Posted on by lhl

God I hate how iTunes handles m3u’s. What kind of retarded behavior is to load streaming files into the main Library, and then of course to completely lose track of the original m3u order. Hello? What’s the point of a PLAYLIST if you’re going to ignore it? Also, if I select a bunch of MP3s to open, I want to be able to actually listen to the songs I selected (what a concept!) not see them completely mish-mashed (and not queued up) in my Library. So let me revise that: I hate how iTunes handles MP3s in general. (I can’t be the only one, can I? – and yes, most of my complaints would be fixed by having an ‘active/current playlist’ and a button/auto-pref to insert played songs into the Library)

Posted on by lhl

This weekend, Creative Commons announced some great new stuff (7MB Flash), including the new Sampling licenses, and tracks to soon be released by Gilberto Gil. Also, 1M+ licensed works, book re-releasing and science licenses.

  • The great hooky guitar/bass backing is by B Minor Relocation Program from the track Superego Exchange. Their full album, Assholes are Back in Seasonis available for download online; remixes by FlowerLounge (listening to a housey/jazzy mixtrack online right now) and Fourstones
  • Colin Mutchler’s original guitar melody My Life, as well as Cora Beth’s violin duet version are both available in the Opsound Pool
Posted on by lhl

What would be great is if Magnatune had a stream-to-shopping cart click-through somehow. Unfortunately, there’s no real standard. One can embed Winamp minibrowser URLs, but that’s just plain annoying. Neither Extended M3U, PLSv2, or icy/shoutcast have per-song URL support (and no players with a clickthrough interface anyway)… This would be such an obvious thing that people would want to do that you’d think there be a playlist standard to attach extra arbitrary metadata onto streams, but I guess not.

Well, I guess you can have some smarter streaming software that tracks which song to which IP (or some other identification method that’d work for proxies; but you’d have to assign a cookie or something first), so that one can visit a page and be able to buy from there. Not *quite* one-click, but pretty close.

Posted on by lhl

got all my Audioscrobbler plug-ins re-installed; nothing aggregated on the list that’s “wrong”, although I think the Radiohead count is waaaay out of wack. Well, eventually my profile will better reflect what I’m actually listening to these days (music over time would be quite interesting)

(less time to program this output [3min] than writing the above paragraph thanks to rss feed + magpie)

Posted on by lhl

Saddle Creek is one of my favorite labels. After my initial exposure to some Bright Eyes/Cursive tracks (via AudioGalaxy, RIP), I’ve since bought just about every album put out by the label (yes, including the Bright Eyes Christmas Album). Which led me to a slight predicament — the Saddle Creek Store is currently offering a free copy of the Saddle Creek 50 sampler with an order of $25 or more, which would be quite tempting to give as a gift, but would involve finding some stuff I didn’t already have. After looking around, I did find some worthwhile albums to pick up. The first, Rilo Kiley’s Barsuk Records debut album. The second, the Amos House Collection, Vol 2, which has tracks from Elliot Smith, Spoon, Bright Eyes, etc.

Also, picked up a Park Avenue album (the one sample track [RA] sounded great), and also the Fizzle Like a Flood album. The entire album is available to sample online.

Lastly, Hopeless Records is currently having a $1 sampler sale. I’m not much into punk/pop-punk nowadays, but the Weakerthans and Atom and His Package tracks definitely make it worthwhile, a no-brainer at $1/pop.

Posted on by lhl

AmazonInterview3

This was my first Amazon full time interview. It was not with a
recruiter but with a head of a two pizza team (a 2PTL). They were
surprised I hadn’t spoken with a recruiter already..

  • Tell me about an exciting opportunity that you worked on
  • How did you use technology there
  • How did you account for scaling?
  • What would be your advice for rapid growth sites such as Friendster
  • Talk to me about working in teams
  • What was your least effective team situation
  • How do you tell someone that someone else is better at a particular position than them
  • Design a web based email system. Describes pieces, components,
    design, large scale, and use case (This lead to lots of questions about
    the components and other decisions)
  • Why Amazon?
  • Where do you see yourself in five years?
  • Find the missing element in an array with values from 1 to 1000.
  • What ideas do you have for Amazon?
  • What blogging software do you recommend?
  • What blogging software do you use?
  • Any questions?

After the interview they sent me a coding question which I have to
complete and email to them before my next phone interview. That next
phone interview will be spent discussing my solution and then on the
basis of that interview they’ll make the fly down decision or not. The
question is:

  • Code up a simple class in the language of your choice to represent
    a deck of cards with operations to shuffle the deck and to deal one
    card.
Posted on by lhl

Emerging from a full night’s sleep (that was fun). Caught Something for Rockets at the Echo last night. They were quite fun, will be getting a copy of their demo/EP from a friend of a friend, so I’ll throw something up here when I get it.

Quick linkdump: