So I’ve been somewhat remiss at keeping on top of this blogging malarky, and the site as a whole is massively out of date.  I’m busy putting my RYM extension stuff on github and I’ll have a good bash at reworking this site into a nice home for my projects.  More to come…

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Ratebird 0.51 is out; just a minor, and slightly dirty, update before I rewrite most of the core code.  It’s overdue a rewrite, as the extension is getting harder and harder to maintain without any kind of OO love.  After that, I’ll take a little time to port the RYMEnhancer section to Firefox (and potentially Chrome), before moving on to address the multiple matches issue.

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• Dandelion and Apricot Wine – ended up more Apricoty than a very Apricoty thing.  I only have one bottle out of 6 left.  It was pretty good for a first attempt at wine-making.
• Mulberry Mead – just keeps getting better and better.  The Mulberry flavour has come out a lot, almost competing with the heather now.  Wonderfully drinkable considering how dry it is.
• Sorb, Orange & Ginger Wine – bitter yet sweet, and hard to drink…a sipper.  Still balanced and pretty yum, despite the malty aftertaste dropping off a bit.  Smells like Pink Grapefruit.  Could do with a bit more roundedness, hopefully another 4-6 months aging should do it.
• Elderberry and Mulberry Wine – FINALLY bordering on drinkable, although still tastes like a young red wine.  This one may need another year before it’s good; I wonder if this is because it was made from 100% juice?
• Rowan and Spiced Plum Wine – The overly sweet pre-mulled christmas delight is still overly sweet, and still tastes like a mulled wine should.  I think the plum might be coming out a bit more, which is nice.  Should be really good when it starts to get properly cold – assuming we don’t have a horrible mild and wet winter like most years these days.
• Rosehip, Blood Orange & Hibiscus Wine – I took forever to get this one going, for one reason and another.  It’s fully fermented now and somehow really rather drinkable; I thought this was meant to take 2 years?  Anyway it can wait at least a year; my patience scares me sometimes
• Elderflower and Rhubarb Wine – Again, just finished and strangely drinkable.  Very weird, although this one should only be 6-8 months before it’s properly tasty.
• Dandelion, Green Raisin & Ginger Wine – On the way to fermentation, I just need to get some bottles to free up a demijon and more sugar.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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