What's in Your Menu bar?

Posted by Andrew Fri, 22 Jun 2007 23:17:00 GMT

Okay folks, here's a bit of nerdery. Erik Barzeski has asked what's in your menu bar? and I think it's about time I answered one of his questions. My menubar lives on my 12" powerbook, so I try to keep it pretty small, because I only have so much space, but recently it has expanded.

menubar

From right to left, we have Spotlight, Tunnelblick which is an OpenVPN GUI for Mac, my clock (yes it is 1:48 am), the battery indicator, processor and network usage menumeters, display and wireless menus, Twitterrific, last.fm client menu, Adium and finally Aaron Wallis' latest creation, DeskLickr, a cool little app which changes your desktop background using images from Flickr.

Now, I'm going to turn it over to you folks: what's in your menu bar. And since this is an equal opportunity blog, what's in your system tray on Windows or in your... whatever you *nix nerds call it?

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How emo is your music?

Posted by Andrew Sat, 10 Jun 2006 22:52:12 GMT

I somehow stumbled onto this article about how to work out how emo your music taste is and I decided to one up it. First off I improved the method to take into account how many times each song has been played.

Basically I grab each artist from your top 50, then find out how many times that artist has been tagged on last.fm as “emo” and then multiply that by the amount of times that artist has been played. Then I divide that number by the sum of the playcounts of those top 50 artists. Finally, this figure is divided by the “Ultimate Emo” number, which is calculated by finding the average number of times the top 50 artists tagged as “emo” have been tagged as “emo” and multiplied by 100 to give you a percentage figure.

I ran the program and was fairly pleased to find that:

Your top 50 artists are 7.00467453151953% percent emo.

I’d take that figure with a grain of salt considering some of the idiots who go around tagging things on Last.fm, but it’s cool nonetheless.

The code is quite clean, and reuseable (I did it all properly OO and everything!) so I’m going to see if I can’t move onwards and upwards from here. If you have any ideas of what I can do, that’d be cool. If you want the source, I’ll upload it in a little while for you all to enjoy, once I’ve put some more exception handling and such in.

For now, just leave your Last.fm username in the comments and I’ll process it for you.

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Songs and Stats

Posted by Andrew Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:40:00 GMT

So here’s that post I promised you yesterday. I spent much time working out what on earth I could post about and the inspiration came from quite close to home. I installed the Last.fm on my laptop a couple of months ago, and it’s been ticking over ever since. This has caused me to realise two rather interesting things:

Interesting thing number one: I listen to more music than anyone I know

It’s true. Since I installed the Last.fm client, I have listened to over 5,000 songs (at time of posting). What that adds up to in hours, I don’t know. But in anyone’s language that’s pretty huge. Music dominates my day. I wake up to music, I listen to music in the shower, I listen to music at school, I listen to music on the way home from school, I listen to music while I’m working (or more likely not working :P), I even have music on while I’m sleeping.

That adds up to a life that is saturated by music. I don’t know that I have anything more profound to say about it, but yeah. Currently, I’m really enjoying the new Snow Patrol album, Eyes Open. It’s a really well produced album, well worth a listen. People who also enjoy Eskimo Joe, Coldplay and similar artists will more than likely enjoy this album.

Interesting thing number two: Last.fm have a whole lot of wasted data

Think about it: they have thousands of people reporting back what they are listening to. Amazing statistical studies could be done. “Hit” profiling, to look at the listening profiles of one hit wonders and bands with cult following. They have a limited webservices API, but it doesn’t allow me to look at the exact data I want.

I would go insane just spending an hour or two twiddling with some of the data they have at their fingertips. Just think! I was going to suggest a database dump, but that could be pretty huge. Perhaps if they torrented it, it would be better… I don’t do statistics, but I’d love to profile people, profile bands, something like that.

Why hasn’t that been done yet? I think Last.fm have been so popular, they’ve been forced to focus on collecting the data rather than analysing it, which I suppose is fair enough. Now that they are getting more stable, it’s time to have a look at that treasure trove of data which they have.

If you are interested, here are a few links:

Want to help me with a label logo/album art? email me at andrew@mootpointer.com

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