Music Critic: Rating the Podcasts

This post has been sitting in edit mode for several months, so I'm just turning it loose.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, so I'm just going for it.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Enough that I have content playing pretty much 6-8 hours every work day. Sometimes the backlog takes several days of concentrated listening to get through.

Most podcasts have lead-in and lead-out music. I'm a musician. It's only natural that I have an opinion on everyone's choices of music.

Disclaimer

I'm trying to cite musical sources where possible. I tried to use Due Diligence there, namely I could not locate a citing of the artists or titles on the relevant web site by using the Home Page, and any pages directly accessible from that, e.g. Legal, About, etc. Feel free to correct me in the Comments.

Further Disclaimer

Also note that I like all of these podcasts, or I wouldn't even be listening to them or blogging to you about them or *cough* encouraging you to listen to them. Take any criticism as tongue-in-cheek, and applying to the music only, not the content!

So without further disclaimers, let's launch into it.

First thing to notice, is that pretty much no one cares to cite the music they are using, and I doubt these are all original works.

The Java Posse

Java (Loose Bruce Kerr)

In the House (Juan Carlos Jimenez)

The lead-in music is well-known to their followers, a parody of a classic tune, poking fun at the whole Java phenomenon, and espcially jabbing at M$, as the Javanistas like to do.

The lead-out music is a bouncy little tune with silvery guitar, plus voice-over.

Cincom Smalltalk

"Effortless" (Josh Woodward)

2009-08-13: Thanks to an actual Reader Comment, this was corrected! Thank you.

The lead-in and lead-out music on this one are about my all-time favorites. Some kind of drop-D zhingmania, very very groovy. Makes me dance in my chair.

Scheeeeeeemiiiiiiiiiiiiing, hang me out to dry....

Anyway, even if you don't give-a-shit about Smalltalk, listen to the first and last minute of one of these podcasts!

Stack Overflow

Unknown (Unknown)

Sounds like porno music, no offense. Maybe that's what they were going for, then in that case, well done mates!

Hanselminutes

Unknown (Unknown)

Some kind of horn-sectioned jazzy number with latin rhythm instruments supplying the beat. Not too offensive, except for the voice-over.

Software Engineering Radio

Unknown (Unknown)

Since these guys are obviously German, it's surprising the lead-in music doesn't sound like something off Trans-Europa Express, but is in fact a high-energy rock guitar tune. Lots of good interviews on wide-ranging topics. They have pages where it would be appropriate to post the info, but none was obviously present.

CNET

Unknown (Unknown)

News jingle, and thank God it's very short. Maybe they could lengthen that and cut the commercial crap they use for lead-in and lead-out instead.

Open Sources

Fix up, look sharp (Dizzee Rascal)

Drinkin' and Gamblin' (Barbecue Bob and the Spareribs)

These guys are right out there; a really fun listen with liberal use of adult language, and the song credits are right up front, where you expect to see them!

Symbian To Be Crushed By Linux-Powered Juggernaut

Ja, for sure, from Sweden....

But you're wearing Lederhosen!

Not sure what triggered that, probably someone mentioned Sweden, maybe something about Nokia. Nowadays that would probably trigger a TSA passenger take-down!

Speaking of Nokia, Symbian is going to go down hard; I think all their open-source posturing is too-little-too-late. Android and iPhone will crush them like the Linux-powered juggernaut that they are. The good news for Nokia is they can just switch over to Android at the inflection point; Symbian is just an albatross for them, which is why they pushed it into Open Source.

An impressive amount of non-Wikipedia anchors!

Theme Change

Enjoy the new visuals.

Why You Should Be Using Factories

Before I hit you with the punchline, let's set everything up.

Read up on Factory Pattern and Dependency Injection, so you will get the punchline. If you are already cool with these techniques, please still read the story, and have a good laugh (I did)!

Okay, here's the situation: parents went away on a week's vacation... Oh wait, not quite.

The real situation was: I had to leave work by a specific time to be home by a specific time, etc. Meanwhile, a coworker calls and asks me if I'm ready to demonstrate that User Interface Prototype hitting the Web Service for that 4 o'clock meeting! I was way ready, but I'm like, "Was this on my Calendar?" and of course it was not on there; Nobody hipped me to that meeting, dude.

Are we there yet?

So, no problem. I will take my rig home and get on VPN access and we are golden.

Except for one thing....

It was so fucking slow on the VPN link to the virtual hosting my remote service that everything was timing out all over the fucking place!

On the upside, I'm glad I was able to test for latency; put timeouts at the top of the list for The Very Next Day.

On the (very) downside, there was only 15 minutes before the start of a 21-person conference call! Out go the "I'm Panicking!" emails to my teammates, as I look into searching for some help with the settings, then determine I'm too panicked to try to deal with it, since the actual timeout would still need to be discovered, and the default 60 seconds was already timing-out.

Are we there now?

We are here now. That's when I remembered the main parts were interface-based, and the class name of the implementation was specified in the configuration file. I simply switched to my debug implementation, with 5 minutes to spare, then sailed through the Demo! You all have one of those, right? Right? Right?

Obviously, the punchline is: It will save your ass in a demo!