Blog archive: Technology & applications
"When you blow something up by a factor of one hundred, it gets weaker by a factor of one hundred. If you try to build a cathedral that way, it just collapses into a pile of rubble." - Alan Kay
Having spent time as both a "Software Engineer" and a Structural Engineer, I am always interested when key industry figures start comparing the two disciplines. Alan Kay's insight into one of the fundamental problems with software reminded me of the arguments over the use of the word "Engineering" for software.
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18 November 2008
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Technology & applications
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.
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04 July 2008
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Technology & applications
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.
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17 February 2008
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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.
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25 January 2008
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Technology & applications
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.
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02 November 2007
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Technology & applications
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
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Technology & applications
I have just updated the normaliser application to add a few new features, including album charts and different time periods. Full update history here.
25 June 2007
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Technology & applications
After grumbling about the way last.fm calculates artist rankings, I realised that in the age of open data it shouldn't be too much hassle to knock together a little application to apply the normalisation calculation I discussed.
The application takes a last.fm username and recalculates the ranking based on an estimate of the amount of time you have spent listening to an artist, rather than the number of tracks played. It uses the excellent MusicBrainz web services to calculate an artist's average track length. Why not give it a whirl.
20 June 2007
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Technology & applications
Following last week's launch of Apple's Safari browser for windows, I've noticed the continuation of a pattern that I was hoping would stop with iTunes for Windows. Why on earth do Apple insist on using a non-standard window chrome design, making the buttons much smaller?
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18 June 2007
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Technology & applications
I'm a big fan of last.fm, a web application that records what music I listen to and can then find people with similar musical tastes as me. I have set up iTunes on my PC to automatically send data about what music I play, and I get all sorts of interesting information from it.
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29 May 2007
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Technology & applications
