During the weekend I decided to hack together my own last.fm radio player in Python. I had found the My Playlist station pretty useless after being treated to the same three songs over and over again, and set out to code a player that would autoskip any songs I’ve already listened to once during a “session”.
So I combed the web and the official developer forum for useful information and even ended up digging into the official desktop client source code to find the answers to my questions. All information needed to implement a client (bar already officially documented components) have now been compiled into one spec-like entry in my last.fm journal.
I seriously don’t know how I could lived this long and used my Gentoo installation without enabling anti-alias for the rendering of fonts. For a long time I have admired Konqueror (or KHTML to be precise) for its beautiful renditions of web pages compared to Firefox, text rendering so soft and clear, thinking it was a KHTML thing. Turns out that all I had to do was to edit some files and restart X.
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I have been playing around with the Amazon Web Services and S3 in particular over the last couple of days. It’s something I have planned to do for a long time now but never have come around till now. But I got a kick in the but to wake up and smell the Amazon Kool-Aid (ok, too many mixed metaphors and pop-cultural references) when I heard Jeff Barr’s presentation “Web Services: Fuelling Innovation and Entrepreneurship” from d.Construct 2006 about AWS, especially how easy it is to get started and play around with the services. One of the tools he mentioned, S3 Firefox Organizer, a Firefox add-on, had me up and running in matter of minutes.
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My comment over at Jeremy blog managed to get somewhat botched so here is it in its original glory:
My approach from now will be fluid layouts using max-width (or “telescoping” layouts as I like to call them) and deal with IE6 using Dean Edwards IE7 script as Eric pointed out a long time ago (at least in internet time).
That leaves us with IE6 browsers with JavaScript turned off and other non-webstandard complying browsers. My hunch is that a fluid layout will look pretty decent in these cases anyway. In terms of Yahoo Graded Browser Support: these aren’t our A-grade browsers. One can not make a web site look exactly the same for all types of browsers, but then that’s the idea behind going fluid.
I haven’t yet managed to read through all the other comments that post generated. It’s a nice concept that Jeremy has going by the way, allowing commenting on posts selectively and not display them publicly until the commenting is closed.
Yesterday I realized that I really need to get on with the redesign when I had to add an !important to get a CSS-rule to apply. Thanks to Firebug 1.0 beta I got a painful visualization of how inefficient the current code can be, my custom rules on top of the Sanbox “Kubrick” skin.
Here’s an idea I’ve been entertaining for some time now and that I would like to see realized: A word navigator. I know that in the field of computational linguistics there’s several implementation of this kind for different areas of our syntactic, lexicographic and semantic network of knowledge for our understanding of language. But what I imagine is a practical application for everyday life and work.
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Over the coming months, I’m going to tear down and redesign this site. I plan to do it slowly, making it a great practice and learning experience for me personally. What I plan to do is chronicle the process, describe steps I’m going to take, what the options are and the rationale behind my choices.
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