July 2006 - Posts
I get asked how to do this many times; here are two quick methods to serialize as well as deserialize objects in .NET:
private static string SerializeObject(object o)
{
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
new XmlSerializer(o.GetType()).Serialize(sw, o);
return sw.ToString();
}
private static T DeserializeObject<T>(string xml)
{
return (T)new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)).Deserialize(new MemoryStream(Convert.FromBase64String(xml)));
}
The Red Bull Big Wave Africa 2006 contest actually happened this year - yesterday to be exact. This year the title of champ went to South African John Whittle from Durban, but not only first place came our way! Second and third places were also taken by South African surfers. Legendary (insane, mad) big wave rider Ross Clarke-Jones was also out in the final yesterday; the guys can be happy to have surfed bombers with the likes of him as well as all the other invitees!
Here's a picture of John dropping down a vertical wall of angry water. Congrats dude!!!
Quoting from the Music Genome Project:
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.
At Pandora.com you can find more music that actually sounds and 'feels' similar to what you like, by supplying one or more names of the bands you enjoy. I've found a couple of albums and bands that rock that I never knew of before .