Some of you may have noticed I’d posted my X-Chat Now Playing script yesterday and removed the post today. That’s because its inter-thread communication was broken. This new version seems to be working. I’m gonna poke at it occasionally and when it feels functional enough, I’ll submit at the site—not that it doesn’t work great already. Yeah, I know I said that yesterday too, but this time, I mean it.
jesus X passed me a baton and I do think it’d be a shame if I broke such an interesting chain. It took me well over an hour to give it enough thought and it was still pretty impossible to make a choice, but I tried my best. Note that none of the lists are in any particular order. So here goes …
Total volume of music files on my computer:
A lot. I couldn’t possibly live without music.
Last CD I bought:
Damodara 3 by Damodara, an indie album I bought on a street corner. I discussed it earlier.
Playing right now:
Raining Again by Moby, from Hotel.
Five songs that mean a lot to me:
Losing My Religion by R.E.M.: The first song I can remember hearing and probably the one I’ll have listened to most—ever.
Oxygene 4 by Jean-Michel Jarre: For driving me towards playing the synthesizer and possibly going into electronic music altogether.
Hypnotic Tango by My Mine: For bringing italo disco into my life definitively. Absolutely lovely.
The Chase by Giorgio Moroder: A massively catchy tune that will be stuck in my head for a long time.
Swedish Designer Drugs by Daan: His second album may not have been very ground-breaking, but this track is solid gold—along with a couple on the massively underrated Bridge Burner bonus CD.
Five albums that mean a lot to me:
Release by the Pet Shop Boys: Gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside when I was walking home one hot evening. It was hard to pick just one album—Nightlife is a really close second.
The First Album by Miss Kittin & The Hacker: Arguably the best electro album ever produced and definitely a trend-setter. I’ve listened to it a million times.
Es Wird Morgen by 2raumwohnung: I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that typical 2raumwohnung sound. They never cease to amaze me.
The Best of New Order: Now, these guys are absolute geniuses. Enough said.
Escape by Enrique Iglesias: Laugh all you want, it’s what cheers me up when I’m feeling down. It’s one of the perks of being gay.
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:
Abigail: For putting up with me.
Joris: Because I’d really like to see what he makes of it.
Jago: Because he’s into music and his blog lacks content.
Zulma: For the sake of our organs.
O’Toole: Because I’m wondering if he’d take it seriously.
You know that show on Vitaya where that black woman visits a family, has a yard sale with the stuff they have lying around and then redecorates their house with the money, turning an ug-lay dump into an ug-lay clean place? No, bitch, I ain’t talkin’ ’bout Debbie Travis ’cause she ain’t no black woman who has yard sales, now, is she? Anyway, that show rocks like a god-damned rockin’ chair.
Yeah, I blame the heat.
Joris linked to What is Your World View? (updated) so it has to be decent. My results:
You scored as Materialist.
Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements.
Materialist: 100%
Modernist: 94%
Postmodernist: 81%
Existentialist: 56%
Romanticist: 50%
Cultural Creative: 44%
Idealist: 38%
Fundamentalist: 19%
I’m not surprised, but actually rather pleased. Physics kick ass.
Adding regexp substitutions like s|<(/?)q>|'&'.($1?'r':'l').'dquo;'|eog just because some browsers don’t like the <q> element is what web design is all about.
I could’ve studied a little more, but creating a multi-color theme for the QDB was just too much fun.
Following a discussion I had over at #bs, I’d like to say a few things about the Semantic Web and the XHTML-CSS combo in particular.
Until recently, I didn’t care about semantics in the HTML I wrote; I would use tables, transparent images, etc. all over and obmit document type declarations. I don’t remember what exactly prompted me to make the switch to writing proper beautiful code, but, either way, it was an accumulation of factors and I had been planning to give it a try for a while.
Having made the switch, I was swiftly confronted with numerous shortcomings of standards—needless to say, Internet Explorer had something do to with some of those. However, after a while, I began to realize that XHTML and CSS are the way to do more with less and that the separation of structure and presentation can in fact be a reality. That prompted me to re-write this very web site. While there’s probably still room for improvement, I think the underlying HTML is now a lot clearer than in the old (table-infested) version and the CSS, elaborate as it may be, reflects the actual rendering rather nicely. More importantly, I can do virtually anything with the layout without touching the HTML or giving up semantics.
Granted, I may have gone overboard. After all, the general user experience on my site has changed little to none. However, I’ve always considered things like the CSS Zen Garden admirable and I’m a firm believer of improving the Web. Even minor adjustments can make a big difference toward user-friendliness or extensibility and especially the ones that take little effort are, in my opinion, always worth taking into consideration.
Finally, if I came off a little strong in the afore-mentioned IRC log, I was by no means trying to offend anyone. I guess—or hope—that’s become my trademarked style of conversation by now.
I just implemented on-the-fly gzip compression here. It was fairly easy, since my (Perl) script uses HTML::Template, so all I had to do—after checking if the client supports gzip, via the Accept-Encoding HTTP header—was find a way to zip the return value of $template->output(). Compress::Zlib::memGzip() gets the job done and it’s about a third faster than invoking gzip. Yay.
Just to give you an idea of how professional local radio stations are … On Saturdays between midnight and 1, on Studio Brussel’s Switch, you ordinarily get Discover the DJ, followed by the DJ Files at 1. Just now, after the midnight news, they played the pre-recorded voice-over for the end of Discover the DJ, immediately followed by the DJ Files intro and its accompanying voice-over and the start of Dave Clarke’s set. After about 5 minutes, they realized they’d fucked up, played a jingle, and Discover the DJ started. In the next five minutes, they managed to accidently play half a station ident right through the music, not once, but twice. Lovely.