su.percilio.us

It’s been a while since I’ve read anything that has made me laugh out loud, but my co-worker just sent me a link that made me laugh out loud at every paragraph. I’ve always been very hot and cold about The Onion. Sometimes it’s just completely off-base and unfunny, but sometimes it’s just about the most intelligent, best-written, offensive thing I’ve ever read. In this musing a man compares his alcoholism to John Cheever’s. It’s particularly hysterical, so I figured I would share it with the world.

How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever’s?

I’m pretty avid user of Last.FM. I’m not big on this social networking fad, even if I do work in the industry, but I’ve found Last.FM very useful, mainly for finding new music. I’m currently building a web-based media manger in PHP and wanted a way to automatically get images for the artists.

I originally used the discogs.com API and although it was pretty easy to use and reasonably comprehensive, I was really disappointed in the quality of the images, not to mention I was constantly getting back images of electronic and ambient artists who had names similar to the rock bands in my collection, rather than the rock band themselves. I’m sorry, but when make a call to get images for “Cream” I don’t expect to get back some 14-year-old kid with a turntable and a DAT machine; I want freaking Clapton, Bruce, and Baker.

So, discogs.com left me a bit cold. But I soon learned about Last.FM and was delighted when I discovered their API. The image quality at Last.FM is superb, so I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed there. I started researching their API and realized that they didn’t really give me any info I needed other than the images and I didn’t want to have to sign up for an API key if all I wanted to do was download pictures of bands. Also, they only appear to provide three sizes of images and for many bands they have a whole slew of images available: large, medium, small, smaller, square; I wanted them all, not just the three provided by their API.

So, in the end I decided not to sign up for a Last.FM API key and instead wrote a very simple little PHP screen scraper that would bring back all of the images I wanted. Last.FM actually aided me in my goal by embedding a JSON string with just exactly what I needed right onto the artist page. It worked very well, so I decided to stick with it.

You can download my simple screen scraper script here. The zip file includes the class file and an example file.

It’ an incredibly simple script. Just a basic class file with only one useable method. It’s written so it can be expanded, but as Last.FM’s API is under constant development, it probably won’t be. But if you just want a simple script to grab artist images from Last.FM, please download my script and let me know if you like it.

I received this link from a colleague and I can’t decide if this is a good idea or not.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?id=57977

It certainly does not seem to have the Battlestar Galactica flair that I’ve come to love. I think this is the Sci-Fi Channel executives overplaying their hand and trying to squeeze as much out of the BSG phenomenon as possible.

I’ll watch it, but I have serious doubts…

I’ve been wanting to make a web comic for a while now. It seems like fun and would give me an outlet for my creative side. I’ve come across three main problems while attempting to throw myself into this artistic endeavor:

1. Lack of Time
   I’m not sure where my time goes. I certainly seem to be busy and tired all the time, but I have very little to show for it.
2. Lack of Focus
   Even if I manage to find the time to sit and think about what I’m doing, I still can’t seem to pay attention long enough to produce anything cogent. Maybe some Adderall is in my future.
3. Lack of Talent
   I can’t draw. Well, that’s not entirely true; I can probably draw well enough to produce a web comic. Randall over at XKCD has taught me that. However, it takes me ages to produce a reasonable drawing and even then I can’t keep it on model for more than one panel.

These three reasons aside I have two web comics in the works. One has to do with a fiery, ethnic heroine who saves the world from some very bad people and the other has to do with antics of me and my co-workers as we stumble blindly through the zany machinations of a tech start-up.

In my opinion, both are extremely promising ideas. And as far as stories go, you’d need some sort of crazy brain turnicut to stop the ideas from flowing. Still, these comics, which are begging to be brough into fruition, still seem so very far away.

Here are a couple of characters I’m working on for the latter comic I mentioned: