Blabbermouth.net has the tracks from a live show by a reunited Soundgarden performing under the anagram name Nudedragons in Seattle April 16th of this year.

It’s fun to hear a high energy band like Soundgarden live, and it must have been a thrilling experience for those lucky enough to be in the audience, but I have to say, between Chris Cornells rather terrible solo album Scream of last year, and this show where he can’t reach the pitch of his own vocal lines it all is starting to seem a bit past its sell by date. There’s nothing worse than hearing some of your favourite songs and the singer not reaching the parts that are supposed to be the most intense but is still trying and falling about two whole notes short. Ouch.

I hope the group of rock legends I’m seeing live next week in Montréal performs better.

Alan Skorkin’s What Every Developer Should Know About URLs is a must-read. The structure of URLs described in great detail, and very well written.

Speaking of online music tools, WolframTones is fun to play with too. It is a mathematical music generator that somehow builds on the Wolfram Alpha technology.

What I find interesting with this sort of thing is that a lot of the time the music will be very reminiscent of something, you get a real sense of having heard that track before.

Anyway, cool tool for a musician with writers block, or for exploring tons of scales you didn’t know existed.

If there were more of this kind of web app, Flash wouldn’t have such a bad reputation. This is Flash taken to its extremes, a kind of Reason for the web, but so simple to use that most anyone can do it.

I know there’s a certain irony in what I’m about to say, considering the state of Flash on mobile Apple devices at the moment but if someone can make something like this for the iPad I think they’ll have a killer app on their hands. I want this with multitouch, pinch to zoom, and the same open sharing of tracks and setups.

I put my first two-minute creation up here. Just press play.

Ben Joffe has this super cool cylinder Tetris game, built using the HTML canvas element and Javascript. Surprisingly playable and a neat demo of what the canvas element is capable of.

Ricky Gervais’ guide to the English in a free podcast from The Guardian, honoring St. George’s Day. open Free Ricky Gervais podcast for St. George’s Day

This is not surprising but still disappointing: Apple is postponing the international iPad launch until the end of May. Non-US Apple users are fairly used to this by now I would think, we are at the back of the line for every new product or feature to come out of Apple.

The Canon Mark 5D II has gotten firmware enabling 24fps film, giving the result a more cinematic look. Turns out the season finale of House was filmed with the Mark 5D II in its entirety. The linked short, The Last 3 Minutes is also worth a look. Not if you want to keep your wallet safe though..

This video preview of an illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland for the iPad is pretty amazing. Via Daring Fireball.

After 20 days it’s here: Opera Mini for the iPhone has finally gotten through the app store approval process. Opera is the first web browser with a non-WebKit rendering engine to be sold on the store. It works like Opera Mini on other platforms: all your web pages go through Opera’s servers to be translated to an intermediary code and compressed. The idea is to reduce the page size and load time on mobile connections.

On first open I am greeted with a nice sleek looking app with a desktop Safari-like dashboard with room for nine easy to reach sites. These are bookmarks rather than most-used sites. The browser has a tabbing mechanism that slides up from the bottom and presents tabs in a row of previews. The tabs load in the background even if you open a new one before the page has finished loading. A nice touch that sets it apart from the current Mobile Safari version.

Pages are fast to load, and while I haven’t done any real tests I feel they load faster than in Safari on my current Edge connection. On Wi-Fi the difference is minimal.

The browsing experience in Opera Mini however, leaves something to be desired. The first thing you notice is perhaps the scrolling. There’s no direction lock like other x-y scrolling iPhone applications. Simply put, this feature is good at guessing if you meant to scroll just vertically or horizontally or wanted to scroll in both directions at the same time, and makes it easy to just flick a web page downwards to read more. Not so in Opera Mini, where a flick invariably sends me down and to the right.

Pinch-to-zoom is so fast it’s unusable, so you’re left with double-clicking the area you want to zoom in on. This works too, it would just be nice to have the option to do either. Sometimes in Mobile Safari I pinch to zoom in on an image for example, more than the double click will allow. As the following screenshot shows you’ll definitely be needing the zoom gesture. Safari on the left, Opera on the right. The image is slightly scaled so click for a full size version.

On most sites I visited, this is how text showed up, unreadable on the most zoomed out level. Usually with Safari I can at least make out headlines which makes it much quicker to find the area of the page I’m interested in. Not so with Opera where most of the text is so small you have to zoom in to see what it says.

There are some other UI inconsistencies. Most notably I have to click several times on objects some times because they didn’t have “focus” the first time. This doesn’t feel very iPhone-like.

I have to admit I have troubles using up the free 120MBytes a month that my phone plan allows me, and I haven’t had much of a problem with Safari’s loading speed even on an Edge connection. This is not quite a native app yet either, in terms of how it feels to use. That said I’m happy there are now competing browsers in the App Store, and Opera Mini is such a different approach that I might use it if my connection is slow or I’m about to run out of free bytes.

UPDATE: The instant back feature is killer. As with the desktop version of Opera, the previous page doesn’t reload when you touch the back button. This makes browsing back and forth in the same tab much more enjoyable. In Safari I’ve gotten used to touching and holding links to open them in a new tab instead because browsing back takes as long as loading a new link. open Opera Mini for the iPhone – initial impressions