I just registered for the O’Reilly OSC. I’ll be attending the PostgreSQL Performance Tuning,
Introduction to XSLT, Template Architectures with Smarty, and Advanced PHP tutorials.
Damn, blogger just ate a big rant that I wrote up over that new WaSP Wired News Article. If I feel up to it, I’ll write some of it back up, but it had to do with web standards being an issue from way back (anyone remember Wilbur and the HTML 3.0 mess?), browsers still being a problem (try to write XHTML 1.1 and dealing with the 16% of visitors still using Netscape 4), and the irony that there are more bugs, hacks and workarounds with CSS2 then there ever was with tables. But that yeah, I agree with the vision, the article and the arguments brought up just rubbed me the wrong way. And having just gone through interviewing for a web designer/developer, yeah, there’s a disproportionate amount of people in the industry who don’t know anything about the web whatsoever.
I ended up spending most of tonight doing system maintenance instead of coding, but I was able to find after some false starts, I found a great tag decoding library called getID3. It only took me a few minutes to get up and running and processing. I have a test script up. If you upload an MP3, it’ll spit back some information. I’ll be working on it in my spare time, it doesn’t look like it’ll be too hard to turn this into a tool that will edit your tags and roundtrip the file. (Not very practical, more a proof of concept than anything).
Bush Admits Dangers Of Pollution — And Refuses Action – ahh, heart-warming.
Spoke too soon… MusicBrainz is a collaborative open database which stores music metadata. This project allows the internet community to uniquely identify a digital piece of music and look up related information such as title, artist, album, etc. MusicBrainz allows users to look up information about CDs as well as individual MP3s/Ogg Vorbis files.
Looks like the project is a bit stalled right now, but it does have ambitious plans to become a comprehensive geneology, tracking influences and participants. Interesting. Currently supported by FreeAmp
MusicBrainz Metadata Initiative 2.0, Aaron Swartz’s article, MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service (PDF)
Others: MusicDB, Open Music Database (planning),
I was thinking about it, and it’s strange that while there’s freedb, there doesn’t seem to be an open source version of MoodLogic‘s MetaDB, because quite frankly their MoodLogic App sorta sucks ass. (It has some cool potential, no doubt, but at least for me, have been a bear to use and not worth paying $30 to buy ‘credits’ to find out how useless it is.
Hmm, crawling through the All Music Guide styles list (or better yet, music map) might be a fun thing to do as well. Hmmm…
Sometime even AC’s post something worthwhile: The best scenario is that copyright once again becomes applied as was intended, to protect producers from other producers, not from consumers. Pirates will be people who copy for resale, not for use in the car.
(Mozilla users get quotations thanks to support for the <q> tag. Groovy, huh?)
The story is “Answer,” from Angels and Spaceships, by Fredric Brown (Dutton, 1954). Here is the original text:
Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore through the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe–ninety-six billion planets–into the supercircuit that would connect them all into the one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.
The Mozilla Source Generator lets you view the final output of JavaScript generated output is one of the most useful sidebars for development ever. Where has this sidebar been all my life? While to a degree the DOM Inspector can work for this purpose, the Source Generator is much more convenient for purposes of reviewing output.
Mozilla 1.0 released today (here), and a week before Netscape 4’s fifth birthday. There’s also a Mozilla 1.0 Start Guide up now, and a FAQ. Neat.