Pete Ashton, Birmingham-based weblogger extraordinaire, has come up with a what I think is a brilliant idea: he is Going Deaf For A Fortnight. In his own words:

Okay, this is the start of a 14 day series of posts, Going Deaf For A Fortnight in which I go to a gig in a small venue in Birmingham every night to see bands I mostly have never heard of before and then write about them here. By the end of it I expect to have attained a good overview of the Birmingham small gigs scene, to hopefully have discovered some good tune-smiths and to probably have descended into a nightmarish Gonzo-style meltdown. We shall see.

At the time of writing he’s half way through and he’s posting some great stuff. If you live in Birmingham and enjoy live music then you really should check out these posts (Clare and Dave? Ever read this?). He’s building up a fascinating snapshot of the live music scene in Brimingham and spicing it up with his own observations and commentary so it’s not just about the bands themselves but contains observations on stuff like the composition of the audiences and the techniques used by the bands to promote themselves in the age of the internet.

And it’s not just reviews. He’s photographing the gigs and posting the photos to a set over on Flickr, and he’s just put a podcast of music by bands he’s seen online. Interesting stuff and a great example of what you can do with your weblog – personal publishing from the underground music scene! The only drawback, at least from his perspective, is the cost so he’s soliciting for donations from people who’ve been enjoying the series (Pete, if you ever read this, I’m unemployed and skint right now – hence the token donation), so if you fall into that category perhaps you could help him out.

There’s been a lot of coverage on this recently, but that’s no reason not to mention it here – especially because this kind of arrogant disregard for people really irritates me and I want the coverage to extend as far and wide as possible. The more people know about this kind of thing the better, so if you ever play music on your computer, you may want to read this.

It’s been revealed recently that the software bundled with certain recent Sony releases uses some arguably dubious techniques to hide itself and make itself almost impossible for the average user to remove. The CDs with this software aim to enforce Sony’s copyright by only allowing customers to play the CD on their computers using the music player bundled with the CD, so the average customer has little choice but the install the software if they want to play their legally-purchased CD on their machine.

You might think that protecting copyright is fair enough, but think about these points:

• The software is hidden in such a way that most users will be unaware it is there (More information at Mark’s Sysinternals Blog).
• This hiding method is then available to anyone else who wants to use it to secretly install software on the infected machines: there is at least one virus already out there which piggybacks on the technique.
• Removing the software can causes serious problems to the computer that will almost certainly be very difficult to fix for the average user without technical support which they will probably have to pay for, or at the very least spend some time researching themselves. (More information at Mark’s Sysinternals Blog)
• The license agreement with the CDs makes no mention of the difficulty of removing the software or its potential security implications.
• By forcing their customers to install software that puts their computers at risk, it seems to me that Sony is making an implicit statement about the relative value it places on its customers’ security and privacy over its own doomed efforts to prevent music piracy (all the time continuing to deny the fact that the software is a potential security risk, when anyone with any technical knowledge can confirm otherwise).
• Since being caught out on this, Sony have made an update available that removes the technique used to hide the software. However, this update has not inspired confidence and it is not clear exactly what else the update does.

In summary: the music companies appear to have little or no respect for their customers and place their copyright enforcment needs ahead of your computer’s and your data’s security. Be very careful before installing anything supplied by a music company on your computer, because it appears that you cannot be sure what it is or what it is doing.

If you have already installed this software and are concerned about it, detailed removal instructions can be found at Mark’s Sysinternals Blog but they are not for the faint-hearted. You may be better off waiting for the anti-virus vendors to release removal kits, such as this proposed one from Sophos.

After a chap called Lloyd Budd showed up on the blosxom list a while back asking about APIs and other such stuff, I wandered over to his company’s website at www.flock.com and put myself on their mailing list. Yesterday I got a mail inviting me to check out a preview release of their browser, based on Firefox, but which is closely integrated with the major blogging APIs and with other related systems like del.icio.us.

Since I offer no API support here, I’ve had to set up a blogger blog to play around with it: Sam’s Blogger Blog (my creativity failed me, OK?). I’ve already got a del.icio.us account, and so far I like that way the it’s closely integrated with the browser: better than foxylicious which I use on and off in Firefox.

Anyway, no time for a long analysis here: I’ve got chores to do at home and now that Uma is asleep I’d better take the chance while it’s still available.

Rollyo – roll your own search engine. At first I thought that this looked quite cool and I still do mostly, but I think that it’s got a major flaw: you can’t search any deeper than a whole domain. I want to be able to search into the directory structure of sites, so example.com/folder/ or even example.net?param=value&param2=value2.

Practical example of why this would be useful: I was trying to build a blosxom orientated search (that’s a link to my profile at Rollyo, as the searches themselves use javascript and I haven’t worked out how to link to one directly yet), but for it to be useful I’d like to be able to search pages like del.icio.us/tag/blosxom and groups.yahoo.com/group/blosxom – limiting the search to groups.yahoo.com or del.icio.us returns far too many false positives without using quite refined search terms, which seems to me to sort of defeat the object somewhat.