August 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Scrobbling Heatmap Calendar
Created by Martin D., one of my ex-colleagues from Last.fm, this is an amazing visualisation of scrobbling activity by year, month, day of the week and even time of day.
They’re manually generated at the moment, with a set for Last.fm staff past and present. The slideshow version is particularly interesting to compare varying peoples listening habits.
Each year of data is arranged in...
5 tags
Last.fm Now-Playing information radiator
This is a litte project I started a while back but only finished/cleaned up recently. It’s a simple information radiator that shows you what a Last.fm user is listening to right now.
It was designed to let one (or many people) know what’s playing at a glance. I’ve been using it while listening to Last.fm radio while getting ready for work, shared office playback (it works...
1 tag
Leaving Last.fm
8 years of scrobbling, 55,000 tracks and 4 years with the incredible Last.fm team, it’s been a blast, but it’s time to move on and do something new.
It’s been a really difficult decision to leave. Last.fm was quite literally a dream job for me and at times a family. I’m proud to have worked on a brilliant product with so many great people. I feel like i’ve grown...
July 2011
1 post
3 tags
Facebook photo facial recognition
[These are old, but I’m clearing my drafts queue]
Last Autumn a group of us visited Berlin, renting a bit apartment, exploring the city and taking lots of photos. I don’t upload photos to Facebook, I’m more of a Flickr guy, but it was interesting to watch Becky upload hers and compare the process.
The most striking, impressive and creepy difference was that Facebook seem to...
June 2011
1 post
5 tags
Artificial Scarcity and Entitlement
kapowaz:
The dawn of ubiquitous computing and communications has had a disruptive effect on numerous previously-stable business models. Those affected most are usually those which relied upon the scarcity of a resource, be that news, music or television programs.
Each one in turn has found itself confronted with a paradigm shift leading away from scarcity, and typically has failed to adapt...
April 2011
1 post
5 tags
Migrating scrobbling authentication to 2.0
I received this email a few months ago, and it made me smile.
Anthony from The Hype Machine here. (http://hypem.com)
Good news!
We’ve just connected your Hype Machine account to Last.fm using a new
secure method recommended by their team (it’s similar to OAuth,
if you want to get technical)!
To do this, we used the Last.fm username and a scrambled version of
the password...
January 2011
1 post
3 tags
Erlang: For an absolute beginner
Last night I spent 30 minutes having a play with a new (to me) programming language, Erlang.
Its a language that will stretch my brain a bit, teach me to think about programming in a different way, and I know some folks using it (Mostly Smarkets and IRCCloud) who’s brains I can pick in the pub.
These are my quick notes from an Erlang newbie, hopefully useful to someone else getting...
December 2010
1 post
3 tags
Tech Hub misrepresents Silicon Roundabout
Yesterday I had a brief conversation on Twitter with Elizabeth Varley of Tech Hub about their claims of 700% startup growth in the Old Street area. I’d suggest reading the original article and the Twitter conversation first. I was convinced to write up some broader thoughts by an excellent post by James Darling, so that is worth reading too.
It may seem pedantic to quibble over a number,...
November 2010
1 post
5 tags
The importance of virtualised development...
Gareth Rushgrove just wrote a great blog post entitled Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation, which puts out a great argument for using virtualised development environments.
The crux of the argument is that you should be testing and running your code in an environment as close as possible to production, and that virtualisation is the easiest way to do that. There are other benefits, but this is...
September 2010
1 post
4 tags
New Twitter favouritism
Twitter have been slowly rolling out access to it’s new web interface , to much discussion, arguing and complaining - not to mention recent security issues.
Putting all that to one side the feature of #newtwitter I’m really fond of is showing your most recently favourited tweet.
Favouriting is an underrated feature on Twitter, though it’s slightly at odds with the concept...
May 2010
1 post
8 tags
Last.fm vs Xbox at DIBI Conference
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Design It, Build It conference in Newcastle, where I gave a talk entitled “Last.fm vs Xbox.”
It was a 30 minute presentation of our experience at Last.fm launching a radio application to millions of Xbox Live users. It was a mix of the Last.fm vs Xbox story, how we dealt with it, the tools we used and general tips for anyone dealing with large...
February 2010
1 post
5 tags
1Bit player update
1Bit is a simple way to let you preview MP3s linked in a web page. It’s a combination of Javascript and (a tiny bit) of flash to automatically pre-pend links to MP3s with a little play icon, allowing you to listen to the track inline. It’s been quite popular, mostly with music blogs. It was built by and myself a year or two ago.
Towards the end of last year James Weiner got in...
January 2010
2 posts
5 tags
Announcing: Design it, Build it.
I’m pleased to announce i’ll be speaking at Design it, Build it - A one day web conference on April 28th in Newcastle. It’s aimed at both designs & developers with a separate track of talks for each
I consider myself a jack-of-all-trades most of the time, with my time (and passion) split evenly between frontend and backend. So it’s great to see a conference with...
4 tags
Batch event importing to Last.fm
Over christmas I sorted out some old boxes from University and found all the paper ticket stubs for gigs from 2002 to 2005. That’s some meaty data I didn’t want to lose, I copied it to a spreadsheet with plans to import it in to the Last.fm events system (where I track all my current gig habbits).
Unfortunately the add events workflow is a real pain for adding more than one event at...
December 2009
3 posts
8 tags
Music Hackday Boston
A couple of weeks I made a trip to Music Hackday Boston. The 4th in a series of music hackdays, designed to bring together smart and passionate people to hack on music technology.
I won’t go in to grand detail as there have already been some excellent write-ups from Ben, Anthony and Brian, but it’s by far the best hackday i’ve attended. A perfect combination of smart people,...
El Boston →
I was recently in Boston for a Music Hackday, luckily I had the time to catch a few bands while I was there. It seems like a town with a pretty good music scene, lots of bands touring through it…
December: New records →
60” of musical joy landed on my desk at work today. I really enjoy buying a big batch of records and the ritual of unpacking them when they arrive. Today I opened:
Two Los Campesinos! 7”s …
October 2009
3 posts
3 tags
Jumping out of an aeroplane
About 3 months ago I jumped out of a plane. From about 14,000 feet. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years now, and i’m glad I finally did. I’m not sure I’d do it again though.
I raised just under £350 for Macmillan Cancer Support, thanks to everyone who sponsored me.
A couple of friends are proper skydivers, they helped me organise the jump and even offered...
6 tags
JSON, Octal Numbers & Validation
Now it’s launched in London I’ve been playing around with the Foursquare API. While it’s not the best API i’ve come across it gives you reasonable access to their data, so i’ve been pretty happily building some small tools using their data.
hit a rather usual bug with JSON parsing for a Foursquare venue, in this case the Bricklayers Arms (The home of Pub...
6 tags
Music taste tube-lines
View the full map (PDF) covering almost 18 months of my scrobbled listening. I really want to print and wall mount this.
This is from an internal Last.fm visualisation/tech demo. It’s not publicly accessible at the moment, though hopefully it will be at some point soon. If you’re desperate to see yours then poke me on Twitter and I can generate you one.
September 2009
1 post
New Records →
After a wander up Oxford St. and a rummage through the HMV vinyl section i emerged with;
1/ Beat Happening - Jamboree (LP, 1988). A band i’m not overly familiar with, though i’ve listened…
August 2009
1 post
4 tags
Micro-San Francisco recommendations
A week later I still haven’t written up my SF trip and as a friend asked for tips here’s a micro version!
- @carlgaywood @dsingleton any tips for San Francisco?
Disclaimer;These are mostly based in/around mission as that’s where I stayed.
Papalote - Good mexican
Thirsty Bear Brewing Company - Local brewery, get the beer sampler
Ritual Coffee Roasters - Amazing coffee
...
July 2009
6 posts
6 tags
Using iTunes Mac to rip CDs at good quality
I haven’t had to rip any CDs on my current laptop till now. I didn’t have a decent ripper and I wouldn’t be using the one built in to iTunes (it’s rubbish). It’s such a rare task to setup a good ripper that I have to go searching for all the details again.
This is a bit of a post self-reference in the future, hopefully it’s helpful to you too
My tool of...
2 tags
Reblogging the past
Thanks to the beauty of the Internet Archive I was able to find copies of all my old posts. An earlier version of this site was powered by a Wordpress install and apparently I didn’t make backups of the database. It’s quite sad losing content, some of it was quite good and it’s left lots of dead links.
I’m now using Tumblr to power the blog part of my site. It allows...
4 tags
Trinity, 64 year atomic anniversary
64 years ago, on July 16, 1945 Trinity was the first test of an atomic weapon. It’s no hyperbole to say that it changed the world we live in forever. This isn’t the kind of thing i’d usually write about, but it’s an important subject, and the quote from Oppenheimer is very moving (particularly the video).
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a...
3 tags
Testing the Tumblr API
Just testing the Tumblr API. I’ve been pulling content in to my personal site (http://dsingleton.co.uk) via the JSON API using the search parameter.
Looking up by slug for each article works for all except Open Tech 2009. For some reason it doesn’t seem to be in the search index, as it’s not even picked up when searching for the term “open”.
Possibly...
5 tags
Open Tech 2009
Recently I went to Open Tech 2009 “an informal, low cost, one-day conference on slightly different approaches to technology, democracy and community. This year’s theme is “Working on Stuff that Matters”. This year it was held at University of London Union, central London.
This isn’t your usual web conference, not £100+ ticket a head, no direct mention of code...
8 tags
Using xargs like I mean it, a bash example.
Using xargs like I mean it. svn st * | grep “^ C” | cut -c 8- | xargs svn revert
http://twitter.com/dsingleton/status/2616994594
A couple of people asked me to explain what this did, so here’s a quick 2 minute explanation (I’ll assume you’re familiar with unix pipes)
First, what was I trying to do? I’d just merged a large branch back down to trunk and...
April 2009
1 post
4 tags
Installing Playdar on OS X 10.4
Congrutulations, you’re on an outdated verison of OS X, but you still want to play with cool things like Playdar. Here’s a hassle filled guide to compiling it from source.
To do this you’ll need XCode (2.4 for Tiger), Macports and Git to start.
XCode 2.4: https://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/getSoftware?bundleID=20262
MacPorts:...
March 2009
4 posts
2 tags
2 tags
Going public (again)
I started using Twitter a couple of years ago, following the buzz of SXSW ‘07. I started out, as almost everyone did, with my statuses open to everyone. There seemed no reason to be private with my status updates. Twitter was a (relatively) new and tiny service, known only to power-geek types so privacy concerns didn’t really enter in to it.
As I used Twitter more, and Twitter itself...
“http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store is just so ridiculously exciting, fantastic...”
– Simon Willison (http://twitter.com/simonw/status/1305167875)
4 tags
September 2007
1 post
7 tags
Giving XFN more visibility through CSS2.1...
As I was redesigning a bit lately and making use of FamFamFam’s very nice Silk icon set (used under the CC Attribution License) and it occurred to me I could use CSS2.1 Attribute Selectors to show the relationships the XFN defines.
If you’re not familiar with XFN this wikipedia article gives a good introduction.
In the WordPress blogroll you get the option to add XFN relationships to...
June 2007
3 posts
3 tags
Truck Festival 2007 Lineup
There proper lineup has been announced and is available on the Truck Festival website. Finally!
We can all stop hunting for semi-official rumours, know who’s actually playing and see what they sound like (if you don’t know them). I’ll certainly be glad to stop updating that list.
The official lineup is:
Main Stage Saturday
Idlewild
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Goldrush
Brakes
Buck 65
Piney...
2 tags
Panels, gender, confusion and a rant
I was going to include this little rant in my @media round-up post, but thought better of it, lest I get too ranty. So yes, this will be a fairly quickly written up little rant, please treat it as such.
As I mentioned before the only negative I came away from the conference with was the Hot topics panel. This was mainly for two reasons, with only vague relation to each other.
Gender and Variety
...
4 tags
@media London 2007
My first @media and it was a lot of fun.
Preperation
Wednesday evening started with boxes, lots of boxes which contained @media bags to be stuffed, lots of bags. Job done we wandered down to the pub in time for a few pre-event drinks and to show off our dashing orange shirts.
Day One
Unfortunately I missed most of Jesse James Garrett’s opening session and some interesting bits of Jason Santa...
May 2007
4 posts
5 tags
Upgrading to PHP5 on OS X
I’ve been meaning to upgrade PHP on my macbook for a while now, today I finally got around to it with a little help from Marc Liyanage PHP Package.
Download the installer (~50MB), un-tar and run it. You should not have PHP5 installed on your system. However, you might have to do a bit of fiddling to get it working properly.
These are just the tweaks I needed, you might need to do more or less,...
4 tags
1 Bit Audio Player
My good friend Mark Wheeler has been puting together a neat little embeded flash/javasript mp3 player called 1 Bit, which i’ve been writing the Javascript for.
1 Bit Audio Player is a very simple and lightweight Adobe Flash MP3 player with automatic JavaScript insertion. It’s main purpose is to act as a quick in-page preview for audio files you link to from your website or blog.
It’s prety neat,...
4 tags
Fun with FAMFAMFAM Icons and jQuery
If you not familiar with the FAMFAMFAM Silk icons they’re a set of 1000 beautiful little 16×16px icons that you’re free to use under the CC-Attribution license.
I’ve been using them a little recently for a few things, including this blog and some coding projects. The problem is, with 1000 icons, finding the ones that are suitable for what you’re doing.
The Silk webpage used to have every icon on...
9 tags
A last.fm tag-cloud generated from XSL
19/07/2009: The script in this post is currently broken, it’ll be fixed soon
If you use last.fm the you can get some pretty interesting statistical data about your musical habits.
Being a web and music geek I’ve put together a simple tag-cloud to show what i’ve listened to that week. Everyone loves a nice tag-cloud.
You can take a look at the finished version on my Music page.
How it...
April 2007
1 post
7 tags
Pixel Art Space Invaders
Note: We actually did this a few months ago now – But I lost the ‘making of’ pictures and only found them again recently.
We’ve already got some art up on the walls in our dev room at work, but two walls were boring and mostly white.
I decided to take some inspiration from one of my old Uni house-mates, Mark, who happens to be a great pixel-artist.
A while back Mark got bored and made...
March 2007
4 posts
5 tags
ALA “Ruining User Experience”
Out of the three new ALA articles the one that really caught my eye was Ruining User Experience by Aaron Gustafson.
It describes how a site should be built upon a solid base, and then gradual layers of enhancement (Images, CSS, Flash, Ajax) applied to create as good an expirience as is possible for that user.
On the web, we don’t know anything about the person coming to our website. We don’t...
8 tags
SXSW Day Three (and onwards)
I’ve been back a couple of days now, so of course people have asked how it was, and my response has been ‘Amazing‘. I really do mean that, the entire week was great. It was a fantastic holiday, full of interesting panels, great people, delicious food and excellent parties. I’ve already started hustling friends into coming next year.
My original plan was to make a blog post once a day, which fell...
5 tags
SXSW Day Two
So i’ve already fallen a day behind on my plan to throw something up here every day.
I just got in on friday, so my recolection of yesterday is a little hazy.
It turns out we get free breakfast, score! Decided to avoid the geekery and conference stuff a bit and walked down to part of South Congress that a stewardess on our Austin flight recomended to me. Lots of little boutiques, indie stores...
4 tags
SXSW Day One
Finally arrived in Austin, unpacked, had a shower and feel human again.
Frances and I left hammersmith at the ungodly hour of 5am, this is not a real time, it deosn’t exist for normal people.
Met up with Ben, Fatty and Steve at gatwick for breakfast and got ourselves organised for the 10 hour flight to Houston.
We got stuck there for a few hours due to a delay, but eventually got to austin and...
February 2007
1 post
10 tags
Recent downtime & upcoming events
Sorry to the (few) people who haven’t been been able to access the site recently. For the past 6 months or so I’ve been hosting this blog on the server at work, so when we switched ISP’s (and thusly IPs) I completely forgot to update my DNS record.
Although it’s handy to host this at work I think it’d be for the best to get some proper hosting. We’ve done quite a lot of internal network...
January 2007
2 posts
2 tags
Teaching Bad Practice
I subscribe to the WSG reading list, an entertaining and informative round up of web-standards-related articles and blog posts. The usual IE bugs, interviews and handy tips, but one thing caught my eye this week was a PHP tutorial on handling forms.
Let’s take a look…
This chapter covers the basics of creating HTML forms and how the form data is transmitted to your PHP script. It introduces...
4 tags
Code Golf: Whats your handicap?
Over the holidays I came discovered Code Golf and got quite addicted to one of the challenges, for those unfamiiar with it:
Based on the original perl golf, Code Golf allows you to show off your code-fu by trying to solve coding problems using the least number of keystrokes.
You’re not just limited to Perl either - PHP, Python and Ruby are all available too.
Challenges are always open, and your...
October 2006
2 posts
5 tags
Dconstruct 2006
I’ve been back from Brighton for almost 24 hours now and I’ve just about caught up on sleep. It was a blast.
Thursday Night
The pre-event part at Heist was good fun, meeting and talking with people I’ve met before at London events and some new ones. Unfortunately I don’t think the planned salsa lessons organized by Adam ever materialized!
After being kicked out around 12:30 a...