Playdar, your local music agent

Playdar is a content resolving service for your music.

It's essentially a semantic web agent - but with no RDF around to add in that 'semantic' part.

A website asks your browser for permission to play tracks, much like Songbird offers, and it allows you to index / search your music.

More importantly, it's possible to search your friend's music, auto-magically, and stream from there. Or at least wired claims so.

I'll wait and see if it ends up more polished.

Songbird, Hype Machine, Music Blogs

I am still in utter awe of Songbird + Last.fm + Hype Machine.

Right now I'm browsing around trying to find new sounds with hype machine. Hype machine points me to Superpose. Songbird makes it trivial for me to add it to my collection.

If I favorite it on hype machine, it'll twitter it for me; I can preview it right in songbird, add it to my library, and I can purchase tracks / albums from Amazon. As soon as I listen to it, it's right there in last.fm.

This isn't a music player, this is a distributed networked music experience.

Also, if someone could please buy me a whitefolksgetcrunk tshirt, or make superpose appear in Adelaide; I would be pretty happy

Related articles by Zemanta

• Watch out iTunes ... Songbird Fugazi rocks !

Genius or Heresy?

DJ Earworm - Intergalatic Human (Beastie Boys vs Daft Punk) - genius or heresy?

I can't choose.

Samsung YP-U3 - horrible

Someone I live with ended up buying one, because she wanted to listen to music.

All of the marketing indicated that a Samsung YP-U3 could simply be stuck into any old USB slot, and off you go.

Unfortunately, that's completely not the case. Unless you install Windows Media Player 10 or higher; the stupid thing won't install.

How annoying, and stupidly designed.

Systembot - Ready or Not

Systembot are awesome.

So is their track, ready or not (MP3).

If you don't know them, you are missing out.

Check out the website, or grab the album, Fuse via paypal.

Yahoo on DRM; and where Songbird really whips the llama's...

I want more of people standing up for what I want; and I want it now.

Yahoo says no to DRM.

So far, my favourite bit:

But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to Aquarium Drunkard, click an MP3. If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.

Hey, you want to get yourself some SongBird!

Pidgin, Songbird, and a Shirt

Alright, let's cut to the chase. I desperately want a ninja filled tshirt.


With the current state of the US dollar, it's probably a good time to prise $25 USD from my ever so tight pockets; but the penny pinching old grandfather in me just won't let me.

So, I have a plan:

1. Wait for either Gutsy Gibbon to land, or a decent feisty backport of pidgin


2. Learn just what exactly this dbus thing is


3. Use a mixture of kung fu and whinging to have Songbird inform Pidgin of what I'm playing, just like I've always wanted.

If I can get at least half way into doing that, then I can most probably convince myself:

• dbus is cool, and you are making something shiny enough that you deserve a t-shirt


• this is way too hard, you need a pity t-shirt

Either option is great for me.

Why isn't it so?

I hate hold music. It's always someone else who has decided what's going to play. Usually, it's an attempt not to frustrate callers on hold. Usually, all it does it make you more frustrated, because it's not your music.

So, I ask this simple question:
Why can't I press a button on my phone to switch the music I'm listening to? Or mute it?

Idea: iBusking

Today I was in Rundle mall; and I saw a busker with a drum machine. He had a pretty decent setup, and a funny shaped guitar - obviously; it's not a guitar, but that's the easiest description for it.

He'd tap away; and the drum machine would pick up a rhythm; then he'd chime in with his music.
It was good enough to have people walk up; pull out their earplugs and start to tap their feet; dance a little even.

One lady with her ipod tips a few $ and wanders off.

I found myself wondering: why does her experience of this music have to stop there? How hard would it be to have the busker give her a copy of his music right there and then? What if the busker had a Really Cheap Device that let him record to MP3 and transfer that to a USB device.
Certainly the busker would solicit more donations; because if you are face to face with someone and getting their music; you are far more likely to put your hand in your pocket.
There's also no issues with trusting money over the internet; or DRM; or any of that junk.

Gecko 1.9 is spinning up...

Gecko 1.9 is starting to come together. This will be pretty awesome, not just because it'll help draw smiley faces.

From the roadmap:

• Cairo for rendering; meaning better performance.
• Python for XUL
• Javascript 2
• More oompf for XULRunner - this will directly help songbird, for instance.

I'm kind of excited.

You can stop with the software releases now...

Songbird 0.2, Internet Explorer 7, Gaim 2.0.0beta4.

What a busy day.

Audioscrobber for Songbird

http://www.songbirdnest.com/extensions

Songbird 0.2 RC3 is out; and it now features a couple of decent extensions - an audioscrobbler extension for one.

Stiff asks, great programmers answer

Interview with Linus Torvalds, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, Steve Yegge, Peter Norvig, Guido Van Rossum, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling and Tim Bray.

Interesting read. Go read it, and if you like post your own answers in the comments here...

How did you learn programming? Were any schools of any use? Or maybe you didn’t even bother with ending any schools :) ?
mIRC scripts (hah!), HTML, and basic PHP. A bit of javascript. I then went off to AIT and went through iCarnegie.

What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?
Humor, and the ability to work in a team without direction. Obsessive compulsive urges to document things and put in meaningful info into version control software / any public communication.

Do you think mathematics and/or physics are an important skill for a programmer? Why?
Not really; most math is terrible for preparing you to build a web application. Which is what I do.

What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?
SPARQL backed web applications. Or apps based on XULRunner; like Songbird - half program, half browser, half finished, totally nifty...

If you had three months to learn one relativly new technology, which one would You choose?
I don't care about new stuff, I just want to be able to compile PHP extensions properly! On any platform I need to also...

What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more productive than others?
Attention to detail and the ability to communicate. If you can't articulate what's on your mind; how can you express ideas in code?

What are your favourite tools (operating system, programming/scripting language, text editor, version control system, shell, database engine, other tools you can’t live without) and why do you like them more than others?
Unix like environments, PHP 5, Editplus, SVN, bash, mysql, ZendCodeAnalyzer and PHPUnit. Oh, and firefox.

What is your favourite book related to computer programming?
*Shrug* - there was a decent one on refactoring, but I've lost it.

What is Your favourite book NOT related to computer programming?
A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge; or Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (I just finished it; it's awesome)

What are your favourite music bands/performers/compositors?
Derb; Cosmic Gate; etc. If it's hard trance, I'll tend to like it. My tastes wander a lot as I buy more vinyl.

What about you; readers?

Last.fm vs Google Music Trends

Google Talk just got a 'show my music' feature; like MSN has and like mIRC scripts have been doing since the dawn of time.

I wonder

• Is it easy to do what google talk has done as; say; a gaim plugin?
• Does the jabber protocol have features for this?
• How hard would it be to do a last.fm / audioscrobbler plugin that submits to google music trends?
• How hard would it be to make the google talk client know what songbird is playing?
• How hard would it be to make songbird export XSPF?
  

Songbird 0.2 Screencast

Songbird 0.2 Screencast: "Do you want to learn how to use Songbird 'more better'?

Behold! A new Songbird 0.2 Screencast has just been published to the 'nest, suitable for forwarding to friends.

There's a screencast out from the 'nest, about songbird 0.2. It's awesome to watch the small features demonstrated; like drag and drop saving of web links to my local mp3 list.

The problem I have is this; in a nutshell: to use songbird as the songbird creators suggest requires me to break down my existing barriers to doing such a thing. I'm so used to not being able to do these things; if I'm presented with the opportunity to do them; my mind rejects them as stupid / silly / impossible.

No idea what I mean? Go watch the screencast.

Ack!

I feel like my parents must.

Songbird, Extensions, & Windjay

Windjay looks promising - the current offerings don't do it for me, but perhaps I'll see my wanted songbird extensions yet...

Wanted Songbird Extensions

Songbird is releasing nightlies... sort of. I would give anything to have two extensions in particular:

• MusicBrainz tagging built right into the bird.
• Last.fm / audioscrobbler plugin to record my listening habits.

The latest nightly seems stable(r)... I can't wait for 0.2!

Update More on extensions...

Harvest & SuprGlu

There's a little application I really don't use that much, SuprGlu. It's an aggregator for all of my online life, and its kind of a blog/flickr/last.fm mashup. I love it, but I neglect it.
I've done the exact same thing with my blog in sticking oodles of tat onto it, SuprGlu should be exactly my kind of thing. For some reason I can't explain, it's not - perhaps because I already have a blog with oodles of tat all over it.

I'm not blogging about SuprGlu.

I'm blogging about another application from the people who made SuprGlu. Harvest looks great, from the very first page on in.

I didn't look much past the first page however.

The reason is because I'm familiar with basecamp; and in my mind I have in broad strokes lumped basecamp and Harvest together - no doubt under the surface they are as different as cats and dogs, but they look the same. I have no easy way to tell what makes Harvest different (though, of course, after the first few pages I begin to get the idea that it is a wildly different beast).

As a developer, rather than any other kind of project worker, I have abandoned tools like basecamp in favour of trac - because it offers such tight integration with source code control, issue tracking, and a wiki. I'm a very hard user to convince that Harvest is infact useful. Much of my project management is done adhoc - I abhor timesheets. Our work accounting department tried to make us do it with dead trees, and it just didn't work. I get shudders when our IT manager speaks of man-hours (they don't exist!) with that look in his eyes. If I was so busy I needed to divide my time between 6 clients and 27 projects, I'm not really sure I would have the time to micromanage and track my time.
Infact, I'd really prefer it if my email client could help manage this workload. Or my calendaring application. Anything that just half does the recording of important times and whatnot all by itself.

I got as far as starting a new project. I put in the name. There's a physical address - oops, I've been editing a client's details. I go to edit the internal project - I find I want to be able to associate URLs with it. Life would be great to be able to simply invite a new contractor to work with me and have them able to get going with trac, svn, our live servers, our production servers, etc - all of these available in link form.
There's no real facility for it.
Bugger.

That's the dealbreaker for me - this doesn't actually help me get things done :(

On the plus side, setup was flawless for this application - if you ever want an example of how to install an applicaton, this is how it should be done.

It's a wonderful piece of software, but it's utterly useless for me. Give it a crack and let me know if it's more useful for you...

Why Google Desktop Search Doesnt Work

Here’s a quick (and extremely simplified) explanation of PageRank from Google’s site:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Now, you can understand why on the web this makes sense right? Every page should link to another, and so on. The genius of PageRank is that it establishes relevance by determining if good content is linked to by other good content. If it is, then you’ve got a nice PageRank. This is a radical departure from the early days of search where webmasters would cram keywords into the sections of their webpages in order to rank higher. That method tended to work when the earliest engines looked at the frequency in which keywords appeared in a given document. PageRank is brilliant because it tries to establish context.

Now that I’ve bored you to death, I’ll get back to the point: 9 out of 10 of the documents on your network have no links between them.
Link

So what you really need to build a half decent search tool / semantic desktop is something that helps you add metadata to documents - the like the MusicBrainz Tagger and MP3s.

A further thought:
If you can find links in word documents, for instance in homework etc; and you have access to a huge range of information about those links (like, say, google), you should be able to hazily guess that word document X with 3 links to cancer journals is a source of information on cancer.

Songbird Democracy

Democracy is released today, and it feels a lot like Songbird.

Note to self: tinker with it.