bellyphant → page three

We decided to head out for a ride today — weather seemed good (i.e. sun was actually detectable, no rain). Hit Regent’s Canal just after the Maida Hill tunnel, and just followed it along. Was a pretty easy ride, except for all the pedestrians — and Islington, where there’s another tunnel! (You wouldn’t guess it, but I think Angel tube is pretty much on top of the tunnel for the canal — strange, it’s so busy on top…) The bit around Camden Lock was also people-packed, so plenty of walking there. Actually, a large part of the journey was on foot…

Anyway, now that I’ve checked out Google Maps, we basically made it all the way to the Limehouse Basin — which is pretty much the Thames. We only turned around because of the tow-path works they were doing; we couldn’t see an easy way back to the canal, so we gave up. If only we’d gone a few hundred more meters! Oh well, next time. (There were a couple of places where we had to go onto the roads around the canal, they seem to be fixing up the towpath.)

So yes, it was probably a more exciting day out than when we headed out west — although that was pretty cool. We ended up doing 30km — which is pretty decent. I reckon we could probably actually get out of the London orbit if we went 30km (and it wasn’t a round trip.) Another highlight was stopping at the Broadway Markets somewhere in Hackney for lunch — they seemed like proper markets, and there was a nice atmosphere around.

Not that I ever usually celebrate Australia Day at all — it’s really just a useful public holiday. This year it’s a bit different because I’m overseas, and the thought of something with Australia-related themes is actually vaguely appealing… James bought Pete and I cans of Fosters (which of course is Australian only by marketing these days — brewed in Scotland!), which was nice; and yesterday evening we went to a pub near Southwark tube that was having some sort of an Ernst and Young related Australia Day celebration — Christie (and Andy) being the link there. It was packed! They’d already run out of VB by the time we got there, but there was loud Australian music playing. Sort of just like being at home! (Except that I wouldn’t actually do much on Australia Day, as I said before…)

We woke up to the usual sound of the weird non-stop reggae radio station this morning. (Lazy on the tuning of the radio…) Except today, the DJ said something along the lines of “Don look outya winda! Don turn on da news!” Naturally, we looked out the window, and were greeted by this sight:

Excellent! You see, part of (in my mind at least) living in Europe has to be snowy winters. I know London may not be the best choice of location for that to occur, but you know… Anyway, we thought it was pretty exciting.

After getting over the whole mental-barrier thing, I decided to cycle to work. After all, I haven’t cycled in the snow before! (And the roads weren’t exactly covered or anything, so it wasn’t going to be that bad.) I put a few more layers on than usual, and popped out the front. There’s something strange about the idea of being able to hop off your bike and throw snowballs…

Turned out it wasn’t bad at all — Regent’s Park looked awesome! (Didn’t get any photos though…) It wasn’t even that adventurous — there were plenty of other cyclists around. Some even in shorts!

It seems that if you do:

rename_column :accounts, :username, :user_name
change_column :accounts, :user_name, :string, { :null => false, 
    :default => "", :limit => 25 }

you get a different result to if you do:

change_column :accounts, :username, :string, { :null => false, 
    :default => "", :limit => 25 }
rename_column :accounts, :username, :user_name

(i.e. the rename happens after the column change)

It seems your change_column gets forgotten about if you do the rename afterwards. The fix: do the rename first. I don’t know how to report ruby bugs, and I can’t be bothered fixing this particular one (it has a fairly simple workaround). Just thought I’d write about it. For fun. (I can also see how this bug came about.)

Oh yeah, the Rails migration thing is pretty cool.

Yesterday was really windy! Lords-cricket-ground-roof-part-blowing-offingly windy. Killing-peoplely-windy (which is really quite scary). 123kph gusts at Heathrow. Anyway, yes, quite windy. I still rode to work though, for some ridiculous reason. Well, the main reason was that it didn’t actually look like it would be that bad — it wasn’t really.

On the way to work, a few gusts blew me about a bit, but I also had the wind behind me through Regents Park, which was kind of fun. The way back was a bit less good, but actually possibly better than last Friday, when the wind was in my face for pretty much the whole ride home. Walking down Leather Lane at lunch wasn’t much fun though — I thought I might go for a walk in the (winter idea of) sun, but the wind was so annoying that I just retreated to the office.

When I got home, I was faced with the fact that the wind was so strong that it had actually blown the skylight in the bathroom fully open. There must have been some pretty serious Bernoulli action going on to lift it up — it’s pretty heavy! Anyway, we had to get a ladder and shut it — now it’s locked down as well.

Anyway, apparently this isn’t winter. I’m told by the weather reports that winter will arrive this weekend — with temperatures of zero reported cheerily as though they’re something to look forward to. Hooray! Better get me some leg warmers (for the cycling, of course)…

A while ago, my friend Andy wrote a plugin for Firefox called Screengrab that takes screenshots of entire webpages. So if you’re looking at a site that has a vertical scrollbar, you’ll end up with a screenshot that’s a normal width, but stretches for the entire length of the page. (I guess you could call it a ‘pageshot’ or something…) It gets pretty good feedback on the Firefox Add-ons site, as well.

Anyway, it’s incredibly useful (if you ever do that sort of thing) — stitching together screenshots by hand is just tedious. I’m always finding that random people seem to need to do this, and don’t know about the extension. So, if you read this blog, need to take screenshots of whole webpages, and I haven’t already told you about this plugin, go and get it!

OpenDNS provide DNS servers that they claim are faster than the ones your ISP provide. I’d have to say I agree. They’re probably also more reliable. I’m trying them out at work today, and I’ll probably give them a go at home. Seems like a cool idea anyway — they have servers is various locations around the US, and now in London. (No servers in Australia though, so probably won’t provide massive gains there, unless your ISP is really crap.)

They also block phishing sites, and do typo correction (e.g. “bellyphant.cmo” => “bellyphant.com”). They also do a search if you type in a totally wrong domain name that they can’t fix — this is where they make their money (they show advertisements). I think you can turn all these features off though.

It seems like a good idea to me. Anything that makes the internet slightly faster is good!

My bike has won an award! Well, not my bike in particular — or even the model of bike I have, come to think of it. But the same frame. And mostly the same important bits. And cheaper. (I got a special with LX components and Magura brakes.) After a bit more riding, I still think it’s excellent. I’ve now just actually got to take it offroad sometime — otherwise I’ve pretty much purchased the bike equivalent of a Chelsea tractor. (Actually “got to go offroad sometime” is probably exactly what the owners of those cars think… I have purchased a bike Chelsea-tractor!)

Anyway, well done Merlin!

It would appear that Gordon has noticed my entry on why Pandora is better than last.fm. Apparently he’s been thinking about the whole expert taxonomy question too, in the context of how it relates to TRIM, a document management system.

After I wrote the previous entry, I decided to put Pandora on. I did note that it didn’t do so well with certain artists. What I failed to realise was that it actually does pretty badly with anything that involves singing. It’s great on the instrumental stuff — it can really get into the “right mood”, and play a bunch of similar (but not exactly the same) tunes. But for some reason it totally sucks at suggesting music you might like — if that music involves singing.

And I think it’s because of this: the experts who decided on the taxonomy spent far more time thinking about the music and how they’d categorize that than they did about singing. (Or at least it seems that way.) Which just goes to show you how expert taxonomies might not work all the time. Or at least that there isn’t just one taxonomy that should be developed — most things can be classified in an alarming number of ways (of which a subset may actually be useful).

I tried to think about what it was that I didn’t like about what it was suggesting; but the interesting thing was that I couldn’t describe why I liked the things I did! I think it might have more to do with the “scene” that music was written as a part of; what the influences were on the artists, and possibly even what country they were from.

So I think the ultimate Pandora/last.fm style site might actually take a biographical tree of musical artists — with as much information as possible about the years they were popular, where they were popular and what their influences. Then it would combine that with the excellent work done by the Musical Genome Project, and possibly even chuck in some last.fm style statistical analysis. That would be cool. (Note that the “social” input into this solution would still be fairly minimal.)

I’ve recently started listening to Pandora again. It’s an internet radio service where you tell it an artist you like, then it makes a station with songs that it thinks you’ll also enjoy. Sound familiar? It’s quite a common idea — last.fm does the same thing.

The difference is in the logic used. Pandora uses experts who listen to songs, and then find their “genetic fingerprint” (seriously, that’s what they call it — it’s part of the Music Genome Project). You can have a look at what they’ve decided is important for any song you’re listening to — sometimes the things they’ve noted are quite interesting.

The other site, last.fm, basically just analyses your entire music library, then uses that to decide that to decide that somehow all the artists in your library must be somehow related. Then it looks at those statistics for everyone, and suggests things that you may be missing from your library.

The problem I think is this: Pandora analyses the songs, and suggests similar songs (or artists). Last.fm doesn’t understand about music at all — it justs understands statistics. If it was based on my CD collection, it would come up with suggestions like this: “You like Augie March? Well, you’re going to love Amon Tobin.” I have every album by both those artists; unfortunately that statement is rarely going to be true (unless there’s something about my musical taste I’ve missed). I like different artists for different moods. Luckily last.fm ignores most of those small problems — after all, probably most Augie March owners aren’t also Amon Tobin owners. It’ll suggest something that everyone else has. Which is just boring. I tried it for a day or two — it didn’t suggest anything that was interesting to me at all. You certainly couldn’t just put it on and listen.

Pandora, on the other hand, does a great job. You can actually just choose an artist, and it’ll make reasonable suggestions. (Actually, Augie March may have been a bad example; it does very badly there — that and Elliott Smith.) I’ve actually discovered quite a few different bands I may have to investigate more through it. It’s much more worth spending your time investigating.

I only have one suggestion: could the people who do the last.fm website and software go and work for Pandora? Last.fm really wins on the website and software integration front. (I’m not sure Pandora actually has any software to download.) I want a downloadable Pandora client, and possibly something that can integrate with iTunes. That’d be cool.