Pirate Intervention

Found this on boingboing:

A clan of World of Warcraft players are really, really into role-playing as pirates. They hang around, talking like pirates and attacking other players (PvPing -- player vs. player). This attracted one of the Warcraft game-monitors who came by to tell them off, but rather than act chastened, they stayed in character and yarred and ho-harred and so forthed the monitor. The transcript of the event is unbelievably funny.

Here is a direct link to the script (as a jpg no less).

For those not in the know, World of Warcraft is a MOM -- Massive Online Multiplayer -- game (like Everquest) where you embody some virtual avatar in a virtual world and basically do whatever you want (I suppose like Grand Theft Auto but in an online social space with real people). In this case, the world is themed after Warcraft. These gentlemen (and perhaps gentlewomen though I wouldn't bet on it) have chosen to band together as pirates.

Favorite interactions:

Moderator: Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are doing goes against the policies we have set forth
Arnie: What that be?
Maj: Har
Koltas: What policy ye be speakin of lass

Moderator: It would not be wise to spit on a moderator...
Saleen spits on moderator
Koltas spits on moderator
Galexious spits on moderator
Slak spits on moderator
Nebulis spits on moderator
Arnie: It's a pirate sign o'respect

Perhaps this moderator (or "wench" as the case may be) will think twice before approaching this band o'pirates again.

iPod Froze, What to do...

My iPod froze while walking to UW today. Thoughts of Cassandra's problems with her third generation iPod immediately entered my head. For Christmas 2003 I gave her a 3rd generation 20gb iPod that, I swear, was infested by a mischievous Chimera -- luckily the Apple Store took it back and replaced it on the spot ~3 months later. I found this link on Apple's website that has step by step instructions on how to recover from a frozen iPod.

For 4th generation iPods and minis :

1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
2. Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.

Third Eye Blind

One of my favorite bands in high school (err, I could say college here to sound younger but it would be skewing the truth) was Third Eye Blind. Radiohead, Weezer, and Third Eye Blind was my lil musical trio. Radiohead would probably shit to hear that they kept such company (but oh well). Now I digress into this digression.

Gf asked me to "sing Motorcycle Driveby" for her tonight as a goodnight luckcharm lullaby -- tomorrow brings the first of many (5) law school finals. That simple utterance alone assures me that she will rock her exams. So, let's talk about 3eb for a second. They deserve more but it's all I can spare.

So, the eponymous debut by Third Eye Blind circa 1997 is one of God's great gifts to hyper-emotional adolescence. Screw all you music snobs who never listened to them because they charted early and often -- a staple on modern rock radio and pop radio in 1997 (from Graduate, to Semi-Charmed Life, to Hows It Gonna Be, to Jumper). They have two songs on this album that I would list in my top twenty favorite songs of all time (no easy feat if I may say so): track 2, Narcolepsy and, particularly, track 13, the aforementioned Motorcycle Driveby.

In fact, if we dig a little deeper into this album, we can point out the tracks that are pure bliss:

Track 01: Losing a Whole Year
Track 02: Narcolepsy
Track 03: Semi-Charmed Life
Track 04: Jumper
Track 05: Graduate (less so, but still good)
Track 06: How's it Going to Be
Track 12: The Background
Track 13: Motorcycle Drive By
Track 14: God Of Wine

So, that would be Tracks 1-6, 12-14 that rule. The tracks from 7-11 are, at best, average and some, like London, are horrendously crappy. Now I am not trying to implicate any convenience stores here but unfortunately for Third Eye Blind they decided to pursue a career of 7-11s rather than 1-6s. Bastards. They could've been somethin'. A cynic would say "mediocrity is inescapable, it was bound to happen" -- i know because i am a cynic -- Stephan Jenkins would say "i never thought of it that way" -- i know because i have a recording of him saying just that. I do.

Argh, inTune & Google Web API

inTune currently uses amazon.com's (very cool) web api to find links to cover art for music files. However, in the case when no cover art exists (most likely because amazon.com does not sell any albums by the given artist) I wanted to use Google's API as a backup. Ah, yes, sounds like a reasonable plan BUT that's assuming Google's API actually exposes their image search functionality. It does not! So, I probably will not support Google in inTune's initial release.

I guess I could, of course, build a scraper that simply appends the artist and/or album onto the end of 'http://images.google.com/images?q=' and grabs the first image that pops up.

But I don't feel like it.

Update (10:42PM May 3, 2005): Fine! So, I have been obsessing over actually using Google's image search. I'm sorry. I'm coding and thinking at the same time (yes, that actually happens sometimes). I typed in "scraping images.google" into Google and, shameslessly, Google answered my call. The first result was Mr. Dan Fernandez who is also Mr. Visual C# Product Manager and in promoting said language hacked together an images.google.com scraper. Ack. I just noticed that this is for VS2005 which I don't have and is also for Visual C# Express. (link)

Update (9:36PM May 6, 2005): OK. Google does not expose their image search capabilities in their API, but yahoo does. I might still write a Google image scraper (for curiosity's sake) but I'd rather not spend too much time on it given that (1) it's questionably legal and (2) harder to maintain given that you're dependent on the format of the webpage.

Mobile Movielens

Movielens is a personalized movie recommendation site run by the Grouplens research team at the University of Minnesota. I've known about the site for a while but only recently started using it. So far I've been impressed.

Ideally though, I would like the following technology to exist. My girlfriend and I walk into Blockbuster and assume our regular routine of scouring the DVD racks looking for movies that we remember we should see. We might pick up a DVD, read the back of the movie box and keep it in our hands just in case we decide on it. I would like to be able to use my cell phone to take a picture of the front cover (or perhaps the DVD bar code) and query Movielens right there in Blockbuster. Movielens would then automatically take into account that I am with my girlfriend (because we both have bluetooth enabled cell phones) and tell me whether this is a movie we would both enjoy (e.g. "Yes, based on your mutual preferences, Hotel Rwanda is a 4.5"). Movielens could also return the imdb.com ranking along with the rottentomatoes.com ranking to provide a bit more context to their personalized rating.

Update: [9:42 05/04/2005] So, since I made this post (3 long days ago), I found three papers that nearly address my above scenario: PocketLens - Toward a Personal Recommender System by Bradley Miller, et. al., MovieLens Unplugged - Experiences with a Recommender System on Four Mobile Devices by Bradley Miller, et. al., PolyLens: A Recommender System for Groups of Users by Mark O'Connor, et. al. All of these papers can be found at the University of Minnesota Grouplens site.

22 Minutes of American Limbo

This is why NPR is great. It is warming. It is entertaining. It is educational. It is journalism. On This American Life this week: "American Limbo." Stories of living completely outside the grid of American life. The story that touched me most:

Act One. The Family That Flees Together, Trees Together. The Jarvis family, a group of eight, goes on the run from the law–for seven years. They live on a boat, in a treehouse in a swamp. They escape capture time after time. And how do the kids turn out, living a life outside of society, as fugitives? Surprisingly great. (22 minutes)

Better than a movie. You should listen too (link).

Music History as Context

Have not had a chance to work on inTune for a few days; however, thoughts have been ruminating.

I'm thinking I might build another application this summer for iTunes. This time using mySQL or some other local database technology that archives the iTunes library.xml file. Each change (in the form of a rating, playcount, addition, removal, etc.) will be stored in the database. The idea being that we could use this data to figure out exactly what and when music was listened to. Could we then, for example, draw a temporal map of songs played in the past sixth months to get a sense of someones fluctuating emotional state during that period.

Obviously we would be able to see certain trends in the ways that people use their iPods or iTunes. What could this tell us? Could music be used as an additional contextual feature to inform UbiComp applications?

I Sweat Your Music Collection

Using iTunes "Rendezvous" system (recently renamed to Bonjour), iTunes users can share their library of music over their local network. And by share I mean stream -- that is, others can only listen to your shared music, not copy it. Anyway, a few people have studied the social nuances that surround this technology (e.g. Grinter at GTech). For example, users are afraid of what other's might think of them based on their music collection (even though the sharing is somewhat anonymized).

I found this anecdote of appropriating iTunes sharing over wireless networks to meet people (and as a sort of low bandwidth instant messaging client) to be quite interesting.

The scene is both postmodern and Reineresque: young man with PowerBook in coffee shop discovers amazing music collection shared via iTunes. He hopes to God it belongs to the raven-haired hotty in the corner. He proceeds to share a library of his own, no songs, but simply titled, “Maria, I sweat your music collection.” She takes note, creates a library called “try_the_new_dalek”. And so began a library-name-only flirting session that will no-doubt make Mac haters seethe and AppleHeadz swoon. Either way, it’s a way to pass the time between scones and textbook chapters on a lonely Tuesday eve. Try it before it becomes some new, creepy form of cyberstalking. from engadet

Sci, The Way It's Supposed To Be

I just went to a fantastic talk by Dr. Sullivan, a professor in Astronomy at UW. It filled me with childhood awe about the true wonders of science and discovery. Good times. Here's the abstract:

Professor Sullivan will provide an overview of Astrobiology, the field which investigates the wide range of multidiciplinary factors that influence the origin and evolution of life on Earth and perhaps beyond. He will also make some remarks on other projects he has initiated, including SETI@Home, MarsDial, and EarthDial.

This was part of the ongoing Intel Research, Seattle seminars.

Wit - Leon == 0

If only we were all as witty as Leon. If only...

link

inTune With Me

I've recently begun a literature search in the space of "recommendation engines." These are systems that leverage information about you (and perhaps others like you) to make a suggestion about things you might like; think amazon.com's recommender.

Quite honestly, I can't say I have ever been truly impressed with the current crop of recommenders. Though, admittedly, I probably haven't used that many of them -- perhaps out of lack of opportunity. However, in the fall of last year (at the beginning of my first term at UW) I subscribed to the Yahoo LAUNCHcast music service (~$3 a month). Note that LAUNCHcast also has a free service with a limited number of radio stations. Song skipping is also crippled (you can, i think, skip 5 songs in a day rather than an unlimited amount). You also then have to listen to a few short commercials every hour.

Launchcast's tagline is "the music that listens to you." Using a method called collaborative filtering, Launchcast introduces new music into your customized radio station that the system thinks you might like. How does it work? The success of the recommender system rests largely on the willingness of the user to actively rate songs. Song, album, artist, and genre ratings are combined with the existing launchcast userbase to find "similar listeners." These listeners have roughly the same ratings as you. Launchcast then begins to play songs that they have rated highly but that you've not rated (or perhaps heard).

Users will be more likely to participate if they feel like the value returned is high. However, the return value is rather low until you (and others, as the system uses collaborative filtering) begin rating songs. This is called the bootstrapping problem -- an issue that exists in many recommendation systems.

I don't mind rating songs. I rate songs in my iTunes library all the time so I have a refined approach to rating songs on launchcast. In addition, music is my passion. It is one of the few things in life that I freely admit to loving without flinching. So, the work that I do to rate songs is worth it to me because I will (hopefully) learn of new music that I like in return.

And, in this case, it's actually worked. I would say that a fair amount (perhaps as much as 60%) of the new music I hear on launchcast, I like. A subset of that (~15%), I really like. In fact, if you look at the music that I have purchased in iTunes in the past six months, a majority of it was introduced to me by launchcast. That fact alone has enormous implications for e-commerce. Suddenly, technology has taken the role of my "trusted musicphile" friend who sends me mix tapes in the mail; though I'm not sure it is yet an adequate replacement.

Of course, the iTunes music store itself has yet to really take advantage of user's metadata. You could imagine iTunes scanning your music library to derive your likes and dislikes (perhaps as a combination of playcount, ratings, and simply number of songs by an artist) and suggest new songs that you might want to buy. They do, however, make recommendations to you based on what is currently in your cart. This obviously has shortcomings.

Lately I've been imagining an iTunes based online dating service where you pair two clients together based on their music tastes. Or, perhaps something more benign, like a friendster that connects people together into the same social network based on similarity clustering of their music libraries.

Still working on what I've dubbed "inTune." A friend yesterday told me the name sucks. Perhaps it does. Not that it matters at this point.

Amazonian Ant Trap

It's not your supermarket everyday Raid ant trap. In fact, it's not a trap for ants at all but rather a trap made by ants. I originally found this link on boingboing.

The ants (Allomerus decemarticulatus), which live in Amazonian plants called Hirtella physophora, construct a honeycomb-like structure out of their host plant's fibres from which they can stage an ambush.

The worker ants hide in the holes of this death trap with their mouths open wide, waiting for locusts, butterflies or other insects to land. When prey arrives they quickly seize its extremities, pulling on legs, arms and antennae until the hostage is rendered immobile. Once trapped, other ants from the colony arrive to sting and bite the prey until it is paralyzed.

(link) There's a video link there too worth checking out.

iTunes Hax0r Links!

I forgot.

http://blogs.msdn.com/dancre/archive/2004/05/08/128645.aspx
http://blog.andrewcarlson.org/archive/2004/05/18/239.aspx

and maybe.

http://ita.progoth.com/

Update: 04/25/2005 10PM
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/03/itunes.html?page=last
http://www.manicwave.com/blog/archives/000145.html

iTunes COM C# Hax0r Stuff

Brace yourself for a revelation. I have not yet used C#. I programmed my Master's thesis in Java (which is a fair amount of code). Of course, when I began my thesis project I thought I knew Java -- by the end I knew I didn't know Java. I like Java though. It's comfortable. I can do the C++ thing (see CSE557 and a fair amount of undergrad and intern work) but I prefer Java.

However, I have always been interested in learning C# -- some people have always been C# evangelists and they are getting to me. What's more though, I feel like it will be beneficial in my career and now I've found a reason to actually sit down and learn it... in the form of an iTunes hack.

I want to publish near real time information about my iTunes library -- I think I'll call it "inTune." Both because it analyzes INformation about iTunes and because it publishes them to your webspace thereby keeping others "in tune" with your music.

It will provide metadata on my entire library of songs, a few examples
Total number of songs in my library
Total number of songs rated
Total number of songs listened to
Hot songs of the week
Hot artists of the week
Most recently added songs/artists
Top 25 lists (bands, songs, etc.)

I was thinking about how to use iTunes metadata to come up with some metric for calculating favorite artist. Something like:

Favorite Artist =
# of times songs played by artist
# of songs ranked - # of songs unranked
# of total songs by artist
weight 3, 4 & 5 star rankings positively
weight 1 & 2 star rankings negatively

I'll throw in some pluses/minuses/multiplication and maybe some division in there to make it a leet formula sometime soon.

Gizoogle Mizaps.

Unexpected surprises with google maps (link).


Notable surprises include a just-erupted volcano, violent scenes from Iraq (a bomb going off in Baghdad and a firefight in Najaf) and even a 747 landing in Tokyo, something difficult to capture given that the satellite is moving at 17,000 mph. (See the picture gallery at left.)


I wonder if people took notice to such things with Microsoft's TerraServer and the like. These tools have been around for a while, no? I guess Google makes things mainstream (whether they want to be or not).

Sick in Seattle

On seventh cup of tea. Current flavor: Lemon Lift. Had uncountable number of cups last night. Experimented with adding multiple flavors of tea bags into one cup. Last night came up with English Green Lemon Lift. Was good but felt like it needed a shot of Earl Grey.

Currently wondering about what affect expired cough drops have on body. I can see the affect it's had on the wrapper. If no posts follow, fear the worst.

Jesus Shaves!

Heard a cover of this song on NPR today by the Roches. It's originally by "Paranoid Larry." You can grab it here for iTunes. I did.

Jesus Shaves
Joins corporate America
Gets laid off
Grows his beard back
Stays up late
Sees a TV commercial
About being a welder
Makes a phone call

Jesus Shaves
Goes on an interview
Does real well
He's got a way with people
Two years on
He's still an apprentice
But not for long
It's graduation

Jesus Shaves
Puts his best suit on
Gets a certificate
Makes it official
Now he's a welder
Wears a big helmet
And twice a week now
Jesus Shaves

*Chorus*
Blessed are the ones who make peace
Blessed are the ones who scrape by
Blessed are the ones livin' holy lives
And here's to the rest of us who try

Jesus Shaves
On Sunday morning
Decides to go fishing
After goin' to church
It's winter time
So he walks on water
Digs a hole in the ice
And fishes for Perch

Jesus Shaves
And scales off the fishes
Has a few filets
And a couple of brewskies
Thinks about the girl
Magdelena in payroll
Decides that he's gonna
Ask her out for dinner

Jesus Shaves
For work on Monday
Goes to the office
Gather's his courage
He's still not sure
Just how he's gonna ask her
Walks over to her desk
And sees a picture of her boyfriend

*Chorus*

She says 'hello'
'How are you this morning'
He asks if she knows
A little snow or rain
She notices him lookin'
At the picture on her desktop
She says it's her cousin
Who's past away
He says 'that's great!'
She looks at him funny
He says 'I didn't mean that'
She says 'It's ok'
And then she smiles
And they both start laughing
And that's when he knows
It's his lucky day

Jesus Shaves
Smilin' in the mirror
Magdelena is sayin'
That they need to hurry
They will be late for work
And the school bus is comin'
But their daughter likes watchin'
As Jesus Shaves

*Chorus*