Tell me what you listen to ..

.. and I'll give you more of that!

This is what Pandora project (a child of Music Genome Projects) seems to do. You tell them the name of one song or artist, they search their database and create a radio station that plays that kind of music. You can fine-tune the selection ("I like it" / "I don't like it"), and see why the specific song is playing.

Totally cool!

They do this by having a huge database of songs with a lot of attributes which describe them, and I don't mean just artist / genre info, there's information about the vocals, the rhythm, the sounds, etc, etc ... or so they say. I guess the search is just an attribute matching.

Too bad this isn't more open. Currently they're using Flash. Dear Santa: This year I'd like an open web service provided by Pandora for searching for similar songs.

A long tradition...

In other news, I've recently found out that Ubuntu distribution has a long tradition:

<onkarshinde> reter: Which Ubuntu? 5.04 or 5.10?
<reter> 5.94

That's eleven years! :-)

Update: Of course, only after I blogged this, came the realization that the fraction represents the month, not the year. So, that's Ubuntu from Oct 2012. Hey, a time-traveler! I must ask him a bit about lotterry ;-)

The Missing Piece

I've always felt that, no matter how good the GNOME desktop became, other systems were more productive and suited for regular users, always one step ahead. What was missing? The answer was ever elusive, until now!

Tonight, I've finally realized what is the missing piece, the "killer tool" that will help GNOME realize its full potential on the Desktop and Beyond, and in the process help me achieve eternal glory.

I proudly present:

The Desktop Cleanup Wizard [TM]

Currently this wonderful tool just sits in the Notification Area and displays the above message. Various studies have shown that users have never, ever, needed the rest of the functionality (such as actually "cleaning" the desktop), so I have not bothered to code everything in. If you do need it, please drop me a comment and I'll see what I can do.

On a more productive side: I've used Python and libnotify for this, and since there's currently no Python bindings for libnotify (until some changes are made), I hacked a small wrapper for myself. This is probably buggy and doesn't contain all the functionality present in the library (most notably, I've completely ignored callbacks), but nevertheless, here it is if someone wants it. The sample script that uses it can be found here.

Gmail Draft goodness

I've just spend a few minutes writing a mail, and chatting in the background, switching between my Firefox and my X-Chat all the time. Then, in one moment, I hit the backspace key, wanting to erase a character in my mail message, and before I knew it my browser went backwards in time.

That is, it left the current page and visited the previous page in history. The current page was gone, and all my message text with it.

Enter the tonight's hero: after visiting my Inbox in Gmail again, I've noticed a red Draft item in the thread in which I was going to post. Thankfully, just before my Backspace accident, Gmail saved the draft of the message.

Thanks, Google! ;-)

Ruby On Railgun

Ruby on Rails is sooo yesterday! Meet the today's buzzword of hip web masters: Ruby On Railgun

Blast the competition out of the sky Internet!

Patent-pending and copyrighted by Nabijach.

Brave new Ubuntu world

My Ubuntu adventure continues! Since the last post, I've upgraded to Breezy proper, and was really impressed with how smooth the thing works. I also began preaching about it to my friends (well, just mentioning it at strategic times, in fact :), and got in an argument with zvrba about whether Ubuntu or Gentoo is better and why (yeah, I know, it's silly).

One thing that I've always held agains Debian, and now Ubuntu, is the principle of "if you need something, download it off the 'net". That's cool if you have broadband Internet connection, but here in Croatia most people are still stuck on 56k modems. Imagine downloading kubuntu-desktop over that ;-) So, I started thinking about compiling a list of mostly-used packages and putting it on DVD. The newly-created Croatian LoCo team liked the idea, so a new project was created: Ubuntu Ningi (this is an unofficial project, but we hope that the Ubuntu powers-that-be will like it). Check it out, tell us what you think, and if you have Breezy, upload your list of packages and help!

Oh, and as a side-effect, I've become a de-facto member of Croatian LoCo team, so now I'm in the process of officially registering with them :)