From Reuters:

Myung made that career switch in October. With two graduate degrees from Boston's New England Conservatory, the 25-year-old gifted violinist turned down a rare opening with the New World Symphony and an audition for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

...

With the cost of tuition rising every year and conservatory students spending as much as six years in school, many like Myung are swamped in debt as they enter a field in which jobs are scarce and salaries often low.

"Even if you do music really well, there's no guarantee that you'll get a job," said Myung.

Click here for the rest. It's a much longer post, without a snarky headline, that would need to discuss the passing of live music, and live musicians, as a part of everyday human existence. And as someone who would of course much prefer live music, or playing music, or writing music, to sitting around with a stereo, while it truly saddens me, I'm still also excited about where interactive digital music can go. But just don't leave it in the hands of these guys, huh? Thanks, BoingBoing, as usual, for getting word out to the world.

So, you wanna develop in Java for your Nextel camera phone? Let's say it's something simple like a simple snapshot program, much like Jonathan Knudsen's early tutorial: Taking Pictures with MMAPI. There are a bunch of particulars of the current crop of Nextel iDEN phones to consider, and the best source for that info is currently available at the iDEN developer site, in the form of the "Developer Guide 2005".

There's a lot of sample code out there, even in the examples above, to get you started. Although the i830 emulator claims to be able to use a webcam to provide functionality in the emulator, I have never been able to get it to work, nor find any information about how to get it to work.

However, I wanted to document just one aspect: how to get the app on the phone to test it. First of all, just to test the app on your phone, you'll need to sign it. Why? Because by default the phone will require explicit user permission to access the getSnapshot method -- thus if you don't sign the MIDlet, it will pause the MIDlet to ask permission, then restart, making for an awful lot of coding specific to handling the pause to get to see your app to work. Luckily most of the iDEN emulators and the iDEN J2ME 2.0 SDK include a tool to temporarily sign your MIDlet for 48 hours.

Here's how you do it:

1) Go to the bin directory in your iDEN SDK directory. For me, this was C:\program files\motorola\iDen SDK for J2ME (MIDP 2_0)\bin\.

2) In this directory you'll find a batch file named util.bat. Run it! If it doesn't run, that's probably because the keytool accessory isn't in your PATH. Typically this tool is in the bin directory of your JDK or JRE install. Add this to your path (i.e. To set the system path under Windows NT, 2000, XP, right click on My Computer and go to properties. Click advanced, then environment variables. From here, go to the system variables window and click path, and then add the full path to your JDK or JRE bin directory. Notice that the directories are separated by semi colons).

3) Once you run utils you'll see a little application that can do a few things for you. All I care about now is the "Sign Midlet Suite" button. Hit that.

4) Use domain "OPA". Enter the IMEI from your phone -- I found that the full IMEI from my phone was one number longer than the numbers the app would accept, but I found that removing the last number in my IMEI (which was a 0) was enough to make it work.

Okay, so that'll do you enough to build and debug a camera app on your Nextel phone. Lovely. It would be nice if the emulator worked, but this is better than nothing, right? Now that you've got it working well, the next step is certifying the code then distributing. Well, those are two decidedly non-trivial steps.

To have your MIDlet code certified you'll have to get a code-signing certificate from someone like Thawte or Verisign. And they require:

A. Valid Business License or Business Registration document

B. Articles of Incorporation or Certificate of Incorporation

C. Articles of Organization or Formation

D. DBA (Doing Business As), Fictitious Business Name, Trade Name, or Assumed Name registration

F. Charter Documentation (For Banks, Universities and Government Agencies)

Uhh, crap. None of the above match up for me, some little individual developer without a commercial entity to support. Besides, it's about a $400 cost to get the little digital ID, so that's a bit much for a guy who's mostly interested in giving applications away.

Anyway, there's always the hurdle that even if I get a DBA from the state of New Jersey, buy the certificate from Verisign, I would still need to get approved by Nextel as a certified partner in order to be allowed to access camera features without having to ask for permission (perhaps at all, perhaps every time...I'm not sure). Even getting that kind of buy-in from Nextel is not a given -- as the stuff I want to build with the camera are mostly software features that I don't want to charge for. That kind of flies in the face of any credible business model, including the need at Nextel to profit off of any software delivered through their networks.

So, there you have it. Some concrete advice to get a camera app on your phone, but still some hurdles left to overcome -- not technical, but perhaps all the more daunting. Let me know if you have any feedback on issues like the MMAPI emulator or the whole code-signing/certification process.

From C-Net News.com, an article about homebrewed cellphones:

Surj Patel is building his own cell phone, bit by soldered bit.

...

Patel says he has lost patience with even the slimmest Motorolas and most advanced Nokias. He has been trying to build new features for cell phones for years, and he--like a growing number of other impatient developers--has concluded that phones have to be as flexible as ordinary computers if he's going to make progress.

"I want the phone to be much more open," Patel said. "The world's best research and development lab is all the hackers out there. Enable them, and they'll do it."

...

Patel is helping organize an Emerging Telephony Conference with tech publisher O'Reilly Media in January, where he hopes to show off as many grassroots development projects as he can find.

Man, do I need to comment? How about a simple -- "Hooray!". Go get 'em Surj.

Here's an article in Wired about a friend of mine, Dean Oliver, from elementary school who's now doing statistical analysis for the Supersonics:

After nearly every game, he produces reports for Sonics president and CEO Wally Walker, detailing patterns that elude traditional observation. This research was critical to the team's unexpected success last season.

...

Oliver thinks possession efficiency is basketball's version of on-base percentage. "Teams that score a lot of points don't necessarily win games, and teams that prevent opponents from scoring a lot of points don't necessarily win, either," he explains. "But if you convert a greater percentage of possessions into points than your opponent does, you win games."

You can check out his book, Basketball on Paper, or his site of the same name (he had more hair when I knew him).

How did I miss this? Found on Tim Shey's (re)blog, dolphins that have learned to sing the theme to Batman:

The researchers first had an adult male bottlenose dolphin position itself in front of an underwater sound projector, called a hydrophone, that produced six different 14-kHz, four-second rhythms. The dolphin was rewarded for performing a certain behavior to each rhythm.

....

"The dolphin was reinforced for producing a specific rhythm to a specific object," said Harley. "For example, when we presented him with a 'Batman' doll, he received a fish for producing a specific rhythm — in this case, a short sound and then a long one."

She added, "If you recall the original 'Batman' TV series musical intro you'll probably remember the way they sang 'Bat-maaaaaaaan.'"

The sound file isn't quite as exciting as you might hope. Not so much a bunch of chirping Flippers going "na-na-Na-na-na", as the high pitched simulation of "BATMAN!" at the end of the song.

And, of no relation to dolphins at all, what is the deal with proto-surf-duo Jan & Dean and Batman? This "Batman" song is horrible --


We need the Batman (Batman)
We need the Batman (Batman)
Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot
So my disguise must be able
To strike terror into their hearts


What's with THE Batman? Bizarro. I love Jan and Dean more than I have an affection for Bruce Wayne, and yet, this is oh-so dissapointing.

Also from The New Scientist, a report of studies finding fractal patterns, or at least self-similar patterns, underlying abstract art:

A TECHNIQUE designed to detect art forgeries using the maths of fractals may also help pinpoint why we instinctively like some abstract paintings more than others - even if we can't put our finger on why.

The abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock famously dripped paint onto large canvasses on the floor, manipulating it into abstract swirls using sticks or trowels. In 1999, an Australian group found that these swirls contained well-defined fractals - patterns that show self-similarity, that is, they are repeated at different magnifications (New Scientist, 5 June 1999, p 11).

The essence of pattern recognition, or self-simularity, as a primary characteristic of appealing art -- whether painting or music -- is not really a revelation.

Even while the charges that modern 20th century music was nothing but random chaos were relatively disproved by an "experiment" by the BBC (I believe), where "real" pieces of modern music were judged by an audience against a truly intentionally random, improvised piece of percussion music -- even with a made up backstory and an imaginary composer, etc. The audience did not like the random piece -- and instead prefered the other works, which, if I recall correctly, were of your garden-variety Darmstadt-type composers. Of course, underlying the seemingly abstract and chaotic work of the modernist school was a highly principaled and disciplined system of non-tonal relationships.

Fractals found the math for many naturally occuring relationships. Leaves, the coastline. Even Webern.

From Smart Mobs, an article in the New Scientist that describes a new concept from Sony Ericsson for a phone that essentially can turn into a remote listening device, by way of automatically picking up and using the speakerphone.

The new device provides a simple solution. Software on the handset checks the number of each incoming call against an address list, to see if the caller has been previously flagged. If they have, the phone rings in the usual way but switches to auto-answer after a predetermined number of rings. So the called phone becomes a live microphone listening to whatever is happening nearby.

The device can also be remotely switched to speakerphone so that the caller can shout “are you OK?” down the line and into the vicinity of the phone. If the phone has been set to voicemail, the caller can key in a code to override the diversion and force the phone into auto-answer mode.

It makes that sweethearting idea of Kottke's seem so innocent.