This week we talk about the common hurdles facing coders, and offer some views about how to overcome these issues.

Patrick, Shane and Dave are joined by Charlie Von Metzradt (homepage, twitter) – a sys-admin and Coder with Demonware (homepage, wikipedia), and Gareth – a manager/sys-admin with HEAnet (homepage, wikipedia).

We first threw our conversational lasso over the topic of frameworks, how they can be a useful tool to get off the ground quickly, but are sometimes a hindrance when it comes to scaling up your application. Shane spoke about how OpenCV has saved him about a man year of coding in his college Final Year Project, but has added some overhead. Patrick and Gareth spoke about Ruby on Rails is a great platform for rapid deployment, but very quickly its idealist abstraction layers result in unmanageable overhead, requiring a complete rewrite of some libraries or modules.

[15:26] Next we moved onto managing client expectations, with David explaining that clients might think that in a feature freeze to fix bugs no work is being performed. Charlie suggested that the client should be given a login to the bugtracker to show that work is being done.

[18:54] Finally we moved onto the topic of developer/system administrator relations, inspired by the recent Shot of Jaq episode, Developing the Devop. If you haven’t heard of Jono and Aq’s latest Internet media adventure yet, then you should check it out.

With Charlie mediating these two groups at his place of work, he spoke about how developers often fail to write coherent logging tools, leading to admin frustration. Gareth suggested that developers package their code and test the unpacking on a testing server before an admin moves it to production. This way a developer will see any potential problems and will familiarise themselves with an admin workflow.

Patrick mentions Capistrano, a deployment tool. Charlie also mentioned a tool called CheckInstall which will create a RPM or Deb when making from source, to keep track of the files modified by the make and easily uninstall the application you’ve just compiled.

So, leave your thoughts below; what middle ground have you found works between Developers and Sys-Admins? How have you best managed a paying client? And at what point have you found a framework to be more hassle than help?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 10^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We also mention possible side channel attacks on a cloud services, including a paper by Thomas Ristenpart which was published at ACM CCS ‘09 titled Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds (PDF).

We also interview Jon Åslund, an Engineer at Spotify. Spotify is a cloud based music service, and Jon spoke about some of the engineering challenges in creating the system.

So, are the benefits of always accessible data and acquiring resources according to demand, justified when considering possible vulnerabilities? Let us know what you think?

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday March 3^rd on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

As a result, a service called Please Rob Me has emerged – showing potentially empty houses, advertising their emptiness. It is based upon people sharing their location then mentioning that they are leaving home.

We talk about where the line lie, and our personal views on the privacy of our locations’. Stalking, kidnap, advertising, crowd control, traffic control and tin-foil hats are all mentioned.

We also reference:

• A paper by Dr. Sjaak Nouwt: Reasonable Expectations of Geo-Privacy?
• Real Time Rome: An MIT project in conjunction with Telecom Italia to track population movements around a Madona Concert and the World Cup

Finally we wrap up, mentioning two upcoming events:

• This Saturday Skynet are hosting Matt Zimmerman, ex-CTO of Canonical. More info on the Skynet and Ubuntu wiki’s.
• The Irish Blog awards have released their long-list, the event will be hosted on March 27^th

So, are we stupid to be giving away so much information, or is it a useful technological progression? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 24^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

At FOSDEM ‘10 I sat down with him to talk about Micro-kernels, Embedded systems, and the state of MINIX 3.

Transcript to follow…

His FOSDEM lectuer can be seen below (XviD AVI download):

The audio (source) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

He spoke about the future of the Music industry, the band’s changing attitude to piracy now that they own their latest record, and explored some of the meanings behind his lyrics.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We discuss mobile devices and their operating systems, including The Notion Ink Adam Tablet, Google’s Android Licensing, Microsofts new Mobile OS, smartphone market share and Flash on the iPhone. We also speak with Andrew Tanenbaum about micro-kernels in phones (full interview).

Do you have any thoughts on Android, Apple, Adam or anything else not necessarily beginning with A in this rapidly moving mobile device market? Let us know!

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 17^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We decided to get some musician’s to share their thoughts on music piracy. The resounding response was that piracy helps them sell live tickets, which is where their real income is.

We spoke with Torsten Kinsella and Lloyd Hanney of God Is an Astronaut, Mary-Kate Geraghty and Jamie Fox of Fight Like Apes, Conor J. O’Brien of Villagers, Industry, Jonas Erik Altberg (Basshunter), Mayer Hawthorne, and Erez Eisen and Amit Duvdevan of Infected Mushroom about Piracy (among other things).

Over the last year I’ve interviewed a number of bands, often posing the quesion “What are your views on online piracy?”. While Aslan have clearly pinned their colors to the mast, others aren’t as quick to lash out, some saying that without piracy they would be unable to make money.

Labels and lobby groups have traditionally been the one’s keeping up the anti-piracy pressure. In light of the following comments we wonder, “Is the ongoing anti-piracy fight really just a last stand?”.

First we have Torsten Kinsella and Lloyd Hanney of God Is an Astronaut speaking about their views on piracy.

---

Lloyd: Between online downloads, illegal downloads, record companies are at a stage where they don’t know really what’s happening aswell, everything’s up in the air at the moment. Over the next few year’s you’ll see some kind of solution coming in.

David: On that, what are your views on online piracy?

Lloyd: At first I was like “We produced this music, it’s our music”, but over time it has turned around. You use your CD’s to promote your music and you try to make money from your live shows.

Torsten: That is really it. I see a lot of debate online, it’s never as black and white as everybody wants to look at it [sic]. When someone takes your music for nothing and put it onto their [iPod], it’s neither right or wrong at this stage, it’s just a fact of life you’ve just got to accept that. I mean, everybody does it, everybody.

---

Torsten and Lloyd there, sharing their views, that recorded music is an advertising tool, a way to promote their live shows. Next let’s hear from Mary-Kate Geraghty and Jamie Fox of Fight Like Apes on what they have to say about piracy and how they’re using new technology as a band.

---

Jamie: At the moment we’ve got Spotify which seems to be the fairest to me. It’s a streaming streaming website which looks like it’s going to overtake iTunes in a few years. It’s really cool, money goes into the artists pocket and you can stream anything. At the end of the day, we’re not going to be the ones complaining about not getting enough money, we’re not that cynical about the industry. We’ve grown up in this industry, as opposed to growing up as Metallica, turning around and complaining that the world’s changing, saying “Oh god, my ‘07 Jaguar is the old model”. At the end of the day, any money is a bonus.

David: But this is still your 9-5, so you’ve got to make a living out of this.

Jamie: Absolutely.

Mary-Kate: We’ve talked about this so much, especially since we’ve realised that this is the thing we’re hoping to make money from. We have really quite casual chats about it, anyone who says they haven’t downloaded something illegally is lying, I don’t accept this moral high-ground thing that people take, that’s why I think Spotify is such a good idea, because it’s a way of taking something for free without owning it for free, without pissing anyone else off. I think if someone downloads our album and likes it, they might come to a gig, buy a T-Shirt, and that’s where we might earn money from them downloading something illegally. Someone might listen to it and not like it and that’s fine. When we released our album first we put it on-line, streaming for free for a week. I think that was our way of saying we just want people to hear the music, we’re not going to make our fortune off records, we’re probably never going to make a living off record sales alone, that’s why I don’t really mind. If they like it and download it I don’t really care.

---

Fight Like Apes are taking control of their cashflow testing a variety of online services to make money.

But more importantly, the want people to hear their music. Conor J. O’Brien of Villagers held a similar view.

---

David: What do you see the future of the music industry panning out to? In terms of Piracy, New Media, people downloading your stuff? For example, are you pro people downloading your music?

Conor: Yeah, I don’t care, it’s cool. Like, I do it. It’s a really natural progression in the music industry, it’s just a tip in the balance of power. It was always going to happen and now they just have to deal with it. There’s just a lot of grumbles about it, because people are loosing money and stuff, it’s always going to happen. Life’s to short to be worried about that kind of stuff, it’s awesome if people hear your music, I don’t care.

---

Like Lloyd, Conor also spoke about how the music business is changing.

The aptly named band Industry also spoke about how the music business is still finding [itself] and how a happy medium needs to be discovered.

---

David: What’s your view on Piracy? I imagine as teenagers you downloaded one or two tracks, but now that you’re on the other side what are your views?

Donal Skeehan: The music industry is changing so much. At the moment the industry is finding itself and the issue with piracy is going to resolve itself. There has to be a happy medium for both artists and people who want to listen to music. It’s going to come with time, the recent case with The Pirate Bay is going to really have an impact on the music business as it is right now. It’s a matter of time I think, but we’d like people to be buying our records.

Lee Hutton: That’s what keeps it going, obviously there needs to be money coming in. But there’s two sides to a story, music does allot for people. And a way to get it is to download it.

Donal: It’s so available at the moment. If you ask a kid whether they’re going to pay or not… Well, it’s a temptation, it’s there: would you not take it?

---

Irish rock and pop acts are not the only ones who share these views. Jonas Erik Altberg, you may know him as Basshunter, is an artist whos’ Swedish songs often told stories relating to technology, online gaming and internet culture. He told us that his success comes from piracy, without it he would be an unknown artist.

---

Jonas: You can never stop the download or upload, never. I mean look at me; without the internet and downloads I would be a fart in the wind, It’s true. I think the future is like iTunes, they were the first [to] put out songs for sale very cheap. Some songs, you download 10 versions and it’s just shitty copies. This is like 320Kbps [VBR]. Exactly, everyone follows. So I think that’s the future, you just order things on-line to your laptop and transfer to your iPod. No one uses portable CD players or anything.

David: Will people continue paying for music, do you think?
Jonas: I think people will continue paying for music, yeah. I know [what] it’s like being a student, I’ve never had a job in my entire life, I couldn’t get one, I don’t know why, I tried. I know [what] it’s like, you have very little money to spend. Imagine if there is a new album out by your favourite artist and you cant buy the album for 3 months. Is that going to prevent you from listening to the music? No. Of course I think it’s more than right that this person should download it.

David: I know that as a student I would much rather spend money on a live show, I would much rather buy a ticket to a gig of an artist I like and get the music for free on-line.

Jonas: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

David: This way, hopefully, the artist gets more money. Rather than getting screwed by a label.

Jonas: Basically all artists today, I mean artists in general, their income is from the shows, not the sales. There aren’t many artists today who produce and write their own music, but I do, so I get the whole cookie. As long as you can pay your bills and rent, put food on the table every day, that’s my goal. Everything else is just a bonus. If people like my music and want to listen to my music I don’t care how they get it, as long as they like it and are having fun.

---

Mayer Hawthorn, a soul musician and multi-instrumentalist, spoke about how artists need to find new ways to generate income.

---

Mayer: The main thing is that there’s nothing you can do about it. You have two choices, you can either be Metallica and yell at everybody and be pissed off all day, or you can say “Hey, that’s how it goes” and figure out other ways to makes money. That’s the way that I go about it.

David: Hence why you’re touring extensively?

Mayer: Yeah, get on the road and have a good live show and people will respect it.

---

Moving from soul to Psychedelic trance, I caught up with Erez Eisen and Amit Duvdevan of Infected Mushroom. Like Basshunter they spoke extensivly about how online file sharing has helped them, with only worries that their album would leak before its official release.

---

David: People obviously download your music alot.

Amit: Yeah!

David: What are your words to people who do download.

Amit: This has helped us from the beginning. We used to come and play in Mexico for 5-6 thousand people. We never sold a CD over there. They used to download it in Napster, back in the day. This is the main thing that broadcasted Infected Mushroom to the word, illegal downloading. We don’t care about it. We care that you come and pay a ticket to see us.

David: That’s what get’s money.

Amit: That’s the main income [for us], so if you download our music I don’t care. For us, we only care before the album is coming out, we don’t want it to leak. But the album is coming out in one month, in two weeks you’re going to see it leaking on the internet. It’s still unsafe but people are going crazy for Legend of the Black Shawarma, so if it leaks, it leaks. Then if people download it, there’s nothing to do, it’s cool.

---

So, twelve artists, telling us how piracy is helping them, how live music is how live music is where they make their money, and the new services they’re trying.

With artists supporting piracy we wonder if anti-piracy campaigns make any difference and if the money spent on such campaignes could be put to better use.

Thanks for listening.

So, where does your moral compass point you? If you downloaded an album and liked it, would you then see the band live and buy a t-shirt? Leave your views below.

The audio and text of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

This show originally aired on Tuesday February 16th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:45pm.

Michele also spoke about online privacy, how we protect out mum’s from spam, and what Google might really be up to with it’s Public DNS offerings. We also spoke about the proposal to extend the DNS protocol.

So, will Google’s products ever cease to innovate and push the boundaries, or are they merely addicted to snooping? Let us know what you think.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 10^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

So, to give us a primer on all things semantic we spoke with John Breslin (homepage, twitter, foaf), founder of the SIOC project (homepage, wikipedia). John told us that Natural Language Processing and extra markup are used to derive meaning from data on the internet. He also spoke about how the Semantic Web will affect both the “average-Joe” user and Web developers.

Our next topic of conversation was ComReg’s announcement that Eircom must reduce the line rental fee charged to other operators from €8.41 to €0.77. We spoke with Peter Evan’s, Product Director of BT Ireland who welcomed the news. Peter spoke about how the market will now be open to true competition, and how we may see new Local ISP’s set up to cater to rural needs. We also discuss the future of broadband here, mentioning that dial up in Ireland (17%) is still more common than the European average (11%) and Magnet’s 50Mbps Fiber to the home offerings.

Christine Heffernan, Acting Head of Corporate Affairs of Vodafone Ireland also sent us a statement in which she said that “[this decision] will lead to more robust competition in the provision of fixed communications services as it will facilitate operators such as Vodafone to offer compelling differentiated products, lower prices, and improved product quality and choice to customers.”

Finally, we had a quick mention of the iPad, and how it’s interesting to see Apple designing their own chips, but we want to see magazines on the device before we buy one.

So, what do you think? Have you moved back to Eircom recently due to high charges? Would a €92 a year saving make you think about moving away from them again? Have you dabbled with Semantic Web technologies? We want to hear from you, leave a comment below.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday February 3^rd on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

Darragh Doyle (homepage, twitter) of boards.ie joined us for the discussion. We first spoke of boards.ie’s recent attack, and then moved onto an interview with Marie McGonagle, who was involved in the reformation of the Defamation Act.

Marie spoke about new aspects of the law, and how old aspects have changed. She told us about warrant’s and what powers the Garda have under this new Act, where they can search and for what reasons. She spoke of the safe harbor of “Innocent Publication”, where an ISP or forum host does not have to act on content posted to it’s forum until they are alerted of it’s existence. Finally, she spoke of legal services that may be available to those who’s Freedom of expression is being infringed, specifically mentioning Digital Rights Ireland. Due to time constraints we could only include an excerpt of the full interview.

After the interview we had discussion with Darragh about Defamation and Freedom of Expression online. Boards.ie were also named as a defendant in a libel case in 2006, launched by MCD. Darragh mentioned how legal cases against online communities can have a chilling effect on discussion in those communities.

So, do you use a blog, or host a forum? Have you been thinking about the new laws and the effect they may have on your online presence or community? Drop us a comment and let us know.

The audio of this show is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

This show originally aired on Wednesday January 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway) at 12:30pm.

We spoke with Marie about the new Act in light of online communities and bloggers. We asked if the new law would give the Garda wider search and seizure powers for those found guilty of Blasphemy. We posed the question, “Is a blog a periodical?”

An excerpt of this interview aired on Wednesday January 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway), during ITFreely, S2E7.

The audio (source) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

Transcript to follow…

We discussed his project, We Predict It, a tool to track and predict trends on Twitter. As We Predict It is powered by tweets (and so by proxy, humans), we also discuss Mahalo, the “Human Powered Search” and ask if Google should be worried.

We brought up the Gawker iTablet Scavenger hunt, where a blog are offering $100,000 in exchange for an hour with a rumoured Apple product. Apple have a team of lawyers and time has shown that they are not afraid to use them, this being no exception.

Our last story was about the recent attack on Gmail China, and whether suspecting the Chinese government is just a bit too tinfoil-hat-y.

So, what do you think? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.

The audio and text of this show are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We spoke of their upcoming album, the loss of visuals in their live set, a new mixing desk that will let them replicate their studio sound live, record deals, booking agents, national attitudes to their music scenes and how to gain a following.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

We also had an interview with Ronan Skehill (Homepage, Twitter, LinkedIn) of PinPoints (Webpage, Twitter), a GPS link service that is device agnostic, converting links to the format your device supports, be it Blackberry Maps, Nokia Maps, &c. Nokia demo’d PinPoints at their CES ovi stand and we discussed the future potential of the service.

We also did our first live video stream. The show is recorded weekly from 19:00-18:00 GMT and from now on you will be able to watch the show being recorded live, and comment in a chatroom, give us feedback as we rant, &c. Below you’ll find the video from uStream; this is probably better viewed live, but it’s good to have the unedited show up too.

The audio and text of this podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

• High school teacher in the US fired for running SETI@home.
• Somali pirates set up a Stock Exchange.
• Dane challenges copyright law.
• Upcoming talks at the 26^th Chaos Communications Congress (26c3). Keep an eye on the GSM talks.
• Irish fabless chip Firm DecaWave sign €250,000 deal with LG for Ultra-WideBand (UWB) chips.
• Plink (an Irish firm, not an application by Simon Tatham) win the second Android Developers Challenge (ADC2) with art scanning application, PlinkArt.
• Last week in an interview with the Economist Roger Faxon (CEO of EMI) mentioned that physical sales still account for 80% of recorded music sales.

The audio and text of this podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Our first topic was embed systems, as Travis is a respected speaker in this field. We spoke about the Brazilian power outtages and how smart power grids in other countries would be susceptible to attack too. We mentioned hacks to get access to the chips, like timing attacks (Travis has written a tool called GoodFET to enable hobbyists to start debugging chips) and using a camera flash.

We spoke very briefly about EU banking data being shared with the US department of justice.

And finally we discussed recent developments in Quantum computing, a historical paper by Feynman, Simulating physics with computers, that laid down much of the Quantum computing groundwork, and Quantum Tunneling and what it means for chip manufacturers.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

We also had a great interview with Hugh Nowlan (homepage, twitter) who was team captain for the winning team in last weeks HackEire, a capture the flag contest hosted by the Irish Reporting & Information Security Service (IRISS) (not the IRC client).

The interview on it’s own is also available.

Links:

• Ars Technica: Spain and Finland’s Broadband schemes
• Three Ireland’s National Broadband Scheme page
• Google Chrome OS press event

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Topics covered were:

• Google’s new protocol, SPDY.
• Microsoft bans 1 million modded Xbox 360’s.
• Microsoft launch new Xbox Social service, including Facebook, Twitter and last.fm support.
• Microsoft alegedly patent SUDO.
• Ozdok botnet taken down.
• The BBC hire a botnet for tech show.
• Dr. Dennis Jennings of ICANN/NSFnet to talk in UCD.
• Google launches Go, a new systems language.
• Some Ruby, Arch Linux and Emacs bashing

Terry is the author of the best-selling Discworld series, a comedy fantasy series which often parodies classical literature, while still maintaining interesting and original characters and plots.

His upcoming book I Shall Wear Midnight will conclude the Tiffany Aching story, that of an apprentice witch’s maturing and moving to “the big city”.

Terry also showed how dangerous (legally) fan ideas can be, with an example of a letter he received advising him to film his movies in the UK and not visit Hollywood.

Like many creative people Terry has had a close relationship with technology, soldering together his first computer, a ZX81. He spoke about how it was possible to extend it, and add your own functionality. He even built what could today be seen as an elementary web cam. It became obvious where much of his inspiration for the sprawling Hex (a computer run by wizards in the books) came from.

Terry has also recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers. He spoke about how voice to text technology has been helping him, as his typing has deteriorated. He even went so far as to say that should his typing skills return he would stay using the voice technology, exclaiming “Hell, this is Star Wars shit! This is what we’ve been dreaming for!”

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

DD: So, we’re here in the Falls Hotel in Enistymon and I’m here with Terry Pratchett. Start with the books, will you be exploring Tiffany Aching or Sam Vimes further?

TP: Oddly enough, Tifany Aching is in I Shall Wear Midnight and that’s the last of the Tifany Aching books. And while I’m actually doing, it’s also become the most adult because she’s got older throughout the years and nearly 16 in this book. So the book will actually bridge the Tifany Aching series and the main Discworld series, she will certainly meet one or two minor characters out of the major Discworld series, because that’s about right, it’s not time for her to go into the big city, there are things that need to be doing. For heavens sake, she kissed the winter and brought summer back. After you’ve done that you cant spend all you time just bandaging people up. I don’t know how many more books I’m going to write, we can come onto that a little while later.

TP: I like Sam Vimes as much as everybody else, but on the whole, with the books that come up, I write what turns up and asks to be read, like for example, Nation. Nation was like a cuckoo in the nest, I put off the idea because I had it about four months before the big Asian Tsunami, and I thought, “I cant write this yet”. So I left it a year or so, and by then it was in my head so much that I just had to get it written. I don’t know what the next adult book is going to be, but I do know I’m writing “I shall wear Midnight” for Tiffany Aching.

DD: Where do your ideas and inspiration come from?

TP: And there was me thinking you were an intelligent young man!

DD laughs.

DD: Apart from satirizing the real world. For example, do you see yourself and your mannerisms in any of your characters?

TP: I see [myself] in my characters because all the characters must, in some way, be derived… You are the only testbed you’ve got for how human beings think although after a while you get problems to understand the commonality at the time[sic]. So I think I’ve answered that, and if I haven’t I probably did want to.

DD: Which tidbit of your contribution to culture do you think will last the longest, for the most centuries?

TP: Centuries: nothing.

DD: That’s being very modest.

TP: I think Lord of the Rings will survive for a very long time.

DD: But that’s not yours.

TP: No, that’s the point I’m making. I think most books are lodged in their time and place. Having said that, people read Jane Austin. Will people read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in a hundred years? [DD: I'd say so.] I don’t know. Bear in mind a hundred years is a very long time in history, I’m thinking the same about Discworld. You’re talking more or less between the Wright Brothers and the Man on the Moon, lots of things changed. There were lots of best selling authors in the 1930’s that no one’s every heard of now, lots of very good children’s authors, like E. Nesbit for example, who’s still just about heard of, Richmal Crompton who used to write the Just William books, huge children’s books writes in those days who will disappear very soon.

DD: You still have C.S. Lewis, you still have [The Chronicles of] Narnia. You still have a number of books.

TP: Absolutely right, Narnia has been a movie which is an important thing. Some do, some don’t, but I don’t know what [the future holds].

DD: The Discworld MUD, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, have you played at all, have you been involved with the MUD?

TP: No, I don’t know anything about it, I know nothing about it at all, I’ve never played it, I’ve never been in it, I know nothing, who is this foolish man MUD? That’s what you get when you mix water and things. If I knew about it, I’d probably have to worry about copyright and things, so I don’t about it. Don’t talk to me again about anything to do with water and dirt.

TP: As Douglas Adams once said: Lots of people come and ask me to do things, by and large if they say “Can we do a play of this”, sometimes you have to say no, when you’d like to say yes because if it goes pear shaped… these days people send me their manuscripts, “please can you read my manuscript”, “no”. I always write back with a polite letter saying “No. The reason is that one day somebody, not you, but somebody is going to turn around and say, ‘In his book, Terry Pratchett does xyz, and he got that from my manuscript’”. It’s never going to be the person I’m writing to, obviously. But some day, someone will because it will be worth money to do so, or God heaven help us, I might read that manuscript, and something might stay in my mind. It’s just not worth it. But it’s a great shame, remember that JK Rowling was accused of plagiarism, and that was all over the newspapers. In a sense, for a little while, accusation was consider to be fact. As they say, mud sticks. It’s a shame that I have to think that.

TP: We got this letter, quite a few years back now, was another letter, and the cover letter said “This letter has been copied to my solicitors”, “Oh no no!”. “I have got a wonderful idea for Discworld that will make you lots of money and is a sure fire, it’s in this envelop [...] this is what you should so”. The fact that he had copied it to his solicitor rather led me to believe, that was not a good thing for us to do. So we wrote back with our standard letter that we do for the kids with the manuscripts and we said “Thank you for this, we have you letter here, it’s not been opened, and it will not be opened, and in the fullness of time it will be thrown away. The reason is…”, for the reason I’ve just said. A little while ago I said to my PA, “Dig it out”, I got curious, I’m prepared to take a risk, “and I want you to read it. Just you, and on your honor not to tell me anything about it, and if you say ‘Oh, crikey’ then I’ll read it, but it must be that I never know what [it says]“. So he opened it up and said “You will not believe this”. It said “Mr. Pratchett, here’s and idea, don’t go to Hollywood, get Discworld filmed by lots of well know faces in the UK, and they will make very good films”. That is not an idea, that is just as plain as the nose on your face. If I’d opened it, what would I have done? By then we’d already done a couple of films. No court would actually do anything about that because it’s such an obvious thing.

TP: It worries me that you have to worry about these legal things, and it’s the as some stuff on the Internet, it’s like Fan Fiction, you know it happens and fair enough. If you ever see Fan Fiction some people put a copyright in their fanfictions.

*TP makes a sound of displeasure.

TP: In a sense yes, but in another sense no. I tend to keep out of it, and if something dirty has to happen Colin goes in with the knife.

DD: Moving on, Hex in the books had some great tech in-jokes, feeding cheese to your mouse, and there was a lot of tech references in there. What’s been your relationship with technology?

TP: I actually soldered together my first computer, it was a ZX81 which was a kit. The nice thing about ZX81’s was that you had to understand stuff to make it do anything sensible. There were masses and masses of things you could add to a ZX81, I had a ZX81 that could tell the difference between light and dark and make decisions as a result of light and dark, and recognise the difference between a cross and a circle. I made a very very primitive optical system for it, and this is on a ZX81 that had practically no memory whatsoever. I followed the tech all the way up, always sort of doing things. Then really I got into the writing as soon as there was a word processor I could afford. I tried to word process on a ZX81 there was an Amstrad 464, that had floppy discs, and it had a decent little word processor with a spell checker. That was it, end of Terry the tech, here’s Terry the writer. But we still have a big tech room in our office.

TP: This is where we segway nicely into the Alzheimers. A firm called Talking Point have got together with the people who make Dragon and they put a kind of front end on [Dragon] which makes it easier and more sensible. I am both a difficult subject… I said online “I thought the latest Dragon was pretty good, but could use some work”, and these guys phoned me up (they’re fans) and said “we are doing this”. They came and showed me their stuff and I bought it there and then. I went through some minimal training, then the first thing we did was we dumped all my books into the algorithms, so it knew my vocabulary. It has quite a number of different ways of teaching the machine you personal pronunciations and new words, which I seldom have to do now. The upshot of it is now, it is so useful to me now, that if my typing ability came back I would sill talk to the computer because, hell, this is Star Wars shit! This is what we’ve been dreaming for, I might not have my flying car, but at least I can talk to the goddam computer.

DD: One final question to finish off. Since you’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimers do you feel that you’ve been viewed as a patient? Have people’s attitudes toward you changed?

TP: No, not really. I’m behind Dignity in Dying, I believe that terminally ill patients should be allowed to die (within reason) when they want to, in their own bed if necessary, it’s what the Victorians did. I’m not particularly keen on the whole assisted suicide thing, [it's] a bit weird, and if you read the guidelines (how the UK government would consider it) even discussing with my wife the issue of assisted dying is illegal. Come on Mister Plod, *claps* come on if you’re hard enough! How damn silly can you get? Because something like that, you discuss it with your relatives, but you mustn’t because they would have financial interests in your death, and it’s silly.

TP: People come up [to me] about that and about Alzheimers. People come up to me in the street all the time, and they have done while I’ve been in this country, and that’s only been since yesterday, and they talk about their mum having it, and their gran has it, and you can see the fear in their eyes and lots of neighbours who’ve been carers tell me that they… Five or six ladies who’ve been nurses have told me, a stranger, that they’ve hoarded poisons (shall we say drugs) that they know how to use, to ensure that if they get a seriously ill disease they’ll be able to kill themselves. I’m not necessarily pleased that this is the case, but government is way behind what the majority of people think. More than three quarters of people agree with my late father who died about six years ago. He said to be before he died “If you see my lying there with pipes and tubes coming out of me and you know there is no going back, tell them to switch me off”. And I did, but of course they weren’t allowed to. What was the point?

DD: Thank you very much, I think you’re very quickly having to rush off.

TP: I am but a servant of the people.

Mayer is very much an artist to watch. He’s immensely capable technically (producing his own work) and has shown promise in both soul and hip-hop. We discussed his recent signing to Stones Throw records, pursuing your passion, the need for production (but not a producer) and collaborations (he’s not aiming low).

We also talked about twitter and his secret reasons for touring. It’s not about the music.

Enjoi.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

DD: I’m here with Mayer Hawthorne.

MH: How do you do?

DD: Just about to do a gig in Galway, Ireland.

MH: Yes sir, my first time in Ireland.

DD: Really? When did you arrive?

MH: This morning.

DD: Have you been enjoying the rain so far?

MH: Yeah, it feels like home.

DD: Where are you from?

MH: I grew up just outside Detroit, MI. It rains there all the time.

DD: Looking forward to the gig tonight?

MH: Yeah, defiantly. I wish my voice were in a little better shape for you guys, I feel bad but that’s how it goes sometimes.

DD: Sure, you’ve been touring for the last week or so, and it looks like you’ve got a pretty impressive line-up in front of you, The US, Europe, and Australia at the end of the tour.

MH: We actually just did the whole US, we’ve just finished 30 dates in the US and we’ve been in the UK for about a week now.

DD: How did the UK go?

MH: It’s been awesome, every show’s been sold out and the crowds have been really good.

DD: You recently signed to Stones Throw, tell us a bit about that, how did that come about?

MH: I moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago to pursue music as a full time gig, trying to lose that day job, and I bumped into a gentleman named Peanut Butter Wolf who is the CEO of Stones Throw records, I met him at a party in LA. I got introduced to him by a mutual friend, she had heard my Mayer Hawthorn demos, which at the time was just a side project that I didn’t take very seriously.

DD: While you were haircut?

MH: Yeah, I’ve always been Haircut; Mayer Hawthorn was really just something for fun I was doing on the side. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that would take priority, and that I would have a career singing soul music. I was a hip-hop DJ and producer, that was my main focus at the time. Wolf seemed intrigued by my soul demos, he wrote me back [sic] and said “Hey, this sounds great, but what is this, what am I listening to?”. I said “Well, there my songs”, he said “What do you mean they’re your songs? You have the rights to them?”. He thought it was an old record that I dug up that I was going to re-issue, and I was like “No, these are my songs, that’s me singing on there, and I wrote the song, and I played everything on it, and produced it myself, and recorded it in my bedroom”. When he found out the real deal he was just blown away, he asked me if I would record a whole album of that material for his label. Which, you can’t really say no to that.

DD: You mentioned that you’re self produced, and that you produce your own stuff [I do, yeah]. Do you think an external producer is necessary for a band, for the quality of the record?

MH: I think it depends on who’s in the band. Somebody’s got to produce it, but I don’t think you necessarily have to have somebody else come it. You do have to have a good producer though, but alot of times somebody in the band can be that good producer.

DD: It’s not necessarily a fresh set of ears that’s necessary?

MH: I don’t think so.

DD: Yeah, it works for you. Do you a future for big labels, for mainstream labels?

MH: I defiantly think major labels are going to be around. As far as me being, in the future, with a major label – it’s a possibility, I don’t shut it out as a possibility, I’m fielding offers at the moment for a lot of different major labels, and we’re going to hear everybody out. If there’s a deal that comes along that’s right for me then I’ll take it, if not, then I won’t.

DD: Good luck with that. What advice would you give to upcoming artists? You mentioned that you were passionate about one thing and this side project took over and became what you are now making money from. What advice would you give to people who are now coming up?

MH: I would say, don’t make music for other people. Make music for yourself, and have as much fun as you can making it. People will find it, people will find [what you’re passionate about], people will love it. People will be attracted to your passion. Go for what you want to do, and be creative, be original. That’s my #1 advice; don’t do what everybody else is doing.

DD: Speaking on collaborations for a moment, I noticed on your twitter page yesterday you were exchanging views with Dita Von Tesse.

MH: Yeah, that was a trip. I don’t actually know that much about her, but she’s got 100,000 followers on twitter. I know a little bit about what she does. That kind of thing has been happening all the time on twitter, that that’s one of the great things about twitter, I really like twitter as a social media forum.

DD: Yeah, you seem to use it, actually, genuinely.

MH: I do, I love it, and I tell everybody to follow me on twitter.

DD: Excellent. A lot of artists are using it as a promotion/media platform, they have a ghost writer writing stuff, but you, genuinely, it’s in your pocket.

MH: Oh yeah, I’m on it. Ask the guys in my band, I’m on it all the time and almost everybody gets annoyed with me, with how much I’m on there.

DD: About remixing and collaborations, do you have any other offers in terms of collaboration, serious potential?

MH: I’m working with Snoop Dogg on some stuff right now, that’s going to be awesome, I’ve been talking to Ghostface Killah about doing some stuff, I just did a track with Freeway for his new album.

DD: So you’re still very much in the Hip-hop space as well?

MH: I guess it’s just sort of been happening that way, that’s actually a really good point. It’s not that I’m out there particularly going after hip-hop artists to collaborate with, but that’s who has been coming to me.

DD: You do also see strange crossovers, I mean, Mark Ronson’s been interested in you, and even in his music there are odd crossovers between Hip-hop in his earlier stuff and Jazz.

MH: Yeah, I guess people can defiantly hear the hip-hop influence in my music, that’s attracted them.

DD: Speaking of, soul is quite old, originated in the 50s, and you mentioned [Peanut Butter Wolf], who thought you had dug up this old record. How are you using modern recording techniques, technology, to bring a more modern sound to soul?

MH: I think a lot of my modern sound comes from me not even being alive in the 60s and 70s. I grew up in the 80s and 90s listening to Public Enemy, LL Cool J and the Smashing Pumpkins. It’s kind of impossible for me to know what it was like back then, when people were recording music. I can only use [the] techniques I’ve learned in my lifetime. I’m an indie artist on an indie label with no budget, and I’m using equipment that I have available to me, which is the cheapest shit I can find and I think that adds a lot to my sound. That’s just the way that it goes. Honestly, if I had all the money in the world, I’d probably do it the same way.

DD: Just to finish up, we mentioned earlier big labels, remixing. What are your views on music piracy?

MH: Music Piracy. The main thing is that there’s nothing you can do about it. You have two choices, you can either be Metallica and yell at everybody and be pissed off all day, or you can say “Hey, that’s how it goes” and figure out other ways to makes money. That’s the way that I go about it.

DD: Hence why you’re touring extensively?

MH: Yeah, get on the road and have a good live show and people will respect it.

DD: Any big gig’s you’re looking forward to? Where you’re saying “that gig’s going to be great”.

MH: London was awesome, we just did two sold out nights in London, I was really looking forward to those, they were great. I’m really looking forward to Ireland, just because I’ve never been here, I’ve never performed here. Same thing with Spain, we’ve got some Spain dates. I’ve never been to Spain. I’m always looking forward to places that I haven’t been and places that I haven’t tried the food, because I’m a really big food guy. That’s part of the fun for me, honestly sometimes I have more fun with the food than I do at the shows. It’s really the “Mayer Hawthorn Lonely Food Tour”. I just pretend it’s about the music, really I’m in it for the food.

DD laughs.

DD: Brilliant, thank you very much, and good luck with the rest of the tour.

MH: Thanks very much man.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

Transcript to follow…

Sascha, project leader, spoke with us about what Eventphone do and what their kit comprises of.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

We interview Emmanuel of 2600 on his way to the HAR (Hacking at Random) conference and hear his views about the quality of bloggers, twitterers and the like. Then we just leave him in a taxi with Dave – we’re very mean – hahaha

All this and more in this week’s IT Freely podcast.

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (BY-SA).

DD: I’m sitting in the Burlington in Dublin with Jono, who has just started with Ubuntu Sprint. How’s it been going?

JB: It’s been really good. Every six months we have the Ubuntu Developers Summit, where we get together with the community and we have 280/300 people come along. In between each UDS we try and get our company together and it’s an opportunity for the company to bond and the team to bond and we don’t really do anything new we just basically sit in a room and work together and it’s been really good. This is the first day, I was in yesterday for a management sprint which was really productive but this is the first day of the proper sprint and it’s been really good so far.

DD: Ubuntu has recently released 9.04, cloud computing APIs. What future technologies are Ubuntu pushing? What do you see Ubuntu being in a year or two years time? What are you working towards?

JB: Many areas, there’s lots of UI stuff. We’ve got this incredible new design team that’s joined and they’re working very closely with the community to identify improvements and innovations in the desktop. The desktop has not really changed all that much in the last five years and as part of project Ayatana, which you can get to online, there’s many… Ayatana is like a Buddhist word which means “fear of consciousness”, and it’s basically all the things around you, and that’s what the project focuses on. It’s like a series of technologies that we’re releasing and working on and contributing to the open source desktop. It’s really funky what they’re doing. There’s also new work gone into the cloud and participating in the cloud revolution that’s happening right now, it’s still very early days but that’s looking really good. Our view with Ubuntu has always been to basically embrace technology and release the best open source software that we can.

DD: Of course, and you recently open-sourced LaunchPad, which was a huge thing for your ex-colleague Matthew Revell.

JB: Well, he’s still my colleague. He’s still there. Ex-cohost. The open-sourcing of LaunchPad was a phenomenal contribution.

DD: We thought it was never going to happen.

JB: I’m on the LaunchPad team so it was really nothing to do with me. Various people in the company were making various noises about whether it would be desirable to have an open-sourced LaunchPad and obviously it would be. You’ve got to point the credit squarely at Mark Shuttleworth. Fundamentally that guy invested millions of dollars in the software and he open-sourced it.

DD: In fairness, he was taking all the flak when people were coming to him saying why isn’t this open-source, you’re an open-source company with a closed-source product, this is the core of what you do. Yeah, fair play to the guy, he stepped up to the critics and said, right, we’re going to squash you and this is now open-source.

JB: Absolutely. LaunchPad is an incredible project and there’s many components in it that are so useful and so fundamental to Ubuntu development and I think it made sense. Open-sourcing big chunks of code is a long and laborious job. There’s lots of very uninteresting details that have to be straightened out before it gets out there, that a lot of people are never aware of. The LaunchPad team worked really hard in getting that together and Mark Shuttleworth set the ball rolling and he made the commitment and it’s our there, and the response has been very, very positive, I’m very happy.

DD: I can imagine. Speaking of teams, and you’re pretty much the team manager of all the teams, how have the LoCo teams being going around the world recently?

JB: So good, I’m so proud of the LoCo project. I helped co-ordinate some of it but it’s really been the good work of the people involved in the different LoCo teams. We have over 200 LoCo teams all over the world. People get together and they’re passionate about Ubuntu and they spread the word and they organise booths and organise shows and all kinds of stuff. I’m really proud of the efforts there and it’s continuing to grow, I mean it’s continuing to grow all over the world, we’ve got LoCo teams in pretty much every populated part of the world right now.

DD: Is the main thing LoCo teams do translate?

JB: No the main thing they really do is advocate.

DD: So like street teams in media.

JB: Yeah, they go out and they give out flyers and CDs and they encourage people to go and try Ubuntu. A lot of LoCo teams do translations and that is definitely a core part of it but advocacy is definitely the main thing that people are attracted to.

DD: This seems to be one thing that Ubuntu are really on the ball on in terms of Linux distros, in terms of really connecting to people. They’ve got the, and I hate to use the term, the marketing side down to a tee, and they’ve got – what we need to connect it to people, in order to connect Linux to human beings. I suppose you’re partially if not fully responsible for that.

JB: I’d definitely err on the side of partially. The Ubuntu movement is a big movement. The thing about open-source is a lot of it is top-down. You find inspiring characters who inspire other inspiring characters who inspire other inspiring characters, and every step of that layer is very important. You could say at the top of that layer is someone like Mark Shuttleworth who is the inspiring character of the Ubuntu world, but I think it cascades in many ways. I mean, every day I meet people and I talk to people who just inspire me. There’s people in different LoCo teams and different projects, in Ubuntu and outside Ubuntu that are the glue that holds everything together. It’s very tempting for us in the Ubuntu camp to be proud of what we’ve done and kind of get a little bit self-congratulatory, but if it wasn’t for X and it wasn’t for FireFox and it wasn’t for OpenOffice and it wasn’t for the Gnome project and the KDE project and BinUtils and all these.

DD: Okay but in fairness this is what every distro does, you could say the same about Fedora, you could say the same thing about Slackware, Gentoo, right? So how does Ubuntu set itself apart from these? I ready know the answer but…

JB: I think why Ubuntu is so successful can been a commitment to the ethos which has been it ‘Just Works’. Right at the beginning of the project, I remember when I first heard of Ubuntu I heard random South African dude was interesting in making an operating system that used Debian at the core and build on top of it to make a really easy to use operating system. I’d been talking for about two or three years that I felt this was the way forward.

DD: We all have, everyone who uses Debian has.

JB: It wasn’t because I was insightful, it was because it just made sense. I wasn’t the only voice, but this guy made it happen and I have a huge amount respect for that. It’s the integration and the commitment to integration and detail, and ease of use, across the products, across the server and desktop, UnR, I think that’s what’s made it happen.

DD: Is there much, I suppose, tight knitting planned between Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server? Let’s take a wild example in the closed-source world, the likes of Exchange Server/Outlook inter-knit. Is there that kind of knit planned for Ubuntu Server/Ubuntu Desktop? Is there an advantage for me to install Ubuntu Server on my server if I have it on my desktop?

JB: I think so, if you’re familiar with Ubuntu Desktop then Ubuntu Server is going to be easy for you.

DD: Over Debian Server?

JB: I’d say so. I mean there’s slight changes in Ubuntu that are going to be in Ubuntu Server. I don’t think there’s a huge difference, I think Ubuntu Server is going to be useful for anyone coming from an open-source background. It’s a really great product, it’s a really powerful product. I don’t think there’s necessarily any particular benefit from installing it if you’ve got a Ubuntu background, just a lot of elements of it are going to be free, the feel of it will be very familiar.

DD: Moving on a little bit, you recently published a book, or at least it went to the printers, what, last week?

JB: Yeah, about two days ago in fact it went to the printers. I got an email saying they said “Yep, it’s gone, it’s done.”, which on one side is really exciting cos it’s like it’s gone to the printers, it’s done, no more book, and on the other side it’s like, oh my god, no more opportunity for changes and edits.

DD: Did Leo write the foreword for it?

JB: Yup, Leo wrote the foreword, Leo Laporte, founder of the Twit network.

DD: Yeah, and we’ve been seeing you on FLOSS recently, quite a bit.

JB: FLOSS weekly’s been a lot of fun, I went on there about three or four months back.

DD: Have you been itching to get back into podcasting and live media?

JB: I have to admit, yeah, I’ve been excited about it. LUGRadio was a lot of fun and I miss it. I’m really proud of what we achieved in four years. You know, Aq, Adam and Chris and Sparks.

DD: Are you purposefully ignoring Ade?

JB: Ade’s got nothing to do with it. Ade was just a hanger on. How could I ignore Ade. And Ade. We had a lot of presenters. I’ve been drinking a bit tonight, that’s probably why… I’m proud of the achievements we made and I’ve kind of been itching to do some podcasting again.

DD: It probably doesn’t hurt to get the word out about Ubuntu.

JB: Yeah. FLOSS has been good, it’s a different beast though. It’s fun, but it’s way more formal.

DD: It’s American.

JB: It’s American yeah, it doesn’t have that Monty Python kind of LUGRadio humour. I mean that fact we were making jokes about Richard Stallman buying a kipper, I mean kind of sums it up.

DD: Rather than making jokes about Miguel de Icaza.

JB: There were a few jokes about Miguel, but he’s a good guy, he took it in good stead. I mean, making jokes about wearing his skin is, ah…

DD: Excellent. So you released Art of Community under Creative Commons license. What does that mean for people who want to get an e-book of it, people who want to get it off Amazon?

JB: The reason why we did it, was when I was interested in writing a book about community management and community building, I though it was really important the community had access to that book. When the book is complete and it’s ready and it’s proofed and complete, we need to provide people with access to the information. Saying the only way you can get access to this information is if you pay $36 or $39, seemed unreasonable. It’s not within the spirit of community, you should provide people with access to the information. What we should also provide people with is the ability to support the project, the ability to to step forward and say “I’m going to stick my $39 down on the table to support the idea of a creative commons book.” so that’s basically what we did. And O’Reilly were very, very, very open to it, and credit to them.

DD: O’Reilly are a very forward-thinking House. The other creative commons project you worked on recently was Severed Fifth. Explain Severed Fifth in a nutshell.

JB: So Severed Fifth in a nutshell was, I was hearing all this talk about Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and how they’ve embraced Creative Commons and how this was changing music and all the rest of it.

DD: Was Radiohead creative commons with In Rainbows? I thought it was just free. I know Year Zero was CC but not In Rainbows.

JB: I thought it was CC, I may be wrong. I was hearing about some established artists who were talking about how they were licensing music under a free license. It’s very easy for them to say that because they’ve built their reputation on the traditional music industry. I was thinking, what happens if you’re a completely unknown artist like I am. My idea was to write an album and to see how far we can push it, when I’m completely unknown. So I bascially wrote ‘Denied by Reign’ which is the first Severed Fifth album. I wrote the songs and then recorded them in my home studio, all the guitars, the drums, the bass, the vocals, did it all myself and then basically released it under the creative commons license, the idea was then to push it hard and see how far I could push it. The problem is that just as that project had kicked off, that’s when the book came along, and I couldn’t turn the book down. So Severed Fifth was sacrificed a little bit in order to write the book, but the book’s done now, and I’ve just started writing the second album.

DD: I don’t mean to insult your musical prowess, but how much is a producer needed in the process of creating an album? How much is it necessary for any genre of musician to have a producer, and therefore that follow on is, is it necessary for them to have a record label?

JB: I think it’s really important to have someone who can produce a great album, so you really want to have a good producer. You hear some free music and it’s just crap, and some that’s really good. With Severed Fifth, I produced it myself just because I knew I could get a reasonable result and I didn’t have to invest money in a producer. But yeah, if you’re going to release an album, make sure it sounds good, and that might mean paying going an paying someone $250 a day to record it, or €250 or £250 or whatever.

DD: Sure sure sure. Are you personally going to be touring with the album?

JB: The plan was to with the first one, but with the second one I’d like to. I don’t know how far. Because I wrote it at a solo album, it’s very difficult to play everything at once, live.

DD: Maybe you can do it at book signings.

JB: Yeah! The plan is to put together a band and start playing some gigs. I starting playing about three or four weeks back with a guy locally, Phil, on guitar, and he was learning a bunch of the songs, it sounded great.

DD: Brilliant. Definitely looking forward to it. To finish up, I’ve heard rumours that Mr.Shuttleworth is fond of roofs in hotels.

JB: Fond of what?

DD: Roofs in hotels.

JB: Roofs?

DD: Roofs, as in, get on the roof.

JB: Okay.

DD: I’m not asking you to confirm or deny this, but do you have a similar perchant for getting on the roof of a building, when you’re somewhere new?

JB: Getting on the roof?

DD: Yeah! Is this a Canonical thing?

JB: A, I have no idea about Mark getting on roofs.

DD: I’m not asking if you do.

JB: He may do, he may not, that’s news to me, but it terms of me… it’s a roof. I don’t have any particular affiliation with a roof I mean I’ve never really intended to get on a roof. I like to get on a roof if there’s a nice view or if it’s warm outside, but no. So where did you hear this? Where did you hear this rumour?

DD: Someone drunk in the pub last night, some drunken Texan. I’m not going to reveal names.

JB: Some drunken Texan? Does he work an Canonical?

DD: Yes.

JB: He works at Canonical. So I know who that person is. And he says he’s got a thing about roofs?

DD: Yeah, apparently. He was chatting about how “Mark’s gonna kick my ass if I come in drunk tomorrow.” and I was like “Oh, what’s Mark like?” and he says “That guy, all he talks about when we get to a new hotel is ‘I’ve got to get on the roof, have you been on the roof yet? Have you seen the roof of this place?’” and apparently, very third-hand at this stage, Mark is a fan of the roof.

JB: Well, good to know, I had no idea, that’s news to me.

DD: Thank you very much, and I’m sure I’ll chat to you again.

JB: No worries, thanks.

We had a chat about signing to Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto label, fan remixes, on-line distribution, and their upcoming album Legend of the Black Shawarma.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

Photo by Hugh O’Brien
dd: We’re here in the Ministry of Sound in London with Duvdev and Eres. How has the tour been going so far?
duv: It’s been really great, massively touring the United States at the moment, and that side of the world, now coming to Europe a little bit, it’s been great so far, most of it live. As you can see here today there are a few DJ sets this year and yeah, it’s been good time.

dd: Do you prefer the live sets or the DJ sets?
duv: We prefer the Live set, this is what we’ve done lately, for the last three or four years, a massive live set with all the crew. It’s kinda weird for us to DJ now, because it’s only me and [Erez], travelling like back in the old days. But it’s fun as well, it’s a different approach. We like both.

dd: I head that you play 190 night a year?
duv: Well, 120 live sets a year, sometimes…
dd: Are you insane? That’s a huge amount.
duv: It’s crazy.
dd: Do you get to go home much at all?
duv: well we basically play weekends, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday. Never mind where we are, we spend 2-3 days at home and go again out. So it’s not a conventional kind of touring way but it’s worked for us and it’s kinda good.

dd: So moving on, Vicious Delicious was a huge success and I suppose that what alot of us know you as, and you came to the mainstream a lot with that. We’re all looking forward to Legend of the Black Shawarma alot. But with Vicious Delicious came a lot of fan remixes and a lot more interaction with fans, fans taking your stuff and remixing it. Have you seen much of the stuff that’s been made? Have you seen many of the YouTube videos say?
Erez: Yeah, we get remixes all the time, from our website or myspace. We always get a lot of remixes.

dd: And you’re happy that people are remixing your work?
ez: Yeah, [they're] not official remixes, they’re not proper ones but it’s still cool that people try and make their own version of our tracks. It’s cool.
duv: As long as it’s being played as Infected Mushroom we don’t care, it’s more people having it, it’s more liking it. It’s cool.

dd: On that, you say it’s not an official remix. I know that for example Nine Inch Nails recently released an album, then fans remixed it and then [NIN] released the fan remixes. Would you consider doing that? Would you consider releasing a Legend of the Black Shawarma: Fan Remixes.
duv: Sure, you know this is something that we really… Me an Ez are really critical about the releases, so we really need to like all the remixes. But if we do, why not? NIN had a good idea with this, and brought a lot of fans trying to remix that. I think especially if you go to the fans and tell them, “Let’s do an album of remixes” then will come much more remixes and much more to choose from. So yeah, it’s a cool idea.
ez: The same for Depeche Mode, we did My Remix, you know this Nokia thing?
dd: No…
ez: So we gave files to people to remix.
duv: It’s for phone, but everybody who has a Nokia can do it, download Smashing the Opponent, the new single, and mix it. We’re all for people doing it in their own way, music should be reachable. If people want the file, we’ve done with them, after we do it, it’s done. It’s cool.

dd: You recently signed to Perfecto, Paul Oakenfold’s label. Does this open new doors in terms of collaboration? How do you see this enhancing Infected Mushroom?
ez: Well Paul is helping us a lot in any direction, we see alot of movie offers, to make stuff for movies, meeting a lot of people we never been able to meet before. And it’s just so helpful since we just met him, before we’d been signed. It’s amazing
duv: Yeah, Paul is really connected, in a mainstream base in the US, because he has been there for so many years, so he knows the major key players, stuff that was not open for Infected Mushroom and now is. Beside him we have alot of people working for us at the moment in the united states, not only Perfecto, we have Rocket Science, which is a company that service the label and does all the work, that did Prodigy, the did Crystal Method. There are a lot of people working on the new Legend of the Black Shawarma. So it’s been great.

dd: Excellent, how do you see the music industry panning out? A lot of people are no longer going for big labels, they’re going for smaller independent labels. A lot of people are trying digital downloads, the likes of Coldplay and Radiohead are giving away albums free. How do you see the music industry overall panning out over the next few years?
duv: There’s two approaches to that. Allot of people say I wont go to a major label because the major labels are afraid to sign new and upcoming bands because they industry today is falling down. And the big bands like you said, Radiohead and stuff like that, they don’t want to be with those labels any more. So there are two approaches, going in the same way. Today, to put your music out there it’s easier than ever. There are so many sites, there’s so many ways to sell music, you don’t need a label. But, there reaches a point that you do need one. So there’s two different approaches. There way that music is going in the future? I think because of Apple and iTunes becoming such a key player, people in the world listening to MP3, and downloading is so easy, I think the labels think it’s going to be over soon. People don’t consume music like they used to. They don’t go and buy a CD. It’s sad, and it’s reality, because a CD sounds really better than an MP3 on your iPhone. But on an iPhone, if you want a song now, you sit here and say “I like this song”, you hear it, you click it, you have it. It’s amazing. Both of the approaches are great, but this is the future, the future goes to that direction, and labels are not going to survive.

dd: People obviously download you music alot.
duv: Yeah!
dd: What are your words to people who do download.
duv: This has helped us from the beginning. We used to come and play in Mexico for 5-6 thousand people. We never sold a CD over there. They used to download it in Napster, back in the day. This is the main thing that broadcasted Infected Mushroom to the word, illegal downloading. We don’t care about it. We care that you come and pay a ticket to see us.
dd: That’s what get’s money.
duv: That’s the main income [for us], so if you download our music I don’t care. For us, we only care before the album is coming out, we don’t want it to leak. But the album is coming out in one month, in two weeks you’re going to see it leaking on the internet. It’s still unsafe but people are going crazy for Legend of the Black Shawarma, so if it leaks, it leaks. Then if people download it, there’s nothing to do, it’s cool.

dd: Legend of the Black Shawarma is an album about food. Why?
ez: Well we travel a lot and our main fun on the road, one of them, is food. So we are really fanatics about food, we like good food. Everywhere we go we look for the best, whatever local thing. So if it’s really amazing, we give it some respect, and write it on the album. So it was only a stupid funny concept, nothing too serious.

dd: Ok, that;s it, thank you very much. Look forward to the set, and I’ll see you again.
ez: Thank you
duv: Thank you very much, thanks.

IT Freely, Episode 5 : Open Source Software & VoIP, featured a brief snippet of an interview with Patrick Collison (homepage, twitter, Facebook) and has a chat about Tech start-ups in Ireland (based on his Irish Times article) and iPhone App School (homepage, twitter).. If you want to hear more, the full interview is available for your auditory delectation here. Check it out.

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

The full interview is available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 3.0) license.

DD: Hello, I’m chatting to Patrick Collison who’s back in the country for, what, only a week?

PC: Yeah, a week, heading back to San Francisco on Monday.

DD: Okay, it’s a terrible life.

PC: *laughs*

DD: I suppose you’ve hit the press recently a few times. One of the things was an article that you publishing the Irish Times in respect to Startups in Ireland. One of the things that it highlighted, one of the things that stood out to me, was that the government should take fifty million and give it to each of fifty startups. Do you think that’s actually a viable thing that they would actually go ahead and do?

PC: I have no idea is the honest answer. I mean it’s worth pointing out in this idea that it’s not actually mine originally. Having said that, I certainly think if done, it would work, it would almost have to work. It seems there isn’t too much doubt that if you offered it, startups would take it, and you know once fifty or whatever number of startups did take up the offer you really would be one of the bigger startup hubs in the world. As to whether the government would do it? I certainly think they should. Ultimately in the context of the governments finances, despite the recession it’s not a huge amount of money, especially compared to the benefit it would bring, I mean you only need one of these companies to do fairly well for them to make their money back. There was a report that came out yesterday that was suggesting €5.7bn in cuts I want to say. And €50m out of that is only a percent.

DD: Yeah yeah, of course, but people are always going to shout and say venture capitalists are risky and can we really trust out tax-payers money to risky startups?

PC: I think we have to, and I think a big part of the problem with investment as it’s done in Ireland today is that it’s NOT trusted to risky ventures and I’ve heard [investors] say one of the things they’re most afraid of is investing in companies that fail. That’s just a really bad mindset, I mean as an investor if you don’t invest in risky companies you’re going to miss out on the really successful ones. It’s important to remember that both Facebook and Google could not raise venture capital the first time they tried to raise it. I mean, they were seen as so risky they could only get danger money. And so, if our own state bodies are having a lower threshold than [Venture Capital companies], they’re almost guaranteed to miss out on the good companies.

DD: Both Facebook and Google started in Universities and a lot can be said for the academic sheltering that they had in their first early days. Google have the stories where they’re working the IT department, robbing a PC once a week saying “Yeah, yeah we’ll image that for you.” and using that as the initial Google search engine. Might it be a better route to approach to say we’ll put money into creating spin-off companies in Universities, take the talent from the University and create a spin-off from it. Would that be another route to take?

PC: I certainly think it’s a decent idea, I mean obviously an awful lot of successful technology companies have come from the Universities in the States. In Facebook’s case I think it was arguably incidental, certainly I don’t think the academic community in the university had much of a role to play, perhaps the social cache of those it was exposed to. I don’t know, I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on Universities to be honest. Like I said, there have been many succesful ones, I don’t know what Universities can do to encourage it. I don’t know of anywhere that has made some kind of explicit decision to change things, which makes sense.

DD: So, along those lines, what else do you think would be needed to create a really sustainable startup culture within the country?

PC: I guess at a broad level the most important thing we have to do is firsty recognise that the goal of having startups here is a valuable one and really focusing on it, and once people accept it as important and once we can agree on the sort of startups to encourage I think a lot will automatically follow from that. I think another thing that is easy to miss, is we tend to focus on the Irish aspect of it and we tend to focus on Irish startups and Irish entrepreneurs, and all the rest, which I think is entirely the wrong approach. I’m all for encouraging Irish people and Irish startups, but if we solely focus our attention on that aspect of it, we’re not going to do too well. It’s important to bear in mind that very, very few of the founders, in fact almost none of the founders of the successful Silicon Valley technology companies actually came from Silicon Valley. If you think of Silicon Valley is around the same population size of Ireland, and if Silicon Valley had only encouraged people native to the Valley to be successful, we’d never have heard of it. All of the successes came from people who moved to the Valley. I think Ireland needs to concentrate on becoming the kind of place that people from France or Germany, India or China or wherever want to come to set up their companies. Of course, Silicon Valley hold a very dominant position here and it’s not going to be easy for anyone to compete, but we need to recognize we’ll have to succeed their to have any success to building anything comparable to the Valley.

DD: Okay, I mean we’ve already done this with the Shannon Free Zone. I mean, the Shannon Free Zone attracted the likes of Intel, the likes of Analog Devices to start their European arms of their tech companies in the country, and the main thing was non-taxes. Do you think non-monetary incentives might be another way. For example, if we take an incubator type thing, have you been keeping tabs on Evert Bopp’s GreenHouse Incubator?

PC: I have, yeah. Personally I’m not a huge believer in incubators. Lots of people have tried, not many have succeeded.

DD: I think the angle I’m trying to take is, except money, what else can we do to attract people?

PC: I think a really important one, and I mentioned this in the article, is immigration law. It’s hard to overstate just how much harm US immigration laws are doing to the country right now. I know countless people who’ve had to leave the country due to being unable to get a visa and have become sucessfully employed elsewhere or started their own companies employing tens or hundreds of people. I guess a local example is Liam Casey who couldn’t obtain a visa into the US and moved to China and now employs eighteen hundred people out there. It’s almost crazy how much the US is shooting itself in the foot here and Ireland to absolutely capitalise on this and not just give a visa, but give a passport to anyone to people who look like they might set up things here.

DD: Does that go for tech companies or does that go across the board? I mean the first criticism you’re going to get is that suddenly the wave of Nigerians we had back in 2000/2001 are going to turn up on our doorstep again if we start offering free visas and free passports.

PC: I think people worry a bit too much about that.

DD: Haha, the health board would say otherwise, with them paying the rent and all.

PC: Of course there are, quote, “risks” here, and I’m not advocating blinding giving out passports or visas or anything like that. But, to give a counter-example here, Ireland used to have a reasonably good name in, I don’t know how you want to define it, the English language 3rd Level education sector, say Britian, the US, Australia, New Zealand etc. Back a couple of years ago we had a 1% market share globally of non-English speaking students coming to English-speaking universities, students from India, China and all the rest, and this figure is actually declining. A big reason for that is the perceived and real difficulty for a student wanting to obtain an Irish visa, and actually the approval rate is something like 60% as compared to something like 94% or 95% in the UK. This is just crazy, these students are profitable for us, they’re generally hard working people, because of the selection bias these are people who want to go abroad, are willing to live abroad, learn another language, study another language, etc. These are almost guaranteed to be good people and yet Ireland is turning them away in large numbers and most importantly creating this perception of Ireland not being a country welcoming to these hard-working, industrious people.

DD: Saint and Scholars and all that, yeah.

PC: Right now we’re committing the same mistakes the US is making, except the US, because of their dominant position, can afford to make them, we can’t.

DD: Okay. I mean it’s something we could really capitalise on here. I suppose one or two bullet points to slap in front of a minister would be really useful. Like you said, fifty million, one to each startup would be one. I think I can imagine a large amount of criticism that’s going to be levelled will be along the lines of administrative and you know, is it worth the amount of effort we put in. If we’re essentially employing 20, 30, 40 civil servants to keep tabs on this hub of innovation, are we going to see enough returns to pay those salaries, in order to actually sustain the effort that goes into it. You can’t say yes or no, it’s very, very likely but it’s probably going to require probably one or two bright sparks like yourself to hand-pick and say “Look, these companies are great, these guys have got real good vision, motivation and direction.” and go with that.

PC: It’s important to remember that even if the initial 50 companies did not produce profit for the government, that doesn’t mean the programme would be a failure. The point of doing this is only partially to bring these particular companies to Ireland, the real point is to turn Ireland into the kind of place where other people would like to come. The real value for Ireland would not be in the first fifty companies we bring, the value would be in the other thousand companies that come because there is this cluster of fifty companies in Ireland.

DD: You’ve lived in San Francisco, and I’m sure there’s an awful lot of auxiliary, social, nerdy type things which we don’t have here. I’ve visited briefly, but I noticed stuff like, on the most simple level, an Apple Store, we don’t have one here, but there they’re all over the place.

PC: *laughs* Compu-B might beg to differ, but I know what you’re saying.

DD: Are there other things like that? I mean, you’ve got a variety of sctreaming alternative music stations in San Francisco, you’ve got a variety of lifestyle things to back up a tech startup culture. What along those lines could be developed and built on here if we want to draw young startup types here and say “We’re [as good socially] as Silicon Valley.”.

PC: It’s a good question for sure, and the honest answer is I don’t know, but it’s certainly important. I guess what I wonder is whether it’s necessary in the beginning or will it just naturally follow if we do all the other things right, and I think it might be the latter. Silicon Valley, when it started out, wasn’t any hive of youthful creative activity, it was a fairly sleepy little place. It’s easier for Silicon Valley to grow organically, something else is going to have to grow a bit and Silicon Valley has all these advantages already. The one thing I would say, is I think it’s really important in attracting people to have really good universities. I don’t have too much to say on the whole fees debate except that there’s very little evidence that you can have both world class universities and free education. We should at least be realistic that the choice is between one or the other. Maybe we decide that we don’t want world-class universities, that we’d rather have free education than the best colleges in the world, and maybe that’s where we want to be but we should at least be honest with ourselves that this is the choice we’re making.

DD: Yeah. Agreed, that’s a good point to make and one that I’ve never really fully considered myself but it’s a good one to make. Moving away from that a bit, I’m sure we’re going to have long discussions about it in the future, one of the things you’ve been involved in recently has been the iPhone App School. How’s that going, when’s that starting?

PC: That’s starting on Monday in the Castleknock Hotel in Dublin.

DD: Brilliant.

PC: It’s an outgrowth of work I was doing in iPhone applications myself and just generally seeing how well it can work out, not for big companies, but for a guy who can afford to spend a few hours a day spending on something. Especially in the current economic situation in Ireland, something that people might really appreciate.

DD: I’m going to have to challenge you on this one. You’ve just thrown in the words “Individual” and “Current economic situation”, and yet you’re charged €1500 a pop for the course. It doesn’t compute with me. Personally I’m interested in developing for the iPhone, but I don’t have a Mac, I’m going to have to shell out a grand for a Mac.

PC: App School provides rental for €100.

DD: If I wanted to develop myself on this in the future, realistically if I going to want to continue developing for this if I’m going to get use out of my investment, I’m going to have to shell out for a Mac.

PC: And an iPhone or an iPod touch.

DD: And an iPhone which I don’t have. So it’s a total investment of about three grand. Where’s your average developer going to come up with that cash?

PC: I agree it’s a problem that people have to spend money and it’d be much nicer if they didn’t have to. Ultimately it still costs us to run App School and we can’t provide it for much less. What I will say it’s that it’s still an awful lot cheaper that almost any other secondary income stream that you might want to create, you know if you might want to set up some sort of website where you take subscription payments or whatever it is, you’re going to have to pay for servers and probably a designer and merchant bank accounts and blah, blah, blah.

DD: I agree to all this, the area I disagree on would be, would it not make more sense to target this at corporations and say, look, you guys can put down the three grand investment and now easily develop an in-house application for your payrolling, you can develop an in-house application for getting out news updates to your sales team, every time there’s a sales update, push that out.

PC: You know, you might be right, but we’re not approaching App School as a way for ourselves to make money, or certainly much, it’d be nice of it made some. It’s more to help people like us. I would have loved to go on this course back when I started doing iPhone Application development, and really this came out of “How can we get people like Daniel and myself up to speed quickly with iPhone applications?” It may not be the theoretically optimal solution to how to do iPhone training in Ireland, and maybe someone, or maybe even us will decide to focus on that a little more.

DD: Okay, on that, if you’re planning courses in future are you limiting yourself to iPhone or are you planning to go towards Android, Symbian, Blackberry?

PC: Again, we’re kind of playing it by ear at this stage, the first course still hasn’t run and we’re interested in seeing how the reception ends up being, and we have a second one planned in Limerick in about two and a half weeks time now and we’ll see how those go and after that we’ll make some decisions in regard to what’ll happen in the future.

DD: Brilliant. One final thing on that, is there has been some controversy recently in regard to lack of freedoms of applications on the App Store. For example there was a podcaster App which was taken down because it duplicated functionality, there was a Nine Inch Nails application which was taken down because it distributed songs for free.

PC: It was announced yesterday that any application which embeds a browser or provides unfiltered access to user-generated content will have to receive an 17+ rating on the store and you will not be able to distribute promotional codes for it.

DD: Right, I mean what would you say to people planning to go on this store if they have an idea and it falls into one of these categories?

PC: There’s not a whole lot I can say I guess. I think it’s utterly stupid. You keep thinking there couldn’t be yet another ‘what the fuck’ moment and then another one comes along. I guess the only consolation, maybe, is that I don’t know of many applications where the developer went and built something and they were not eventually able to get it into the store. In all the famous cases that attracted publicity that I know of, the applications did eventually end up in the store, perhaps with some modifications or a different rating or whatever. So even though it’s stupid I don’t think that the problem is actually that significant. It’s more morally repugnant than actually commercially harmful.

DD: Sure sure. It sounds like a fantastic idea. It’s yourself, Daniel and Damien Mulley behind it, yeah?

PC: That’s right, and SQT Training is kind of our training back-end.

DD: Brilliant, brilliant. Best of luck, and I’m very much looking forward to the both of them, and I’m sure there’ll be nifty stuff coming out of there. Thank you very much and we’ll chat to your again at some point in the future!

PC: Thank you.

Also, some comments on the U2 gigs in Dublin, which Patrick was lucky enough to go and hear.

Enjoy!

Segue to an investigation of Voice over IP (VoIP) as implemented in HEAnet and some of the advantages it can bring over using more expensive, proprietary solutions. Does it solve all things telecomms related? Certainly not, but there’s a lot it can do.

We also mention resources businesses and individuals can use when working with Open Source, The System Administrators’ Guild of Ireland and the Irish Linux Users’ Group.

Dave also interviews Patrick Collison (homepage, twitter, Facebook) and has a chat about Tech start-ups in Ireland (based on his Irish Times article) and iPhone App School (homepage, twitter).

The full interview (MP3) is available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 3.0) license.

But first, check out this weeks astounding episode of IT Freely, now with even more technical talking type content:

We had a quick chat about life on the road, the break-up of The Immediate, Inspiration for some of his songs, Piracy and the future of the music industry.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

dd: I’m here with Conor of Villagers
cob: Hello
dd: And previously of The Immediate. How have you been getting on in the last while? How have things been on the road?
cob: Good yeah, I’ve just literally… I was in Amsterdam this morning.
dd: Business or pleasure?
cob: Business, doing a solo support tour of Tracy Chapman around Europe, which was bizarre but enlightening also. Kinda tired, learning a lot, I still feel like we’re at the beginning of things.

dd: What gigs do you have coming up next after tonight?
cob: I have to play at a wedding on Friday, but I’m not playing my songs, I’m just playing.
dd: So you’re going to be a wedding singer?
cob: No, I’m going to be a wedding guitarist, not even a wedding singer. That’s my next gig, then after that… oh yeah, Latitude! We’re going to play this festive in Suffolk in the UK called Latitude which is sort of like a weird of a weird festival in the forest, apparently its kind of hard to find and it looks really interesting. It’s the day after the wedding, I’m one of the best men, I have to leave the wedding at like half seven, then get a ferry over and then drive for 7 hours because we’re on at 2:45 the next day. Hopefully we’ll get there in time.

dd: What kind of reception have Villagers been getting?
cob: Mainly on the FM, *bdum-tsch*. I don’t know, we’ve been getting good reception, yeah. It’s been good, positive.

dd: Rolling back a bit, to your work with The Immediate, I suppose the biggest shock to all of us was the suddenness in which you guys went your own ways. We saw great things are were expecting an awful lot more. Can you chat at minute about that, would you consider working working with the guys again in the future?
cob: Well, I would consider it, if it made sense, but I cant envision a time it would ever make sense. The spark kinda died for us so we ended it before we killed each other. And now it’s all good, we’ve split and I can’t really envision a time where it would make sense for us to get back together.

dd: Not even to get back together and create stuff, but just get back together and play.
cob: To play a show?
dd: Yeah, to play a show.
cob: No, I can’t envision that, no not at all.

dd: Moving to some of your other stuff, the subject matter of some of your songs, and specifically about inspiration that you’ve had for your songs. Where does your inspiration for Becoming a Jackel and Cecelia [& Her Selfhood] [come from]?
cob: Only with hindsight have I realised that the songs I’ve written in the last couple of months, even in the last two years, are all based on the idea of change, something you cant really control, or a physical change, or an emotional change, anything that makes you realise that you’re not as in control as you let yourself think you are. I didn’t set out to write about that, it just turned out that way. The ones that I threw away, the ones I didn’t want anyone to ever hear were the ones didn’t seem to align with this particular genre.

dd: One last question before we wrap up. What do you see the future of the music industry panning out to? In terms of Piracy, New Media, people downloading your stuff? For example, are you pro people downloading your music?
cob: Yeah, I don’t care, it’s cool. Like, I do it. It’s a really natural progression in the music industry, it’s just a tip in the balance of power. It was always going to happen and now they just have to deal with it. There’s just a lot of grumbles about it, because people are loosing money and stuff, it’s always going to happen. Life’s to short to be worried about that kind of stuff, it’s awesome if people hear your music, I don’t care.

dd: Thank you very much and hopefully we’ll chat to you again.
cob: Thanks dude, thanks Flirt.