bellyphant → page four

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.

As the title of this post may suggest, I reckon Rubinius is genuinely a cool project. Basically, It’s a Ruby VM written in Ruby — in a similar way to PyPy is a Python VM written in Python. How does it work, you say? Part of the code translates Ruby to C. It translates itself to C, then compiles, and there you go, you have a VM. Obviously you have to go through this bootstrapping process using an existing interpreter, but once you’ve got that on one platform, you’re sorted. (And if you did have to write one in a different language first, it needn’t be all that good. Luckily Ruby has a fairly decent one though.)

Why do I think this is the next VM? Well, the only other one that seems to have any hope is JRuby, and that’s written in Java. And that just seems boring… If a language is good, it should be capable of hosting itself — Java should be the same, actually. (Are there any Java on Java VMs out there?)

I haven’t actually tested Rubinius yet. I will at some point; even if it’s not that great at the moment, I’m pretty sure it’ll be great soon.

Well, today I needed a change. I needed some sun, and I needed to see something different — something other than rain. Luckily a rainy morning turned into a sunny lunchtime. So I walked to Fleet Street (apparently I work less than 10 minutes from Fleet Street; I reckon that’s quite cool; I don’t know why though), found a bakery that sells baguettes for reasonable prices (hooray!), found Ludgate Circus (I’ve been wondering where that is), walked over Blackfriars bridge, went into the Tate Modern, had a look at the slide installation (didn’t go on it though — next time!), walked over the Millenium Walkway (think that’s what it’s called), past St Paul’s, back up Fleet Street, up Farringdon Street, Holborn Viaduct and back to work.

It really is quite cool how much of this place you can see in such a short time.

Last night we went to see Australian band Sodastream play at St-Giles-in-the-Fields. I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever been to a gig in a church before, so I thought it might be the pick of the two gigs they’re playing in London (they’re playing next week at Kilburn, which is practically next door). It certainly was (I assume) — the church made for a pretty awesome venue. Some photos:

Anyway, I enjoyed it heaps. I don’t actually know a whole lot about Sodastream, but I think this gig has made me want to find out more. I think I had always assumed there were more than two guys in the band; I guess that shows how ignorant I am! If they come by your way, they’re well worth checking out. (Oh yeah, that third photo above is Sodastream’s Pete Cohen playing the saw. It sounded kind of like a theremin).

They were supported by Shady Bard (who I hadn’t heard of but quite enjoyed — I wouldn’t want to possibly insult them by comparing them to other bands, but definitely thought there were shades of Mogwai in there — but with more/audible singing) and The Clientele (who I also hadn’t heard of, but seemed to be more comfortable on stage than Shady Bard so I assume they’ve been around longer; I didn’t like them as much, but they were quite good). Photos:

We also went to the Science Museum in the afternoon before going to the gig. That place is great! Damn the stupid Transport for London Journey Planner though — it told us that we had to take two buses to get there, which we did. In the pouring rain, changing at the totally inconvenient circus that is Hyde Park Corner. Turns out there was a bus that basically goes straight from our front door to the museums. Oh well, next time.

Update 8 Jan 2007:

• Review of the gig here (not by me, obviously — they also didn’t seem to see Shady Bard, which is a pity).
• Photos by grange85
• Photos by robster75
• Photos by GiaScala

I’m actually in a few of the crowd photos by grange85, and my big head is in the bottom right of this one — I don’t have the nickname “Big Headed Simon” for nothing! (Sorry if I blocked anyone’s view…) I can’t believe how crowded it got — when we got there we pretty much just walked up to the front. For some reason no-one was sitting there, and even then people were only filling up the first three rows or so.

I’m trying out Feedburner — so now my RSS feed should be going through it. The new url for the feed is here (although the old URL redirects there as well, so if you have a smart reader, you should get it). I’m mainly doing it to find out what the hell Feedburner is really, and what it does. That and Google Analytics doesn’t seem to tell me that much (that could be due to the general lack of traffic, of course!).

Reading the article Matching Objects with Patterns (via Lambda the Ultimate), I was reminded of the Scala Programming language. It mixes up OO and functional ideas in a way I seem to remember approving of in the past. Perhaps most interestingly, it runs on the Java VM. I think there might even be a .NET version.

It’s not quite the “bordering on total language decomposition” language I think I’m looking for, but it does look like it could be worth spending some time on.

The pattern matching paper is quite interesting as well — and shows some of the declarative power of a decent functional language. I’ve found myself over recent years wishing that I could just put a “yacc for objects” into my projects. I never really thought about it much, but that paper seems to indicate that it’s not such a bad idea :) I should probably spend more time fiddling around with functional languages…

Old news perhaps (being that the post is from 2005), but Bodhi found this, and I found it amusing (and interesting — as the tags for this post imply…):

Beyond embiggens and cromulent

So it would appear that the new style I put up a while ago doesn’t work well in Internet Explorer 7 (and possibly IE 6, but I haven’t tested it). Some of the blog entries end up not line-wrapping — every paragraph is just one line. It would also appear the same problems happens with Opera. Hmmm…

In the meantime, use Firefox — that’s what I do!