Cameron Beccario : General

Never stop moving

cambecc — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 12:25:00 GMT

It's been a year since I left Microsoft and moved to Japan to study Japanese at Yamasa. Now that my year-long studies have completed, I have moved to Tokyo (just this past Tuesday!) for a job doing IT design.

In the spirit of change, my blog has also moved and can be found here: http://journal.nullschool.net/

Can I promise great articles, well-formed prose, and witty comments? No. But I like the colors.

Analyzing the aggregate music tastes of Mac, Windows, Linux users

cambecc — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Recently, a friend of mine introduced me to Audioscrobbler. Using an audio player plug-in, your music choices are collected and compiled into an overview of your musical taste, accessible from the Audioscrobbler website. The website also displays a list of neighbors--users with statistically close musical tastes. Friendster for music.

Groups are another interesting feature of Audioscrobbler. By joining a group (voluntarily), my music taste is combined with other members to create an aggregate musical profile of the group. Curious, I decided to look at the musical tastes of three groups--Mac, Windows, and Linux--to see if I could learn anything about the psychology of their users.

Presented with the top 50 favorite artists for each group of Mac, Windows, and Linux users, I first removed artists common to all three. For the record, those were:

Radiohead

The Beatles

Modest Mouse

Pink Floyd

Coldplay

Metallica

Nirvana

Depeche Mode

Green Day

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Muse

Evanescence

Led Zeppelin

Franz Ferdinand

Tori Amos

Second, I looked at the top 10 remaining artists in each group. This should give us a good profile of OS users' musical tastes:

Mac	Windows	Linux
David Bowie	Bushido	Iron Maiden
Beck	Alexisonfire	Rammstein
Pixies	Iron Maiden	Nightwish
周杰倫	Rammstein	Eels
Air	Linkin Park	Nine Inch Nails
Björk	In Flames	Lloyd Banks
Death Cab For Cutie	Elliott Smith	Dream Theater
菅野よう子	Nightwish	Blind Guardian
Bob Dylan	Incubus	Placebo
R.E.M.	Foo Fighters	Dream

As somewhat expected, the Mac group features a definite indie streak. Many of these artists blaze their own paths, such as Bowie, Beck and Björk. After all, aren't these people who think different? Also not surprising is the political rebelliousness symbolized by Dylan and R.E.M. You think they voted Bush? Hell, no. And I'm willing to bet neither did your average Mac user. It seems anime is popular, too; Kanno Yoko (菅野よう子) is apparently a famous anime soundtrack composer. I have no idea why Jay Chou (周杰倫) has such a strong showing. I've never even heard of the guy.

Windows and Linux users seem to be pretty angry people, Rammstein and Iron Maiden being highly ranked on each list. Who can blame them? Linux folks like to claim moral superiority, and this irks Windows users. On the other hand, Windows users don't care about command prompts and compiling kernels, and this irks Linux users ("they should care dammit, freedom of humanity depends on it!"). But certainly their musical tastes must differ somehow. With so many artists in common I couldn't detect a difference, so I went back to the original top 50 lists and selected the top uniquely-occurring artists. What remains is the true "essence" of the groups' musical tastes:

Mac	Windows	Linux
David Bowie	Bushido	Eels
Beck	Alexisonfire	Lloyd Banks
Pixies	Incubus	Dream
周杰倫	Foo Fighters	Grandaddy
Death Cab For Cutie	Blink-182	梶浦由記
Bob Dylan	Papa Roach	Goo Goo Dolls
R.E.M.	Korn	A Perfect Circle
The Cure	Avril Lavigne	Ben Folds
DJ Shadow	Rage Against the Machine	Motorworks
The Clash	Bad Religion	Styles

The Mac group retains its indie rebelliousness (note inclusion of The Clash and The Cure). They probably have a hard time getting along with people outside of their "in-group". The Windows and Linux tastes are still hard to differentiate, so I looked up the "mood" of each artist at allmusic. If mood is any indication of the disposition of listeners then the results are oddly appropriate. Windows users are hostile, raucous, confrontational, nihilistic, angry and angst-ridden. On the other hand, Linux users are messy, cerebral, quirky, earnest, greasy and menacing. Well I guess that settles that.

I'm at war with the washing machine

cambecc — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:39:00 GMT

I'm at war with the washing machine. No matter which countermeasures I take, this "home appliance" manages to stretch my clothes to extreme and unfair proportions. It is particularly brutal to t-shirts.

I'm not the only one. Each apartment in my building has the same model. Every so often I spot a student, a fellow soldier from the front, with a t-shirt draped loosely around their neck like a toga; a t-shirt sent forth into the watery void only to return a changed garment, a v-neck vest or a one-piece skirt.

The machine, a Sharp ES-25E, consists of a main washing tank with an impeller at the bottom. The impeller, which periodically changes direction, creates a watery vortex of death in which my hapless clothes become "clean". They also become stretched in a way similar to when approaching the event horizon of a black hole. The impeller can be set between two levels, strong and weak, both of which elicit evil cackles from the machine. Down at the 100 yen shop, you can buy nylon-mesh bags for protecting clothes. In theory this reduces the stresses experienced when spinning through the vortex but, alas, it merely delays the inevitable.

If I had a dryer, I could purposefully shrink the clothing back into a reasonable shape. Hmm... Perhaps the war is not lost.

People to thank, blogs as an emergent social network

cambecc — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:31:00 GMT

Meeting people and building social networks is what makes conferences like TechEd really valuable. Last week was no exception. I had the privilege of meeting and talking with quite a few nice people. Thanks to everyone on this list:

[伊藤由起子] Yukiko Ito, ZEST Inc.

[宇田豊和] Toyokazu Uda, Fuji Xerox

[柿沼雄一郎] Yuichiro Kakinuma, ITMedia

[河端善博] Yoshihiro Kawabata, SQL Server MVP (blog)

[片岡真二] Shinji Kataoka (Pegasus Laboratory)

[北端智] Satoru Kitabata

[小島紋] Aya Kojima, INETA Japan

[杉下朋年] Tomotoshi Sugishita, Visual Basic MVP (PAPA'n VB)

[鈴木祐巳] Masami Suzuki, Microsoft

[沼口繁] Shigeru Numaguchi, Microsoft

[堀田健也] Kenya Horita, ASP .Net MVP (Hollytown)

[福王寺聡明] Tomiaki Fukuoji (FooPah!)

[山崎明子] Akiko Yamazaki, NEC, presented the VB 2005 session

[優一吉原] Yuichi Yoshihara (Elfaria Development Studio.eds)

Special thanks go to Fukuoji-san, Sugishita-san, and Yoshihara-san for putting up with my horrible Japanese abilities for so long. Also to Ito-san for inviting me to TechEd and and Kawabata-san for inviting me to the Comega panel discussion.

At the TechEd 10th Anniversary party, I was introduced to a bunch of people, one of whom had drawn my likeness in character-form on a paper plate and handed it to me along with his business card. No name, just a blog: TimberLandChapel. [UPDATE: the owner is [今井聡] Satoshi Imai--thanks for the email, and the drawing!]

There are many other cool people I met, but either I don't have their business card or I drank a little too much at the party. So, ごめんなさい!

This got me thinking a little bit (the social networking, not the drinking, although that happens sometimes too). Closed social networks such as Friendster and Orkut are exactly that: closed. And they have a tendency for major branches of their networks to die off. But blogs and blogrolls can be said to constitute an emergent, loosely defined social network owned by no one entity. In much the same way that RSS is used as a standard for publishing (allowing aggregation and subscription, among other things), wouldn't it be nice to have a standard way of describing the social relationships between two people, i.e., two blogs? This standard could facilitate back tracking, privacy permissions (see LiveJournal), and who knows what else. Perhaps it already exists?

Tokyo Trip Report: the Java-in-Japan question

cambecc — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 08:07:00 GMT

Had a great time in Tokyo last week. Used Freespot to find some places with free wireless access, among them Cafe la Voie and Mixing Cafe. Also went to a meeting of the Tokyo PC Users Group where I heard an enjoyable presentation on the application of the electromagnetic spectrum to weapons technology. Spent some time in Roppongi Hills, which is just absolutely amazing in its vision, style, and labyrinthine layout. (And convinced me once again that wealth knows no boundary). Finally, I had a great talk with Yuki Ito (official Nice Person in my book) about user groups, Visual Basic, Java, and a slew of other topics. Why is it that Java is so popular in Japan? I like to gauge a technology's popularity by the number of books for sale. While browsing the stacks at Kinokuniya (a book store), I noticed one shelf of books for .Net, one for VB, two for C/C++, and six for Java. Perhaps more telling, the aisle was full of people reading the Java books. Talking with Yuki, it seems .Net usage is growing extremely quickly, but no doubt it has a lot of catching up to do (since .Net is still "new" in Japan). What happened?