Same process as before - when you first create each kind of chart it’ll take a while to fetch your data, subsequent charts will be created a whole lot faster. Eventually I’ll make a script to purge the data stored for anybody who hasn’t used the program in a couple of months so keep popping back if you get fed up with the waits.

As always comments are welcome. Oh and suggestions for a better name too..

I’ve made it automatically updating, so you only need to add your data once the very first time you visit, and after that it’ll check whether there should be new charts available. Maybe it should only happen a few days into the week - LastFM never get the charts out on time after all..

That and I added a few extra quick links, to 3/6/12/24 months previous. No more ‘wait a month for charts to refresh’ ;-). I should totally see if I can make this into a greasemonkey script..

PHP’s strtotime function is no end of brilliance - strtotime("-6 months") and strtotime("last sunday") are genius conceptions.

Two things have happened in the world in the last few days. One involves Japanese people getting carried away with their video games and breaking their arms, the other one of the worst possible ways to die. (’A woman in Australia has been killed by her pet camel after the animal may have tried to have sex with her.‘) :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/ :/

I cracked and downloaded the FoFR theme (if only someone would say what FoFR stands for) for foobar and it’s amazing and gorgeous and all this, but it’s not my quaint foobar that can handle several playlists of 15,000 songs and rename and tag and move files and still perform wonderfully. Though it is rather nice to have some glamour to my media player.

Don’t try to tell me that’s unintentional.

We’ll be poking our toes around Warsaw in twelve days now. I’ll totally use Mogwai song titles for posts along the way - We’re No Here, Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home and A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters are a few (though hopefully not the last, I suppose). Smooth connection: These are some great Mogwai sessions. Download My Father, My King and You Don’t Know Jesus if you only want a taster. I have no idea how long they’ll remain available. And go see them live if you get the chance; I can’t think of any band more intense.

This is pretty astonishing.

Chanced upon it on a compilation of Nordic jazz. If you’re subscribed to eMusic the whole album is currently free.

1. Climatepredicion.net (and the BBC Climate Change Experiment)

Aims to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate change. You run, and can view, your own simulation of the earth. s’Pretty cool. The BBC gave this a lot of publicity.

From Wikipedia:

This will allow the project to improve understanding of how sensitive the models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and sulphur cycle. In the past, estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands) of model runs. By using participants’ computers, the project will be able to improve understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists.

2. Folding@Home

A Stanford University project attempting to understand protein folding/misfolding, and related diseases like Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis and BSE. Apparently idle PS3s are having a great effect on this project!

3. Seti@Home

Everybody knows this one; if you read the newspapers it’s the one ’searching for aliens’. It looks for evidence of possible radio transmissions from extra-terrestrials. So far it has a whole lot of publicity and users (over five million) and no conclusive results, but has found several spots worth investigating further. Just imagine it being your computer that provided the conclusive evidence ;-)

4. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

A real slow one. A Mersenne number is one less than a power of two, M_n = 2ⁿ − 1. Finding five primes in three years has been a lucky streak.

The last Mersenne prime found (in September 2006) was 9,808,358 digits long - the Wikipedia article on it all has a nice summary: 1080 is a rough estimate of the number of atoms that form the entire visible universe. Compare this number, with its 80 digits, to M_32582657, which has over 9.8 million digits.

If you need an incentive, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering $100,000 to whoever finds the first ten million digit prime number!

5. The World Community Grid

This is a collective, rather than a single project. Projects are approved by an advisory board and currently include research into HIV, cancer, muscular dystrophy and genome comparison. Pretty cool if you’ve no particular persuasion for any one project.

And there’s plenty more listed at http://www.distributedcomputing.info/.

Playing bop is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

(.. implying that you need to get rhythm down to score well?)

Those songs to me don’t exist, you know? “So What” or Kind of Blue, I’m not going to play that shit, those things are there. They were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It’s over; it’s on the record.

Keith [Jarrett] played so nice I had to give him two pianos. I’d say “Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?”

I never practice my guitar - from time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.

Coming from Duke Ellington, Miles Davis (twice) and Wes Montgomery, respectively.

Iain Paisley sat next to Sinn Fein what the hell is going on? Not fully side by side though, let’s not get too carried away with ourselves.. Long may it continue!

A useful Firefox thing:
To stop windows being resized by websites click - Tools \ Preferences \ Content. Click the ‘advanced’ next to ‘Enable Javascript’. Uncheck ‘Move or Resize Existing Windows’. Live happily again. Oh it’ll screw your popups over though, if you still live with those (..?!)

Finally: Why doesn’t the Firefox spellchecker recognise the word Firefox?

Only the EU could have created a situation where people who are not farmers are paid not to farm.

The stories accompanying the pictures here are wonderful .. this one especially. The man with a wink and a small coin is a strange recurrence and not one whose significance (if there’s any at all) I can decipher. Someone else’s moments.