Monthly Archive for May, 2007
That Last.fm found a buyer isn’t really surprising at all. I’d been expecting that for some time, and if anything it’s overdue. They’ve been continually adding new features, like Events, that are always executed exceptionally well and they’ve built a huge community. Tens of thousands of people constantly and voluntarily submitting information about their musical preferences. What company wouldn’t be interested in that kind of marketing data? So the acquisition was a given, but CBS? At least with a Google or a Yahoo you know pretty much what to expect. Flickr and del.icio.us have both done reasonably well after joining up with Yahoo, or at least haven’t taken any turns for the worse. With CBS though, it’s a big unknown and one tends to assume the worst. What would a broadcast television company (read: dinosaur) do with a cutting edge social music web service? The Last.fm team seems pretty confident that it’ll work out well and that they’ll be able to continue as they were but with more resources, but then again they have 280 million reasons to be positive. It does seem likely though that they’ll be able to add even more music for streaming now, though they already had a fairly impressive amount given that they didn’t have much clout for licensing when they were going it alone. So here’s hoping it goes well. I’ve gotten pretty attached to Last.fm over the past couple years and I hope they don’t change their openness towards developers and their efforts to enable music geeks to frolic in streams of sweet, sweet data.
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This sounds brilliant. We’re totally going to have to try this.
I was pleasantly surprised with 28 Weeks Later. After learning that it wasn’t directed by Danny Boyle and after seeing the trailers I was considering not even seeing it in theaters, a drastic reaction given that I’ll go for pretty much any thing with zombies in it. Upon seeing that the trailer featured lots of soldiers, huge explosions, and kids as the main characters I made the assumption that they’d taken things in the direction of Resident Evil with stupid, brain-dead (heh) action, and added a heart warming family element to make it more accessible. This turned out to be entirely not the case, and I’m glad I ended up seeing it. It stays very close to the style of the first movie, right down to the godspeed you! black emperor inspired soundtrack. Of course, this also means tons of shaky cam and low frame rate flashes, which may or may not be your thing. I thought it still worked well though. While there was certainly plenty of action, it never felt like it was at the expense of the characters or the atmosphere though it did contain less quietly unsettling moments than the first. I guess it was somewhat like the shift in tone from Alien to Aliens, though not quiet as drastic. Having younger characters in the focus certainly didn’t soften the previous film’s vision of the zombie apocalypse either. A NY Times review called it “unflinching”, and I couldn’t think of a better word really. If anything did soften from the first film, it was the portrayal of the darker aspects of humanity. It’s no secret that zombie films (at least those that follow George Romero’s lead) almost always have a social commentary of some sort as the subtext, and more often than not the message is that man is the real monster. While it’s a recognizable trope of the genre, sometimes it can tend to be a little overstated and the more subtle presentation of 28 Weeks Later went over well with me. Unlike the first film, there aren’t any characters that are distinctly evil or despicable. True, the carnage and chaos are triggered and then exacerbated by human actions but it’s the result of believably flawed characters and people having to make impossible decisions, not out of malice or greed as might be more typical. There aren’t any characters, major or otherwise, that are impossible to sympathize with. It makes things a little more unpredictable since in most zombie films the unsympathetic characters are usually among the first to go, and quite messily at that. I may not be exactly hard to please when it comes to zombie films, but 28 Weeks Later definitely exceeded my expectations and then some.
Not infrequently while I’m listening to music the thought will occur to me that the song I’m listening to is so awesome that I really should share it with everyone. Yes, but how? Last.fm recently added a feature to let you embed a mini-player to any of the songs they stream (some as full tracks, some as 30 second clips), but getting the code and pasting it into a new blog post sounds like way too much effort. Sharing great music is fine and all, but let’s be reasonable here. This sounds like a job for a script, and once again I’m impressed by just how easy it is to get stuff done with Ruby. Taking advantage of the XMLRPC libraries I posted about earlier, I was able to write a script to get the current track info from Winamp, grab the resource id from the Last.fm page for the track for embedding it as a player and post it to a weblog. The only thing it requires that’s not in the standard library is the Hpricot gem for parsing HTML to get the resource id from Last.fm. It’s only about 80 lines of code. Every time I do something with Ruby, it ends up taking much less effort than I would have guessed. Granted this doesn’t have a lot in the way of error handling currently, and it only works on Windows and with Winamp at the moment, but it’s functional enough for me. Maybe I’ll add more to it later though. I’d like to turn it into an actual Winamp plugin but the thought of writing it over in C++ just gives me the jibblies, since it was so dang easy in Ruby. At any rate here’s the script in its current unpolished bare-bones form, just in case anyone finds it useful: SongPost 0.1
Well, there’s one more thing to cross off the list of things to do before I die. At the risk (ok, certainty) of sounding ridiculous: Wheeee! Morrissey! Whoooo! My throat is quite sore and I think I pulled a calf muscle from standing on my toes so much (note to tall hipsters: the tweed fedora, while stylish, is not the most considerate accessory for a concert) but it was totally great. We got there early enough to get reasonably close to the front, but not close enough to get any of the coveted post-show loot like picks, setlists, or drumsticks. I was pleasantly surprised that he played more Smiths songs than I would have thought. We got “The Queen is Dead”, “Panic”, “Girlfriend in a Coma”, “The Boy with a Thorn in His Side” and “How Soon is Now?”, though my hopes of seeing “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” (only my favorite song ever) were dashed at the end of the encore. I still haven’t gotten around to getting the two most recent albums (actually, I don’t have anything newer than Vauxhall and I) so there were quite a few unfamiliar songs. I’ve heard the latest two are supposed to be quite good and I didn’t hear anything that would indicate otherwise so I think I’ll definitely need to pick those up soon.
Elsewhere