I’ve heard raindrops here and there about design by limitation lately. Number of chars in twitter, flickr video length, 1 photo/day in fotolog… There are a couple of limitations in instructionset which I missed at first but on a second thought I found interesting:

• There’s no clear way to post a result(images, applets, audio…).

  You can always give a url, but it is not even suggested. I thought it might be an obvious improvement, but after trying to come up with solutions for the 2 first instructions, I’ve discovered that results could be a distraction. Instructions are about language and interpretation. I’ve found myself repeating the sentence, trying to define exactly every word, looking for a fold, or a flaw in which to introduce a deviation… Thinking how they relate to the programming language, how I relate to the programming language (specially with the first one “draw a straight line and follow it”)… I think that this relationship between everyday and programming language is a powerful one to explore.

• There is no form of comments/discussion other than the description of you implementation.

  After seeing some of the contributions, I’ve found interesting approaches and I’d like to give feedback, but given the overwhelming noise ratio in today’s software playgrounds, I appreciate that there’s no way to do it. Paraphrasing Cage: just respond with your implementation.

Now, I don’t know if these are intended features or result of an early release, but if one could vote against new features… :)

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 point of reference for our own thoughts, places visited, people met, images, consumed products… affect the way we perceive ourselves? or the way we will be perceived in the future?

Just thinking out loud, to hear how it sounds like.

The main point for storing things (es) is retrieving them. Common sense dictates that to find your things easily (and I’m rather obsessed with that), you should keep similar things in the same place, so the use of multiple services to keep track of similar information might seem counterproductive.

I have the tentative feeling that this is not so:

The richness of our homes results from our influence over their every characteristics and their accumulation of the traces of our activities. This richness is missing from our digital dwellings (by which I mean file systems, application windows, blogs, and mobile phones as well as the virtual locations in online worlds that more closely mimic physical homes).

Exploring personal digital archives for non-functional purposes. David A. Mellis.

One of the things I’ve learned to love about storing bookmarks in delicious is to forget about being organised at all. Taking advantage of idiosincracies related to personal experience, jokes, fuzzy relationships, ongoing thoughts etc. in titles descriptions and tags helps me find my information more easily. It adds the rich trace of my activities that software usually lacks.

Then, using different services adds, I believe, an additional layer of context. Episodic memory is characterized by having a unique context associated with a learning episode. The context of storing a bit of information is both physical (at work, at home…) and digital (where it comes from, where you store it…). Adding variety at this level might help a bit. You’ll save it in a slightly different way, and to a different place, for a peculiar reason. The little thoughts that you have when deciding to store it in either place will also be part of its context.

So my experimental feeling is that a reasonable amount (it’s not necessary to become francis bacon) of scattering could inject some healthy variety to our experience of digital information, giving us a richer context in which to manage our own data. To put it Mellis words again, we might be making our storage less efficient, but we’d be improving our memory of it.

And after all, the honorable 2.0 tradition of giving outer access to personal data makes scattering a simple problem of aggregation. You can always centralize your traces.

Let’s see how it goes.

I still remember that glorious day that my brother told me “hey you must come and see that!, I’ve discovered a radio station and they’re playing Sun ra’s ‘Space is the Place’. Full length!!” (gracias nono). That was like 5 or 6 years ago, and in this time my debt for them has only grown. I’ve discovered there tons of my favorite musicians…

So I thought that you could go there, tune in to the stream or download some podcasts, fall in love with their music and donate some money to support their expenses, could you?

This has been relatively straightforward, but, as with the actionscript to java conversion, I’ve run into some nuances between languages and I’ve definitely learned the hard way (read “wasting some hours of my life”) why pre and post increment operators can be evil.

Grab them here

For usage, you can have a look at the openFrameworks app provided. If you want to have a quick glance at the types of movement, see the easing applet (p5 version).

Being this a programming exercise, it will have improvable things for sure. I’m thinking of some, but if you know anything, please let me know.

After having a look at the last.fm player source code* I instantly saw what a stupid thing I had suggested. In no way I’d be able to figure out that bunch of c++ classes (not that it made any sense to try, just to implement such a simple thing).

I thought of some other alternatives, mostly involving desktop widgets, but as far as I could see, none of the options could cover both my local music and the last.fm player (for when I’m listening to radio). I gave up the idea.

But one day, while sending a recommendation to a friend via the player I realized that I could write some text in that text box. Could I send recommendations to myself? Yes. And how could I take those recommendations out of last.fm? Luckily, they offer an rss feed for manual recommendations in their web services.

So I hacked together some code that parsed my recommendations and sent the ones with my username to my helipad notebook (not public, so I don’t have much to show). I set up a cron job and… You can see that I still use it in my rss feed.

The code is so trivial (and so tied to helipad in my case) that I’m sure you can do it better quickly, but in case you are interested, I could try to clean some of the php mess and send it upon request.

Although they are kind of personal, I’ve been thinking of publishing the notes directly here, since the rss feed is public anyway (and explicit sharing can improve your personal content, I think)

As a side note, I think last.fm could get some value of implementing such a thing. On one hand users could get some sort of musical microblogging, like a contextual twitter. On the other hand, since the info is always from last.fm, it could really enrich artists, songs and album pages, and more seamlesly than the current shoutbox, in my humble opinion.

* yes, I learned how to use subversion. Now I can’t live without it.

While I was at it, I discovered a couple of implementations (1, 2), but I was almost done, and wanted to learn how to make processing libraries anyway.

So in the hope that it is useful to somebody, here it is:
http://jesusgollonet.com/processing/pennerEasing/

*I’m also using them in openFrameworks, so I’ve begun porting them to c++ too. They’ll be here when I’m done.

This edit mode doesn’t have any as2 specific keywords, so if you have to work on as2 don’t delete the original. Otherwise, you can just replace your original actionscript.xml file (you’ll find it problably in “c:\program files\jEdit\modes” if you’re on win xp) with this one. Make a backup of the original, just in case.

Grab the actionscript 3 edit mode for jEdit

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 last.fm recentracks web service gives me the date a given track was played in a timestamp of my current timezone (+02:00 , Europe/Paris, as I’ve just learnt), but my web server is on a different timezone (-05:00, America/Los_Angeles), so when I try to insert a date in the database, even though I’m giving it a timestamp, it gets interpreted as being 7 hours less than it actually is. So a track played at let’s say 31 Mar 2007, 23:55 would be stored as having been played at 31 Mar 2007, 16:55. Not good.

Not wanting to fiddle with configurations or anything beyond my knowledge, I discovered that I could set the timezone in both php and mysql for a given script or db query.

Setting the timezone in php

If you want to know which timezone your server is in, you can guess it with


date_default_timezone_get();


Which should give you a string like “America/Los_Angeles” or any other of the supported timezones list

If it is different than your desired timezone, look for the one you want in the list and before doing any time operation, call:


// set your timezone as gmt +02:00
date_default_timezone_set("Europe/Paris");


From then on, all your php code should understand timestamps and dates in that timezone.

Then for mysql use CONVERT_TZ

Even though it is corrected in php, you’ll have to do it also when inserting information on you mysql db, because it will interpret timestamps again in its time zone. You can guess which is it by having a look at the system time zone variable.

In my case, after trying some hacky alternatives I discovered CONVERT_TZ in one of the latest comments in this post

From the mysql manual


CONVERT_TZ(dt,from_tz,to_tz)


CONVERT_TZ() converts a datetime value dt from the time zone given by from_tz to the time zone given by to_tz and returns the resulting value.

You have to pass it the timestamp, current timezone (’SYSTEM’ is the server time zone) and target timezone and it happily converts between them.

So now my query would look like this:

$query = "INSERT INTO recenttracks (artist, name, url, date, type)
	VALUES ( '$lastFmTrack->artist',
	'$lastFmTrack->name',
	'$lastFmTrack->url',
	CONVERT_TZ(FROM_UNIXTIME(’$lastFmTrack->playDate’), ‘SYSTEM’, ‘+02:00′), 
	‘$lastFmTrack->type’)”;

Basically that’s it. Hope it is useful for someone.

Mind you, I’m nothing of an expert in php or mysql, this is just a method which worked for me. Corrections are welcome.