07.31.07
Billie Piper to play Belle!
Yes, it is true. Super lovely lady Billie Piper, is going to play Belle De Jour! Yes, it’s hosted on the Daily Mail webshite, but, well, good news is good news even when delivered by small minded racism fuckwits.
Melon and cheese
While it’s not a stack of freezing cold melon with hard Italian cheeses, but I’ve just had some seriously over ripe gala melon with a strong cheddar, and it was excellent. And now I’m about to put a garlic bread in the oven, because I have the munchies.
07.23.07
Belle breaks my heart
I love Belle De Jour. I love the media frenzy trying to out her, I love her cander about boy, and I love the fact who does what she wants for a living (or at least I hope she does), but when you read about men being shitty, it could break my heart.
Even through the middle of it though, she retains a stunningly sharp wit: “Fuck perspective. Some men really are life support systems for their cocks.”
I’m sorry Belle, men and women are so different, that we (boys) are bound to hurt girls at times, and worse of all, we won’t even know why (or when), but for what it’s worth, and I don’t think I can apologise on behalf of half the human race, I’m just not qualified, I’m sorry.
Tastey food make food nice feel
Yes, it’s all gone a bit BlackBooks as I druled over whatwereeating.com.
07.22.07
Who swapped our weather with Malasia?
I’ve only walked to the end of my road to Tescos and back (and round Tescos - I didn’t just go there for look), and I’ve got sweat pouring off me. I can actually feel it beading on my forehead which is a new experience. I didn’t notice it on the walk home, because I was being rained on! Yes, rain. On a day thats hot enough to make me feel like a whale in a tshirt.
Summer? Hast thou forsaken us?
07.21.07
IMDB is wonderful…
… for situations like where you are watching The Craft late at night and somebody looks familiar and you’ve no idea why, and then it turns out that one of the blokes was in Road Trip.
Storing bbc listen again stuff
I love the BBC’s listen again service, but since work banned streaming media, I’ve made no use of it because I have a radio in my house (numerous actually), a radio in my car, and now the onlyplace I am without BBC content is work. I do podcast several things that are available, but it would be really nice to be able to rip certain programs to OGG or mp3.
Step up tomtaylor and his rather neat bash script (spit, spit, cought, bloody bash),which makesuse of mplayer to rip the stream and then encode it. very neat.
DRM free mp3 store?
I like the look of bleep.com, serving up mp3 goodness at about 6 quid an album from lots of good labels like warp and XL.
Transformers
rocked. no messing about. Fast and the Furious, with robots, and a girl, and Matrix style fighting between robots, and guns, and exposions, and some really funny lines and ideas. Go. Now. Preferably toamidnight showing like I just did.
07.20.07
Tagging - the slow ramp of enlightenment
As if perfectly timed with my rant this morning aboutiTunes and the need to be able to tag mp3s, here’s an interesting diagram about “the cycle of hype” around tagging. We are entering the phase whereby tagging stops being attempted to be used as a silver bullet, and slowly finding what its really good for.
I hope they use the doctor with fat fingers
Who knows, made the bugger will turn out to have cancer of the arsehole. I hope so. Maybe his cock might rot off too, or atleast he might bang it in the fridge door one night when he goes to get another cold Bud.
So they smoke some gear - I’d rather have somebody know knows what it is like at the helm than a sanctamonius, sheltered and ideological cretin!
Well it appears that some of our leaders have been smoking the weed and taking hits from the bong whilst at university. Big surprise. Lets face a simple fact, that I would suspect that more people under the age of 45 have ingested something illegal at some point in their life, and to rule them all out of working in the public eye would be silly. There is a major difference between somebody who has used drugs (and I’m goign to risk making no distinction between any of the chemicals that are ruled as illegal at this point) and somebody who is a curret drug user.
yesterday evening I had the misguided pleasure of watchng a fat Scottish bloke in a badly fitting suit explaining, in a ranting manner, how nobody “who’d touched that filth” should be allowed to serve in office. “They broke the law, simple as that!” he banged on. Now, I can appreciate his point, that it is some what hypocritical so say that “yes yes, I did it, but I knew it was wrong, and now I’m in a position to make it even more wrong I’m going to do so”, but surely he cannot mean that we should ditch ever MP who has broken any law? Would parking fines count? What about speeding? Shoplifting is not something I would consider to be life threatening or the plague of our society, should it mean you are struck from the books and never allowed to try and sort out this country?
Maybe he was jsut meaning people who’ve played with chemicals? Judging by the shape and colour of his nose, the texture of his skin and the puffyness of his eyes, the man speaking (and I wish I’d taken note of who he was) was proably not unfamiliar with scotch, or maybe gin. In many countries alcohol falls under the same laws as cannibis, and many would argue that it has many of the same effects. Long term skunk smoking can leave you in a real mess, but I would wager that the effects of long term alcohol use are much the same.
I suggest we have a drugs-confessions amnysty. If MPs, or anybody else for that matter, has anyhing they’d like to get of their chest, just say it now. Smoked a few skins whilst at uni, tell the world. Done a few lines with a BBC journo in the bogs of the Ivy? Tell me. Let me know. Once had a few ports too many and insulted the Bishop of Bath and Wells before driving back to Mayfair? Let it all out. Purge your soul. Some stuffy idiots might get a bit blustery about it, but most people will hopefully admire your honesty. Better now that with the Daily Mail finds a photo of it and drives you from public office on a wave of “public feeling” which they always seem to be able to find amongst the under-informed and soundbyte perfect lageratti.
When it comes to the crunch, I would rather have people with some experience of the item in question making decisions about the laws that are to be passed. Regardless of the political party and the mps in question, surely somebody who has actually skinned up can bring something more to the debate than simply “it’s wrong and we all know it” which seemed to be the fat redfaced sanctamonius Scotsmans main arguement. This is not to say that a whole range of people shouldn’t be consolutled. Get the pharmocologists in. Get the pscyologists in. Make sure you speak to drugs councillers, and users, and reformed users, and dealers (yes - I am not joking), to school children and teachers, to weekend ravers and their grans, to parents and to prostitutes, but for god sake, don’t expect everybody who runs the country to have lived a puritanical and saintly life, thats just unrealistic.
Why is everything so slow?
This is really beginning to bug me. I have a large mp3collection, mostly because I spent 2 weeks ripping my cd collection to mp3 in case of theft and fire, and so I can take it on the road with me when working away from home.
I’ve been used iTunes to try and mange it, but it’s unfuriatingly slow. I’ve about 20,000 tracks, stored on an external drive, and sometime moving between artists takes a minute! Awhole minute, and iTunes crashes.
I’ve tried winAMP (and xmms) but a single list is just unusable. I’ve tried songbird, but it’s just painfully slow too. I’m about to lash some cash and buy a NAS which has an itunes streamer built in, which might solve the problem, but you can’t make playlists from iTunes streams, or burn mix cds (my current hobby), so that doesn’t solve the problem.
What software is out there than will let you manage 20k files, and the id3 tags (I’m slowly getting them sorted with iTunes and MusicBrainz and a set of iTunes scripts I’ve written), and not be slow as a dog with three legs. If only winAmp had the ability to build your files into a navigable system using the id3 data it would be top.
Speaking of which - how do you start to display so much music? Ideally I’d like to be able to select whole albums to play, so some sort of Artist>Album combo would be good, but the list becomes unmanageable. Also its annoying when you think “Oh - a bit of Dave Smith - that would be good” remembering his 1987 hit “Dave is great”, so you click on Dave Smith, and find you have his album “Dave Smith sings the blues” including the album art. Brilliant. Click on it and actually… you’ve got one song. Probably from a film soundtrack or something else, and no idea where the rest of the songs are, or how you even got this one track. Very annoying that.
I wonder if tagging isn’t the answer? I love the way that flickr creates a big cloud of files, and by the virtue of tags, they can be grouped infinatly. Each photo can be associated with all the others you took on the day, or all the other photos of the sea, and all the other photos that are predominantly blue. If you could do this with music it would be great! I could have a big cloud of music where each track could be a memeber of as many lists as you like. So I could add “Newcastle” , “Seen live”, “acoustic”, “sad” and “rare genius” tags to my John Egdel tracks as well as “(album)Your big day”, “(year)2005″ and “(label)Caw Records” and other such information such as is now found in mp3s. You could also manage your playlistings the same way by associating tags such as “(playlist:5)Running cd” denoting that this track should be track 5 in the “Running cd” playlist.
I’m no programmer any more, but surely such a thing it possible, possibly even not that ddifficult? You could build the init tag set form id3 tags, and store it in a clean data structure making is superfast to edit and search. You could even write some fothe stuff back to id3 tags maybe.
07.19.07
HowTo: Make a poster from ever book cover you own (nearly)
1) Have a librarything account. Feed it all Your books.
2) Install DownloadThemAll for Firefox.
3)Visit your “My Library” page on LibraryThing and select “view covers”. Then pick “100 per page”.
4)Rightclikc and use DownLoadThemAll to download all the jpg images into a folder.
5)Repeat step 4 until you have all the covers in a folder
6)In your favorite scripting language loop though all the file names and add a row to an HTML table for each one. I used ksh, here’s my script (it works because I renamed all the images to make it a bit easier):
#!/usr/bin/ksh
integer i=0;
integer j=0;
integer p=0;
while ((i<10))
do
print "(put your row opener here)"
i=i+1
while ((j<21))
do
j=j+1;
print "(put your cell and img reference here)";
p=p+1;
done
j=0
print "(put your row closer)" ;
done
7) Add a table header to your HTML file, and view in Firefox.
Print it to PDF using the brilliant PDFCreator fiddling with the page size until you get something you like.
9) Enjoy! You can find mine here for your viewing pleasure.
Whats in a name
This is a great article about handelling personal names from around the world. It is easy to forget that most people’s names are not Firstname Surname, let alone ChristianName Familyname.
07.18.07
Cheese dilemas
This little cartoon makes an excellent point, if you’re going to have a brilliant product, don’t let a silly thing that can easily be changed get in the way.
Slow eating and slow drinking make for a happier person
I think this little article about having an hour in the evening to decompress and shoot the breeze (a horrible American phrase which I’ve always liked because it sounds like sitting outside in the summer and chatting until it goes cold) is spot on. We rush our food, we rush our drinking, and all so we can watch TV and numb our minds.
Lessons in software engineering
Whilst several of these 19 eponymous Laws of SoftEngg are pretty flippant, there are some complete gems in there.
“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned” which should be taken into account in all planning of technical activities.
On the subject of what kind of company you choose to work for, it would be prudent to consider “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it”
Why does your brand new Intel Box take forever to let you save a document in Word? The answer lies in Wirth’s law: “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.”
What a great word!
pleochroic (plee-uh-KRO-ik) adjective
“Showing different colors when viewed from different directions.”
