Matthew Walton’s Blog

First I have to mention the excellent Cross O’th Hands, who played for a ceilidh from 8pm until 10pm. There was a great deal of dancing and some great tunes.

However, the main act was Bellowhead, and it was clear that most people were there for them. The hall got busier and busier as the time for Bellowhead to appear drew closer, with the dance floor full of people standing, and many seats occupied as well.

Now Bellowhead are an unusual band. Spiers and Boden are a long-established duo with a reputation for a certain level of eccentricity. In Bellowhead, they take that tendency to extremes with nine other talented musicians playing a variety of instruments: trumpet, saxophones, bass clarinet, trombone, ‘cello, fiddles, oboe, bagpipes, whistles, accordions, concertina and a wide variety of percussion (including a frying pan).

The cheer as Bellowhead came on stage was extremely loud, and the band launched immediately into Jordan, a song from their first full album. Things got much louder after that.

This is something to criticise – after a while it became apparent that the band were too loud, to the point where the speakers or something in the chain couldn’t quite cope and so there were hints of distortion around the edges, and the soprano saxophone came over way too strongly a few times. The overall quality was good, but if it was just a little bit quieter it would’ve been far more enjoyable.

I’m not going to go through everything they played, although there were quite a few things that aren’t on either of their albums. Some I suppose could be from their original EP which I don’t have, but I suspect some of them just aren’t on any recordings which bodes well for future album repertoire. I do feel though that Bellowhead’s strength is in live performance. While listening to one of their albums is a pleasure, seeing them live is a completely different experience where the energy and enthusiasm really gets you.

And of course, nobody sings quite like John Boden.

Joe Shaw wrote about XML and Google’s Protocol Buffers, which I admit I hadn’t heard of before today, but it’s pretty irrelevant what the debate was, XML versus Protocol Buffers or XML versus Pink Fairy Protocol or whatever. The point he makes very well, and the point which is very important and, I feel, not appreciated very much in the wider Internet, is that XML is not suitable for everything.

I’m not going to say much more, because I can’t make the point any better than he did, but the point is a good one. At work I designed a simple prefix-based ASCII protocol for two servers to use to talk to each other. Much more lightweight than XML, much easier to encode and decode, and you only need the first few bytes of a message to figure out if the message is incomplete or not. And you can transmit pretty much anything with it. It’s even human-readable, to a certain extent – you need the protocol spec in hand (or you have to know it) but you can figure out what a message is trying to say.

Estimated bandwidth saving over using XML? I reckon it’s about 30% lighter than a reasonable XML application to do the same job.

XML does of course have its place, and having tools like XSLT and XPath available to play with structured data is great, but sometimes you don’t need it, and sometimes you just can’t take the bandwidth hit, because like it or not XML gets verbose very quickly.

This post brought to you by the thinking about work on a Sunday society.

Since Foresight’s X server started using EXA for acceleration by default with the intel driver, various bits of rendering on the desktop have been horribly slow. Fortunately it’s still possible to switch back to XAA, which at least on my i915 is faster. Just stick

Option “AccelMethod” “xaa”

In the driver section of xorg.conf. Hopefully EXA will get faster in the future.

Yes, Jonathan Coulton in London! His first time performing ‘over here’ and yes, he did sing Over There — he sang it first, after saying he thought he should get it out of the way and then not being able to start because he was trying not to laugh.

The atmosphere prior to the start of the concert was absolutely incredible. I’m going to keep comparing it to Loreena McKennitt at the Barbican, because there was the same sense of being part of a group of really dedicated fans, and of extreme anticipation. In her case it was because she’d not toured at all for nine years. In JoCo’s case, it’s because he’s never been here at all.

With a group of people from JoCo’s forum, I was right near the front of the queue. The doors didn’t even open until the advertised start time, which is not how I usually understand these things to work — the time on the ticket is usually the show’s intended start time. Therefore the concert started later than expected, and the whole transport situation became rather more stressful than it should have been.

However, the show itself was worth waiting for. After Over There — complete with derisory boos during the ’saved their asses in World War Two’ line — we were treated to a good cross-section of JoCo’s music, although unfortunately not including the new Lady Aberlin’s Muumuu. Particular highlights included Skullcrusher Mountain with virtually everyone singing every single word and the last chorus as an audience solo; Re: Your Brains as a concert-ender with audience participation (as if we hadn’t been participating already, as he acknowledged) where we had to learn to sing it like a mob of zombies, not like a Viennese children’s choir which has been turned into zombies. ‘Perhaps your mouths don’t work properly since you became zombies’.

I can’t recount all the wonderful moments as I’ll be here all day and I need to go shopping and do some cooking, but we did get the world premiere of Code Monkey sung with the accompaniment of JoCo’s new Tenori-On.

What do you mean, you don’t know what a Tenori-On is? Get thee to Google! Away, away!

I’ve moved. If you need updated contact details (address and landline have changed, everything else remains the same), get in touch and I’ll give them to you.

Also, if you’re around and at a loose end, come over for dinner. I’ve got a dining table and four chairs, but you might have to bring a plate.