Glossary For The Non-BMT'ers
| BMT-PMS: | Short for Blue Maggot Towel Project Management System. This is a client side program that interfaces with the Blue Maggot Towel central server to provide VPN access, time tracking, centralized instant messaging on the internal Jabber network (as well as Yahoo IM, AOL IM, MSN IM, Bonjour, and a couple of esoteric networks), software VoIP, and of course, Project Management, which includes everything from archived whiteboards, access to the entire BMT library, timetables, conference notes, schedules, and all that boring stuff. There are clients for OS X, Win32, Linux, and *BSD, all written in C (though Hose bastardized the OS X version a bit with some ObjC stuff). The client is extensible thanks to a modular plug-in system, which has given rise to a number of clearly pointless endeavors, such as the Bathroom Monitor (keeps track of how many times you go to the bathroom, duration of your visit, and what Lemon Jelly track was playing), the Alcohol Module (a running tally of what beers are in all our fridges updated in realtime), and the L-MAGS module. |
| L-MAG: | Short for L-MAGS, which is short for Larval Media Aggregation System, itself a module built as part of the BMT-PMS. Yes, these acronyms are serious. Serious inasmuch as building a program with 'PMS' in its name is serious. L-MAGS can be configured to run in numerous modes, exclusively or simultaneously. For details, see each mode. |
| Leech: | A person who connects only to download tracks off the streaming server. This has been an increasing problem as of late (Chris finds you people especially soulless). These people are annoying because they connect twice from the same IP, usually with one client to actually listen and one to grab the track. It costs us money in terms of bandwidth (larvae is on a metered line where you pay for total amounts transferred), bother in terms of sucking up a slot that someone actually listening could use, time in the fact that we actually had to dedicate some resources to figuring out ways to deal with it, and CPU/electricity bills in the fact that we now have to transcode everything on the fly from whatever its original bitrate was to 128kb. We do the last part because although it sounds ok streaming, it sounds crappy if you try and play a captured 128kb stream (who likes 128kb MP3s? No one sane.), and it cuts the bandwidth down slightly to allow for a few more clients that would otherwise be bumped because the stream is maxing out the bandwidth we allocate for it. We haven't done anything drastic yet regarding the dual IP offenders (though anything above two connections is usually killed). We know that a bunch of you share internet connections behind NAT (suckers). If you're all using real clients, like iTunes, you can connect as many times as you want - we don't care. Otherwise, be wary of the machette script that kills known stream ripper clients at random times. We don't care if you listen, but if you like the music enough to grab it, go buy it; the tracks are most likely available at the iTunes Music Store for $.99. Don't be cheap. Most of these bands aren't huge, money grubbing types, so if you could support them, it would make everyone happy. If you're really THAT desperate for a track, email Chris. |
| Monument Insomniacs!: | See the Pilsen Insomniacs! entry. This office is extremely small and only used for very specific things. Basically the same thing as the Pilsen stream (different library though). It comes off our other main server in one of the strangest locations we've ever been in. It also provides variety if the Pilsen stream is playing some crappy track. |
| Obsessive Mode: | One of the numerous modes you can place L-MAGS in. Obsessive mode is one of the more complicated algorithmic structures developed by Chris and Hose. In short, it figures out which tunes you are obsessed with, both past and present, and exports them to the media server. Read on for the more nitty-gritty. Obsessive Mode goes far beyond "favorite tracks", "highest rated tracks", and other more simpler analysis modes. Requirements include some sort of tracking database, which can be either any SQL database (preferably PostgreSQL, but also MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or various Oracle flavors), Winamp 5+ with the media library enabled, MusicMatch, or iTunes. By far the easiest analysis can be done with the SQL databases, but since most normal people have no idea how to link their music libraries to databases, more traditional modes are used. iTunes provides a good datasource, followed by the rest, and since most people use that, we'll use iTunes as the primary example. Obsessive Mode has a simple goal: anything above a certain score is classified as an 'obsessed about' song and is thusly noted. How does it figure this out? First Obsessive Mode first takes a user's entire library and establishes an average rating for the entire library. In iTunes this is simple enough: all tracks are averaged by their user rating (0-5 stars in the program). Of course those with with slightly higher than whatever is the established average will have their score bumped up a bit and vice versa. Next, the date the song was added to the library is considered - older tracks receive more relative 'weight' when considering their ratings. For example, a song with 2 stars that has been around for 5 years is clearly not that liked, so it gets more of a weight thrown towards "yuck" than a newer song with two stars, as new tracks are more mobile in a person's head, ie what you hated when you first bought might start sounding pretty good a few months later. It works the other way too - a four star track that's been around forever has more good karma than one you just bought and marked up to four stars - you may get sick of it pretty quick, so it doesn't have nearly as much weight behind it. Next, playcounts are taken into consideration. This is also weighed against the original addition date, and then averaged out. At this point, a SQL database is slightly more accurate as it can tell if your playcounts are all bunched together or spread out - if they are bunched together recently, or spread out over a track's entire lifetime in your library. In this case it's not quantity that matters, but location. Example: you have a track you've played 300 times over the past 5 years, but you've played it a lot more when you first added it as opposed to recently. This is compared to how many times you play the average track, and it's found to be less in the recent months. It gets less weight thrown behind it. Another track you've played 300 times but you bought it YESTERDAY. Clearly that will have so much weight behind it that it jumps straight past the obsessive threshold. Finally, another track you used to not play much, but you've had a sudden upswing in the amount of times you've listened to it lately, well above the average - it gets more weight as well. But wait, it gets much more complicated. As L-MAGS is hooked into the BMT-PMS, it has access to a user's work and writing patterns (really, user's entire schedule). With that in mind, it can start tracing patterns of what you're listening to when you're writing on certain projects, when you're answering emails, when it's the middle of the night, and when you're out (if you have an iPod). If you're working on one of the JJ Abrams projects and you listen to nothing but Orbital over and over, those tracks get a lot more weight... and if you actually MANUALLY select tracks back and forth over and over, the weight shoots through the roof. Finally, if you're using one of the writing proggies like Microsoft Word (what the... who uses this to write?!?), Blue-Tec Ulysses, Scrivener, TexShop, etc, and actually typing it in continuously, stop and pick a track manually, it's weight goes up as well. There are TONS of small little weight addition/subtraction routines built into this one, but that should give you an idea of how OBS Mode works. Note that because of the exhaustive data mining required, the longer you've had your library in a data source (SQL db, iTunes), the better it is at... well, everything. |
| Peace In The Bathroom: | No one likes a nasty bathroom. What would help to have the aural experience match the pristine apperance of our bathrooms? Lemon Jelly of course. This stream plays nothing but the coolest chill-out, road-trip to the beach, stare at a lava lamp group ever. It plays in the two Pilsen bathrooms, the monument office bathroom, and a number of the staffers' house bathrooms. Trust us, there's nothing cooler than taking a dip in the hot tub with integrated water jets and a rubber ducky while "In The Bath" plays. |
| Pilsen Insomniacs!: | The Pilsen Insomniacs are the BMT crew. Pilsen is the neighborhood our main office is in, and we've been known to spend completely ass-backwards hours there. Our main internal server (bloaty.bluemaggottowel.com) is located there and contains a HUMONGOUS music library. A very small section of that is exported to the pilsen_office-stream. It's small because we really don't have time to cut out all the extraneous stuff, like lectures, readings, and other random things that make up a bulk of the library... so we took anything that was music related and rated above 95% by the users and let it stream out. Usually it's just folks in the office connecting to the stream and listening to it, but we've made it public because occasionally one of us hear's a tune we haven't heard in awhile, freak out and call one of our friends screaming, "OOOH OOOH! You HAVE to listen to this!" |
| Popularity Mode: | One of the numerous modes you can place L-MAGS in. Tracks how many times the same tune in your library has been accessed over the network and lists the top set. Only works with networkable music libraries, such as iTunes with Bonjour enabled. |
| Rugby Vs. Lax: | Rugby Vs. Lax is the name of the San Francisco City sponsored project, and easily one of our most expensive to date. Well, expensive for THEM, not us. Let's see... 70+ people? Check. Symphony orchestra? Check. Sectioning off whole parts of Golden Gate Park? Check. HD cams and lots of them? Check. Not only did it cause one of our own to move there, we opened a whole new office on the city by the bay! Sheesh. Here's the soundtrack to the project (yes, it has a SOUNDTRACK!). |
| Tracking Mode: | One of the numerous modes you can place L-MAGS in. Basically maintains a list of what the user has been listening to live so you can follow along. |
| Unique Mode: | One of the numerous modes you can place L-MAGS in. Identifies which tracks are unique to you and no one else has in their library. Usually stuff you're too embarassed to admit that you have. |
| Writer's 6th Sense Mode: | One of the numerous modes you can place L-MAGS in. Most of us have this on because we both find it creepy and annoying at the same time. If you have a track playing and someone else plays the same thing at the same time, it gets listed. This of course doesn't count when you're tracking someone else in Tracking Mode or whatever - it has to be something from your own library, not streamed. The name comes from the fact that there are many, many, MANY times writers think of the same ideas during similar time periods without even being in the same country and having no shared friends or experiences. It's called the collective unconscious, and it can be a bitch. |
