Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Online radio, as it should have been created

I'm experimenting a new kind of online radio for about two weeks. It is called Last.com. I've first read about
it three weeks ago in a Wired article.
The principe is simplistic but truly great :


  • you create an personal account

  • you log in and you get a mp3 stream (works with xmms) and a javascript auto-refreshing window : you can see on this window what you are listening (their mp3 doesn't yet send title UDP packet). And if you don't like what you are listening, you just change click on javascript window to say "I don't like this, change" (or you can also change even if you like current track.

Last.fm system will learn your musical taste and will progressively serve you music you'll probably like. Then, you can find people who have the same musical taste as you and listen to their stream.. At any moment, you can access all streams you already listened to, to get more
info, order CD from Amazon and so on.
For old web users, this will probably remind you of Firefly, before they were bought by Microsoft.
In short, it is THE online radio I've been looking for a very long time.
Try it, you'll love it.

Monday, July 28, 2003

I hate Monday morning

I usually not like Garfield but today, I am.
During this week-end, there were two power outages in our office and when I came this morning, my main system refused to boot.. I thought it was its power supply (our PC are quite old) but after further testing, motherboard was the dead stuff.. I changed it and had to fight with DOS disks to upgrade BIOS.. In short, I lost my entire morning on that :(
During the afternoon, I had to play again with hardware to re-gain access to my GNOME cvs compilation system because an cable was screwing the switch where it was plugged (we ended to find it was the switch was faulty).
Anyway, I was still able to rebuild Evolution against latest kerberos package Florin did last Friday before his holidays, fix missing schemas
registration in gnome-control-center, fix typing-break module which was merged into gnome-control-center recently (after annoying richard and filling an unneeded bug report, I discovered it was again a missing schema registration in libgnome package :(. In the mean time, I found
again some generated stubs/skeleton shipped with control-center tarball and did a full clean-up and distcheck check of gnome-control-center (it is now only waiting for jrb approval). I've started to backport GTK+ fix for theme thumbnail, I'll hope to finish that tomorrow.

Website redesign

Here it is..
For the third time, I've changed my website design and backend..
After trying PostNuke (too slow, hard to configure, too bloated), GeekLog (very fast, very easy to configure but too bloated for my use and too much painful to upgrade), I've finally discovered PyBlosxom, thanks to Jdub..
BTW I've also stolen his website design (which is now also the new GNOME website design). But my banner is an original one, based on photo taken during my latest travel to Moroco. And my funny head is courtesy of Havoc photos from GUADEC in Dublin, last June.
Also, thanks again to Jeff, I've my own news aggregator, powered by SpycyRoll. Beware, it also contains some french-speaking news feeds :)
Now, I still need to port to the new layout my photo gallery (I think this one will not as easy as other, since it is not fully CSS based) and my lending database. And I also need to keep posting entries on a regular basis :)