Software over the rainbow

desearch and revelopment

Category: Web

when…

Some months ago I listened to this beautiful remix by 3spds. It’s based on a record of a religious group whose 900 followers committed a mass suicide. He tells the story in a light but touching way. At the time of this recording, they believed they had found the key to happiness and equality. Next [...]

instructions, limitations

Instruction set is a recently launched site that gives some instructions every month and asks for implementations in code. Think Sol Lewitt goes 2.0 (sorry I couldn’t resist). It is a beautiful simple idea and It’s stealing me lots of braincycles (see). I’ve heard raindrops here and there about design by limitation lately. Number of [...]

A timestamped generation

Thinking about the traces we leave behind in all the software we use, I was wondering: How will the biography of a data-intensive person – you know, blogs, twitter, delicious, tumblr, last.fm…- look like in the future? Will those “domestic privacies” be taken into account? How will the fact that we have a clear, unambiguous [...]

Mess up, dig for context, scatter… and find your stuff

So I bit the bullet and have just opened a tumblr account. I’ve been somehow reluctant to try just another service (despite passionate, reliable recommendations). The way I use delicious (keeping an annotated track of interesting stuff) is pretty similar to what I could get using tumblr, so why should I add another tool? The [...]

php and mysql in different time zones

Just a quick code tip for working with dates in mysql and php. I’m building a script to regularly mirror my last.fm recent tracks to a mysql database of my own. I’m interested in experimenting with daily and hourly statistics. One problem that has taken me some head scratching has been the fact that the [...]

Music and memory: A small (frustrated) last.fm project

Antecedent: A couple of months ago, having a look at some old stats in my last.fm profile, I realised how much I could remember a given time by just seeing the music I used to listen to (that old (unfinished?) project by marcos weskamp and didier hilhorst came to mind inmediately). The source: Last.fm keeps [...]

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Should we be learning from las vegas?