• 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 out.

The caption attached to Kim Jong-il is brilliant:

Bet he is.

Calton Hill, Edinburgh, April 30th.

This e-mail may be confidential and privileged. Do not open it if you are in any doubt that you are the intended recipient. You must scan this e-mail and any attachments for the presence of viruses or any other unwelcome content. This e-mail must be read in conjunction with the important legal notice at …..

I don’t understand the complete misunderstanding of email/technology you need to deem silly things like this legally useful.

I was a little disappointed nobody matched the heroic efforts of Catherine Taylor-Dawson, of the Vote For Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket Party, who managed to get just one vote in Cardiff North in 2005, apparently a record low for any candidate in a general election since universal suffrage. And she wasn’t even registered there!

According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact.

The Big Red Door was an interesting one .. the entire crowd looked like this. No exaggeration. Some cracking music though. The Banana Sessions were a super start to the night, especially their Prodigy medley. Then just about the most ridiculous band I’ve ever seen playing catchy reggae that didn’t make much sense. A singer wearing zebra-print tights, a Newcastle United t-shirt, a sailor’s hat and a superb beard. A bassist in trousers and cape. A guitarist in boxer shorts and a t-shirt three or four sizes too small. Another guitarist who looked like he’d wandered in after a few cans on the Meadows, playing an unmiced box with strings that surely nobody could hear. It was great fun and I’ve got no idea who they were. The Horndogs finished up, they play exactly what I wish I’d got myself into when I came to Edinburgh.

Was well up for Departure Lounge -- this video of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble had me pretty excited

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ospt8g4i-9k

The Souljazz Orchestra were cracking, some really exciting afrobeat with tenor and alto saxophonists that looked just like the two men in the Jam lizards sketch and a wonderful baritone. Highly recommend them. The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble were a bit more PARTY and YEAH! and PARTY than the tunes I hoped they’d play, but I was more frustrated by all the people trying to shove past when there was nowhere to go. Rather ruined it.

Pretty mad that of the nine members of HBE, eight are brothers, they have four mothers between them and another fifteen brothers.

I’m writing this as Gordon Brown apologises for being rude and honest.

‘I’ve just been talking to Gillian, etc. etc. GHASTLY SMILE GHASTLY SMILE.’

I really hope we don’t have to put up with another four years of Brown’s fakery.

I also discovered that using a foreign key of an object returned by a Django QuerySet as a dictionary key prompts Django to look the actual data up. I had something like the following:

class WeekData(models.Model):
    artist = models.ForeignKey(Artist)
    plays = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    ..

tracking = defaultdict(int)
for week in WeekData.objects.all():
    tracking[week.artist] += week.plays


The dictionary update was taking ages. Confused, I enabled Mysql’s logging and discovered 25,000 lines of the following..

SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 22
SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 23
SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 24
SELECT `id`, `name` FROM `muncher_artist` WHERE `id` = 25

At which point I realised that using week.artist as the key here looks up the artist every time, meaning 25,000 useless database queries and a really, really slow function. Perhaps I was being too hopeful in my expectation that Django would be clever.

Changing the last line to:

tracking[week.artist_id] += week.plays

sped the function up by a factor of ten and lets me produce images like this in reasonable time:

It’s showing which artists occupy which chart positions as the weeks go by. The dark black line is for Fleet Foxes .. seems I went pretty mad for them :o

Plus a couple more here.

Thought I’d see if eMusic was still value for money this afternoon .. astonished to find a year’s subscription is still £140 but they’ve reduced the number of songs allowed by from 90 to 35. So I’ll be giving that a miss. How do they expect to compete with Spotify?

And so, ladies and gentlemen, as the gentle donkey of time is lead into the tranquil Bethlehem of hope, before having his ears blown off by the Israeli army of eternity, I notice it’s the end of the show..