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You can’t beat a quick (silly) list.

Posted by Sam on 01 Sep 2010 | Categories: Internets, Music

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you’ve heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag some friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what albums my friends choose.

  • Marilyn Manson – Antichrist Superstar
  • Radiohead – OK Computer
  • Portishead – Dummy
  • Massive Attack – Mezzanine
  • Anathema – Judgement
  • Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral
  • Strapping Young Lad – City
  • A Perfect Circle – 13th Step
  • Tool – Lateralus
  • ISIS – Panopticon
  • The Angelic Process – Weighing Souls with Sand
  • Deathspell Omega – Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice
  • Drudkh – Blood In Our Wells
  • Troum & All Sides – Shutûn
  • Steve Roach – Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces

Obviously, there is a new version of Ratebird out, to celebrate 1000 downloads.  There’s some trimming, and some new stuff.  Next time, there will be some more new stuff.  And some more trimming.  Here’s to the next 1000, and subsequent taking over of the world…

Ratebird 0.4

Posted by Sam on 15 Aug 2010 | Categories: Internets, Mozilla

So here‘s some more Ratebird love. I finally have a progress pane, and writing metadata to files too. Unfortunately the latter isn’t compatible with Itunes or WMP ratings, which probably renders it useless for 90% of the people who are interested in such a feature, but there you go; hopefully POTI will take a look at this before Songbird 2.

In other news, I was messing around with a mashup of last.fm and RYM…called, you’ve guessed it, Last.RYM :)   Unfortunately it’s dead in the water until RYM get around to responding to my pleas for unbanning my web server IP address (too many requests apparently).  I’ll see if I can get it working locally.

Sonisphere 2010

Posted by smaister's Last.fm Journal on 08 Aug 2010 | Categories: Music

Fri 30 Jul – Sonisphere Festival 2010 - Artists I saw all or most of:

Friday
First up were Bigelf, who laid down some seriously chunky sabbath-esque grooves with lashings of extra organ. Retro to the point of slightly silly, but still an awesome opener.

Gary Numan seemed to surprise half the crowd he played to, purely by being good. I saw him in 2001 so already knew he was good. Numan's knowing smirk during Cars was quite amusing, and his onstage presence certainly proved that he had exerted more than a purely musical influence on the likes of Trent Reznor. The set was a great mix of newer and older material played with intensity and passion befitting the original industrial rock icon.

Chrome Hoof get better every time I see them, and this was no exception. With their utterly infectious dirty basslines, the Hoof come over like a freakish funk orchestra of doom, a giant disco ball with lots of legs and big metal teeth. Highlights were the giant chrome robot which came walking through the crowd, the epic bassoon walk along the side of the stage, and dancing my buttocks off for the entire set...again.


Saturday
Fear Factory were in fine form, and apart from the odd missed cue from Dino and a sound glitch, as machine-like as ever thanks to the addition of the Strapping Young Lad rhythm section. Gene Hoglan was incredible as expected, such an effortless performance.

Tim Minchin is rightly becoming a bit of a legend these days, and worked a couple of digs about Good Charlotte (playing at the same time) into his material, to rapturous applause. The new stuff was pretty damn good but the setting was just crying out for a rendition of 'so rock', and that song with the ludicrous upwards fan action...can't remember exactly but might have been the one about taking your canvas bags to the supermarket :)

Skunk Anansie were just incredible, and again I think more than a few people were surprised by this. I wasn't because I saw them waaaaay back in '99. Skin's vocals were as spine-tingling as ever, still one of the best female vocalists I've ever seen live. Sadly I missed the start and my favourite track Charlie Big Potato, either that or they didn't play it.

earthtone9 are a strange band for me because the only time I saw them (the Lost Weekend in '99, same as Skunk Anansie), I didn't know any of their stuff and was too knackered after Kill II This to appreciate them properly. I then got into them quite heavily after they split up. So I was close to tears hearing Karl rip into Tat Twam Asi, it was utterly devastating. The rest of the set didn't evoke such a strong reaction but it didn't matter as it was all fantastic stuff and soooo good to have them back. NEW ALBUM PLEASE!

After running to the other side of the field after ET9 finished because I knew it would be totally rammed (haha), Rammstein didn't disappoint. Well, actually they did a little bit, because the recent gig in Manchester was longer and better. Eschewing the awesome entrance where band members break and cut through the set background to get to the stage, this time the 'stein opted for a simpler but no less ostentatious opening - ploughing into Rammleid from behind a gigantic German flag that wrapped around the entire stage. Most of the set was actually from the new album, and they cut the 'greatest hits' stuff towards the end slightly (in Manchester we got two encores, and Engel, complete with Till wearing gigantic flaming angel wings). Flake's dinghy excursion didn't work too well either, with the crowd sending him the wrong way a couple of times; first it looked like he was going back to the stage prematurely, then it was taking ages for him to get anywhere, and then some guy climbed in with him. It was Rammstein though; they tore through their material like a well-oiled German industrial machine, burnt everything they could find and of course Till covered the front few rows (sadly I wasn't close enough...this time) in his foamy fluid. JOB DONE.


Sunday
Rollins had some good stories, interesting leftie views and was pretty damn funny. Especially his assertation that Slayer are essentially musical perfection - now that's comedy.

The Cult surprised a lot of people by playing a lot of songs that people knew, but didn't know they were by The Cult. That included me this time, as I'd never seen them before. Great stage presence, good songs, had a good jump around.

Sadly I had to cut The Cult slightly short to see Converge, who were typically intense although not quite as engaging as I'd seen them in the past - could have been a sound thing. Still great stuff.

I didn't see all or even most of Iggy And The Stooges, but I thought I'd mention how large Iggy Pop's head is compared to the rest of his body. Also, he didn't mention car insurance during or between the couple of tracks I saw. The music wasn't really my thing.

Possibly the unexpected pinnacle of the festival for me, I've seen Kylesa two or three times before and I always think they're great. This time, they were absolutely incredible. Maybe my familiarity with the new album helped somewhat but the sound was perfect, both drummers totally in the zone, the riffs divine and I was in psychedelic sludge heaven for the entire set.


Other Highlights
My non-musical highlights were clearly discovering the joys of cup-collecting (being paid £8 for walking back from Rammstein - THANKS SONISPHERE), rediscovering the joys of Sean's driving (no less scary in a big van than in a yellow mini), the awesomely laid-back 'Smoky tentacles' shisha bar, meeting randoms whilst listening to great music in the Bohemia bar, the bizarre trapezists, the bonkers dutch band doing acoustic covers of famous rock songs, almost failing to buy a box of cider in Asda, getting into a wheelbarrow for a particularly stupid photo, and last but not least, barbequeing anything we could find (Space Raiders, Wheat Crunchies, foam strawberry and banana sweets).

Yet more Ratebird.

Posted by Sam on 15 Jul 2010 | Categories: Internets, Mozilla, Web development

So I released Ratebird 0.32 with the aforementioned überfix for the RYM site.  Took a bit of noodling to get it to happen, but it turned out simpler was better and we got there in the end.   Basically if you’re on an artist page when signed in to RYM, your ratings for that artist’s releases appear instead of the ‘rate’ text in the far right; the long-standing problem is that this doesn’t happen for split or various artist releases…until now.  Hopefully the RYM guys won’t finally fix this in the immediate future, thus denying me my…er, glory?

I then noticed a typo in the install.rdf I uploaded so pushed 0.33 up with possibly the fastest Mozilla extension feature I’ve ever written – took me less than 40min to add a context menu option for library items that opens a new tab with a basic search of the album (or artist if the album tag is null) for that track.  Works for multiple tracks and pseudoThreaded too, just in case.  Will get back on to improving the core feature for 0.4, although it won’t be for at least a couple of weeks.

And finally, I looked at the CDN stuff again and it would appear the aforementioned Google App Engine doesn’t support PHP/MySQL – putting WordPress and this site right out of the equation.  There has been some success in getting WordPress to work but it’s pretty damn fiddly and I’d probably just be better off paying for Amazon’s CDN.  Will revisit at some point.

Ratebird can be found here.

New version of Ratebird

Posted by Sam on 07 Jul 2010 | Categories: Internets, Mozilla

I finally pushed the work I’ve been sporadically doing on Ratebird over the last three months or so up to a.s.c (Songbird deserves an acronym for their addons site too).

Basically I wanted to properly sort out the preferences, and implement my greasemonkey script for RYM into the extension – which ended up being one hell of a lot simpler than I had imagined.  It still took a couple of days of fiddling to fix the script up (the RYM site had changed, some things weren’t well implemented, and some things needed re-writing entirely), but the actual integration of script and extension took only a couple of hours, which totally took me by surprise.  I think I can attribute this succes to a most useful wee tool, along with my recently enhanced knowledge of the way all these extension files fit together.

The next release should be just a few days away – Again on the user-scripting of the RYM site side of things, I’m implementing a fix for what I consider to be one of RYM’s most annoying bugs.  After that, I’ll go back to the core functionality and see about getting my code for multiple matches hooked up.  Oh, and some kind of UI telling you what’s going on, that would be nice.

You can get Ratebird from here.  Requires Songbird, obviously.

Zend Certification

Posted by Sam on 05 Jul 2010 | Categories: Internets, Life, Web development, Work

I passed my Zend PHP5 Certification exam today, which has been a long time coming; work and life always managed to get in the way of studying for and, crucially, booking the exam itself.

It was certainly more broad, less fiddly/fussy than the practice tests available on the Web, and thankfully with far fewer grammatical, spelling and, most annoyingly, syntactical errors.  Whilst the flaws of the exam are obvious (it often favours testing recall of function syntax, specific behaviour, obscure use cases, etc. over real-world problems and coding skill or elegance of solutions), I found it a highly positive experience to really get into some of the dark corners of the PHP manual; I feel I came away with a heightened understanding of the language in general and learnt a lot about the more advanced (and interesting) new techniques available.  Especially streams…that’s a funky set of functionality right there.

Maybe I’ll apply some of the techniques I learnt to this site, but first of all it needs a new design, which shouldn’t take too long now that I’ve found myself with a lot more ‘free’ time.

Gigs of the year…

Posted by Sam on 06 Feb 2010 | Categories: Music

Forgot my favourite gigs of last year.  Just dragging them from Last.fm, so I may have missed some out:

  1. Ulver (Queen Elizabeth Hall, London)
  2. Agalloch (The Underworld, London)
  3. Gregor Samsa (Corporation, Sheffield)
  4. Faith No More (Brixton Academy, London)
  5. Burst/The Ocean (Corporation, Sheffield)
  6. Esoteric (Victoria Inn, Derby)

This year’s list is highly likely to be topped by Esoteric, at a different venue in Derby, closely followed by Rammstein at the MEN Arena in Manchester.  I doubt anything else can get close to those two – although I can always hope :)

New Extension

Posted by Sam on 19 Jan 2010 | Categories: Internets, Mozilla, Music, Web development

So I got annoyed with looking up albums in RYM and decided to write something to extract the ratings into Songbird.  The result is here, it’s actually at 0.2 already because I’ve done quite a lot of work on it recently (whilst being something of a slack blogger).  Now all I need are the POTI guys to make Songbird do multiple genre tagging, improve the search/filter functions accordingly and then make Songbird much snappier with large libraries.  Then I will have the (almost) perfect media player.

Future plans include integrating the RYM enhancer script into this, once I’ve got the hang of pref management.

Some lists of stuff…

Posted by Sam on 11 Jan 2010 | Categories: Food & Drink, Music

So, here are my favourite albums of 2009 – as of now.  It is in vague order of appreciation, although don’t pay too much attention to the order as they are all fantastic.

  1. Blut aus NordMemoria Vetusta II: Dialogue With the Stars
  2. Nautic DepthsSiberian winter
  3. Mathias Grassow & Tomas WeissQuiet Calling II
  4. Arktau EosAi Ma Ra
  5. Mathias GrassowTranspersonal
  6. Steve RoachAfterlight
  7. TroumEald-Ge-Stréon / Abhijňâ
  8. The Mount Fuji Doomjazz CorporationSuccubus
  9. WardrunaRunaljod – gap var Ginnunga
  10. IsisWavering Radiant
  11. Fall of EfrafaInlé
  12. Steve RoachImmersion: Four
  13. KylesaStatic Tensions
  14. Raison d’êtreThe Stains of the Embodied Sacrifice
  15. The Ruins of BeverastFoulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite
  16. ZuCarboniferous
  17. Yhdarl Drone Nightmares, Part II: Buried Burnt Earth
  18. Devin TownsendAddicted
  19. dredgThe Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion
  20. TombsWinter Hours
  21. CobaltGin
  22. UrfaustEinsiedler
  23. Steve RoachDynamic Stillness
  24. SkagosÁst
  25. Sun of the BlindSkullreader

I tried a lot of fantastic beers in 2009, so here are my favourite bottled beers that were new to me:

  1. Thornbridge St Petersburg Highland Whisky Reserve
  2. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout
  3. Nøgne Ø Dark Horizon First Edition
  4. Thornbridge St Petersburg Speyside Whisky Reserve
  5. Thornbridge Alliance PX Reserve
  6. Thornbridge Alliance Madeira Reserve
  7. Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter
  8. Rochefort Trappistes 8
  9. Ayinger Weizen-Bock
  10. Struisse Pannepot
  11. Spire Xtinguisher
  12. Moor Old Freddy Walker
  13. Thornbridge St Petersburg Imperial Russian Stout Islay Whisky Reserve
  14. Mikkeller Beer Geek Brunch Weasel
  15. Anchor Old Foghorn Ale

…ditto for Cask Beers:

  1. Thornbridge Handel
  2. Marble Ginger
  3. Brewdog Paradox Isle of Arran
  4. Crown Ring Of Fire
  5. Spire The Wall
  6. Thornbridge Cherry St. Petersburg
  7. Crown Wood Street Porter
  8. Thornbridge Alliance
  9. Fugelestou Sledgehammer Stout
  10. Thornbridge Halcyon

…and again for Ciders:

  1. Dunkertons Black Fox Organic
  2. Sheppys Dabinett
  3. Newton Court Medium Dry

I was tempted to carry on with a list of spirits and one of honeys…but I think that’s quite enough for one day.

Brewing Update

Posted by Sam on 13 Dec 2009 | Categories: Food & Drink

Dandelion & Apricot Wine (May ’09) – Tasty stuff, although it has had just over 6 months to get there.  Well integrated flavours – lots of fruit, flowery notes, ending on a big apricot aftertaste, spices and caramel (I used some proper awesome sun-dried apricots, innit).

Elderberry & Mulberry Wine (Oct ’09) – Massive deep red/purple colour and soft berry flavour, like a Cabernet Sauvignon on berroids (lol).  Still rough, but softening fast – this will be one smooth bastard in a few months.

Sorb, Orange & Ginger Wine (Nov ’09) – The most ludicrous wine I have made so far.  It fermented out super-quickly, ending up massively alcoholic and yet somehow still sweet, with a massive bitterness from the Sorbs.  Now the bitterness is mellowing and a totally bizarre (and very tasty) big malty aftertaste has developed.  Amazingly drinkable only a month after fermentation.

Mulberry Mead (Nov ’09) – Still fermenting, but not far off finishing.  Strangely enough, it stopped a while ago, then restarted without any prompting.  Dry, massive heather honey aroma, already a complex fruity beast so I can’t wait to try this after a few months to see what develops.

Rowan & Spiced Plum Wine (Dec ’09) – Stalled at the first stage by the absence of plums.  Oh noes!  Will get some tomorrow – and some cinnamon sticks.  Next Xmas will be great if this stuff turns out well ;)

Rosehip Wine, Pumpkin Wine, Mint Wine/Mead, Blackberry Mead, Strawberry Tree Fruit Mead/Wine/Brandy – A glint in the brewer’s eye.

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