of 2006 here in the Swamp. Bruce Eckel joins us today with news on his latest book, "Thinking in Java, 4th ed", computing thoughts and many other things.

Bruce shared his opinion regarding these questions from the blogosphere:

1. When will we be able to get a copy of the new edition of "Thinking in Java"?
2. Some people complain about having so many changes made to the Java language... should Java stabilize or keep being upgraded, maybe more aggressively?
3. Is C# (or .NET) a real menace to the Java platform?
4. C# is going to incorporate SQL and XML in the language. That would increment tremendously the productivity of business developers, but on the other hand, it may be considered as "syntactic sugar". Should Java do the same (incorporate SQL and XML in the language)?

In addition, these topics are mentioned:

• Ruby on Rails
• PHP
• Elliotte Rusty Harold and Cafe Au Lait
• Digg
• Del.icio.us
• Artima Blogs
• Accelerando, by Charles Stross
• Bill Venners
• Samorost - a vio-free game Bruce likes

Podcast Alley has a wonderful index for each and every podcast registered there, including Swampcast!

Enjoy! and, please let me know what you think...

Here's a new Swampcast - featurng Bruce Eckel, author of "Thinking in Java" MP3 (31.4Mb) Thanks to Tod Maffin for the lead-in magic! UPDATE! I plan to do a Swampcast podcast soon with Bruce Eckel, author of "Thinking in Java" . If you have any questions you'd like to ask, post a comment here or email me at AskBruce at Swampcast dot com. Yeah!

Virtual Garage: Blaine Transue hosts Virtual Garage. Each week, Saturdays 7 - 9pm (PST) on KSVY 91.3 FM in Sonoma California and simulcast on the internet at www.ksvy.org. Non genre specific, no geographic limitations, no language barriers. Simply the best self produced music on the planet.

As music goes, Virtual Garage is my hands-down favorite. Blaine Transue hand picks music from sources like GarageBand.com and ques them up with the essential ingredients that separate an ordinary compilation from a show you love to listen to, a show you tell your friends about. A show you want to burn to disk and play again and again. Those ingredients are good taste and timing.

Yesterday, being Friday (TGIF!), I slowed down a little and listened to the Nov 8th Virtual Garage show. Once again, Blaine Transue compiled a set full of extremely well produced and enjoyable music. I found myself not just listening but paying attention to the music he played. Music from New York that made me take a mental note and plan to look the artists and venues up the next time I'm there.

This morning, I realized that tonight is the night another Virtual Garage is slated to air. I have a house with an old NuTone intercom system wired all throughout its rooms, patio and garage. Vitrual Garage makes this old house really rock! (All you Make afficianados: all I did was plug the audio out from my computer into the aux input of my 40 year old home intercom and voila! there's a whole lotta rockin' goin on!)

Meanwhile, I picked up a couple of new books:

Making Music on the Mac

GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual

My mother teaches piano and for some strange reason, I never learned how to play. My sister Dana gave me a book for my birthday called "The Piano Shop on the Left Bank - Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier", By THAD CARHART (here's the first chapter). This wonderful book, combined with a recent musical awakening experience I had in Oakland, CA with friends Michael Hauser, Hadley Louden and others led me to a piano shop here in the Swamp this week. Yes, I cast aside my old decision that I was better suited to appreciate music than play and found myself sitting in front of a Yamaha F22, an oak upright. And, as if contrast were necessary, I listened to the salesman play a full size concert grand that he said Elton John and Paul McCartney had played.

But, I digress. I am Dying for a Mate'