dots and loops

Edit: I just updated to the newest version of J. River Media Center and it looks like they liked this idea so much it’s now a core feature, making this old plugin obsolete.

I kind of like the “genius” playlist feature in the new iTunes, so I attempted to do something similar for J. River’s Media Center (my music manager of choice at the moment).

The idea behind iTunes “genius” feature is to scour your music database and queue up tracks similar to the one you are currently listening to. How well it does this is debatable. iTunes seems to cook up it’s “similarity” data based on the listening and purchasing habits of it’s users. Interestingly, if everyone’s listening habits were completely eclectic, and if they always kept their player on random, there would be nothing to go on. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. continue reading

Dala is the name I’ve given my web-based feed aggregator. It started off in the distant past as a patch for the Lilina aggregator. Eventually I decided to just code up an aggregator from scratch using PHP and a home rolled MVC framework. Dala in the result. It is an acronym for Dots And Loops Aggregator. continue reading

Backing up your data is fun and profitable! For my main data drives I use either rsync or Dantz Retrospect to simply mirror them to external USB drives (powered on only for this express purpose). This has me about 80% covered, but my system files and home directories are not backed up. The following script is meant to pick up the missing pieces. continue reading

I think guestbooks are kind of neat. Sometimes you want to leave a general comment on somebodies blog, but you don’t know exactly where. You don’t feel right leaving your comment on any of the posts, because you just want to say “cool blog!” or whatever, and it doesn’t really apply. continue reading

Edit: I don’t bother with this anymore. I’ve found Akismet’s anti-spam plugin to be so effective that it’s no longer a hassle to just approve comments manually.

I use a simple comment validation hack on my site as a first defense against spam. The system uses what’s known as a Turing number, named after the mathematician Alan Turing. If you have ever signed up for an e-mail account at yahoo or gone to e-gold’s website, you know what I’m talking about. Here’s how I did it. continue reading