Author: Daniele Nicolucci

Mike Portnoy leaves Dream Theater

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

Dream Theater has released a short press release on their website:

To all of our loyal fans and friends: It is with profound sadness — regret — we announce that Mike Portnoy, our lifelong drummer and friend, has decided to leave Dream Theater. Mike’s stature in the band has meant the world to all of us professionally, musically, and personally over the years. There is no dispute: Mike has been a major force within this band.

While it is true that Mike is choosing to pursue other ventures and challenges, we can assure you that Dream Theater will continue to move forward with the same intensity — and in the same musical tradition — that you have all helped make so successful, and which is truly gratifying to us.

Fans and friends: File this episode under “Black Clouds and Silver Linings.” As planned, we begin recording our newest album in January 2011, and we’ll follow that with a full-on world tour. “The Spirit Carries On.”

All of us in Dream Theater wholeheartedly wish Mike the best on his musical journey. We have had a long and meaningful career together. It is our true hope that he finds all he is looking for, and that he achieves the happiness he deserves. He will be missed.

Also, Mike himself posted this tweet:

This is a sad, sad day….I’m afraid I have some bad news…. MP/DT Sept 1985 – Sept 2010

And then this note on his Facebook page, which is thankfully accessible to non-Facebook users (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read it):

I BEG of the fans to please NOT hold A7X responsible for MY decision…they are just as shocked as you guys..I had been contemplating this and desiring a “break” (not split) as long ago as last year…everything else is fully explained in the press release…thank you all for your support and understanding…this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done… : (

This is bad news, but I already knew this would happen soon. See, all Dream Theater’s members have been involved in side projects all along. It’s just the way they are: they are great musicians, and they can’t stand still. James, just to give an example, released several solo albums (“Mullmuzzler” 1 and 2), and participated in True Symphonic Rockestra and in Ayreon‘s “The Human Equation.”

However, Mike lately had not only released an album with Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) and toured with them (John Petrucci did the same with the G3 project, after all), but just by following his tweets you could easily tell that A7X had become “his” band. On September 5th, he tweeted: “Its 3:30am and I am getting tattooed by Grant Cobb on a moving A7X tour bus after losing a bet to Dan The Body…this aint DT!!”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging. It’s just that Dream Theater is, if I am allowed to say so, “purer” than any other progrock band out there. Alright, alright, that’s the hardcore fan in me talking, right. But surely everybody would agree that Dream Theater is more like Marillion on steroids than cousins of Metallica, right? All the other members of Dream Theater have “grown up and calmed down,” in a way, whereas Mike seems to be, well, the wildest of the bunch, even though he recovered from his alcohol and drug addiction.

His path with Alcoholics Anonymous has indeed been put into music by Dream Theater over the course of five albums, since 2002, in what is called the “Twelve-Step Suite”:

  • The Glass Prison, from Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (I – Reflection; II – Restoration; III – Revelation)
  • This Dying Soul, from Train of Tought (IV – Reflections of Reality; V – Release)
  • The Root of All Evil, from Octavarium (VI – Ready;  VII – Remove)
  • Repentance, from Systematic Chaos (VIII – Regret; IX – Restitution)
  • The Shattered Fortress, from Black Clouds & Silver Linings (X – Restraint; XI – Receive; XII – Responsible)

All these songs’ lyrics carry a dedication to “Bill W. and all of his friends.” Why all the parts’ names begin with the letter R is currently unknown; however, knowing Mike’s passion for nuggets, it’s not a coincidence.

Still, some people in 2002 feared that Dream Theater’s career would end with the completion of the Twelve-Step Suite. These fears were mostly quenched when they signed with RoadRunner Records in 2005, and many think that Octavarium tells the story of their relationship with recording labels.

Still, the question now stands: what will happen to Dream Theater? Mike Portnoy had been producing the band’s albums for a long while. He may still keep doing that, of course. But who is going to replace him? How will the music change? I am one of those who thinks that Images and Words was their best album, followed by Scenes from a Memory. The freshness of the former was probably influenced in part by Kevin J. Moore, and the latter bears a distinct “Rudessness” to it.

I wish Mike the best for his career, but as a long time fan, yeah, I’m speechless. I hope that this will mark a return to origins for Dream Theater: after all, we (they) have gone through three keyboardists and two (actually three) singers. The point is that while we are “used” to changing keyboardists (no offense to Jordan, I’m glad he’s on board even though, well, Kevin was Kevin — sorry about that), changing drummers is like replacing a load-bearing wall in a building. Everything might crumble. Let’s hope not.

Rock on.

Edit: Mike also posted a detailed note on his website’s forum.

Fix broken IMAP attachments in Mail.app

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

I have recently started getting broken images in Mail.app. Often, when someone sent me relatively big pictures (over 1 MB in size), the image ended up being corrupted, with a smaller file size that one would expect. This results in a picture that’s visible up to a certain point, and then rest is usually filled with solid grey by the viewer.

While this could happen because the attached image is indeed broken — that is, if the sender is attaching an image that’s already corrupted on his/her machine —, it’s unlikely that the file gets mangled during the transit. To begin with, the base64 encoding adds lots of CRC (1/3 of the file size, and this alone explains why it’s a very bad idea to send big files through e-mail). In addition to that, no MTA will accept a malformed message: MIME parts must be completed with an extra boundary marker, and the infamous dot on its own line has to be there to commit the DATA part. Using a webmail system makes it even more difficult to corrupt a file in transit, because there is the extra uploading step that ensures that the attachment reaches the server before the message is constructed and finally sent.

If none of this makes sense and you want to know more, please refer to RFC 2821, but the point is that it’s virtually impossible for several people to send corrupted images. It’s way more likely that the problem lies within the recipient’s client.

With OS X’s Mail.app, these problems happen when there is some communication failure during the download of the message. Essentially, if the download gets interrupted for any reason, Mail.app may be unable to notice and will be perfectly happy with the broken file. There are two ways to fix this:

  • The hard way: go to ~/Library/Mail, and for each INBOX you may have, delete anything inside the Attachment folder
  • The easy way: select your Inbox folder within Mail.app and simply run Mailbox → Rebuild

That should take care of the problem. Note that the Rebuild procedure will redownload every message from the server again with all the attachments, essentially resynchronizeing the local cache with whatever is on the server, fixing any discrepancies. It may take some time, but you can keep an eye on the progress by opening the Activity window (Window → Activity, or ⌘0.)

Chords for “Soft Kitty,” from The Big Bang Theory

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

One of the funniest “inside jokes” of The Big Bang Theory is the song that Sheldon’s mom used to sing to him when he was sick. It’s featured in three episodes, as you can see here:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqSmzGj_sQc

The song is, like most lullabies, very simple. I came up with the chords earlier today, while jamming with my ukulele. Here they are, for all my musically-inclined nerdy readers. Corrections are welcome.

[G] Soft kitty, [C] warm kitty,
[G] little ball of [D] fur;
[G] happy kitty, [C] sleepy kitty,
[G] purr, [D] purr, [G] purr.

Interesting trivia: they are almost the same chords as The Lion Sleeps Tonight, except for a minor difference in the last verse that shouldn’t prevent the most creative among you to fit one into the other.

Should you prefer so, you could play it as C F C G / C F C G C or by whichever transposition makes you happy.

iPhone 3G comes back to life after installing iOS 4.1

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

As I had predicted, Apple introduced iOS 4.1 at the iPod event last Wednesday. It is officially scheduled for release on September 9th, but there are ways to download the Gold Master that was seeded to the members of the Apple Developer Program. I am not one — not yet, anyway — but I couldn’t take it anymore.

The installation was extremely simple, with no remote activation or anything like that. This is because the GM is essentially the very same that will be pushed to the masses in a week. I simply pressed the option key while clicking on ‘update’ in iTunes and I got a dialog window to choose the .ipsw file from the disk. After that, it took its sweet updating time and lo and behold, my two-year-old device was running the latest incarnation of iOS.

I am extremely pleased to report that my iPhone 3G has come back to life. After using it extensively, to the extent of purposefully opening all sorts of apps in rapid succession to make it crumble, it stood strong. I can assure you that this is not placebo: it’s pleasant to use again. Most importantly, it doesn’t randomly freeze for a random amount of time in a random fashion in random apps. Sometimes it does take its time when the lock screen comes up (perhaps it does some cleaning when it automatically locks, and it reloads something?), but other than that, it’s completely different from 4.0.x.

Mind you, this is still a two-year-old phone and there have been two major revisions since it came out, so do not expect The Flash in your iPhone (hey! that’s a geeky double-entendre! neat!), but it’s definitely a major improvement. One disappointment stands, though: 3G units just don’t have the hardware to run the Epic Citadel demo, but — once again — is anybody really surprised by that?

The real irony is that my iPhone 3G was such a pain to use in the past couple of months (especially with the annoying freezes) that I honestly can’t even say whether 4.1 makes it as fast as 3.1.2, or if it’s still slower than that. All I know is that it’s faster than 4.0.2, and that’s all I care about.

Twitter’s RSS feeds are broken, and will stay broken

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

What happens when Twitter switches from basic authentication to OAuth? Clients that relied on the former will stop working, until an update comes to add support for the latter. This has been called the OAuthocalipse and aside from minor glitches with some programs, it happened without much of a problem, much like the infamous millennium bug (ah, those were the good times: free Kevin!)

One of the lesser used functions of Twitter has been brutally smashed by the switch to the safer authentication method, however, and in a way it’s quite ridiculous. I’m talking about RSS feeds that are — or should I say were — generated from the timelines and so on. It was probably not very used, given the plethora of dedicated Twitter client, but as a very basic user who is mostly in read mode, I really appreciated it. Of course, to get a feed of your own timeline you had to log in, and how do you do that? With basic HTTP authentication, of course. Not anymore.

Now, I’m sure that some RSS aggregators will implement OAuth. Whether the one I use will do that or not is still unknown. In any case, all of this is ridiculous for two reasons:

  1. RSS is strictly a read-only system, so adding an extra layer of complexity (in that it has to be implemented from scratch whereas basic authentication is handled by virtually all HTTP libraries and frameworks) takes time and ultimately money. The result is that many clients will be able to happily access all sorts of password-protected feeds except Twitter’s.
  2. Twitter still shows an RSS badge in most pages’ sidebar, and carries the appropriate meta tags in the <head> section to advertise the feeds to the browser. As if that were not enough, one’s own friends’ timeline (ie. the “main page” you see when you log in) has three alternate feeds: your timeline, your mentions and your favorites. Needless to say, none of them work. So why keep them up?

I’m not the only one with this problem. Commenter #8 on this post, Dan Lyke, says:

I’m now considering whether I want to bother keeping my Twitter presence at all. Sure, I could write a Twitter reader of some sort that changed things into RSS, or run an app just for Twitter, but in a few hours Twitter has gone from being a part of my usual work flow to a freakin’ hassle.

I feel exactly the same way, and to me Twitter wasn’t even “part of my usual workflow.” I seldom write and I just use it to get updates from very few users / companies. I guess I’ll check it much less now that I have to open up the page, as I have no intention of using yet another program just for that. When I have some time I’ll probably end up writing a thin wrapper around OAuth to get an RSS feed out of my timeline, but right now I’m not thrilled about this.

My personal progressive rock anthem: The Ytse Jam

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

Those who know me also know about my obsession with Dream Theater. I even met them personally on April 11th, 2000. For this reason, I think it would be interesting to share a live version of what I personally consider the archetypal modern progrock anthem, The Ytse Jam.

First, a little history: Dream Theater’s first name was Majesty, however another band with the same name threatened to sue them and they eventually switched to Dream Theater, following the suggestion of Portnoy’s father. They even went as Glasser for a short while, but thankfully the name was ditched after ten days or so. However, the Dream Theater symbol is still named Majesty.

On their first album as Dream Theater, When Dream and Day Unite, they released an instrumental song that laid the foundation for what their music would eventually become. The piece was called The Ytse Jam (but most often referred to simply as Ytse Jam) and runs 5 minutes and 43 seconds. It is packed with odd time signatures and catchy riffs. It’s also the first example of their passion for nuggets and secret codes, as “Ytse Jam” is “Majesty” reversed.

I’d like to mention some random trivia about the band, but I suppose that I’d better make a separate post about that. In the meantime, for the nerdiest among you, a detailed analysis of their 2005 album Octavarium can be found at spatang.com. It mentions all the hidden messages contained therein, and it’s a very enjoyable read.

So, without futher ado, here is The Ytse Jam performed live in 2004 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of When Dream and Day Unite‘s original release.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvJ7PLtTK-4

And an older version with a drum solo by Portnoy. If I’m not mistaken, this is from the Live in Tokyo tape, filmed in 1993. You can see the original line-up, with Kevin J. Moore at the keyboards. (Alright, it’s not the original line-up since LaBrie had already replaced Dominici, but this is instrumental and neither would be there anyway.)

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEo2GUM4SFI

Pretty neat, innit?

Progressive acoustic music: Maneli Jamal and others

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

The word “progressive” carries many meanings. When talking about music, it’s the best word to get people confused, as everybody will give a different definition of it. To me, progressive music is not necessarily linked to a genre; rather, it defines the progression of a piece — no pun intended — that defies the typical “verse – chorus – verse – chorus – bridge – chorus” structure found in most popular music.

Often, but this is not strictly required, there will be many time and key changes throughout the song, and the song itself can be longer, sometimes even much longer, than someone used to pop music might find acceptable. All of this inevitably relegates progressive music to a niche for connosseurs, mostly because it’s seldom music that one “understands” upon first listening to it.

I mentioned genres because most people associate that to progressive rock or progressive metal, with bands such as Yes, Rush, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd; and more recently with Marillion, Dream Theater, Ayreon and others. Yet, any style can show progressive traits, at least according to my definition.

Jazz music is progressive by design, and my favorite example of a gorgeous non-rock progressive piece is Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which I present to you in a gorgeous, albeit much shortened, version by The 5 Browns:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bZ0gBBZnCI

A style that has recently become common is what I call progressive acoustic music. It involves playing an acoustic guitar in unconventional ways, mixing different techniques such as tapping, strumming, plucking and hitting the body in a very peculiar way, producing songs that are progressive not just in structure, but also in feeling.

The most known song of this kind is probably Andy McKee’s “Drifting”:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddn4MGaS3N4

The independent label CandyRat acts as a hub for many artists who make this kind of music, allowing them to network and come up with little gems like this, by Antoine Dufour and Tommy Gauthier (make sure your speakers have a good bass response):

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4BYMvVvMg0

I also recently came across an Iranian guitarist, Maneli Jamal, whose foray into progressive acoustic is not as bold and aggressive as Andy McKee’s, but is rather sweet and, dare I say it, hypnotic. Here is his live performance on BBC Persian:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN9pmLCqlWE

Watch it twice: get a general feel for it the first time, then pay attention at how skillfully he uses natural harmonics and how sharp, yet “easy,” the transitions are. What I especially like is that even through the different parts, the whole piece has an underlying rhythm that encircles the music. He effectively joins the best of both worlds.

There is a downside to this type of music. It is so peculiar that just listening to it doesn’t make it justice. The playing style is so much an integral part of it that it has to be watched, especially when played live.

Thankfully, DVDs can be produced very easily and without the need for an expensive service nowadays, so artists can make some money out of their work, and that’s good for all of us. It would be a pity indeed if people like Andy, Antoine and Mameli gave up their skills to get a nine-to-five to pay bills.

As a bonus, here are two of videos of a great duo. What makes their performances is not only their undeniable ability, but also the fact that you can see that they’re genuinely having fun. How can you beat that?

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=famYtHftpwE

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GJs6Cj7X2I

Could iOS 4.1 be released on Wednesday?

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

Apple will hold a music-related event on Wednesday, September 1st. New iPods will be introduced, as it happens yearly. There is strong evidence of a new iPod nano based around the 3×3 cm touch screen seen earlier this year, and possibly a new iPod Touch with 3G data capabilities — essentially a smaller iPad.

This leads me to think that these new units may require iOS 4.1 at minimum, and the new firmware could therefore be made available to iPhones (and older generations of iPod Touches — ok now that’s a weird plural) on the same day.

Of course, the new units may be shipped with a particular version that won’t be made available to other devices, as it was with the iPad: iPhone OS 3.2 was never made available for iPhones, and iPads won’t see iOS 4 until the fall. Apple may also release iOS 4 for iPad on Wednesday, or give a release date. Or perhaps introduce iPad 2 whilst lowering the price of the current iPad, probably giving a refund to angry customers (it has already happened with the original iPhone.) Besides, Apple would get to use the line they love so much: our competitors are still trying to copy version 1, and we have already released version 2.

Personally, I don’t care what new hardware is on the horizon. I just want iOS 4.1 for the iPhone and I want it to make my 3G decent again.