Life, politics and... application development by Frank Quist.
I'm a second-year social work student in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Here I occasionally "blog" on random topics, as a means of distracting myself from the place of intense chaos that some call Hogeschool Utrecht. Also, I have to channel my nerdier tendencies somewhere... social work does not tend to work for that.
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Now we are faced with the daunting task of wrapping our minds around the Palin memoir Going Rogue, appearing atop a bestseller list near you. Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can’t write, intended for an audience that doesn’t read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn’t think. God is dead.
Quote reblogged from Told or Known
Tired of media saying that the internet is isolating people. Try being a geek before the internet.
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Spotify.fm 2 Beta released
Spotify.fm has been entirely recoded to be clearer, easier to extend and to be more interactive. The recode was a long process, because not just hacking something together (as it was) but really making it stable (for the long term) takes much more time. I’d say there’s about 2000 lines worth of code here, not including the framework. The site is currently in beta since some error handling is not yet done smoothly and the site has not been thoroughly stresstested.
In any case, besides being more stable (no more weekly artists or RSS bugs), these features have been added:
- New, clearer, design
- Clean URLs that are easy to bookmark or remember
- Last.fm similar artists search + RSS
- Similar artist search link next to every release
- Search Spotify’s newest releases by artist or album
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Export your favourite artists’ albums to Spotify<- Unfortunately, this does not currently work with the Spotify client! - Front page links Pitchfork’s album reviews to Spotify’s latest releases
- Blog feeds
- Remembers your last.fm name (cookie)
- Links to the relevant Last.fm pages
- Your weekly artists, recommended artists, tags and similar artists are cached, so that each week the site remembers more artists (say, it remembers your recommended artists from a month ago)
- New Spotify releases are added quicklier
- RSS feeds are cached to cope with badly designed RSS readers
- Follows the Last.fm API TOS (as far as I can discern), unlike many other Last.fm services (unfortunately, this means that, to comply with max. requests policies, the amount of artists/tags a user can view every hour is limited)
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Art may explore the limits of the nasty things humans are capable of doing to eachother. Artists, who breathe, bleed, and shit like the rest of us mortals, may not.
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On a scale from heaven to hell, I am a hell-class procrastinator. i’ve searched all my life for a way in which I finally match up intent and action. I notice that I just do not know the way. I do know what is not the way, so far. One way that is not the way is making a fuss over it.
Beginning of a realisation: I do not know the solution but I know that there are a lot of things that I know that are not true. Instead of searching for the solution for procrastination, I should focus on unlearning everything existent in my work and life habits that I cannot confirm to be true. Perhaps in there lies the way.
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I’m starting to wonder if you have to be able to be content with ‘good enough’ if you want to be a functioning perfectionist. Doesn’t the kind of judgement that leads to good decisions come from being able to rationally judge quality? I notice that the one thing my perfectionism does is ruthlessly kill that sort of rationality.
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Spotify.fm - Spotify&Last.fm mashup
I totally forgot to post about this.
A few days ago I released my newest project: Spotify.fm. This tool will show you the latest Spotify releases for your favourite artists (retrieved from Last.fm). Not just the 50 most listened to, but all of your favourite artists from the past six months. This is invaluable (to me) for finding new music to listen to on Spotify, and if artists I like get added to the site.
Other sites were either slow, had a layout I did not like, or stopped updating, so in my not so humble opinion it’s the best Spotify+Last.fm service currently around.
It supports RSS feeds, and soon will support searching for new releases by tag, recommended artists or similar artists.
If you’re in love with Spotify as much as I am, and use Last.fm, be sure to check it out.
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aTumble (tumblr app for Android) 1.6.8 review
A while ago I posted a tiny “review” of aTumble, a small tumblr app for Android. Since then the author has added or changed some features, and I think it’s time for a review of the changes and a more expansive review of the application. I haven’t used it in a while so I don’t remember everything that has changed. Still, here goes.
aTumble is a small ($0.99) application for the mobile Android OS that attempts to make viewing and posting to Tumblr easier. Its featurebase is small, but that should be no problem if the features are well-polished. Currently, you can view the dashboard, your own Tumblr posts, and write/delete posts. These things are not polished, and I will detail the problems and good things in the list below. I hope it’ll come in useful to the author or someone else. Do note that for $0.99 this isn’t that bad of an app.
- The dashboard function is nice but slow. After a brief but puzzling ‘rendering…’ message, it shows about 10 of the latest dashboard posts in a nice layout which does leave me wondering what’s wrong with the speedier layout technique used in the “My Tumblr” screen. Loading more posts takes quite long or does not work at all. Too much eyecandy, too little speed and functionality.
- aTumblr 1.6.8 has added like and reblog functionality in the dashboard. The ‘like’ functionality is inline and pretty nice, as is the dashboard post expansion after a hold-click (the delay could be shorter or it could indicate something could happen and it should expand if you click on the ‘x notes’ link). The reblog feature is less polished, it just sends you to a login form at tumblr.com.
- Good changes since last time: the new post layout has been fixed on cupcake and there’s nice multiple tumblelogs support.
- Still no post editing, while that seems to be the most important missing feature (more important than ‘liking’, I presume) and the most requested one.
- If one starts writing a post, but changes from the post window to another part of the app, the post is ‘forgotten’, without a warning message. One of the nice things about Android is that mostly every app remembers state. Anyone used to this could easily lose their work.
- When you use the application for the first time you get (smartly) presented with the settings screen. However, once the necessary login details are entered, there’s no indication for what the user should do. it looks like an intro screen, but the user should press back to get into the main app. This is unintuitive.
- Android integration has improved. When trying to share a page in the Browser, aTumble is one of the options, nice (could it be possible to use the Title as link name?). Same for the Youtube sharing option, though only as link. There’s still some lack of integration: for example, there’s no sharing option after having taken a picture.
- Nitpick: unlike in about 99% of the input forms in Android there’s no auto-capitalisation.
The website of the application states: “aTumble is an Android application that allows you to quickly an easily post to your Tumblr account (sic)”. If that’s the core function - it does just that, indeed, and that’s fine. If it wants to be more, it’s going to need some polish.
Feel free to contact me if I’ve got anything wrong.
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I do not think the compiz behavior is wrong, just hard to understand.
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Talk of swine flu might have been hysterical, but it was necessary. - By Anne Applebaum - Slate Magazine →
To which the correct response should be: So what? Before “that panic was ridiculous” becomes the conventional wisdom, let’s be frank about it: Where infectious diseases are concerned, panic is good. Panic is what we want. Without panic, nothing happens. Up to 500 million people will get malaria this year, and more than 1 million of them will die, mostly in very poor countries. Yet there is no fear of malaria in the rich world; there is no hysterical media coverage, and thus there is still no satisfactory prevention or cure. By contrast, designs for preventions and cures for swine flu are already, after a mere two weeks of hyperattention, well on track.
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