Musings

Crunch Boxes

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:18:22 +0100

After a quick support request from the Plex team I mentioned how much I’d like a linux version of the Plex Media Server so I could look to getting it working on a Drobo FS.

As the anonymous Plexian noted, the major issue with this would be the lack of power in Drobo’s CPU for transcoding — you just wouldn’t be able to live-stream videos to mobile devices from PMS running on embedded systems.

With a bit of tinkering you can farm out data intensive tasks like this to more powerful processors, I suggested leveraging the power from a PMS on a traditional computer on the network, but it got me to thinking:

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could buy or create a totally headless computer which you could hook up to power and the network and would provide number crunching power to any application which needed it?

My first thoughts would be to create/use a specific distro of linux. You’d create daemons for a few common place CPU intensive tasks (video transcoding for example) and, as the OS would be standard, any specific daemons could be pushed to the ‘crunch box’ to perform any other task.

The major benefit of these, as far as I can see, is being able to have the grunt force for processing sleeping on your network, using minimal power, until it’s required. I’m pretty conscious of how much power my iMac would use if I left it on just to funnel video to my iPhone via Plex while I’m travelling.

So, for anyone reading this, do you think such a system could be created? Is there anything you would want included?

Potty Mouth!

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:22:30 +0100

Potty Mouth!:

I had some time to kill on a lazy summer’s day and I noticed that splendid chap Max, had posed a question to the lazy web:

Is there a tool for measuring profanity in code-bases? If not, can someone write it and call it “pottymouth”? Ta.

So I did.

If you know ruby then maybe to can help it be a little better, fork the repo and see what you can do.

I built Blinkers, a little greasemonkey script/Firefox extension...

Wed, 05 May 2010 16:37:00 +0100

I built Blinkers, a little greasemonkey script/Firefox extension that will prevent you from seeing your own Facebook news feed. Why? Because we all know it eats time and poops procrastination guilt.

If you’re still having difficulty avoiding the internets while you work, consider using my DialUp application (or help me make it better!)

I’ve released Thimblr — a tool to speed up your...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:47:55 +0100

I’ve released Thimblr — a tool to speed up your Tumblr theme development. Its a Ruby gem, so it’s very simple to install, with gem install Thimblr, once that’s done you just need to run thimblr, as a binary is installed for you with the gem.

This screencast should help you with the basics, though I’ve designed it to be totally self explanatory, but if you have any problems please open an issue on github and I’ll get right on it!

Please note, because I don’t have a windows box to test on at the moment it just plain won’t work at the moment. If anyone knows of a good place to store settings files etc. in windows then let me know and I’ll get it working.

I finally got round to completing project prime, it’s a...

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:08:00 +0100

I finally got round to completing project prime, it’s a collaborative artwork based on four of my poems, Chapters I, II, III and IV.

Though these are, perhaps, uninspiring names they were chosen to allow readers (in particular the collaborative artists involved with this work) to form their own interpretations and impressions of the poetry. Over the course of several weeks 44 people submitted a little information about themselves and their impressions of each of the pieces.

Each person is represented in the artwork below by a coloured shape. Each shape’s centre is placed on the canvas according to their age, with older people towards the right, and the first people to collaborate nearer the bottom. The colour of the shape shows their preference towards each poem the stronger the primary colour the more they liked that poem; red for Chapter II, green for Chapter III and blue for Chapter IV. Chapter I has is preference shown by transparency, the faster a shape pulses the more it was liked by the person it represents.

If you’re interested in the code I used to generate the work, you can see it in a gist on github — I hope you enjoy it!

Sweet idea

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:50:17 +0000

If he doesn’t get on it soon I certainly will! URLs can be a real pain to speak.

benosteen:

Thinking about making a url-‘shortener’ which shortens urls if pronounced eg http://foo.bar/guid -> http://nowsay.it/waterwingflapjack

In its final days now, Project Prime is my attempt at combining...

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:14:51 +0000

In its final days now, Project Prime is my attempt at combining art, poetry and maths in a funky little collaborative weave.

Hopefully, the result will be a collection of people’s opinions of my poetry in a dynamic visual form… I’m still to be convinced that it’ll work well though! I’ll probably end the work this weekend, and work on producing the final piece… stay tuned

Playgrub Love

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 01:18:06 +0000

Playgrub Love:

Playdar is really starting to gain some momentum as great services like playgrub build on it’s strong foundations.

I’ve just added to Playgrub’s codebase by building some additional scrapers so that you can make use of Toby’s fine webapp to (legally!) listen to some popular radio playlists on your own schedule!

So if you feel like listening to music from XFM, Radio 1, Kerrang! or NME then you should do the follwoing:

Download and install the (frankly epic) Playdar service.
Browse to playgrub.com and install the bookmarklet
Go and visit your favourite radio playlist or musical listing and hit ‘Grub’!

The number of services currently supported is still limited, so if there’s a site you’ve found that lists songs you’d like to be able to grub then please let us know! Hopefully Playgrub will have a request feature soon, but in the meanwhile leave a comment here or have a look at the code behind them - if you know any Javascript at all you’ll be able to write one yourself in no time!

Finally, if you’re interested, stay tuned to the playgrub blog - playdar will only get more popular in the coming months and playgrub is bound to be at the forefront.

Reinterpretation (Chapter I)

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:38:00 +0000

Reinterpretation (Chapter I):

Cy Densham, my literary counterpart, is in the process of releasing a haiku in four parts.

This part, Chapter I, whilst not conforming to the traditional standard for haiku of 5,7,5 syllables it is in the same vein. Hopefully more will become apparent as the remaining chapters are released!

Podcasting Your Favourite Tracks Without Copyright Worries

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:31:00 +0000

I had an idea last night, I’m going to sketch it out here it may turn into more than an idea at some point!

If you’re a hobby podcaster or webradio DJ then you may find yourself limited to the songs you can use without having to hunt down a licence or permission. Despite the fact that its easier all the time it could be time consuming enough to make it not worth while.

Having become quite interested in Playdar I came up with an idea for making podcasting even the most protected of tracks (say the Happy Birthday song) totally legal.

In brief I propose an extension of the XSPF playlist format to include instructions for playing tracks at the same time. This will allow Joe Podcaster to record a voice track (chopped up into segments), upload them and include them in a playlist that includes these voice segments as well as defining resolvable names for the songs in the podcast, each with a description of when each track (speech or music) should be played relative to each other.

You podcast listener will retrieve the extended XSPF, download the unresolvable elements (the podcaster’s voice) and resolve the copyrighted tracks from whatever sources are available, ready to play - because the songs are resolved locally there is no copyright infringement!

A program on the listener’s computer can compile an audio file ready for use in any music player, or programs could be extended to support this format.

Below is an example extended XSPF I’ve sketched out based on version 0 of the XSPF file format (which is available online).

I hope this makes vague sense, I’ve run out of time to write more! I’m bound to make massive changes to this idea as it progresses - what are your thoughts?

Its Been A While…

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:21:44 +0000

Well, its been a few months since I posted last - the genuine joy of interesting/difficult work in my final year as a Physics undergrad - but there’s a fair amount I should probably put up here for posterity:

I’ve become very interested in Playdar - an old friend of mine, James Wheare, is a ket developer - and the possibilities music resolution has to offer. As a consequence I released quite a few libraries and a program that helps some of playdar’s features become a little more tangible.

Voici DAAPlaydar: a script that will resolve playlists of yours (using playdar) and make them available to you via DAAP share. A very cool concept (even if I say so myself!) but it falls short because iTunes is very picky about the DAAP servers it talks to, Songbird works well though :) I hope to be ablet o work a bit more on this in the near future - if you have any expertise with DAAP, you know who to get in touch with!
In order to get DAAPlaydar working I had to build a few libraries, one to decode Apple’s DMAP object encoding method (now a ruby gem on gemcutter called (drumroll please) dmap - woop! There’s also PlaydARR, a ruby library for interacting with the Playdar server (also now a gem on gemcutter). So named because pirates help combat global warming. True story.
My dashing alter ego Cy Densham has released some more poetry, your opinions are more than welcome.
At some point some of the many photos I took while traveling Japan will arrive on Flickr (I’m fighting with FlickrUpload for Aperture at the moment) some of the photos are already up, and of course they’re geotagged so you can just browse to Japan in Flickr to see them.
I’ve also realized that one of the projects I enjoyed working on the most isn’t mentioned on here! Shock horror. irotoku is a (very basic) way of hiding information in images - ie. Stenography - the implementation of the decoder I wrote in C here is quick enough that if you hide MP3 data in a (big!) image you can pipe directly from the image through irotoku to an MP3 player and listen to your heart’s content. Good fun.

So that’s pretty much all for now, Cy has some interesting ideas so there may some more stuff up here soon, but he might be pushed down by this newly inspired Physicist and such tedious things as job applications. Yay.

I find it very amusing that despite 3 years with an SLR and...

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:52:36 +0100

I find it very amusing that despite 3 years with an SLR and progressively increasing skill in using it (or so I feel :P) that the number one ‘interesting’ photo in my flickr collection is one I took on a mobile phone…

Geo Tumblr

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:45:34 +0100

Geo Tumblr:

Well, I’m back from Japan and while I was there I kept an online journal (Tumblr, you rock) to let everyone at home know what was going on. To make things even cooler I vowed to keep the posts tagged with where I was while I was writing them, of course tumblr has no functionality for this so I hacked up a geotagging solution using javascript.

After making a formal request for geotagging features on their getsatisfaction pages someone asked me how I got it done, so I created a (very sloppy) tutorial as a github gist. If you feel like getting some rather hacky geotagging features in your tumblog, this is one way to do it with google maps and plenty of time!

The Cons:

You have to find your lat and long in decimal format in order to tag your post with a geo:51;-1. This was very annoying when my iPhone doesn’t really have this ability. (I used tweetie when it was offline, which posts the google map link of your position when you ask it to)
Many of the posts I wrote in more than one place (long posts, written in the evening about a place I’d left, or about more than one place) which meant there was no obvious single location for the post.
There’s a painful javascript yank on any system visiting the site, due to the amount of computing that needs to be done to work around the tumblr system, which was never designed to do this. (Its not that bad really, but just irks me as it shouldn’t be necessary!)

And yes, Japan was amazing.

Facebook API Niggle

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:49:00 +0100

I like Facebook (despite its recent frustrating changes that make walls confusing) but I have a niggle as a developer using their APIs.
If you choose to use Facebook’s XFBML to put a commenting system on your blog (like I do here) then anyone posting that page inside facebook has a separate comments list. Try posting this page on facebook, if you comment on that post in your feed the comments won’t appear on this page and things you write here won’t appear there.

Granted, sometimes this behaviour is preferable (popular sites might have thousands of comments on one page, and 99% will probably not be your friends or anyone you care about) but it would be good if when you initially ‘share’ a link on facebook, while the javascript is grabbing the pictures and headlines from the page, it would also look for XFBML and tie the commenting systems together if the site publisher had the relevant option toggled in their developer settings. You could even have non-friends’ posts hidden by default (or listed merely as ‘34 other posts’).

I realise its hardly a pressing problem, but I really love Facebook’s interconnectivity and I use off-site Facebook commenting in a couple of places, it’d be nice to see it happen!

Shameless plug for my brother’s music video production...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:20:07 +0100

Shameless plug for my brother’s music video production (music by Kids With Sticks)

get_iplayer - It Rocks

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:16:40 +0100

If you’re a mac user, and like your BBC television (and have a tv license) then you may like my options file from the awesome get_iplayer.
You’ll need to be vaguely happy on the terminal, but with this options file you can grab BBC video and have it automatically thrown into iTunes. With the PVR facility of get_iplayer you can even have them added to your iTunes as they’re aired!

There’s some commenting on the options file so you’ll hopefully be able to tailor it as you need and, with luck, I’ll have subtitles working soon too!

http://facebook.com/jphastings

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:16:22 +0100

http://facebook.com/jphastings:

Wow, vanity plates for facebook. Huzzah!

Helix

Sun, 31 May 2009 12:35:00 +0100

Helix:

My literary counterpart, Cy Densham, posted an interesting new poem/artwork today. Let me know what you think!

"I just realized; this is my last exam and I still don’t know what to put in the..."

Fri, 29 May 2009 17:06:00 +0100

“I just realized; this is my last exam and I still don’t know what to put in the ‘year’ box.”

- Chris Bacon

"Try another pleasure, such as putting your underwear in the fridge when the weather is hot."

Wed, 27 May 2009 00:17:49 +0100

“Try another pleasure, such as putting your underwear in the fridge when the weather is hot.”

- Rich Jackson