Ok, so while I was on my way to the store circa six hours ago, I'm happily riding along, listening to what is arguably Denvers premiere rock radio station, kbpi, and I hear this nice little ad about how they're now streaming all audio content over the web. "Why couldn't they have that when I was in Lincoln?" I ask myself.

Five minutes ago, having awoken at what appears to be becoming my regular waking time, I recall the ad, and decide to check it out and see what they've got (even if it might require me to reinstall the infamously unstable RealPlayer for 5 minutes to hear it). I should've just stayed in bed.

At first glance, the web design appears fairly decent, if on the slightly high bandwidth side. I've seen worse. A brief glance at the html source reveals some badly kludgy javascript code that does essentially nothing useful. Again, I've seen worse.

So there it is, at the top of the page, a big bold headline about how the station is now being broadcast over the web, and an accompanying link to the audio (which took me a minute to find, cause their instructions direct you to the "link on the left", which is actually down at the bottom of the navigation bar.) I click, and get a "Save As" dialog, with a default filename of "startstream.cgi".

Alright, now I knew from the beginning that it would probably be asking too much for them to use something nice and elegant like shoutcast, but this was bordering on the absurd. I saved the file (which was, as I suspected, just a tiny text file which merely contained pointer info the actual content), and proceeded to examine its contents. It appeared to have an XML-ish syntax. (In fact, looking at it again now, I see that it does indeed follow all the XML rules for document markup.)

The first line, which got my attention: "<ASX VERSION="3.0">" A quick search on google confirmed my fears. First hit: Australian Stock Exchange. Irrelevant. Second hit: All about ASX files. msdn.microsoft.com/blahblahlblah. So now we know the source of the evil.

The xml doc in question contains several pseudo-standard looking uri type constructs beginning with the characters "mms://". Upon a little reading of documentation on the empire's server, one can find is a "Windows Media Service" namespace. How lovely.

So anyway, the moral of this story. That cluefulness in the technologies of broadcasting does not equal cluefulness in web design? That the evil empire has taken over our favorite mainstream media outlets? That things prophesied in The Halloween Documents are coming to pass? Any of the above? All of the above?

I remember a time when a netcraft lookup of kbpi.com identified it as running Red Hat/Apache. My heart was warmed. (Incidentally, I just now checked it again, and got the following: "kbpi.com is running unknown on connect: Host is down".)

Oh well. I doubt I would've employed that method of listening to it much anyway, given that I can get far better quality over local airwaves than with modem bandwidth. It's just sad to see this happening to the web. I know Microsoft's been working on getting their mangy little foot in the door on stuff like this for some time, but I've seldom been hindered access to content on sites I would visit before. Too bad. (In case you're wondering, The Peak's site isn't any better. I tried visiting there last month.)

Well, time to stop ranting and get back to coding. We've got a world to save.... or something like that.