Arthurthefourth.com

I Never Thought I’d See The Day

Jun 6, 2005 programmingandInterfaces

I’m still expecting someone to pop out from behind the bushes and say “April Fool’s!” But it’s June, and it is far too hot for hell to have frozen over.

And yet…

Apple is switching to Intel.

Album Cover Browser

Apr 30, 2004 programmingandInterfaces

OK, here’s my problem with iTunes. It’s great that you can assign album covers to your tracks. But what’s the point? So you can stare at the cover while you’re listening to the song? Seems kind of silly.

I’ve been looking, but have been unable to find, something that will let me browse my iTunes Library by Album Cover, the way I do with my real CD’s. I think that would be MUCH more enjoyable than looking through lists of album names. Has anyone seen such a program?

Clutter kind of has the idea, but it doesn’t pick up the art from iTunes, hasn’t been updated in almost a year, and, most importantly, you have to choose and arrange onscreen the albums you want to be able to browse through. If you want to look at your whole collection, you’re back to lists of names.

If you’ve seen anything out there, let me know. This might be an interesting project to get me back into programming…

Taskmaster

Sep 14, 2003 programmingandInterfaces

Taskmaster (screenshot) was my attempt at creating a new kind of to-do list program. All the efforts I’d seen thus far had some major flaws that I felt needed to be addressed.

itunes.php

Sep 12, 2003 programmingandInterfaces

itunes.php LIVES!

By tying together Amazon Web Services, Kung-Tunes, and a simple mySQL table using PHP, I have managed to speed up album cover lookups on the sidebar there, but more importantly, I’ve got album covers for all recent tracks now! I wrote a previous entry about grouping recent tracks by album – this one is about how to suck the album covers off of Amazon’s servers…

[Update 9/15 2:08 PM: I've fixed a bunch of bugs, including bad character encoding in song titles, database problems with long album titles, and issues with including both frontend pages within the same webpage. Thanks to Etan for catching a bunch of them. ]

More Licensing and the Tricky Nature of the Law

Sep 12, 2003 programmingandInterfaces

For those you who read my previous entry on software licensing for my itunes.php scripts and actually cared at all, you’ll be glad to know that I’ve made a decision…

Licensing

Sep 12, 2003 programmingandInterfaces

So today I finished a couple hundreds of lines of code that allow me to do all the nifty album cover and iTunes trickery that you can see in my sidebar and over at itunes.php. I want to release them to the world so that other bloggers using Kung-Tunes can do what they will with Amazon’s vast stores of info. But I can’t find a license that I like!

I Love XML!

Aug 22, 2003 programmingandInterfaces

Entirely apart from how amazing the concept of Web Services is, and how it’s allowed me to suck info off of Amazon’s servers for the music I’m listening to, I love XML because it’s the backbone of RSS, and I just found out today that Craigslist has RSS feeds!

They’re at the end of every category page. So I can now keep tabs on all the new furniture in Manhattan. Or internet engineering jobs in Queens. Or casual encounters in all of New York. Cause those shits are funny.

Can I Take Your Order?

Jul 27, 2003 programmingandInterfaces

More on the making money front. As graduate school can only happen at the earliest in September 2004, and that’s if I pull everything together, take the GRE’s, figure out where I want to apply, and get applications in by November, I still need to find some way to make more money in the next year or so.

I have tried to keep myself sharp in programming by teaching myself new languages: last summer I was working on C++, and recently I’ve been doing Objective-C. However, it would seem that anyone looking for a C++ programmer expects experience with teams developing Windows applications, or something of that ilk. Objective-C, on the other hand, is not going to get me anywhere, and, besides, I’m mad at OS X right now, so…I’m gonna delve deep into PHP. Gonna write a lot of it. Gonna know it cold.

Here’s where you come in. Code is only useful when it does something. So, the question for you all is what it should do? What kind of features would you like to see on this website? What kind of data would you like to see manipulated? Ratings? More magical Itunes trickery? Any and all suggestions are appreciated. I also encourage people to tell me I’m barking up the wrong tree and that there’s a much better way to get a new job, complete with explanation and the time I should show up at the interview.

Thanks.

Data and Information (a queixa.com rant)

Jul 18, 2003 programmingandInterfaces

The other day, when we were at Artbots, I mentioned to Evan that I was “obsessed with data.” This was brought on by the way most “interactive” art pieces function – they transform one kind of data into another: visual to audio, movement to movement, you name it to you name it.

But in another sense, this is an obsession I’ve always had. The information that’s available all around us could tell us MUCH MUCH more than we already know. First of all, there’s our own data – our e-mails, documents, etc. Zöe is a program I installed recently which is hard to describe. Its author describes it thus:

“So what is Zoë? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context.”

It looks like this:

Zöe only scratches the surface of what can be done with a small portion of our own data – our stored e-mails. We have a tendency to think in terms of limited paradigms: search, search by content, search titles, subjects, etc. We forget that there are patterns we don’t see: ways in which we can pieces of data to each other.

WikiWebs are another good example. People often refer to these as webpages which are freely editable by all, but they forget the coolest part – links everywhere that form automatically just by formatting your words in the right way! The data stored in the Wikipedia is not just a set of articles – it’s a whole intertwingular interweb! It’s what the WWW should really be all about! Not static sites with flashy designs! Content! With lots of relevant links to related content! And lots of exclamation points!