I haven’t bought many CDs in the last year. They’ve nearly all been downloads, normally from iTunes. I’m also slowly working through ripping all my older CDs to mp3 so that I can listen from my laptop. I often listen to music while I’m working on some proper technical thing, I’m just too easily distracted otherwise. So having them all on my laptop is convenient, too convenient as I rarely even switch my CD player on now.

As I don’t tend to buy albums any more, but individual tracks, it means I place more value in playlists. The extra time I save by not having to deal with CDs, CD draws, cases and organising them is probably more than wasted by having to search for songs I want to listen to. I can’t listen to my whole collection at random as some songs I don’t want to listen to at certain times or depending on what mood I’m in. The lack of albums also means I don’t have the same flow between tracks. I tend to make large playlists, and then use the Party Shuffle (such an un-cool name in a very cool application) option in iTunes to randomly select from within that playlist. That lets me here the right songs depending upon a mood, but it still doesn’t allow any kind of sensible flow between tracks. I sometimes make more specific and shorter playlists, kind of like the compilation tapes I’d make in the 80s. They do fit a mood and have a flow, but they take a lot of time and effort to generate.

It’s almost as if the value in music has moved from the actual songs to the playlists. Or maybe that’s where it always was in the olden days and now its gone back there.

I think the use of video cameras, for none professional use, is going to end. Does any one actually have any home videos (not the Paris Hilton variety) that they enjoy watching? I think we’ll still take video clips, but they’re going to be lots of 20/30 second clips. The sort of thing that a phone or still digital camera specialise in. Software like Picasa can already store and organise these, you can watch them in couple of minutes in the same way you browse through your digital photos. Or you may choose to upload them and let Google index them.

We can all take reasonable quality still photos, we don’t need to edit them much and we can easily and quickly filter out the bad ones. If we take hours of video footage, then probably we only want a 5 minute edit of it. That’s possible, and certainly the software is around to do that, but it still requires a lot of manual editing. Unless the video application’s search/editing capabilities is able to work out the interesting bits automatically, then I think long home videos (and cameras) will be finished.

I do think we’ll end up taking more and more short video clips though, it’s still nice to see short clips of our friends and family messing about, just as long as we don’t have to sit through hours of them.

I came across the trend analysis part of IceRocket today when I was looking around trying to find some ideas for how I might do a project I’m working on. It’s actually pretty clever and gives you a sense of the “buzz” associated with a certain topic from people’s blogs. For example, if you might want to compare the amount of buzz generated, between The OC with Desperate Housewives. It turns out that The OC seems to generate much more buzz than Desperate Housewives, I guess maybe it has a younger more blog-aware audience. Or maybe it’s just because it has Rachel Bilson in it.

Google launched their IM client, Google Talk last night. Although AOL, Yahoo! and MSN all have a big head start, I think Talk’s got a pretty good chance of becoming the world’s number one messaging client. It feels very webby and is tiny. It feels like it’s been developed in something along the lines of Konfabulator or Sash. I really like the lightweight clean interface. Very Google. Very cool.

“Don’t worry, Darren is just on his reverse pattern thing”, is something Ian said a few days ago at lunch. He is very perceptive and had noticed that I’d done my usual trick of grabbing hold of the latest “in thing” and reversed it. I think I was arguing that talking is overrated or innovation is bad for you, something like that. He is right though, I do like a reverse pattern.

Over the weekend I read an article in a newspaper supplement about reverse shoplifting which really appealed to me. It’s where people take things in to a shop and put them on the shelves to make them look like they belong there. People in the UK have been buying canned food, replacing the labels and putting them back in supermarkets, as some kind of artistic statement. They even made sure the barcode worked so that people could buy their modified items without realising. I seem to remember Banksy did something similar in a New York gallery too a while back. It definitely feels like it has its roots in computing with people hacking web sites and putting their own content their. We need more reverse patterns.

I’ve been stuck in the dark ages slightly here, but this morning I made the move from WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) 5.1.1 to Rational Application Developer (RAD) 6. The reason I’d delayed was that I had a whole stack of projects running within WSAD and was expecting more pain in moving them across to RAD. Moving, in the past, from Visual Age for Java to WSAD 4 and then WSAD 5 caused me much more of a problem. With RAD, however, it was all fairly straight forward.

Once installed, I made backups of my WSAD workspace directories, pointed RAD to the WSAD workspace directories and they all sorted themselves out. There’s probably a more prescribed, measured and safer migration route, but I always tend to favour the patented “try it and see” approach. There were a few error messages on doing this, but after starting itself up the next time it had sorted everything out.

First impressions are very good, it doesn’t have a small memory footprint, but I wasn’t really expecting anything else. You do need a fairly beefy machine to do some serious J2EE development, even so It actually feels faster than WSAD. It has a few nice extra auto code fix features which always come in useful. Oh and I love those nice new curved window tabs.