Lots of Free (legal) Music under the Creative Commons licence, and that's never bad.

With this site you can listen and rate songs right in your browser with a simple and elegant flash player. It gives you reccomendations based on songs you rated highly and the genres you like, and if you like a song you can download the mp3. And on top of all this the site design is really well done.

Definitely one for the bookmarks...

Tonight I got an iPod for an early Birthday/Christmas present. I am one very happy man right now :D

Now if I could just get iTunes to believe me when I tell it that I do in fact have music on my computer already, without resorting to importing the files one by one... I'm sure its because it is mac software ported to the PC, but iTunes is the most horribly unreliable music organiser I've ever seen. I may end up using an iPod winamp plugin eventually, but I want to give iTunes a go because I really like its party shuffle combined with ratings...

I'm looking at getting an iPod this christmas, so I decided to install iTunes and see if I liked it, since I figure it will be the best way to sync my iPod. I set about writing a script to give all my songs ratings based on another system I use. It took a while, but finally worked. I imported my library into iTunes and all was good - except that when I closed and reopened iTunes, it suddenly couldn't find any of my songs.

After copious fiddling around, I discovered that iTunes is storing my filenames as, for example:
Artist%20-%20Track%20Name.mp3/
So for some reason it's treating files as URLs, which is probably to make it interoperable with media from the net. Fine. So why can't it read back the information it wrote?

I tried editing the file, and putting the filename as just Artist - Track Name.mp3, and now it works fine. A simple urldecode could script the process, but this is stupid. Why does iTunes deliberately write url encoded filenames, and then can't even read them back in?

Update:
The above seemed to be the case for importing, but now I've run into an entirely different problem once my songs are all into iTunes. After I close and reopen the program, suddenly it can't find any of my files. Nothing new here. Actually I lie, it can find a few which I added manually. I had a look in the Library.xml file to see what difference there was between the files it could and couldn't find, and suddenly it seems to have taken to using the entire file-path when importing, and only the ones with full file paths can be found. But the really stupid part is that it has the "Music Folder" set correctly, so if the relative filenames were just appended to this string it would find the files. But no, iTunes continues to amaze me in its utter stupidity and unreliability.

I want to give up, but I feel like I'm just so damn close...

If you havent seen it yet, clicketh here and you shall. I managed to get my there for a few seconds (yay for 3 letter names), and we even had a short cooperative outburst where I wrote "ARR" and others kept adding "R"s. There's nothing quite like pirates to get the community spirit going.

Currently there are a whole lot of people who ar just stockpiling everyone else's letters into the corners, but that just makes it all the more challenging to get your way ;)

My server is working again, woo and yay... Now for today's post which was supposed to happen 3 days ago...

This is awesome: A short animation, where each frame has been made into a stencil and sprayed onto a random surface. The guy then took photos of the final griftitii (a stab at the plural for graffiti ;) ) and assembled them into an animation. The result is a surprisingly seamless animation with a different background for each, it's very cool indeed.

MSN search is nearly out of beta. The interface is nice - prettier than Google's, but still not cluttered at all. The results page seems friendlier, I guess it's due to use of bigger fonts and more whitespace... Looks don't really matter in a search engine, but they do help to make good first impressions.

The site keeps being "Unavaliable", and the searches take quite a while (currently a search takes about 2-3 seconds on the server alone). But I would assume these to be resovled when the final version is rolled out.

Features seem to be on par with Google's, more or less, except for one notable (and slightly exciting) difference:
In the "Search Builder" panel, there is a "Results Ranking". I haven't been able to test out these settings particularly, but I think they are going to be very handy when honing in on those elusive pages which seem to get lost in the crap. Or at least I hope so. Microsoft wants in on the searching, and if they can get (a lot) closer to Google's speed then they may well be in with a chance.

Or maybe I'm just peeved because a search for "Tim Cuthbertson" on Google doesn't even turn up this site until down low on the FIFTH page... I realise there are others out there that share my name, but hell, the first two results are about me - and both of them are nearly 4 years out of date now. That'll teach me for using an alias...

Update: It's running much faster now, under half a second per search. That's decent.

Now look, I have nothing against the simpsons. I quite like the show, it's just that they repeat the episodes so damn often I get sick of them very quickly. But I guess channel Ten either doesn't know this or - more likely - doesn't care.

I thought it was a bug in my samurize code at first, but no. Channel Ten is showing 2 hours of simpsons in the next 2.5 hour slot. Does anyone else find that even mildly ridiculous?

Oh, and because everyone always seems to ask why one show is in bold, the show that's on next is always bolded to make sure I notice it.

A friend of mine told me about this man and where he could be found. I call him "Middle Finger Man" (MFM)because no one knows his real name. These man sits on his porch all day every day and flips off everyone that drives by and has been doing this for years. He is so reliable to be there that you can actually give directions according to this man as a landmark.

That part is hilarious on its own, but there's more: Middle Finger Man - with video coverage of the encounter, of couse ;)

Yup, it's finally here: Firefox 1.0

Now you have no excuses for not getting it! Well... except for the fact that the website is currently down ;)
Try a mirror.

Update: And who do you think is hosting the new Firefox Start Page? Interesting indeed... (it's google, if you can't read link targets properly ;P)

Koders looks to be an excellent resource for programmers. And how could it not be cool? It starts with a K!

Koders has a huge range of code, in various languages and under various licences (mostly GPL by the looks of it). You can restrict your search to a specific language or license, or just search among all.

This is going straight to my QuickSearch bookmarks ;)

This one looks to be a big deal:

Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code.
The vulnerability has been confirmed in the following versions:
* Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP SP1 (fully patched).
* Internet Explorer 6.0

Ahh, good ol' execution of arbitrary code.

*hugs Firefox*

I was going through some homework tasks for my Information Systems subject at uni, and I noticed this printed in the student handbook:

See Section ERROR! Reference Source Not Found. (click for photo)

Is it just me, or does this appear to be a 404 error in my manual? To be honest I'm not too surprised, the subject is pretty dodgy - along with seemingly the entire Information Systems department...