Peterbe.com

I really do enjoy my Pandora internet radio station and it greatly pleases me to hear about the Pandora Version 2 which they emailed me about just a few days ago.

"As one of our most treasured early listeners, we want to make sure this transition works for you?-recognizing that you subscribed at a time when subscription was the only option. To that end, we've automatically given you a complimentary upgrade of your current quarterly subscription to an annual subscription-9 additional months at no cost to you."

Cool. Not only are they upgrading my subscription, they're also vastly improving the whole service:

"As you read this, we are releasing Pandora Version 2. In addition to many new features including bookmarking, station editing, playlist improvements and much fine-tuning, the new service will now include a free, ad-supported version. Listeners have the choice to subscribe and stay clear of ads, or use the free service which will gradually incorporate advertising."

What can I say? Use Pandora!!

"WOW!! 107 Days and I have lost 46.2 Pounds! Eating ONLY McDonalds!!!"

Here's a guy with some real self distance: Kevin O'Connor of MyMcDiet.com

"Super Size me was the wrong message! It's you, not them, that is responsible. Great idea Morgan, tell a fat guy it is not their fault. How about telling them to get off their fat butts and do something before they hurt themselves. You don't have to stop eating at McDonald's or anything else you like, you just have to match it with the appropriate amount of exercise! Watch me."

This is so cool. Kevin has set out to prove the Super Size Me film wrong. It's not about MacDonald's and it's evil corporate ideals. It's about the individual and her decision. Kevin understands that you remain/become a "big fat guy" from unhealthy food; but he also points out that unhealthy food exists elsewhere too.

"Yes I have elected not to buy McDonald's on occasion and went to the grocery store, just to find myself buying doughnuts and bearclaws! What would have been better for me, the bagel, egg and cheese with orange juice or 3 big fat doughnuts that made me crave more sugar all day. Get real people. Take AIM, at ourselves. Stand up for yourself."

Last night I wrote a little function that tries to show dates cleverly by comparing the date with todays date, it formats the date differently.

If the date is today is just says "Today 10:00" and for yesterday it says "Yesterday 10:00". If it's within a week it shows is like this "Thursday 10:00". If the date is older than about 30 days it skips the time part and just shows "13-May 2005" and if anything else (ie. > 7 and < 30 days) it shows the whole thing like this "13-Oct 2005 10:00".

What do you think about this? ...from a usability/accessability point of view. One counter argument I have against this is that if you print off a page where it says "Today 12:22" and leave that printed paper for a few days, what "Today" means will change.

To demonstrate it, I've put together a little demo page so that you can get a feel for how it works. Please let me know what you think.

This is definitely unique and you can guarantee that if you have one of these you'll get so much close-range attention and comments like "you're weird". It'll also be a guaranteed ice breaker conversation topic. Or like they say on their website:

"Stranger than your mother-in-law, the all new Radio Active watch just hit the stores in Japan, featuring an all new unique way to display the time. Looks hard at first but trust me after about one day, you can tell the time almost as fast as a regular watch. Guaranteed that everyone who sees it will ask you about it."

It's only ¥11900 ($100 US dollars or £60 British pounds) and my watch is starting to fall apart. Perhaps this is what I should get next!

Yesterday I wrote about my first screencasting test but I've now found something even cooler. It's called pyvnc2swf. It's a Python script that intercepts a VNC connection to record the screen. I haven't tried it yet but I will soon because as I mentioned in my previous post Camtasia Studio only works on Windows and I only use Linux.

If you want to see it used in action, check out Ian Bicking's screencast about ajaxy exception catching

I think there's a lot of potential in screencasting. As far as I've understood, screencasting is when you make a movie recoding in some manner of what happens on the computer screen. To test this I downloaded Camtasia Studio 3 and as a demo I created a new Issue Tracker instance on www.issuetrackerproduct.com. The next time I do this I'll make sure I plan what I want to do instead of just making it up after I've started. On this windows computer that I tried this it lagged so incredibly much that it was to move the mouse because it didn't move smoothly. Perhaps there are some further options to free up some resources to make it run better.

If you want to see the result (as a Flash movie) follow this link (1.2Mb)

Tonight I need a little function that let me define a list of whitelisted email address and a list of blacklisted email address. This is then "merged" in a function called acceptOriginatorEmail(emailaddress) which is used to see if a particular email address is acceptable.

I've never written something like this before so I had to reinvent the wheel and guess my way towards a solution. My assumptions are that you start with whitelist and return True on a match on the blacklist, then you check against the blacklist and return False on a match and default to True if no match is made.

This makes it possible to define which email addresses should be accepted and which ones should be rejected like this:

whitelist = ('*@peterbe.com', 'bill.gates@microsoft.com')
blacklist = ('*@microsoft.com')

I've now set up alias to www.peterbe.com such that ww.peterbe.com and wwww.peterbe.com both redirect to www.peterbe.com.

We'll see what effect this might have and if it's worth. I guess 99% of all visitors on this site get it right but this tightens the "fool-proofness" even more. Google have one such alias set up on ww.google.com but not wwww.google.com

To some Python users this is old-school old-news stuff but since I've never used it before I found it worth mentioning.

I have a script that scans a rather large tree of folders filled with files. None of the folders have the same name but they can mistakably contain the same files eg:

folder XYZ-2005-11-27/
   email1.bin
   email2.bin
folder CBA-2005-07-10/
   email1.bin
   email2.bin

Sometimes two different folders contain the same file names exactly. Sometimes, the file sizes as equal too. But in some of those cases, even though the file sizes and names are the same they are different files. But! If they are the same files just in different locations I want to find them. How to do that?

Ever worried about how to handle a 20 Petabyte (that's roughly 21 million Gigabytes) digital archives? Shane Hathaway has. As far as I can see it's only a research project without any beta code so far but it sure is geekily exciting in a way.

He mentions one of problems with this and for that you don't need a double PhD to understand:

"Power is a large concern. 20 PB worth of spinning hard drives would incur a power bill in the neighborhood of $100,000 per month. Over time, that power bill could even exceed the hardware acquisition cost."

Even though it's just a rough estimate it's still quite fascinating.