• 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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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