In just 7 days I’ve gone from the bottom of the local music charts up to the number 2 spot by making use of simple and relatively cheap promotional tools that are provided..

The statistics they provide are top notch as well! if I had to complain about one thing it would be the cost of the mobile app.. $299 per year for iPhone, $99 for Android! .. as a mobile app developer myself, I know they are making a killer profit on that if anyone is biting.. an app certificate costs only $99 per year, everything after that is profit aside from time.. I decided for forgo that service since I’d already nearly completed my own ( much better, I must say ) mobile app .. I’ll probably continue that development and finish it off.. it is both Android, iPhone and iPad compatible.

Back to ReverbNation – Last night I decided to give their digital distribution a whirl.. my final album on TuneCore is expiring and that will remove the last remnants of my previous efforts.. The process with ReverbNation was pretty similar to my process with TuneCore .. you simply select your files, upload them.. upload your cover art, fill in some basic information and you’re off to the races! The cost for this service is comparable to tunecore though I believe you get more stores out of ReverbNation for your money.. ( don’t quote me on this ) ..

But when you combine the plethora of services that ReverbNation offers compared to the other guys .. it becomes a clear and heavy win for the ReverbNation team! the only thing I think anyone would have a hard time tackling is the customer service provided by TuneCore .. I had one issue with ReverbNation and I contacted them about it but have never heard a single response back .. though my issue did magically vanish after 4-5 days..

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

ReverbNation – www.reverbnation.com ( or www.reverbnation.com/oneduality to check me out )
TuneCore – www.tunecore.com

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This time we’re talking about reverb nation ( www.reverbnation.com )

I must admit I generally fell in love with what they have to offer! .. easy facebook intergration, many powerful free features and a price point for digital distribution that beats out tunecore, not only that! but they offer a free online distribution through their integrated store using audiolife ..

Now there’s where the trouble’s began ..

I uploaded now 8 tracks as of this post to www.reverbnation.com/oneduality .. I decided to make 3 of those 8 tracks available as purchases. Those 3 tracks uploaded successfully with no errors, I can see them in the online store but when you click “buy”.. only one of them actually adds to the cart.. to further this, when you are viewing my facebook page.. only two of the three songs show up which makes no logical sense to me.. clearly there are issues..

To further this mess.. I tried contacting reverb nation days ago and have yet to hear back from them at all.. I also contacted audio life and they too have not replied to me regarding my issues.. this happens to make me quite hesitant to spend money on premium features.. I did reluctantly buy into the premium storage for $30 a year which seems hefty and I’m also using them to promote a song.. which has yielded poor results so far ( maybe I just suck ) …

Now despite all the negativity I just spewed.. that is all I have bad to say about them, they are offering a lot of amazing features at no cost, and given that their online store is “beta” I can’t fault them for the numerous bugs.. what I can fault them for however is lack of customer service, especially considering I have bought into some of their premium services.. I am now afraid to invest much further if they aren’t willing to help me.. TuneCore remains at the top of their game on the field of customer service.. while they don’t offer NEARLY as many perks and charge more money .. the customer service team is dedicated and brilliant.. They even participate in my blog from time to time :)

Kudos to TuneCore and Kudos to ReverbNation .. while I don’t love all of your features, I do love both of you just the same .. now if I could just surgically merge you both =)

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The passing of Steve Jobs however is a momentous occasion because he is a legend, whether you’re a fan of Apple not.

I am the owner of two computers running snow leopard, I own two ios devices ( an original iphone and a 4th generation ipod ) but I am at heart a unix hacker .. I have disagreed completely with many of the policies apple has taken when it comes to development, and in general.. how they do business..

It is Jobs’ perfectionist way that has lead Apple to their success, his desire for perfection and uniformity and his uncompromising attitude.. has it been bad? I think in some ways it has.. but it has lead to what we have now, it has forced his employees to deliver a top notch user experience, the hardware to be sexy and sleek, and the competitors to clammer.. in otherwords, it has pushed competitiveness.. which is precisely what drove us where we are now.. whether you love or hate apple, they set bars that others were forced to try to reach .. and today we lost a driving force behind that, so lets hope we have another Jobs in our generation..

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The documentary with Brennan and I will air on July 17th on National Geographic but as I understand it will also air July 16th as part of a 2 hour special on FOX. ( Saturday on FOX and Sunday on National Geographic )

The episode is aptly titled “The Flying Car”

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A crew filmed me for an interview about the accident and we did a re-enactment of the events.. the crew was amazing, and I had a great time doing it.. I think it’s a compelling story,  which goes without saying so I’m excited to see the results.

Look for Indestructibles on National Geographic starting on July 10th! the episode I’m involved in will be later in the month, but the entire series looks great .. so check it out!

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Presently there are two full length albums posted but over the next coming days the full catalog will be available. You can also find four sample tracks from my upcoming album “Eleven”.

There’s NO CATCH to this, all files are provided as 320kpbs MP3s… The only rules are that you can’t re-use my music and that you can’t re-sell it.. you can share it all you want as long as you share the original zip file in tact.

ENJOY!

Event Horizon 2.0

iTunes: click here

The new album features 25 tracks, including 12 songs off of the original album and 13 brand new songs to expand on the experience.

Event Horizon takes place in a dark dystopian future where freedom is a thing of the past. A dark force is hunting down the last remnants of individuality to destroy any resistance in its path.

This album is designed to provide an atmosphere so not all of the tracks are musical in nature, some of them are there to expand on the story as it unfolds in your imagination.

Listen now, buy links are at the top of this post :)

So who is this guy? He’s a man who was born in December back in 1965, so if he didn’t have enough to complain about .. being buck naked mid december is certainly one of them.. but I digress..

Greg was born and raised in the queens, he certainly had a lot of things to tap into for his talent and ther’es no doubt that a successful self defence is picking on others.. Greg is amazing in that regard..

The thing I admire most about Greg and really the thing I’ll mis most about his loss is his quick wit and willingness to say things regardless.. he may not have been a widely known comedian, but he had balls of steel and he was all too happy to show it off .. Greg, you will be missed.. I know how late I am but really I am a guy with no voice any way so it doesn’t matter..  all too fitting that a man who is unknown salutes you ;)

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I’ve constructed a class that implements two functions, posting a status update and following an author .. This is purely for educational purposes and is intended to demonstrate the art of page scraping as well as the use of CURL for posting and retrieving data, I would of course never personally recommend using the code because I’m sure it’s some sort of violation of their TOS ;) so yeah.. don’t do it! ;) ;)

Some important things to note:

1. This will break if twitter changes their html up too much
2. This is probably a violation, so if you do use it, use it reasonably .. don’t submit a million requests per second, throttle it down =)
3. You’re using it at your own risk
4. It will post status updates as if you posted from a mobile device ( Ie. Mobile Web )

DOWNLOAD: Click to download example and class file

USAGE:

include(“tweeter.php”);

$tweeter = new tweeter();
$tweeter->login($username,$password);
$tweeter->post_tweet(“Hey, this is cool!”);
$tweeter->folllow(“oneduality”);

Contents of tweeter.php:

class tweet {
    var $user;
    var $token='';
    var $ch='';
    var $action='';

    // Logs in to twitter
    function login($user,$pass) {
        $this->user = $user;

        // Initialize CH
        if (!function_exists("curl_init")) die("This requires the CURL module, please install CURL for php.");
        $this->ch = curl_init();

        // Parse the login form
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://mobile.twitter.com/session/new");
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $this->user . ".txt");
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $this->user . ".txt");
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3 ");
        $page = curl_exec($this->ch);

        $page = stristr($page, "
");
        preg_match("/form action=\"(.*?)\"/", $page, $this->action);
        preg_match("/input name=\"authenticity_token\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"(.*?)\"/", $page, $this->token);

        // Login and get your home page
        $strpost = "authenticity_token=".urlencode($this->token[1])."&username=".urlencode($user)."&password=".urlencode($pass);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_URL, $this->action[1]);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $strpost);
        $page = curl_exec($this->ch);

        // Verify that we logged in ok
        preg_match("/\
(.*?)\<\/div\>/", $page, $warning);
        if (isset($warning[1])) return $warning[1];
        $page = stristr($page,"
");
        preg_match("/form action=\"(.*?)\"/", $page, $this->action);
        preg_match("/input name=\"authenticity_token\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"(.*?)\"/", $page, $this->authenticity_token);
    }

    function post_tweet($status) {

        // Set status
        $tweet['display_coordinates']='';
        $tweet['in_reply_to_status_id']='';
        $tweet['lat']='';
        $tweet['long']='';
        $tweet['place_id']='';
        $tweet['text']=$status;
        $ar = array("authenticity_token" => $this->token[1], "tweet"=>$tweet);
        $data = http_build_query($ar);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_URL, $this->action[1]);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
        $page = curl_exec($this->ch);

        return true;
    }

    function follow($author_name) {

        $action = "http://mobile.twitter.com/$author_name/follow";
        $ar = array("authenticity_token" => $this->token[1], "tweet"=>$tweet, 'last_url'=>'/$author_name', );
        $data = http_build_query($ar);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_URL, $action);
        curl_setopt($this->ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
        $page = curl_exec($this->ch);

        return true;
    }
}

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