August 18, 2005

Geeky Books

Just placed an order on Bookpool for a few geeky books:



I'll definitely be posting here after I get them to let you know how they all are.

Posted by Jason at 10:18 PM

August 16, 2005

Tunes on Rails

I've finally brought back the "Current Tunes" section of the blog. The sidebar now displays whatever song I'm currently listening to in iTunes and a list of the last 50 songs I've played is here. The song links take you to the iTunes Music Store.

All of this brought to you server side by Ruby on Rails. I hardly do any web programming, but Ruby on Rails has had quite the buzz about it, so I've been wanting to try it out for a while now. I've also been wanting to bring back the Recent Tunes section of the site, and RoR seemed like a perfect fit for that.

Justin William's tutorial on MacZealots got me up and running with Rails on my Powerbook and the OnLamp tutorial got me 90% of the information I needed to get the app working. I feel like I should go into more detail about the development process, but there's really not much to say. After doing the OnLamp tutorial, getting my app working was extremely straightforward. I guess this is why people love Rails.

So getting the app running on my local machine was a breeze, but getting it running on my server was another story, since 1and1 does not support Ruby on Rails out of the box. Fortunately, I did find this script which helped me get most of what I needed installed in my home directory on the server. Then I had quite a time getting a symlink from my web directory to the app's public directory setup and working. Since the symlink was not at the root of my web directory, I had to modify the .htaccess file to properly point to the dispatch.cgi file. Unfortunately, the first time I did this I apparently deleted a crucial space between the $ ending a regex and the path to the dispatch.cgi file. It took me a good while before I figured out that's why things weren't working.

The other issue at the moment is loading the Recent Tunes page is quite slow since I haven't set up FastCGI, and I'm not sure that I can with my current hosting plan. I'll likely be switching hosts in the near future, so I'm not too concerned about that right now.

I guess the last bit of info on this topic is the client side part of the app. It's just a small Cocoa app that registers for the com.apple.iTunes.playerInfo distributed notification (which I found thanks to Notification Watcher). I also make use of the spiffy CURLHandle framework.

Interestingly, I just noticed that the notification does not include Rating and Play Count information for all songs. I'll have to figure out why that is. Other than that though things seem to be working after having the client running for about an hour on my laptop. And I just fixed the bug that caused a song to be listed multiple times if I pause and then played ([album isEqualToString:m_currentSongArtist]? that'd be a typo, though it would be true for self titled albums). The true test will be running the client all day at work tomorrow.

At some point I'll probably clean up the code a bit and package both the client and server and put it up for download, but no promises on when that might happen.

Posted by Jason at 12:50 AM

August 14, 2005

The Mixed Tape

In honor of the recently released single The Mixed Tape by Jack's Mannequin, I decided it'd be a good time to add a new section to my site where I can post the various mix cds that I've made / will make. Eventually I'll probably add some descriptions about each of the CDs, but for now it's just a track listing.

Where are you now?
As I'm swimming through the stereo
I'm writing you a symphony of sound
Where are you now?
As I rearrange the songs again

And this is my mixed tape for her
It's like I wrote every note
With my own fingers
Posted by Jason at 01:57 PM

August 06, 2005

August Music Recommendations

Haven't updated the music recommendations in the sidebar for well over a month, so let's do that now. I've listened to pretty much just two albums this past week at work Catch Without Arms by Dredg and Illinois by Sufjan Stevens.

Nick turned me onto Catch Without arms a couple weeks ago, and I've really been digging it. The music is rather dark and heavy, but not in a loud and screamy way. At any rate, it's really good and now I'm really disappointed that I missed their set at BFD in June. Favorite songs include the title track, Not That Simple, and my favorite by far is Sang Real. Definitely check this album out.

I got into Sufjan Stevens from Ricci by way of Nick. When Ricci first played introduced me to them, I asked how he found out about them, and he said Nick. And I responded, "I thought so, because this sounds like music Nick would like". I'm not quite sure how to describe it, iTunes classifies it as Folk. And while there is some folksy-ness to it, it's much more complex than that. You should just check it out for yourself. My favorite songs so far Come On! Feel the Illinoise! and The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders.

The other album I've been listening to a fair amount recently is One Fell Swoop by The Spill Canvas. This may be a bit too "emo" for some people, and some of the lyrics are a bit too over the top for me. But nonetheless, there's a lot of good songs on the album. I definitely like Lusta Prima Vista and Polygraph Right Now, which are two of the more electric songs on the album. I also like the final ballad, Self-Conclusion, even if it is almost the same song as The Tide (my favorite song of theirs). The album is out on Tuesday and you can stream half the songs from it on their Pure Volume site.

Now I just can't wait until the end of the month which will see Jack's Mannequin (Andrew from Something Corporate) debut album as well as a new Death Cab for Cutie album. w00t!

And on a side note, best of luck to Andrew with his bone marrow transplant. You've got lots of people praying for you. We all know you will keep on fighting.

Posted by Jason at 12:20 AM

August 04, 2005

Recent Reading

I just finished reading a couple books I got for my birthday. First was Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. After finally reading all of the Harry Potter books last summer and enjoying them, I was definitely looking forward to this one. The Half Blood Prince was certainly an enjoyable read and I'm anxious to see how the story all wraps up. I still say that my favorite of the Harry Potter books is number 4, The Goblet of Fire. So, needless to say I'll be seeing the movie when it comes out this fall.

The other book I got was Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (economist) and Stephen J. Dubner (New York Times journalist). I absolutely loved it and recommend it to everyone. The book covers a wide variety of topics from the similarities between teachers and sumo wrestlers to the real cause of the nationwide crime drop of the 90s. Though the authors say right from the beginning that it has "no unifying theme", I would argue that the theme is looking at conventional wisdom, and finding out where it's conventional simply because it's "simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting, though not necessarily true".

Perhaps the best part of the book is that is simply looks at hard data and lets the numbers do the talking. It eschews trying to force the data to be politically correct or fit into some moral standard and instead looks at what the data is telling us (though you aren't going to be learning the ins and outs of regression analysis from this book). They say it best in the epilogue when describing what you might get out of this style of thinking:

Will the ability to think such thoughts improve your life materially? Probably not.
...
You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren't quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea. Some of these ideas might make you uncomfortable, even unpopular. To claim that legalized abortion resulted in a massive drop in crime will inevitably lead to explosive moral reactions. But the fact of the matter is that Freakonomics-style thinking simply doesn't traffic in morality. As we suggested in the beginning of this book, if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.

I definitely intend to read some of Levitt's papers and other material referenced in the book. And as I said, I highly recommend this book to everyone, so if you want to borrow it from me, just let me know.

Posted by Jason at 12:29 AM | Comments (4)

August 03, 2005

Back to School Shuffle

The iTunes Music Store has a new playlist up called Back to School Shuffle. It's an awesome list of songs, and is arranged such that odd numbered songs are fairly well known and the following even numbered song is from a lesser known band of similar style. Good stuff.

Some personal recommendations from the list:

And there's a bunch of songs in the playlist that I haven't heard of and am going to need to check out. So if you find anything good that I haven't already mentioned, leave me a recommendation in the comments.

Oh, and I love the text from the Playlist Notes:

Does your roommate think he's cool because he loves Arcade Fire? Trump him with Wolf Parade. Wooing that girl in your lit class who thinks The Killers are the coolest thing going? Sing sweet Bloc Party nothings in her ear and see what happens.

Plus the Playlist Notes use the term "musicologist" which is what I have on my business card.

Posted by Jason at 11:57 PM