Jaiku wishlist

Today, due to the massive problems that Twitter has been facing for quite some time now —which got really worse in the last couple of days—, lots of people in the “portuguese geek scene” went over to Jaiku to check out the service.

Now, I’ve been using Jaiku for quite some time now and I know it is far from perfect, but given Twitter’s latest trend of (at least partial) unavailability, I think Jaiku may look like a viable alternative to some people at least.

I don’t believe that people will actually flee in droves to Jaiku and the most probable outcome of all of this is that when (if??) Twitter deals with it’s load issues (and they should be more than on the ball on this one, especially now that they’ve got the funding to do it), everyone will just come back “home” and twitter away to their heart’s content, their Jaiku accounts soon forgotten.

But in the off-chance that the people at the big G do try to grab some serious market-share at this time, here is my (very personal and off-the-cuff) wishlist for nifty Jaiku features:

• Let us choose which if our contacts we want to receive notifications on our mobile devices from and which ones we just want to see updated on the web. (Twitter does this);

• Let us group our contacts and give us a nice and easy interface to turn on mobile notifications for those groups of contacts. An (admittedly esoteric) extension of the above feature which I would find most useful;

• Remove the spurious characters we get when we receive an update via SMS which is actually a comment on some message. What’s the point of those characters anyway (am I just being dense and not getting it, I wonder…);

• Am I missing something or is there no direct messaging capability? If it really isn’t there, do add it;

• Stability, stability, stability;

• Speed (but only after stability);

• Design it to scale, please, while you still can! Hurry up moving it to the App Engine.

More things are sure to come into my mind, I’ll update the list if/when they do.

Diary 2008-05-22

Well, with the amount of rain that we had today my hopes of spending the holiday basking in the sun were shot to high-hell, so I had to improvise…

Got a few KMs in this morning, running in Estoril. Nice weather for that, at least, as people tended to stay at home or at the mall and weren’t inclined to go near the beaches. Also not too hot. I feel like I’m getting back in shape, which is nice.

Then I came home and finally put a new episode of the Undercover Songs podcast on-line. I had recorded it a couple of days ago, actually, but hadn’t taken the time to grab all the links and note the starting times of each song…

Yesterday I just lost patience with my storage woes at home and ordered myself a drobo. Hope that takes care of my current and middle-term storage needs.

And now, since it’s still pouring out there, back to my “Anthology at the End of the Universe” and a cup of tea.

Diary 2008-05-21

Youth without youth (the newest film by Coppola) is weird —almost (but not quite) as in David Lynch weird— but very interesting. Can’t explain exactly why, but I liked it a lot.
Yes, weird.

My external hard drive — the one where I keep my backups and my mp3 collection at home— seems to have gone meet the great HD in the sky.
I do have backups of the stuff I keep there (for the most part, at least), but it will be a pain to recover everything.
I’ve been meaning to get a full RAID solution for this stuff, but never quite liked what I found out there in the stores. Also, I want a stand-alone, one-box kind of thing. Which cannot be too noisy. (Oh and the RAID is meant to be for redundancy, not for extra capacity, this is a backup solution at heart, not a mega-disposable-disk, so RAID-0 solutions are not an option).
So now I’ll have to look at what’s available on the shelves and then carry on the recovery of my old stuff. Sucks!

The pre-wazup Google App Engine app is coming along nicely. I already have user management, along with user preferences storage and I hammered the python-twitter API in order to be able to call it from within the App Engine sandbox. This would be much faster for me, would I be able to do it in Perl, but still Python is proving to be… interesting.

Got a new Undercover Songs episode ready to post but haven’t gotten around to fetching all the links to all the bands and stuff. It will be posted soon, though. At least I hope so, the mp3 disk crash isn’t making this very easy… :-/

The summer concerts’ line-ups are beginning to stabilize. Apparently Paredes de Coura will be the place to be this year.
“And you’re so far away from me…” :-)

python-twitter vs Google App Engine

In preparation for tackling Wazup, I started learning a little bit about Python (I know many people have said this already, but Dive Into Python is a really good book!) and I decided to try out a much smaller (and hopefully easier) app to begin with.
So I began coding a little toy that does some stuff with my twitter friends list.

I’m using python-twitter and the app is coming along nicely, except…

Well, like I said earlier, I’m something of an old-hand at programming and my first instinct when learning a new language or tackling a new kind of problem is to first get it working on the command-line and then get the code to work on the web (or whatever happens to be my intended platform). Yes, and my IDE is vim OK?

So what’s the big deal, you may ask?

When I ported my app, which was running perfectly on the command-line, into the App Engine development platform it started bombing, complaining about not being able to get the current user.

Say what?? Well, one thing I’m more than used to is to debug stuff, even in languages I don’t master. And this was very easy to do actually, so I got to the point really fast: python-twitter assumes you’re running on a real machine and implements a caching mechanism that assumes you have such things as a tmp dir where you can store your temporary files.
The code was trying to determine who I was in order to find out where it should store it’s temporary cache files.

Of course in a sandboxed environment such as the App Engine, there is no such thing as disk-based storage (or even system users for that matter), so it was failing miserably.

Turns out that someone else had already been there and the way to work around this is to modify python-twitter and make it use App Engine’s own datastore for the caching. That is if I do think it needs caching at all, I’m still not too sure about that.

Oh well, my first project to “ease” myself \into the language and already I’m making changes to other people’s code…

It’s been fun, though, I must admit to that!

Íntima Fracção e outros programas

Já me tinha ocorrido escrever sobre este tema, mas por alguma razão esta foi uma daquelas coisas que ficou sempre para trás, sempre esquecida. Por vezes as coisas que nos são mais familiares, ainda que as apreciemos bastante, acabam por perder protagonismo face à novidade…

Vou então deixar aqui umas notas sobre a rádio.

Mas não é da rádio da manhã, com os locutores frenéticos a tentar manter os condutores acordados enquanto conduzem para o emprego, tentando enfiar um máximo de piadas pelo meio da miríade de spots publicitários, indicações de trânsito, previsões do tempo, resumos das não-notícias dos jornais da manhã e músicas das playlists gastas que nos fazem ficar enjoados de tanto as ouvir.

Nem tão pouco da rádio da tarde, com menos interrupções de trânsito e de previsões do tempo, mas mais cheias ainda das playlists, a esta hora ainda menos ousadas, mais gastas e mais chatas.

A rádio de que eu quero falar brevemente é a rádio da boa!
Aquela que nos faz ter vontade de ouvir rádio. Que nos faz ter vontade de reservar um pouco do nosso tempo para simplesmente prestarmos atenção ao que estamos a ouvir. Aquela que nos obriga a fazer o esforço para estar disponível àquela hora para ouvir aquele programa. Ou então a arranjar alternativas… Mas já lá vamos. ;-)

Quem ler este artigo e tiver idade para tal, talvez se recorde de um conceito antigo —e já (quase) esquecido— da rádio chamado “programas de autor” (musicais, claro). Pois é, aqueles programas que passavam músicas escolhidas a dedo pelo seu autor. Músicas que de alguma forma encaixavam umas com as outras, de acordo com uma sensibilidade muito própria de quem fazia a selecção. Podiam ser novas ou muito antigas, podiam ser êxitos de vendas ou lados B de cassetes (lembram-se?) promocionais, mas de alguma forma, se o dito autor fosse bom no que fazia, o conjunto de todas essas músicas valia muitíssimo mais do que as músicas todas, individualmente.
Tempos houve em que este tipo de programa era bastante apreciado e eram produzidos vários deles em várias rádios nacionais.

Assim de repente vem-me à memória a “Hora do Lobo”, do António Sérgio (que foi retirado do ar, pela Comercial, há coisa de meses), as “Noites Longas do Fm Estéreo”, do António Santos (cujo livro de pequenos textos o meu pai comprou e me lembro perfeitamente de andar lá por casa), o mais popular “Oceano Pacífico”, do João Chaves (que nunca apreciei tanto como os outros que mencionei e que penso que talvez ainda seja emitido)…
Penso que hoje ainda temos alguns programas de autor, sobretudo na Antena1 e Antena2, mas estes são de cariz muito específico, com géneros definidos. Os grandes programas de autor de música pop/rock/folk, esses, na prática, acabaram…

Ou pelo menos eu pensei que sim durante bastante tempo.

Talvez fruto de ter sempre vivido (e estudado) na zona de Lisboa, nunca entrei em contacto com essa mina de pequenas jóias que dá pelo nome de RUC (a Rádio Universitária de Coimbra).
Já se percebe pelo discurso que entretanto esse mal foi sanado e, há uns meses (coisa de dois anos, talvez), deparei com um programa que dá pelo nome de “Íntima Fracção”, que era distribuído, na altura em formato podcast, pela própria RUC.

Quando ouvi pela primeira vez a Íntima nem queria acreditar!
Não queria acreditar que ainda havia programas destes e, sobretudo, não queria acreditar que eu me tinha esquecido que, em tempos, uma grande parte das minhas noites era passada a ouvir, precisamente, coisas assim. (Aqui convém explicar que, felizmente nunca fui muito de me colar à televisão, hábito que hoje se tornou ainda mais vincado).

Bom, fui acompanhando a Íntima Fracção como podia, inicialmente via podcast da RUC, depois via podcast GavezDois, até que a Íntima “saiu do ar”.
Foi triste, mas o Francisco Amaral sempre disse que a coisa não se ficava por aí.

E as boas notícias estouraram há umas (poucas) semanas —as tais de que quero, enfim, falar: a Íntima está agora a ser distribuída pelo Expresso On-Line e o último programa, de seu nome “Sonhos e realidade” é, na minha opinião, dos melhores que foram produzidos desde há bastante tempo.
Já tinha saudades da Íntima. Já tinha muitas saudades. Ainda bem que ela voltou!

Entretanto e para não dar a ideia de que este é o início e o final da coisa, existem mais alguns programas de rádio que consumo —geralmente em formato podcast— e que posso recomendar vivamente.

Temos, por exemplo, o “lado B” do Pedro Esteves, que passa em algumas rádios que muito poucos têm a sorte de conseguir recepcionar (Miróbriga fica longe para quem mora em Cascais e já terminei o meu curso no IST há mais anos do que quero admitir) :-)

E não posso deixar de referir o fabuloso “Vidro Azul”, do Ricardo Mariano, que recentemente ganhou honras de emissão na Rádio Radar, de noite, bem de noite, como cabe a um programa deste género.

É bom ter rádio assim. Mesmo que não a oiça via éter, como o fazia há muitos anos, mesmo assim costumo guardar estes programas para a noite, quando eles sabem melhor, quando eles foram feitos para ser apreciados.

Para mim é totalmente verdade que o vídeo não matou as estrelas da rádio.

Bobby McFerrin At Coliseu de Lisboa

Yesterday Bobby McFerrin gave a concert in Lisboa, at the Coliseu.

It was a “solo” concert, which consisted mainly of the man and his microphone. And it was enough to blow me away (along with the rest of the audience). If you’ve ever seen the videos of other concerts by Bobby (most notably his Bach pieces) you have an idea of what it was like.

We had mostly jazz tunes, but also the occasional classical piece, all sung by the man himself.

Except when it wasn’t just him (I did put the word solo in quotes up there,) and he got the whole audience to sing with him, or the time when he got some 30 people on stage with him and he conducted them into an impromptu choir. Or when he asked someone to come up to the stage and dance to his singing. Oh and I mustn’t forget about his foray into the crowd, fetching volunteers to sing some simple pattern to act as a basis for his improvisations.
He also had a guest guitar player which, when compared with all the rest of the evening, pales a lot (even though his performance was extremely good).

It was an incredible evening, that’s for sure and the feeling I got was that everyone felt a real connection with the show and felt themselves as making part of it at some stage or another, which is something I think is quite rare. Even when he went down into the crowd to look for (quite a few) volunteers to do the small skits with, people (mostly) participated with sheer joy, instead of shying away.

As for his vocal qualities, well, there’s not much I can say here that hasn’t been stated time and again by people who know his music. The sheer vocal range he has, the impeccable sense of timing and rhythm, the joy of his singing… People don’t call him a musical genius for nothing (and I’m not even alluding to all of his many accomplishments in so many fields of music!)
And the man has a sense of humor. He sure does!

Truly a unique experience.

If you have the chance to catch Bobby playing —or rather, singing— live I heartily recommend you grab it without hesitation. I know I will, if ever the chance comes again.

Perception / Bias

I have multiple ways of using my iPod in my car, while driving to work: sometimes I listen to podcasts; other times I select an album or artist to listen to; others, still, I listen to my “mixed tape” (or other, thematic) playlists.
All of the above stem from a conscious decision to listen to that particular show/artist/album/compilation.
But then, some other times, I just put it on shuffle and let it rip, usually inside a restricted context —shuffle all of the songs which are rated 3-stars and above, which have been played least recently — (yes, I do actually have automagic playlists such as these, I am, after all, a geek).

And then there are those days when I feel like listening to a good shuffle, but I want to feel somehow productive while doing it. And on those days, instead of stuffing the iPod inside the glove compartment (where the “aux” connector is) and controlling it with the remote, I just lay it on the passenger’s seat and make it shuffle through the “Unrated” playlist. I then listen to the songs, one by one, without the benefit of the whole album they belong to, and after I’ve caught the gist of them I rate them on their own merit. On a bad traffic day I sometimes rate 20-30 songs. It sure helps to pass the time!

So what does this have to do with perception?

Well, I found that when I’m doing this kind of (supposedly) objective listening, I can have my perception thwarted in a huge way if I’m not careful about it. And I find this to be most amusing.

This is what happens: some days I’m mostly stuck in traffic and I’m stalled most of the time. On those days I tend to look at the iPod whenever a song begins and upon seing the artist and album it belongs to, I immediately get a sense of how I’ll rate the song. After a few seconds I just rate it and then (if I’m not in the mood for that particular song) I just skip it and get to the next one; Other days, though, traffic is a bit lighter (or I’m just distracted with something else), and I don’t bother to look for the details of the song, I just listen to it, usually for a much longer time than when I know who’s playing and what it is and then I rate it.
And it is at these times, when I rate it before I know what it is that I truly appreciate each song on it’s own. And the funny thing is that I sometimes get some huge (and great) surprises.

Case in point: today I was doing just that kind of rating, while driving to work and I started listening to a song which fell a bit out of my usual league (and definitely out of the groove of the previous ones, which were mostly hard rock). This was a song which had a slight country feel to it, but was still enough of a rock song for me to enjoy. It was not an absolute marvel, but it had a good vibe, which I really quite liked (it sort of fit the mood of the day, which also helped). Now some songs you just know what band they’re from, just by listening to a few chords, but this one was kind of baffling me. I couldn’t quite place it (I had a few educated guesses, which turned out to be quite close, but I wasn’t sure about it).
So what was it? “Try And Love Again” by the Eagles.
This is a song from the Hotel California album which I (obviously) don’t know all that well. I’ve listened to it, sure, but I’ve never really listened to it and the proof is that I haven’t rated most of it. If I just decided to put the album on, listen to it cover-to-cover and rate the songs as I went along I would probably get a bit tired of it (like I said, this is not exactly my favourite genre) and would rate most songs rather poorly.
Had I looked at the iPod before listening to the song and saw that it was an Eagles song, chances are I’d have given it a medium-type rating and skipped it after a few seconds.
As it happened, though, I really listened to the song, enjoyed it for it’s own sake, and then gave it a good rating. Because it is a really nice song and it made me feel good. And that’s (at least partially) what music is about.

Our perceptions are so easily biased that it kind of scares me to think about it.
What happened here was nothing that surprises or shocks me, I know that we are all prone to this type of thing and I understand the basic mechanisms behind it. In fact, this is why people invented things like blind wine tasting and other such activities, but it is always kind of funny —and scary— when you get such a sobering example of just how prone you are to falling for something like this.

Diary 2008-05-09

• Twittering from the mobile phone is something that I do a lot. I can honestly say that for me the killer feature of Twitter is the SMS interface. When I am on-line I already have a number of virtual worlds (text-based) that I’m usually connected to and I also still hang around a couple-three IRC channels, not to mention having accounts in almost every single IM(-like) system I can remember, so on-line my instant communication needs are pretty much met, thankyouverymuch! But Twitter (or Jaiku, which is better than Twitter in principle, but is still just not all there yet) bridges the gap from on-line and IRL in a very nice way (especially if you remember that off is your friend!);

• Of course not everything is perfect with twittering on-the-go. The predictive technology mobile phones use is a God-sent to be sure, but sometimes you get some truly amusing mistakes. Just this week I sent out something along the lines of “it takes all lines”, when I meant “it takes all kinds”. It obviously gave rise to a crack about peace, love and fat joints. Oh the humanity! ;-)

• Another aspect of Twitter-by-SMS is that it only works if you keep a judiciously chosen list of people from whom you wish to receive updates on your “devices”. This list, I find, is in constant flux, with a given person entering, leaving and re-entering it as I feel more inclined to chat about this or that type of topics. In fact I find I have a few small groups of contacts which are usually “on” together. I wish there was an easy way to materialize these groups and change the mobile “subscription” based on those. Hum… now that I think about it, there may be an opportunity for a nice web-app here…

• And while I’m on the mobile phone subject, I think it is Melo who says that he constantly has his best ideas on the shower. Well, it regularly happens to me too so I’ve taken to dictating said ideas to my mobile phone (much as I do when I’m driving or otherwise occupied) and hopping I’ll later remember to write them down and maybe even act on them. It turns out I usually remember them pretty good after having dictated them, but the interesting fact is that I now find myself having almost 50 voice notes hanging around, waiting to be listened to, processed and deleted. Ouch!

• On a totally unrelated note, if you’re into music, do be sure to check out the latest episode of the Contrast Podcast to which I contributed with a rather nice (IMHO) song!

Cleanliness

In the office I work at there’s a procedure (as in most places, I assume) that whenever the cleaning crew finishes with a WC they sign off on a control sheet plastered somewhere inside.

As is also usual, people started complaining that the cleaning crews weren’t coming over often enough and they started reporting that the supposed three visits per day weren’t happening at all.

So the cleaning crew stepped up to the plate and gave people what they wanted. We now have 2 or 3 visits per day per WC. On the gent’s WC in my floor, for example we can now read on the control sheet that they come over at around 06h30 (that’s AM) and then at around 09h30 (again AM). Sometimes we get an extra visit at around 08h00 (also AM).

Isn’t it nice to have one’s wish granted?

Wazup

Note: This is just an idea at this stage, I don’t know if/when I’ll ever get around to implementing it. Knowing me, it will probably never happen, so don’t hold your breath if you find this to be interesting.

What is it?

Wazup is an idea of mine for a service that boils down to a site which lets me know, at a glance, what is happening now, near me. For a given definition of now. And of near.

Introduction and motivation

This project was born for a number of reasons, of which I highlight a few to help me keep on track if I ever get to developing it:

1. I wanted to learn Python and there is no better way to learn a new language than to have a real, useful project to build using it;
2. I wanted to try out the Google App Engine;
3. I wanted to build a new application and code it from the ground up (feeling nostalgic from the days when I did good old honest-to-God coding);
4. I also wanted it to be a web application, since I’ve never really written one of these;
5. I actually find myself sometimes in the late afternoon or early evening feeling like going out to do something and having to trawl through a number of sites and feeds that I keep with “interesting stuff” that is happening.

From the above list it should be apparent that even if I do know that there are probably a dozen such sites out there, I really want to indulge in thinking about (and maybe even prototyping) one.
As such, comments along the lines of “Yeah, but site X.com does it this way” or “Well, site Y.org does it better” are totally irrelevant so don’t bother.
On the other hand, comments which point me to nifty feature ideas or implementation details or something along these lines are most welcome (even if they may well end up not being considered for the exercise).

Intended features

First of all a warning: this is not a road-map for the app’s development. I’m not actually sure I’ll even ever get to build the thing. This is just a list of stuff I’d like to eventually have working, if I do go ahead and do it.

The numbers in front of each item are a crude idea of the importance of each idea. A ‘1’ means that it is important to have ASAP, a ‘3’ means that it can wait (and possibly will never get done at all).

And now, for the list:

• Handle multiple users and their respective data feeds and preferences (3);
• Handle multiple data sources, with fetchers and parsers built specifically for each one of them (1);
• Have an easy plug-in system to build such fetchers and parsers (1);
• Be able to fetch the data in real-time (unless I can figure out if the Google App Engine environment allows me to call a function regularly with some kind of scheduled job or something);
• Allow me to define what time-frame I’m interested in seeing (2);
• Allow me to pick and choose events to look at more closely (3);
• Allow me to choose how I want the results to be ordered (by location, by time, …) (2);
• Be aware of where I am (or allow me to tell it) and automatically adjust to show me the relevant events only (over-rideable, and using some of the many geo-location services available out there —so web2.0!) (3).