Just a note to say I updated Historical Charts to take advantage of Last.fm automatically correcting misspelled info.
February 2012 M T W T F S S « Jan 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Archives
Prickly Pear
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
I love the penultimate paragraph of the Guardian’s report on Man Utd’s total failure at Fulham last weekend:
As for Ronaldo, this was one of those wearisome afternoons when he played with the soul of a pickpocket, trying to get opponents sent off, eyeballing the officials, exaggerating injuries – in short, the whole everyone-is-against-me routine. At one point he spent so long portraying himself as the victim, repeatedly pulling up his shorts to show Dowd a scrape on his thigh, the referee demonstrated how little he cared by doing exactly the same with his own leg. Dowd might as well have made a W for Whatever with his fingers.
And I’m slightly cheered that though I only got 50% for my first machine learning assignment the class average was only 52%. Fifty is something of a psychological barrier .. anything less would feel a lot worse.
Hidden Quotes
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
Take a look at the URLs used to make the charts at the bottom of this page.
ithankYouGodformostthisamazingdayfortheleapinggreenlyspiritsof
treesandabluetruedreamofskyandforeverythingwhichisnatural
whichisinfinitewhichisyesithankYouGodformostthisamazingday
fortheleapinggreenlyspiritsoftreesandabluetruedreamofskyand
foreverythingwhichisnaturalwhichisinfinitewhichisyeseecummings
It’d be even cooler if the chart was at all attractive..
A Mystery Solved
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
Forever ago, in the glory-days of Napster and Kazaa, I discovered Radiohead (hurrah!) and amidst the 28.8kb/s hunt for b-sides and rarities on other people’s computers found myself in possession of a song called Cogs. It was a weird and haunting song that seemed to fit right into the Kid A/Amnesiac theme but didn’t fit with GreenPlastic’s suggestion that Cogs was an alternate title for Last Flowers.
It became this anomaly in my collection, Radiohead but not, and I forgot about it until today, when I thought I’d scan it with Last.fm’s command line fingerprinter which told me:
<track confidence="0.245223">
<artist>Ennio Morricone</artist>
<title>Man With A Harmonica</title>
<url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ennio+Morricone/_/Man+With+A+Harmonica</url>
</track>
Which wasn’t what I expected at all.
But now a six-year odd mystery has been solved and I’d love to know how the fingerprinter works. Probably some hairy maths .. it’s impressive it can figure these things, especially now they’re automatically redirected.
It’s still an excellent song.
Eyes
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
He’s standing there on Platform 5 of London Bridge station. He always is. Always in the same spot, always in the same outfit, always staring at me, always. And I’m always here, watching him.
We started forty years ago. Little has happened since. Every day we are here, staring.
I know his eyes.
They’re dark blue and jealous and bitter. I tried to decipher what had happened to make them once, but their glare intensified and I was scared so I backed down.
Recursive chmod
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
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
Monday, January 5th, 2009
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.