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Last.fm

I’m a big fan of Last.fm and since I started using Banshee, I’ve reported all my my music through it. A couple of tools came to my attention today.

Digg linked to the Mainstream-O-Meter to measure how mainstream your listening habits are. Digg, being the force they are, have made the site go offline temporarily. My music came in at 68% mainstream. 68%! I like to think I’m a little more eclectic, but maybe I’m not. Or maybe tech geeks like me who use Last.fm just have similar tastes. 🙂

Pscott linked the second one, LastGraph, which graphs out your music listening habits over time. You can set the background color / theme, and the date range you want to graph.

Here’s my 2007 graph:

2007-music

And here is since I started using Last.fm in Oct. 2005:

all-music

Click through to Flickr to actually read them. A couple of notes:

  • I hacked my Xbox, and added Last.fm reporting. My wife listening to music through it really skews it. (Dixie Chicks or U2 anyone?)
  • I’m definitely a streaky listener. I get stuck on an album or artist and listen to the crap out of it. (Liz Phair, Chili Peppers, The Shins)
  • You can tell when I installed my home theater in August of last year. From August to December, I wasn’t spending any time in my office on my PC. It was all about the new, big TV. The little music I listened to was on the Sonos through the network. (I so wish Sonos had Last.fm reporting built-in!)
  • I also listen to a lot of 89.3 The Current, both on the radio through the home theater, and streaming online through Banshee. That is not reflected in the graph. That is truly eclectic listening.

I’m a big enough fan, that I’ve actually subscribed for over the last year. I can’t say I’m thrilled by the recent acquisition by CBS, but I love the statistics Last.fm collects and lets me share, both on their website and through the badge on this blog.

Writing Foresight Docs: Part 3

My original intent in this continuing series on Writing Documentation for Foresight was to post weekly, but I just had to share the latest news.

With Paul Scott-Wilson’s help in IRC last night, the Userguide’s first two chapters are now working in Yelp. Pscott shared a diff file fixing some syntax issues, and pointed out I could just run yelp installation.xml to display the Docbook file in Yelp, or if it crashed, the terminal spit back all the errors and the lines to go fix them on. (I really do need to use the command line more.)

After spending a couple hours on all the errors that the terminal was yelling at me about, we now have Yelp displaying the Userguide (with images!):

userguide-yelp1

There are still a number of typo’s I’m finding, especially as it relates to bullets and indentation, but the menu’s and links are working, the content is displayed, and best of all, no errors when starting from the command line. Check it out yourself from the Mercurial repository, it’s up to date.

Next up: Learn how to tie the docbook files together (Pscott pointed me at this link: http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ModularDoc.html) and package them up in Foresight. These first two chapters took me longer than expected to port to Docbook and re-write, so it’s probably a good idea to see if this even works.

Nadrinplace.com

My son Alex has a blog.

And like his father, his alias (Nadrin) was randomly generated by a game.

My wife registered the domain and added it to my hosting account, and I installed WordPress for him this weekend, and he picked out the theme.

Good to know geekery runs in the family!

Here he is at his desk, his monitor is just out of sight on the left.

DSC01677

Writing Docs: Part 2

Last week, I kicked off the first blog post in my ongoing adventures to learn how to write GNOME documentation, posted as a long rant about my frustrations in the tools and information available. This week in part two, I’ll cover the start of porting the Userguide to Docbook, the tools I’m using, how I’m learning, and my unanswered questions.

After downloading the source for gedit, banshee and seahorse, I started browsing through the XML files to learn the structure and tags. I was using Gedit, but then on Tuesday Og posted about Geany and I decided to give that a try. (And of course it’s in the Foresight repos!) I mentioned it in IRC Thursday night as my new favorite tool for writing Docbook, and Ken recommended I use Mercurial for revision control.

geany-gedit

Ken set up a Mercurial repo for the userguide with the other Foresight repos, and answered my questions on using Mercurial as I quickly scanned the Mercurial documentation. Over the next couple of days I tweaked my Mercurial setup, fixing the author link with a tip from Ken, and getting Nano to be my default text editor as set in my .bashrc file.

One of the weird things I learned with Docbook, is that the section tags, and as you can see in the Gedit screenshot, having nothing to with creating sections in the documentation, rather they are the sublevels within a given chapter. I still don’t understand a number of the tags used by default, such as guilabel, which appears to be a bold tag. I fired off an email to the GNOME-docs mailing list this morning, and Leonardo Fontenelle posted links to the Subversion repositories with the handbook and styleguide, which I’m slowly going through today.

For the Userguide itself, we are creating a folder for each chapter, rather than creating one big XML file for Yelp in Mercurial. I’m hopeful a script can be written to tie the XML files together, but I haven’t even started looking at how you take these files and get them to display in Yelp. I’ve only finished chapter one, and chapter 2 is just over halfway done. There’s a lot of copy / paste going on, as I build the docbook structure for the chapter, then copy from the wiki to a text file, and copy chunks from that to the XML file. It’s slow going as I have to review the tags, and I’m just re-using the structure and tags I see used in other GNOME help files. But I learn best by doing, and repetition. At this point I have no idea if it’s working or not, or how many errors each file may have, which I won’t know until they’re displayed in Yelp. My goal is after I finish chapter 3 to ask for help in tackling that piece, in getting the files to display in Yelp, I’m assuming in a FL-1.

I’ve also mentioned this in IRC, but it’s really interesting for me on a personal level to be putting in to practice all the development practices I’ve read about over the years. From creating the source XML file to pushing the files in to a revision control system, it’s an interesting feeling building something from scratch. And this is just the beginning – once I have a few chapters I’ll need to learn how to package them for inclusion in Foresight, and then update the userguide with each release.

The only downside? With the Mercurial repository being public, you’ll be able to see if I’m working on the userguide or slacking off! No pressure there at all….

Philip K. Dick

I mentioned a few weeks ago a link from Total Dick-Head, a blog dedicated to all things Philip K. Dick. Today’s post covers the new Library of America release of four of Dick’s most original novels that is released today in one hardcover edition. The novels are:

  • The Man in the High Castle
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • Ubik

The Library of America’s mission is to _“preserve the nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions is as strong as ever.”

_

Their goal is to publish books to last the test time:

  • The paper is acid-free and meets the requirements for permanence set by the American National Standards Institute; it will not turn yellow or brittle. The books are bound with the grain of the paper to ensure that they open easily and lie flat without crinkling or buckling.
  • The binding boards are flexible yet strong and make the book light, easy to carry, trim in appearance, and a pleasure to hold.
  • The page layout has been designed for clarity as well as elegance. The typeface, Galliard, is exceptionally readable and easy on the eyes.
  • The binding cloth is durable woven rayon, dyed in the thread for richness of color. Handsome endsheets match the binding cloth and add to the visual unity of the series. The books are Smyth-sewn for permanence and flexibility, and each includes a ribbon marker.

Apparently the street date for the book is today. I actually picked this up almost 3 weeks ago in Milwaukee at a local book store. The book is gorgeous – it came shrink wrapped, and the paper quality and presentation is top notch. I own a lot of Dick’s short fiction, and look forward to reading some of his early novels.