The Unofficial Yahoo Weblog has a neat post on the Yahoo! Music Engine. Apparently, it even provides a Unix-style shell to access your music!

Did you know that the Yahoo! Music Engine (affectionately called YME) supports RSS playlists?

Excerpt:

This is extraordinary from Yahoo!’s viewpoint. To whatever extent things like this catch on, people will be strongly guided to the Yahoo! Music Engine to hear the music, and to Music Unlimited subscription to create their own playlist blogs.

I’ve had a few conversations today with friends from other teams. Believe me when I say, you ain’t seen nothing yet

Yahoo’s First-Quarter Profit doubles! In the same announcement, you’ll notice this:

In a bid for even more traffic, Yahoo plans to introduce a new digital music store later this year. In an interview Tuesday, Semel declined to provide details, but indicated it would include features that will compete with Apple Computer Inc.’s popular store, which allows consumers to download individual songs for 99 cents apiece.

“I hope it is even more popular,” than iTunes, Semel said. Yahoo plans to introduce the new music features in early summer.

I’ve seen the internal beta. It totally rocks! (pun intended).

The webosphere is all about design and aesthetics these days, which is of course, just what the doctor ordered and mainly thanks to Google and Apple (yes, I know you were waiting for me to say that).

And when Paul Graham says we are now witnessing the return of the Mac, people sit up and take notice (my iPod agrees with me too).

I especially liked this part:

So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.

That reminds me of the Shufflephones hack that my friend Jim has made. Now, that is something really designer-ish but very usable at the same time:

He even has a whole blog dedicated to shuffle hacks.

I try to always keep in mind that ‘Usability and Simplicity’ are the two most important factors for anything to succeed. It almost feels like Apple invented that concept.

This also means that I’m getting a Powerbook soon. I can’t wait.

My manager went to our Sunnyvale office recently and came back today. I had asked him to get an iPod Mini for me… when he gave it to me in the morning, I was grinning away to glory. I am not much of a gadget guy, but I was craving for an iPod being such a music buff. I forced myself not to open up the package in the morning (otherwise I wouldn’t get any work done). So, when I came back home in the evening, I tore open the package and went total gaga over it.

First of all, it is so compact, I wonder how Apple managed to squeeze so much into something so small… this is the 4 GB version, so I can store approximately 1000 songs on this baby! Oh, and I can use it as a huge floppy drive as well

The first song I copied to it and listened was the instrumental version of the title track of Roja. For me, there is simply no other song that is as good as that one…

Just compare the sizes of the iPod Mini and my watch in the last snap above…

Now, I just have to find enough good songs to fill it….

P.S. The reason I had to get it ‘imported’ was that it costs $200 == 9 grand rupees that way whereas it costs 18 grand rupees in the Apple store in Forum, Koramangala, Bangalore.

Most music sites will work only on Windows and that too specifically IE – so I was glad to see that MusicIndiaOnline now works on Linux using the RealOne Player. Their FAQ answers about how to get it to work on Linux.

Btw, I really like this album by Om – The Fusion Band, especially the ‘Maula’ and ‘Mohana’ songs.

Its great that I get to hear these songs for free. Now that I have heard these songs and really like them, I can buy the cassette/CD from the music shop knowing that the money is well-spent. I usually have a good nose errr…. pair of ears for music but off late, I’ve bought a few cassettes which I’m sure I’m never gonna hear again.

Tip: Mepis Linux comes with RealOne installed. So I didn’t have to do anything to get this working. It just worked out of the box. I like this so much that I want to say it again – ‘It just works.’

Aargh!! I’m having one of those bad days…

As it is, I’m having major problems with SQL in my work and have a tough time with that …

On an unrelated note, I am trying to install a package and rpm throws up with an error:

$ sudo rpm -qa
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30978) from dbenv->open: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 -  (-30978)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
no packages

$ man rpm

$ sudo rpm --rebuilddb
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30978) from dbenv->open: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index

And now all Yahoo sites are not opening in my browser – I’ve tried Konqueror as well. I’ve tried flushing the Firefox cache, restarted Firefox….. Nothing’s working. Sigh.

Background music: ‘In The End’ by Linkin’ Park:

What it meant to me / will eventually / be a memory / of a time when I tried so hard And got so far But in the end It doesn’t even matter I had to fall To lose it all But in the end It doesn’t even matter

Update : Even my net connection at home is down due to an incompetent cable-wallah. And of all the things, a reboot fixed the rpm problem!!

$ sudo rpm -qa
tzdata-2003d-2
ethtool-1.8-3.1
libstdc++-3.3.3-7
fedora-release-2-4
pcre-4.5-2
shadow-utils-4.0.3-21
zlib-1.2.1.1-2.1
grep-2.5.1-26
procps-3.2.0-1.1
dev-3.3.13-1
......

I’m doing a late-nighter at work today… so I thought of listening to some music while doing the hackathon, but I’ve got bored of the ones on my hard disk. So, how about internet radio? Well, I switched to FC2 on my office box, so I can’t use Yahoo Messenger 6 Launchcast radio, but wait, there is an alternative, Shoutcast! So, I go there, click on one of the stations that suits me and listen to great songs in XMMS! Now, ain’t that nice? (And yes, you can use Winamp too )

And… thanks to the IPv6 disabling tip, browsing is now several times faster on Fedora!

Yesterday morning, I attended the GATE exam. I did very well considering my (lack of) preparation . Paper was quite easy actually considering that it consisted of what we have already studied … but I still feel that the probability of me solving a probability problem is …. I don’t know, I already told you I couldn’t solve probability problems!

In the evening, I attended the Bryan Adams concert at Palace Grounds. I had gone alongwith my buddies Balaji, Nitin and Srinivas. We were waiting for the show to begin from 5pm. We were let in to the ground by around 5.30 . With more than 30,000 people in the grounds, there was so much pushin’ and shovin’ and suffocation, and to think I paid 600 rupees for this! That’s when I (wittily?) commented to my buddy "I haven’t suffered so much even in Tirupati. Why should I here?" the pretty girl standing in front of me, heard me and giggled.

After a lot of chanting of "DNA sucks" (DNA Networks were the organizers of the concert), things finally started happening at 8, but the wrong things. Aasma, the pop band, came out to sing but they were booed off the stage after 2 songs. Then Dragonfly came and sang about 4 songs – one was pretty good but we were just too tired of waiting to listen.

Finally, Bryan came out at around 9:15 and started singing immediately. Then all of us got into the mood and Bryan sang all our favourite songs – 18 Til I Die, Run to You, I’m Ready, Back To You, Cloud #9, Everything I Do, …. he sang for nearly 2 hours and believe me, when I say, it was worth all the trouble. We just had the most awesome time and to think that if I could take about 10 steps, I could have shook hands with Bryan – that’s how close I was to the stage.

After a "We want more" chant, Bryan sang some more songs and finally it was time to go home. Then I told the pretty girl that "I don’t know about Tirupati, but this sure was a spiritual experience for me " . After we reached the parkin’ lot, we waited and waited for the traffic jam to get cleared – we waited more than an hour in the parking lot. Then finally we got something to eat on the way and I reached home about 2 in the night, but it was all worth it…