Category Archives: code

Last.fm Explorer

A note to say that a successor to Historical Charts is available at twothreefall.co.uk/lastfmexplorer. Redesign and restructure aside, new features alongside the charts that went before include:

Interactive charts and plots of weekly playcounts
Charts for only new artists
Information about extreme weeks

For an example see what it does with my data.
I’m pleased with how it’s turned [...]

Django experiments

I’ve been playing about with Django and Last.fm data, intended as an eventual upgrade to historical charts. It’s fun .. I now know I play most music in March and November (university deadline time!), that my top three artists of 2010 so far are Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear and The Delgados, and that my [...]

Sunburn

Exams are over, the sun came and went, I got a first (hurrah!), a job for a couple of months and now it’s just .. working out what now? Completing Chrono Trigger is my first priority :D
Spent some time moving the last.fm charts thing to Python, because Python is tasty, PHP is clumsy, and matplotlib [...]

Charts update

Just a note to say I updated Historical Charts to take advantage of Last.fm automatically correcting misspelled info.

Recursive chmod

Just so I don’t forget.
Directories only: find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
Files only : find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Extremely Slow Track Chart Updating

Should be alleviated – an unindexed query called for each track in a chart list was returning close to a million rows = ouch and hurrah for indexes.

Life in the Stencil Buffer

Stumbling through a load of OpenGL documentation I came across a demonstration of Conway’s Game of Life using the stencil buffer, which is simultaneously awesome and horrible:
Life in the Stencil Buffer
One way to create this game using OpenGL is to use a multipass algorithm. Keep the data in the color buffer, one pixel for each [...]