Where we relax a bit, loosen the tie and wax lyrical on the stuff we think matters.
The Design Museum is generally a good way to spend an hour or two, and will often provide a little bit of inspiration or extra motivation. Their current exhibition about Richard Rogers Architects is one the of the best they've had for a few years - full of incredible architectural models and renderings of some of the world's most impressive structures.
08 August 2008 | Add the first comment | London, Design
Our last.fm normaliser application recently celebrated its first birthday, and we're pretty pleased that not only has it lasted this long, but it still seems to be going strong. In that year, it has served up over a quarter of a million charts and now has over 215,000 albums in its cache.
It has been very interesting to compare usage with coverage - while most of our referrals come from last.fm itself, this article in Read Write Web, a link from Tom Coates and the launch of last.fm's directory of external applications all provided some welcome spikes in traffic.
04 July 2008 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications, Mashups
The 5 April 2008 edition of Radio 4's "Money Box" program had a segment about the problems a blind user has been having when he tries to access his American Express credit card statements online. Apparently, the problem started in December 2007 when Amex switched statement format from HTML to PDF.
07 April 2008 | Add the first comment | Quality & standards, Web accessibility
I had a pretty weird night last night. My wife and I went along to an event at the London Word Festival, ostensibly a comedy night themed around technology featuring comedians who blog. There were some good names there, particularly Richard Herring and Simon Munnery, and having been to see Saul Williams and le Sac vs Pip the night before, we were ready for a good night.
27 February 2008 | Add the first comment | Culture, London
Read Write Web has just published an interesting summary piece about the semantic web, that predicts the eventual demise of relational databases in favour of "structure on the fly" searching.
17 February 2008 | Add the first comment | Semantic web, Technology & applications
We've just knocked together a stats page for our last.fm normaliser application, that rejigs your charts based on an estimate of how long you have actually spent listening.
25 January 2008 | Add the first comment | Technology & applications, Mashups
I've just bought myself some new pencils and quite like these little twisty things on the barrel. It lets you indicate what type of lead you have loaded the pencil up with. I'm a standard HB kinda guy nowadays, but these would have been very useful in my engineering days, when I'd switch to a 2H for particularly difficult tasks.
15 January 2008 | Add the first comment | Design
I have just published a little application that grabs the top 50 artists from your Last.fm profile and searches for the latests news about them from Google News. The results are produced in RSS format.
02 November 2007 | 3 comments | Technology & applications, Mashups
I don't know if it is a sign of getting older, but I am finding myself getting increasingly hacked off with the gangs of kids on buses, listening to loud music through the speakers of their mobile phones.
02 October 2007 | Add the first comment | London, Culture
After much head-scratching and a few hairy moments with the database this afternoon, we have updated the Last.fm Normaliser to use median track length values in its calculations, rather than the arithmetic mean values used previously.
Hopefully, this should smooth out a lot of the issues people were reporting with a handful of extra-long or extra-short tracks skewing the figures for a particular artist or album.
02 July 2007 | 31 comments | Mashups, Technology & applications
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