Linkstew

I was playing with iTunes 3.0 and totally loving the new Ratings and Smart Playlist features today when I realized that I was having a few issues with how these features were fitting into my workflow. Here were my two biggest problems:

• To rate the current song, I had to stop what I was doing, and either go to iTunes and select the rating, or navigate iTunes' hierarchical Dock menu, both of which took enough time that I wasn't rating songs as I was listening to them.
• iTunes has to play the end of the song in order to increment the Play Count field and update the Last Played field. This means that if I want those fields incremented but don't actually want to listen to a whole song, I have to go into iTunes and inch the player to the end of the track.

So I took the tools I had available to me and hacked up some scripts to address these problems for me. I made some little Applescripts that will set the rating of the currently playing song to the specified value, and which will skip a song by advancing the currently playing song to 1 second before the end of the track so that the Play Count will update.

Then, I put these scripts into a folder which I configured my LaunchBar to know about, and now I can change the rating of the currently playing song or skip the currently playing song from any application with just a few keystrokes. (Of course, these things should work from your quick application launcher of choice, and aren't tied specifically to LaunchBar.)

This combination is working killer for me tonight, but I don't know if other people would put up with the little quirks that I put up with because I wrote them and know why they exist.

So I'm hesitant to do something like put these scripts on Version Tracker, but if you want to check them out and give me feedback, please do:

Headless iTunes Scripts 1.0 (~210 kb)

update, 2002-07-31: Instead of Launch Bar, I've been using Key Xing to invoke the scripts, because it's faster, easier to launch, and because it runs the non-application compiled scripts a lot faster than LaunchBar can invoke the compiled application versions of the scripts. Also there isn't the interface issue with control returning to LaunchBar after the script runs with Key Xing, because control never switches to Key Xing like it does with Launch Bar.

If you were wondering why I made application versions of those scripts, its because Launch Bar doesn't have an AppleScript execution environment, so the only way I could launch the script through Launch Bar was as an application. Key Xing, however, has an AppleScript execution environment, so it's much faster.

So far I've managed to rate 1548 of 3898 of my songs. Whew, so many to go.

Is it just me, or has Linkstew been loading slowly lately? In particular, it feels like when I first try to load the site, there's an abnormally long delay before the site starts responding.

Now, there's actually more than subjective feedback you can give me here: In Passing runs on the same web server and accesses the same database as Linkstew, so the only difference between the two is the code.

So, is Linkstew loading unreasonably slow relative to how quickly In Passing loads, or is it just me? Please let me know what you think in the comments.

While I was taking my final tonight, I noticed my shirt was a little wet. I looked down, and saw a tear, and a red stain forming, and realized that the test had "ripped me a new one" when I wasn't looking. I touched the stain and then tasted my finger, and I wondered to myself, "Why does blood taste so sweet?"

It's irony.

Well, it didn't quite go like that, and the final wasn't actually that bad. But you see, I tend to take breaks to amuse myself during long tests, and during my final tonight, I ended up coming up with this jokeless punchline that I'm absolutely in love with: "It's irony." As in, employ some nice freestyle english footwork to arrive at the adjective irony, meaning "Of or pertaining to iron."

The best joke I've got for it so far (which, to give credit where credit is due, was offered up by Jan) is the above referenced "Why does blood taste so sweet?," which hopefully explains that whole little story above. But the problem with that joke is that it's just not... ironic enough for the punchline.

So, I'm still mulling over other possible jokes for the punch-line, and enjoyably, by the nature of folklore, a punch-line can have as many jokes as it wants. So, offer up suggestions! Try them out on your friends, family and co-workers! And most importantly, um... I can't think of a most importantly.

Oh, well, finally, it's perfectly possible that this punch line already exists in the wild (Hm, are punch-lines a form of joke parasites?), and that I just happened to have coincidentally bred a related strain during my final. And if that's the case, and I am just ripping off some clever person, please grind my ego down to a stump, and crush the filings into my foot. And then, when I ask if you can see anything stuck in my foot, you, can tell me "It's irony."

So I just got this email forward, and I'm not exactly complaining, I'm just curious in a folkloristic kind of way. So below is the forward, and here's what I want from you: If you get a copy of this forward, please post in the comments or email to me any differences between the copy of the forward I got and the copy of the forward you got, along with your email address, so that I might ask you some other questions about the forward later. I may or may not use this for my folklore class, but even if I don't use it, I'll still post anything interesting anyone shares. Thanks!

TEN PROPOSED NEW LAWS FOR THIS CRISIS:
1. To buy an American flag, you must present proof you have voted at least once in the last three elections (yes, local and state elections count).
2. To display an American flag in any form, you must present proof of voter registration.
3. To wave an American flag in public, you must be able to name at least one of the following:
   1. One of your U.S. Senators
   2. Your U.S. Representative
   3. Your President ("George Bush" does not count; ambiguous)
4. To sell any product with an American flag on it, you must answer the following question correctly: The Bill of Rights is part of:
   1. The Declaration of Independence.
   2. The Constitution;
   3. The Magna Carta;
5. Those heard singing patriotic songs in public may be asked to show their voter registration cards.
6. To be permitted to scream "Nuke Afghanistan!" you must be able to correctly locate Afghanistan on a map or globe.
7. To be permitted to scream "Arabs go home!" you must list and correctly locate ten Arab homelands.
8. Those who wish to express opinions about Arabs and Arab-Americans must pass the following test:
   1. Those who follow the religion of Islam are called:
      1. Muslims
      2. Muslins
      3. Fanatics
   2. The holy book of Islam is called:
      1. The Koran
      2. The Koram
      3. The Bible
   3. In Arabic, God is called:
      1. Ali
      2. Allah
      3. Jehovah
9. Priority for purchase of American flags will be given to those whose ancestors lived on American soil the longest. When all American Indians who wish to display the red, white and blue are satisfied, other applicants will be accepted.
10. A call for war on any radio talk-show will be construed as a public declaration of willingness to enlist in the US Army; callers will have 24 hours to complete the paperwork.

After only two nights of coding, the shiny and new (but not very different) Linkstew not only has all the features of the old Linkstew, but it's got many new features as well.

So what are these shiny new features of Linkstew? Well...

• Comments. My main use for comments is actually for personal annotation of entries (and to occasionally complain about bad posts), but it's an open system, and everyone is free to contribute. Just hit the "++" link in the corner to join the fray.
• More immediate access to The Stew. A few items of The Stew are now available on the front page, with a link to see other related entries. This is to make it easier to quickly browse around related ideas on the site.
• Related Topics. On the front page, for example, the topics which are most related to the recent entries are displayed in the navigation bar. On a topic page, the topics most related to the displayed topic are displayed. And on an entry page, the entry's topics are displayed. Once again, this hopefully allows a reader to jump around related ideas, much like a person thinks.

And of course, all the features that have always been available are still here. Read Random Entries, or Search for key words from an entry you remember reading months ago, or read by date or by topic. The one feature I know I still need to implement is comment previews, but other than that, I'm really happy with the way the shiny new Linkstew+The Stew is shaping up.

And in honor of all this, I've got a new email address: bsii@thestew.net. And if you don't want to leave a comment about it, that's how you should contact me.

I've been working insane hours at work, and I needed a break from all the coding I've been doing, so tonight I rebuilt Linkstew using Kevin's Furynodes. Yes, coding this site actually is a break from coding for work. I pretty much threw away all of the old Linkstew code, which is kind of depressing, but also huge a relief. Cricky, the old Linkstew was so broken.

Yes, some features from the old version are still missing. But with Furynodes, they'll be real easy for me to add back in at a later date, and they'll work better than before. And I've got plans to display even more metadata for The Stew, including related categories when viewing a category. But in place of the temporarily missing features, you get comments! Woohoo!

I know it doesn't look shiny and new, but it really is. But I basically just recreated the old look and feel, so I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to make the page more usable.

Also, it seems to me like the whole page is running slowly. But I've been having net issues all night, so could y'all tell me if the page feels slow(er)? Or is it just me?

I started growing my hair out long about seven years ago, I guess. I can't remember for sure. I know that it was at least a little bit long when I had my yearbook picture taken in my freshman year of high school, because I'd been wearing a hat, and the combination of hat hair and half long hair and pimples made for a really goofy shot.

I got a hair cut last june, and before that, I'm not really sure when it was. My hair is really long now, and I really want and need a hair cut. But I don't want the same old thing... And yet, I don't want to change it too radically.

What the heck would I look like with short hair? How exactly would I get it cut? I'd have to make choices about my hair! What a hassle! Which tells you why I let it grow long in the first place, and why I haven't gotten around to chopping it all off.

Which really leaves me very few options. I guess I'll just get it cut so that it's just long enough to still tie back -- that way, I can have the illusion that it's long if I want it, and yet, it'll be shorter and different at the same time. From there, I can get used to the shorter hair, and maybe go shorter still.

Unless you have any better ideas about what I should do with my hair, in which case, you should let me know.

Here I find myself at my 300th entry of content into this site, let alone all the old stuff sitting on the old site that I intend to integrate back into this site, and then burn down the current facade you're familiar with and then build a new, consolidated site up out of the ashes of both of them. But that hasn't happened yet. And in the mean time, I find myself faced with a dilemma. A number of them, actually.

First, I don't have a consistent voice for myself. Part of this, I think, comes from the very little time I spend on writing these entries. If I spent a little longer here, a few extra minutes there, the content here would probably shine. It may sound arrogant, but I think I can write reasonably well, if maybe a little convoluted, when I want to. But here, where I just want to get my thoughts out, I don't tend to take the few extra seconds necessary to put some shine on. And that problem is in one sense one of writing quality, but in another sense the lack of consistency I cited above. Is an unreliable narrator better than no narrator at all?

Another factor which might help me figure out how to write is knowing my audience. I'm a narrator speaking to the wind. A little disorienting, actually. Right now, I only know of maybe 3 people who actually read this page consistently, and I'm not really writing this for them in the first place. So I don't know who I'm writing for, which, I think, doesn't give me a north to steer towards as I spill my mind. If you're part of my audience, please let me know by mailing bsii@linkstew.org.

The final problem is a problem I've always faced, and that is one of categorization. I incredibly frequently find content which seems like it doesn't fit into any particular category that I currently have in place, and perhaps even more often I find content which fits into many places. This page is, after all, linkstew. It's both about me and what I'm doing and who I am, and it's about things that have made me think. In a lot of cases, one of the Stew Categories should intersect one of the link categories. Perhaps what should happen is something where entries here belong to multiple categories, and on the front page, a category isn't displayed, but it'll show up in any of the indicated categories. I also don't know how to divide up my links categories, which is much harder than the stew categories. Again, this is a problem which I think would be solved by knowing who my audience is.