What is your Chicago music IQ?

Chicago is a musical town, and after a year of living here I am just beginning to realize how many great musical careers intersect with the Chicago scene. Chicago's unique styles of blues, soul, jazz and hip-hop have all made me smile at one time or other. This post is a hats off and thank you to the musicians of the city of broad shoulders. Thanks!

And now a celebration of Chicago music through trivia. What is your Chicago music IQ? Did you know that Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls went to High School together here, or that both Wilco and the Smashing Pumpkins got started here? I didn't, but now I do and I decided to write a quiz to publicize some interesting facts. The study guide is first: a list of artists and links to them on Wikipedia. Study up before you take the quiz below.

• Sam Cooke
• Wilco
• Muddy Waters
• Mel Torme
• Lou Rawls
• Coleman Hawkins
• Jim O'Rourke
• Billy Corgan
• Herbie Hancock
• Quincy Jones
• Gene Krupa
• The Smashing Pumpkins

The Quiz:

1. Which two singers grew up in chicago and were in a 50's gospel group called "The Teenage Kings of Harmony?"
2. What chicago band features the landmark Marina Towers on the cover an album?
3. Who is the chicago filmmaker, producer and musician with an album cover featuring a naked reclining asian man getting fellatio from a small rabbit?
4. Which Chicago born jazz drummer was the first person to use a bass drum pedal in 1927?
5. Who was the Glendale heights kid and guitar virtuoso who's father, a jazz guitarist, refused to give him guitar lessons because he doubted his commitment?
6. What artist got his nickname from his childhood fondness for playing in the mud? (Yeah, this is super easy, but an interesting fact.)
7. What Chicago born music producer produced the 2 biggest selling albums of all time, and is the only african-american film producer to have been nominated for an oscar in the category of best picture?
8. Who attended high school in Chicago (and Topeka, Kansas) before becoming the first influential jazz musician to use the tenor saxophone?
9. This Chicago based musician was one of the first mainstream musicians to use an Apple computer in making music. His 1980 album featured sounds from an Apple II.
10. Born in Chicago this singer's nickname is the Velvet Fog.

I guess you get a point for each of these questions. So the highest possible IQ is 10! Go brains!

RailsConf 2007

This is my pre-RailsConf post. I've just arrived in Portland and am looking over the list of presentations for tomorrow. Here are the ones I'm considering. These better be good!

• Clean Code, by Robert Martin
• Doing REST Right, by Scott Raymond
• Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, by Adam Keys

On another RailsConf note. I'm looking forward to hanging out in the ThoughtWorks lounge where they will be writing a Rails app FOR RailsConf FROM scratch. Anyone is welcome to stop by, pick up a story card and do some coding. It will be a good chance to learn some Rails-fu from some experts. I'm also looking forward to some of the announcements that ThoughtWorks will be making regarding pushing Rails into the Enterprise. Most of all I'm just looking forward to learning, hangin, codin, drinkin and playing with my new camera here in lovely Portland OR.

Stickin it to tha man.

Fidelity manages my 401k plan, and up until a few weeks ago I never thought much about it. Then I went to a save Darfur rally and candlelight vigil in Federal Plaza. There were many speakers, and one of the main topics was divestment from Sudan. One speech in particular caught my attention because they mentioned Fidelity as a major investor in foreign oil companies in Sudan. The revenue the Sudanese government is receiving from these companies has directly funded the genocide and continuing civil war there.

That got me thinking and I went to work to stir some of my co-workers up about how bad Fidelity was. Today we had a meeting with our plan representatives from Fidelity and expressed our disapproval. It was pretty satisfying even though it raised some questions about what we could really do about it. Would our entire company pull out of our relationship with Fidelity? Not likely, after all are there any of these big financial companies who are squeaky clean? Do we try and get more socially responsible funds in our plan? We also found out that Fidelity had recently sold 90% of their holdings. That took some of the wind from our sails, but we still spoke our minds, and I like to think that while we might not have directly drove a stake in the heart of this, we at least had something to do with helping divest billions of dollars from companies like PetroChina.

I'm still going to write a follow up letter to Fidelity, who claims that the sale of these stocks was just coincidental. Berkshire, you are next. Now if only I could afford even one share.

Migrating from Wordpress to Blogger

A general trend in my techno-lifestyle has been the move from do-it-myself, to FREE services. Take my email for example. I used to refuse to use Hotmail or Yahoo! because I didn't trust my communications to some company, and I wanted to use Imap. Along came gmail, and suddenly I could get tons of space, and an awesome client for free. Bye-bye exim and bye-bye Thunderbird. What about storing my photos online? No way was I going to put all my personal photos on some company's servers. Then Flickr began offering Unlimited storage at an amazingly low price, and their software made sharing a joy. Bye-bye jigl and my ever increasing storage woes. I guess what is driving my adoption of these services is the maturity they have achieved. Ajax makes the interfaces useable and with prices hovering just above free nothing else makes any sense.

So I recently realized that I was really not using my virtual server anymore. Google gives you free subversion repositories, free email, and free blogs. So the time had come to kill my server and the only thing standing in my way was migrating my blog from wordpress to blogger. It turns out this is not a straightforward thing to do.

Step 1: see if anyone else had done it. Of course others have done it, but there is no automatic solution (that works). There are dozens of how to documents on moving from blogger to wordpress, but I found only 1 useful for doing the opposite. It also came with a pretty well made Java tool. Here is a link to the tool. Too bad it errored out when I tried migrating my blog. It wasn't open source either so I couldn't try to fix it. I think it is designed to move a wordpress.com blog, not a standalone hosted instance of wordpress. In any case after fiddling with it for half an hour I thought I had better start rolling my own solution.

Step 2: I used mysqldump to grab my WP database from my server and then imported it into a local mysql database.

Step 3: I downloaded the python version of Google Blogger API and used it to create a few dummy posts and comments.

Step 4: I wrote a python script and migrated my entire blog comments and all in about 20 seconds.

Lessons learned:

• The Blogger API wasn't intended for migrations. You can't set the author of the comments programmatically. They belong to the person you login as. You can't backdate comments, so they appear anachronistic on the site. This is too bad, because there were some interesting folks who had left me comments. I would have liked to preserve that history.

• Python is a nice language, but I hate, hate, hate the whitespace sensitive nature of it. I also find it a bit less elegant than Ruby. Google, you need to stop pretending that Python is so great and get your API out there in Ruby.

• I'm never going to use this code again, thus it ain't very reuseable. My unit tests depend on my specific wordpress database. Stuff is just hardcoded in. I totally ripped off some of the sample code that came with the api download. For what it is worth I threw it up on my google code site. Feel free to check it out. It would be easy to make it better, but I don't want to mess with it.