rivo

At my day job, we use linear programming to calculate virtual capacities on airplanes, i.e. overbooking. There's a few other optimization techniques involved, such as dynamic progamming, but if you've ever been asked to take a different plane, chances are an LP was involved.

I find it interesting that the author refers to record companies. It's almost always the producers who make these kind of decisions. Most producers go with the current trend in terms of sound. If a producer wants to give me an 80s sound à la Bryan Adams, I'll go somewhere else. So it's the musicians as well. Everyone wants to sound "modern". Currently, this means loudness (and clipping, apparently).

There is lots of research on zoomable user interfaces. A variation is detail-in-context interfaces where the points of interest are magnified while the rest is compressed. The OS X icon bar is a good example. Check out http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Ma... (contains many references to ZUI research as well) It's been suggested to use a trackball with your left hand to zoom in and out while keeping the mouse in your right hand (vice versa for left-handed people). I'd like to see that happen.

I believe that the only way to make customers pay for articles again is in conjunction with hardware (such as the Kindle) and an online store (such as iTunes). I hate reading long articles on my monitor. (I do it because there's no other option than buying the paper - but for one article?.) I'd be happy to pay in order to be able to read a good article on the subway. Not $1/article, mind you, but even a few cents per article would turn into a nice sum of money for the newspapers.

Doing something like TechCrunch in an ever-growing Internet startup world, Arrington is (wrongly) perceived as a deciding factor to success, as a God to some, maybe even. Although it's wrong, I'm not surprised this happened.

I just spent five days researching how to generate PDFs dynamically or alternatively how to fill PDF forms dynamically from a server-side script. Just so anyone who purchased a ticket to our concert can print it out themselves (the ticket will include a barcode which can be scanned using a mobile phone with Java and a camera).

Then it dawned on me that I could simply point them to a (HTML) page which they can print out. Believe me, I felt stupid.

(But at least I learned about PDF forms, (X)FDF, and JavaScript in PDFs. Oh well...)

I wrote a lot for my own band and that was probably the best way to get into the business and get to know the right people. Our first album was released in 2004 and people still buy it (word of mouth) so I'm still getting royalties. Lately, I've been writing for other artists as well but you never know if they pick your song and when they do, whether it picks up or not. So luck is a huge factor.

It's not something you pick up just like that. I've been making music as long as I've been programming (about 27 years). So take this "passive income" and divide it by all those hours spent. You'll get something close to zero.

There are books on the topic. I recommend "Tunesmith" by Jimmy Webb. It's about the art and the industry.

On another note, it's really hard for me to bring the two things together. I could program audio software but that's programming, hardly any "art" involved. Lately, I've been making music for computer games but that's just the art, no technical knowledge required. As long as I can think, it's been either/or.

I'm actually that "rockstar programmer". ;)

Songwriting. Royalties. It wears off after a while, though. I'm not John Lennon. And it's not stable income. But still. It feels great when the check arrives.