Uri Nieto

Qué lindo es vivir no?

Another year goes by. So it’s time for me to review the important things I’ve done this year, so that my extremely limited memory won’t have to store all of this information, which will be now and forever on The Internet.

• Thin Bag Of Urine project starts, first World Tour in Catalonia
• NEMISIG 2012 in Dartmouth
• Antikaraoke with Rachel
• New recording of Sol De Nit
• Pass candidacy exams, I become a Ph.D candidate
• Finish all the classes of my Ph.D
• Internship at The Echo Nest
• Oral presentation at ICMPC 2012 in Thessaloniki
• Nat
• Teach C one more time, all the lab for me. Banana times
• Poster presentation at ISMIR 2012 in Porto
• Headbanging around The States
• Appearing in Mobivery New York
• Sound Of Muzak
• Great interview at the most popular Catalan radio station (rac1)
• Ens en sortim
• Successfully defend my Ph.D Topic Proposal
• Signed up for NYRR, wanna do a half marathon in January
• AirSynth Prototype
• Puerto Rico for Thanksgiving
• Getting mugged with a hidden gun in NY for the first time. No iPhone 4S anymore
• La Ofensa
• I get a calcified tendon in my shoulder, and it’s extremely painful but codeine is fun
• Finland with my sister
• Singing at Mephisto with Dragonslayer + Moreno del Metal
• Too many things to do, and too little time in Granollers

Happy new year titans!

Don’t worry, you’re just a pale blue dot

Internet se ha revolucionado esta semana porque el FBI ha cerrado la web de contenidos Megaupload. Aunque ya había indicios de que el FBI estaba tras esta empresa llamada Megaupload (que contenía MegaVideos, MegaPorn y mega etcétera), fundada por el excéntrico millonario gordo Kim Schimtz, ha sido de repente que la web ha dejado de funcionar y ahora sólo se ven tres sellos solemnemente sagrados que nos recuerdan que los Estados Unidos de América siguen governando el mundo.

Megaupload después del cierre

Dejando aparte los métodos utilizados para cerrar la web (y lo peliculero que debe de haber sido la entrada de las fuerzas del FBI a la mansión de Schmitz en Nueva Zelanda), me alegro de que finalmente esta web se haya ido a la mierda. Recordemos qué servicios ofrecía Megauploads (y básicamente todas sus webs hermanas: Rapidshare, MediaFire, etc):

• Almacenamiento para compartir archivos.
• Descargas directas a archivos de otros usuarios.
• Servicio limitado para usuarios no registrados.
• Mucha banda ancha y ilimitado número bajadas simultáneas para usuarios de pago.

Esto, a primera vista, parece un servicio razonable, donde los usuarios pueden compartir archivos libremente con el mundo. Por supuesto, si un archivo tenía copyright, y alguien lo demandaba, este archivo dejaba de existir. Aún así, todos sabemos que a veces tardaban semanas e incluso meses (y años!) en cerrar un link con copyright. En cualquier caso, el servicio, desde que nació, me pareció inútil e inmoral. Pues si queremos compartir archivos (ya sean con copyright o no), nos vamos a las redes P2P y nadie se forra por eso.

Debido al creciente uso de las webs de enlaces directos, Megaupload empezó a facturar millones de dolares al año por unos contenidos que en su mayor parte, eran registrados con copyright. En ningún caso una parte de estos beneficios se reportaban a los autores de estas creaciones. Aún así, quiero dejar claro que no siempre eran archivos con copyright los que almacenaba Megaupload: Yo he usado sus servicios gratuitos para compartir una carpeta de imágenes de un viaje con amigos, o algún vídeo que pesaba demasiado para enviar por mail y no me importaba que fuese público. Pero esto no me justifica el tener que pagar a Megaupload un servicio premium. Conozco a mucha gente que tenía cuentas de pago en Megaupload, y todos los usaban para acceder a material con copyright. Esto es tan immoral por parte de los jefazos de Megaupload (y de cualquier otra web de enlaces directos, y sí, incluyo a Seriesyonkis en este paquete de webs basura) como la gente que se forra vendiendo películas copiadas en el topmanta.

Estoy a favor de compartir archivos. Pero considero repugnante que haya gente que se aproveche del contenido de los demás para hacerse multimillonario, sin ni siquiera dar las gracias. El siguiente video es bastante representativo del tipo de personas que genera esta puta mafia (aquí vemos al CEO de Megaupload por Marruecos, sobornando a la policía, con su cochazo obtenido gracias al contenido de un montón de autores a los cuales no ha pagado una mierda):

Resumiendo: Si quieres compartir archivos públicamente, usa las redes P2P (BitTorrent, eDonkey, …) . Y si quieres compartir archivos de manera privada, usa e.g. Dropbox, que va de cojones. Y dejemos ya de alimentar/crear cerdos millonarios. Creedme, el mundo es mejor sin Megaupload.

EDIT: Si no te gusta Dropbox, o si quieres una alternativa opensource para compartir archivos de manera privada, Zimbra es lo que buscas.

Today another year ends. And celebrating the fifth (5th!) anniversary of this blog, I will follow the tradition to bullet point this year’s highlights. So, here we are:

• Inauguration of Jarl’em All Studios with Tú, Garfunkel
• The guys from ProjectRnL and Eren Başbuğ come to NY and I show them MARL, and they show me their amazing music with Jordan Rudess
• SCREAMINATOR (alpha) wins the best SoundCloud hack in the Music Hack Day in NY
• I shoot, edit, and produce the latest Sargon videoclip: Novetat
• Catalan World Tour 2011 with El Bolsa. So much fun!
• Through The Morning, Through The Night at Jarl’em All Studios
• The Antikaraoke is the best place in Barcelona
• I don’t get the PhD funding from NYU
• Many flights to Spain for interviews for Caja Madrid Fellowship
• Raydibaum and Inspira fill my life with amazing music
• Big Song of Ice and Fire fan, and of the HBO series Game Of Thrones
• Osama dies, the US celebraties and disturbing paper covers appear
• Interviewing for SoundCloud leads to some cool audio resampling code
• My first race of my life (Up Hill to Tibidabo!)
• 10th Ultimate Screaming Lesson
• I get the Caja Madrid fellowship, I’m staying in NY for three more years!
• I get a new Sony camera that records awesome videos
• Learning of Psychology of Music, Probability and Pro Tools
• Motives finding redefined
• DigiTech Jamman is too much fun
• Python + NumPy + SciPy = the new (better, free, faster) version of MATLAB
• End of a long distance relation
• Six Flags Great Adventure is crazy
• SCREAMINATOR is out!
• The Book Of Mormon is the best show of the history of mankind
• Summers in NY are extremely HOT
• Great Spanish trip with my sister and my sister’s boyfriend
• Crazy (*crazy*) time in Madrid
• Andalucía is probably one of the most beautiful places in Spain
• Festa Major de Granollers
• Start of the most intense semester ever: I TA a course in C Programming + I take one of the most difficult Computer Science courses at NYU
• Opeth + Katatonia in NY
• I am featured in the latest The Cloud Runner CD
• Eyal Amir at MARL!
• Opeth Cover by me, video by Eyal Amir
• Spain is Blue (Rajoy wins)
• Central Park is my favorite place in NY (especially in the Fall)
• I am a zombie teacher for Halloween
• I have never coded so much in my life
• 14 hours work days
• Miguel Noguera is my new hero
• Geo Synthesizer is my favorite iPad instrument
• Submitted abstract for ICMPC 2012
• My students made a videogame where I am the main character!
• Spain for Christmas is the best
• Sargon rehearses one more time!
• Final race of the year, on the 31st of December

Ouf, so many things. I should filter this thing in the future. In any case: happy new year everybody!

“Being alone in Granollers”

Massa bo.

Thanks Franc.

It’s time to grow a beard. This is actually a serious video. An official video. The music makes the rockstar you have inside feel alive. Makes you grow your rockstar beard. The fame and fortune and the manly insides you have long forgotten will rise again. So gay. So good. So manly. So pioneer. So american.

(from beards dot org)

It’s amazing what you find in the Internet. (via Menéame).

Another year is passing by. And it’s a tradition to this blog to say something about it. Since it’s easier to make a search on the Internet, I will start with the description from the wikipedia:

2010 (MMX) is a common year starting on a Friday and is the current year. In the Gregorian calendar, it was the 2010th year of the Common Era or the Anno Domini designation; the 10th year of the 3rd millennium and of the 21st century; and the 1st of the 2010s decade.

The United Nations has designated 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity and International Year of Youth.

International Year of Biodiversity and Youth? I wonder what that is. I guess it’s something related with living in the future.

So, after some crazy earthquakes in Chile, some unutterable icelandic vulcanos collapsing Europe, the end of Lost, WikiLeaks telling the truth about the world, the biggest demonstration in Barcelona demanding greater autonomy for Catalonia within (or without?) Spain, Spain winning the World Cup, and the loss of the greatest Leslie Nielsen, I’m gonna make a brief list of my 2010, chronologically ordered:

• Bad start of the year in Barcelona
• NAMM show in Los Angeles
• VoxCarina
• Sonic Skull Shot
• The ReactPad
• New Songs From California
• SLOrk Live at Stanford
• Playing with Jordan Rudess in San Francisco
• Playing with Jordan Rudess at Stanford
• Headbanging Around Europe
• Blackbird
• I can now prepare the best food in the world
• Yosemite
• California Road Trip with a Mexican Princess
• Weekend in Lake Tahoe
• Headbanging Orchestra live at Stanford
• Stanford Graduation
• I am stupid and I break up
• 9th Ultimate Screaming Lesson
• Dream Theater and Iron Maiden After Show
• Internship at Sonoma Wire Works
• Family visit in California (Vegas, Yosemite, …)
• Tool in San Francisco
• Spain wins the WorldCup in San Francisco
• The Mission days before I leave California
• Coast to Coast Roadtrip
• The Best Festa Major in Granollers?
• My mum gets married
• Moving to New York
• Start my PhD in Music Technology at NYU
• Lemur
• The Eldar
• Falling in love again
• Come Away With Me…
• Machine Learning
• MorphWiz Collaborator
• SketchWiz Collaborator
• The Guitaptop Project
• Unsupervised Music Motifs Extraction
• Scoring for Films and Multimedia
• Best time in Oaxaca
• Live concert in Oaxaca
• Mexican Princess
• Merry Christmas and Happy New Year App
• Back home for Christmas (Family, friends, Starcraft and finally organizing my old stuff)

Happy New Year all titans. See you in NY!

I’m back home, in Granollers. That is nice. And I find amazing things. Like this:

Ahh, good old days. Shit, I’m getting old.

Merry Christmas titans!