Offmessage

If you don’t often follow the links to the left (yes, over there < -) you may not have visited i like recently… You should. It’s always great, and today I was pointed to kiddley. I Like: Whimsical, yes. Kitsch, often. Thoughtful, always. Entertaining, without doubt.

We won. (And no, that’s not a link to the “Finland win Eurovision” story, but to Gloucester RFC winning the European Challenge Cup).

I can’t say that I’m disappointed about this news – Ian Harvey replaces the injured Shane Bond for the whole season. Bond is a frightening talent, but he’s fragile (as this latest episode has proven) and Harv was the linchpin of our finest hour. And he’s in astonishing form already this season. Oh yes.

Home births are the way forward. I can’t thank York Community midwives enough for making the birth such an amazing experience. (Speaking as the one who didn’t actually do the giving birth, of course).

Thinking about the previous post about Amazon got me to thinking about Firefly (again). For some reason I had it in my head that they had been bought by Amazon and had formed the basis of the Amazon recommendations engine. Turns out that good old Wikipedia has a page about them, like they have for every other subject under the sun. Looks like they were in fact bought by Microsoft.

A few of us were avid users. My continued interest in recommendations engines (collaborative filtering, whatever) still harks back to that as a benchmark. Strange it’s 10 years ago now.

They just don’t let up. It is amazing that they have stayed so revolutionary.

Now this: http://zoomin.com.au/australia/qld/brisbane/milton/park+road is a truly RESTful URL.

Fascinating news from the creator of Javascript:

As it evolves, JavaScript will take its cues from the Python language, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript [...] “If it all holds, we’ll end up in the middle of next year with JavaScript 2 implemented,” said Eich.

And as he so often is, this week he’s on the mark again…

Given that Google can’t practically aspire to control the Internet and Microsoft can’t NOT aspire to control it, Google already has a vastly lighter load to carry

It’s no secret that I’ve lost my love for PHP over the last 6 months as I’ve got to grips with Python. The power and simplicity of Python makes it almost impossible to go back – all those dollar signs and semi-colons make code hard to read and typos almost guaranteed, let alone the apparent random naming of functions, the difficulty of unit testing and the poor object orientation….

It was therefore a bit of a surprise to find that there’s nothing near the quality of the excellent getid3() PHP package for Python. There’s the extremely slim python-id3 (which is functional but very limited) and the relatively new but very promising pytagger. I’m trying to get access to my MusicBrainz tags (for yet more AudioScrobbler action) and it’s proving harder than I first thought. I may yet be writing my own