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Review: Summadayze 2012

My Review of Summadayze which was published in Inpress magazine this year.

SUMMADAYZE 2012
SIDNEY MYER MUSIC BOWL

Summadayze has a reputation as one of the key mainstream music festivals of the summer, but the festival landscape is becoming more competitive. Embarrassing delays of headline acts aside, the promoters have all the bases covered: the location, lineup, stages, sound, sunshine and singlets – all check. But is ticking all the music-festival boxes still enough to be that one, choice, must-attend summer event?

Acts such as Pendulum, Calvin Harris, Snoop Dog, Scissor Sisters and Moby will draw a crowd, but the line-up choices just seem a bit ‘safe’. Including a couple of dubstep and progressive electro acts, 12th Planet and Tiga, seems like a no-brainer given the growing popularity of these genres of late, but the sparse audience attendance at these sets suggests otherwise.

Looking forward to getting our serious dubstep swagger on, it’s disappointing to rock up for 12th Planet and be greeted by what could only be called a ‘casual gathering’ of fans – there’s literally enough room to swing a cat. That’s not to say the set isn’t polished, far from it. Fans of the LA-based DJ find their dirty bass-drop senses tingling with delight and the tight audio engineering is noticeably impressive for a live set. So what gives? We can only turn to the disparity between the promoter’s perception of dubstep’s apparent popularity explosion and the reality that it is still yet to really take off in Australia. This experience calls to mind watching the Boiler Room crowd at last year’s Big Day Out as they looked around in confusion whenever a dubstep track was dropped: “How do I dance to this?”

The turnout at Tiga is much more respectable. His upbeat, electro style appeals to those punters wanting more of a dance-party vibe to keep the night kicking on. Tiga’s set is intelligently crafted, appealing to the more observant listeners whose focus is rewarded with stealthy drops of some classic ‘90s remixes. Ignoring the expectedly packed Main Stage, Tiga is where the party’s at.

The night is set to climax with Pendulum – the illustrious, yet elusive, headline act. After staring at an empty stage for 30 minutes or so, shuffling to the front and filling the gaps left by a few impatient bailers, expectations are high. Pendulum deliver everything you would expect from one of their standalone shows. Rob Swire’s delightfully cheesy improvisations on the keys are honestly a highlight. The act have truly evolved from a progressive drum’n’bass trio into a modern-day rock band pumping out epic tunes and ripping crowd member’s faces off with little effort. However, the toll of the band’s 24-month tour can be felt lurking under the surface. The setlist is pretty standard (bordering on predictable) with hits from their latest LP interspersed with drops of live favourites such as ABC News Theme, Blood Sugar and The Prodigy’s Voodoo People.

This is definitely a thoroughly entertaining finale to quench the thirst of those who stayed all day to see what they came to see. But we are left with a feeling of déjà vu after seeing Pendulum at Festival Hall in November of 2010. Almost nothing has changed in over a year and we were expecting a lot more. The set felt a little too much like ‘colour by numbers’ (or should that be ‘Watercolour by numbers’?). Here’s hoping the group’s upcoming break from touring restores some of that creative energy. And in the meantime, sit glued to Twitter waiting to see what Swire and Gareth McGrillen’s side-project, Knife Party, have to offer.

I love Urban Dictionary

Usage defines meaning.

Hippie-whip: (verb) To exploit someone’s strongly held alternative values and beliefs for the purposes of tricking them into going out of their way to help or support you. The subjects of a hippie-whip are compelled to act in your interests as it is a way for them to demonstrate their commitment to their hippie values.

Their daughter enjoys being a vegetarian, not because of any noble principles, but simply because it’s a way for her to “hippie-whip” her parents into making a fuss over her and her vegetarianism.

Phone leg: A British synonym of phantom phone, the experience of feeling your phone vibrate in your pocket when in fact it hasn’t. You are either imagining it or mistaking other vibration sources for your phone. Commonly occurs when driving in the narrow cobble-stoned streets of London. More likely to occur if you are talking about someone behind their back. You suddenly think they’re calling you, feel an immediate twinge of guilt, followed by immense relief when you realise it was just phone leg.

Ed: “Hang on, my phone’s going. Oh no it’s not. It’s phone leg. I thought it was my daughter. Do you get phone leg?”
Rob: “Yes, but I try not to keep it in my leg.”
Ed: “What are you, a terminator?”

ESL speak: The change in speech that happens (sometimes unconsciously) when an EFL speaker is talking to an ESL speaker. The EFL speaks louder & slower, uses clearer syllables and sometimes adopts the accent of their ESL audience. Useful when ordering Chinese or Indian takeaway over the phone so it is more easily understood. Has no racist motivations at all but is simply a practical way to assist communication.

EFL: “I have one beef-a-black-been, laaj spesha frai raice, tree dim sim.”
ESL: “Ok, be ten fitteen minnas. Ba Bai.”
Friend-of-EFL: “Dude, that was some nice ESL speak.”
ESL: “Tayn-you. Mehbe I shudda orda sam sprin roos a well.”
Friend-of-ESL: “OK you can stop now you friggin racist.”

How to fake LaTeX in Microsoft Word 2007

Ever seen those sweet research papers with that awesome font? That’s LaTeX. If you are a die-hard LaTeX fan you can pretty much stop reading this post right now. For the rest of us, Microsoft Word 2007 is often a practical alternative when pressed for time.

I’ll be the first to admit that if you can be bothered getting your hands dirty, LaTeX makes documents look pretty damn sweet. But there are times when the fuss of setting up distros and then beating LaTeX into submission just isn’t worth it (positioning figures, anyone?). If you just need to throw a quick document together, but want people to think you’re a LaTeX pro, you can get passable results using Word 2007 with a few tweaks:

  1. First, download the Computer Modern and Latin Modern fonts. Word 2007 supports the OpenType format so get that. Don’t be disheartened by how these fonts look onscreen – some look like total arse, but let’s face it, these fonts were not designed for the screen at all. They look fine when printed or even in a PDF if you zoom in far enough. And stick with “LM Roman 12″ as it has the proper bold font, others may look strange. You can find even more fonts if you install a LaTeX distro like MikTeX and search the installation folder for *.pfm files.
  2. If you want to approximate BibTeX-style references, get the IEEE citation stylesheet for Microsoft Word 2007 and extract to
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style.
  3. Set up your heading sizes and turn on 1.2.3 section numbering. I can’t be bothered explaining how so here’s a sample word document to get you started.
  4. Make sure you use the LM fonts for all figures and diagrams for consistency. However, for built-in equations, you’re stuck with Cambria Math, which Microsoft built especially for equations, but it doesn’t look too bad.

When you’ve finished your document it should look something like this PDF of the sample template linked to above.

Google Reader Recommendations

Google have added a new “recommendations” feature to Google Reader. First I thought, “Oh great, they’ve stolen my idea.” But actually, it’s not even close to the goal of increasing the precision of my Google Reader inbox. Recommendations does not appear to be using any kind of classification (e.g. StumbleUpon), instead just clumping all users “likes” together in one big naive popularity contest.

The interface is simple. You can click an “I like this” button for each item. This is the most important UI feature Reader has introduced to date. Using the shortcut keys, I can read articles with acceptable speed and use the L key to quickly flag interesting items. However, what Google does with this “user X likes item Y” training data needs a lot of work.

Google Reader Recommendations

Here’s some improvements that need to be made, ASAP:

  • It shouldn’t show me items from feeds I subscribe to and have already read (syntactic duplication).
  • It shouldn’t show me reposts of news stories I have already read (semantic duplication). If a story is deemed relevant, show me the most authoritative reporting of it.
  • It shouldn’t show me useless no-content feeds that require you go to the original site to view the story.
  • If it’s going to recommend YouTube videos, then it should use the mountain of data it already has on the YouTube network already, not just recommend based on popularity.
  • Recommendations need to have much higher precision. Currently, I estimate its less than 0.1  (for every 10 items I read, 1 is relevant).
  • It should apply the relevance filtering to posts in my existing subscriptions, most of which have similarly low precision.
  • However, there are some feeds such as web comics which should not be filtered. I want to read every single XKCD whether I find it funny or not. If a system could predict which I find funny before I read them I’d be thoroughly impressed!
  • Ranking of items (by “magic”? please…) is NOT important. I want to read stories from oldest to newest. I want recall of 1.0 and precision of at least 0.8 or I’m not interested.

To be successful, it needs to merge StumbleUpon’s classification system (which has the logic right) with the Google Reader framework (which has the interface right).

To make a parallel with Gmail and spam classification, the reason Gmail’s anti-spam shits all over other spam classifiers is that Google added a simple “This is Spam” button to the web interface, effectively outsourcing the training of spam messages to its enormous user base. Similar techniques can be applied to Google Reader, but on an individualised basis.

Key to the success of such a classifier is social analysis, which is used by StumbleUpon and Last.fm recommends music I might like, based on what people with similar taste listen to.

Google PDF Quick View

Google has started to integrate it’s Google Docs PDF viewer into search results, allowing you to view PDFs right in the browser. Finally, you can uninstall that bloated Adobe Reader plugin, like you’ve always wanted to. If you’re on a Mac, you can see PDFs without waiting for Preview to open.

OK, so this is pretty old news but I hadn’t really noticed until recently as they don’t show a link for all documents. But why is this so awesome? PDF is a rich format that offers many features not really relevant to web search. Most often searchers are just looking for some information, like MSY’s latest price on that Hot New Intel CPU.

But this only affects search results. But you can install a Greasemonkey script which opens all links to PDF, PPT and DOC files using the Google Docs Viewer. We’ve had online apps for a while, but I consider Google’s  step of opening up the GDocs Viewer to be THE official singularity, or “beginning of the end” for the humble desktop application. After this, there is no turning back. And I for one, want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Or as a friend of mine once said “Firefox + Internet = Operating System”.

That said, one feature that needs improvement is searching within documents. This is only enabled for some documents, presumably the one Google has had time to index the metadata or OCR. And search hits are only highlighted with no feature of iterating through them.