Last.fm Boffin

http://www.last.fm/group/Audioscrobbler+Beta/forum/30705/_/510180

Been trying out the ‘Boffin’ tool from Last.fm this evening – and I’m astounded!

Basically, it scans your PC for music, groups it by tag, and then lets you play only music with a specific tag. For instance, I’ve had “Trance” selected for a while now, and it just keeps shoving on amazing tunes I didn’t even know I had!

Obviously, its on an Alpha release, but the technology demonstrated behind it is superb. Didn’t take long to scan my entire music library, and did a pretty good job (so far) of getting the tags and grouping them.

Its also nice to see what my music library mainly consists of (hope the picture works!):

Can’t wait to see this incorporated into the main Last.fm program!

Invaders must Die

Downloaded the new Prodigy album yesterday, and I’m currently in two minds as to whether I like it or not.

The title track is pretty awesome, and ‘Omen’ is epic (I owned that before), however a lot of the other stuff just isn’t their style, neither old school Prodigy or new-electro Prodigy.

I’d say I do regret buying this one, but its definitely one to get for free (not that I encourage that!)

Site upgrades

Found time this afternoon to make a couple of quick upgrades to the website :-D

The ‘blog’ link will no longer go straight to blogger, but will instead parse the feed within my own site. I’ve also removed all the nasty characters (I think) that the RSS feed seems to put in, but I’m still having trouble with the actual styling of some posts, apparently ones that come from my phone! I’ve also not quite finished a way of viewing older posts, that should be here soon.

Keep your eyes peeled for more stuff soon!

Busy times

I really should get round to writing here more often!

Spent quite a lot of last night writing up a summative essay for Intro. to Management, a lot of bullshit went into it though! I’m currently procrastinating instead of walking the 40 minute round trip to hand it in. Really can’t be bothered!

48 hour production in college this weekend – and all the PA Committee ‘freshers’ are involved, I’ve just had an email saying I’m doing all the mixing for the band – joy of joys! Should be a fun weekend anyway, can see me being drunk for the majority of it though!

Also been told I’m ringing in another quarter with DUSCR next week, I think I’ve scored more this term than I’d done in the 8 years before uni!

Peace out…

Half-Fire-Life-Drill

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7867861.stm

Found that on the BBC website this morning – looks like a fantastic use of my departments research team! Maybe just an excuse for them to play Source games all day?!!

Basically, the team (headed by Dr Shamus Smith) took the Half-Life engine, added a map representing the CompSci department, and then used it to run a simulation about escaping from a fire in the building. Sounds like a good idea, in theory!

Found this very interesting:

"If a door was on fire, they [gamers] would try and run through it, rather than look for a different exit," said Dr Smith

I’d like to think that I’d go for a different exit anyway… or are all gamers retarded in that way? Hope they wouldn’t try a similar strategy in real life!

Really didn’t like how the university covered this though (http://www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=7525). Sure Half-Life is violent, but simulations have been around for ages!

FSX gone?

http://www.flightsimx.co.uk/announcements/microsoft-flight-simulator-development-team-axed/

Sad day for the Flight Simulation world :-(

Gambling

http://tinyurl.com/89fhcb

If we’re honest – the one word Obama is guaranteed to say in his speech is ‘change’. Here’s my plan.

Betsson.com are offering odds of 1.03-to-1 on him saying it. Somehow, I manage to get a short term loan for a few thousand pounds. Bet this, pay off the loan straight away, walk away with the 3% (minus loan interest). Betting small amounts wouldn’t be worth it, but £1m equals £30k profit!

Anyone got a spare few million that I can borrow for a week?