forsv: potpourri of thoughts

Hi-tech workers make 'curry rock'

Hundreds of thousands of hi-tech workers from India have come to the US in the past decade.

Many of them arrived on the H-1B visa programme, which allows American companies to hire highly-skilled foreign workers.

For many Indians, getting a visa is a dream come true. But living and working in the US can be harder than expected and a group of Indian-born engineers has put the H-1B experience to music.

It all started, as these things often do, at a party. It was a house-warming party in the Washington DC area to be precise.

An Indian computer engineer with a yen for Jethro Tull was throwing the shindig. Among the guests were a couple of other Indian hi-tech workers with musical backgrounds.

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Can I have your sound?

The Bootleg Browser. Links to live shows from almost 350 artists.

Coworkers Judged by iTunes Playlists

Office workers who share music via Apple Computer's iTunes software track their coworkers' comings and goings and form opinions about them based on their playlists.

The opinions are not always what the sharer intended, a new study finds.

The sharing phenomenon can nonetheless create a community of sorts among coworkers who otherwise barely know each other.

The study, of an unnamed mid-sized U.S. company, was funded in part by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

"People sharing music in our study were aware of the comings and goings of others in the office because they noticed the appearance and disappearance of others’ music on the network," said Amy Voida, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech who led the research. "They imagined what other people might think about their music collections, and they were aware of the musical holes left when someone left the company."

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best way to transfer your music collection

"What's the best way to transfer your music collection to your iPod? It depends on what you value most: your time, money, or sanity."

mix mp3s

This is a great tool to mix mp3s with, especially if you don't have $400-600 for final scratch pro. It was designed specifically for DJing live and works like a virtual turntable. Besides being free, it's far better than most of the other toy-ish mixing programs available. Having two soundcards makes things easier, but it can even run on a system with one soundcard (although you still need a real mixer). We've come a long way since this.