Cristiano on Tech/Life

• ie7.js & ie8.js – I need to look into these libraries to make my next project work 100% in both IE7 and IE6
• Get MySQLdb Running on Mac Leopard « Bethink – This is the only online tutorial that I managed to be able to setup up MySQLdb successfully with.
• CitySounds.fm – The music of cities – One of the other hacks from Music Hack Day. Way more awesome than mine if I might say.
• Ask a Basterd: Can I Answer My Cell at a Movie if It Seems Urgent? – Brilliant photo
• My Little Django – because magical mascots are awesome! – Haha, I remember Carl giving this talk, but the fact that someone made a My Little Django generator is brilliant!

I gave a little talk at News Innovation here in London 2 weeks back, at which I quickly ran through a long list of data visualisations to show how it can help people understand things easier. I promised to put the list on my blog and forgot till now.

Here they are. Most of them come from Dan W’s Tumblr which has a lot more, but some of them were my own finds.

• guardian-twitterfall – Google Code – Handy little tool for tracking Tweets
• The Amazing World of Version Numbers | Technologizer – Some fun anecdotes regarding version numbers.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• O2 Digital News Centre: Turning on Twitter Texts – O2 is now going to support free direct-to-mobile texts for your Twitter mentions and direct messages. This is awesome, and means I don't have to wait for any of the iPhone twitter clients to integrate push notifications.
• Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Rsync – Handy little explanation of how to make automated snapshot backups using rsync

So we were at the first London Music Hack Day this weekend, held at the beautiful Guardian offices where we held BarcampLondon6 a few months back. I’ve been to a few hack days before, mostly organised by Yahoo and the BBC, and sice the last one I promised myself to always at least prepare some hack and present it. The first few times that I went to Hack Days I didn’t, and it never felt right. My track record so far on these last two hacks is pretty good, with the last one getting an article on the Guardian blog, and this weekend’s one actually winning a price. But before that let’s look at some of the other hacks.

Some of the cool hacks

There was an amazing amount of hacks put together over the weekend, leading to a presentation session of well over 2 hours. A full list can be found on the Music Hack Day wiki but I handpicked a few that I really liked.

Percussion machine by @alistair

Alistair and Mr Duck set off to make something pretty crazy and play with Arduino boards and servos. They created a percussion machine that made most of us laugh.

Music Bore

I’d like to describe Music Bore as the death to Radio DJ. Powered by IRC and Mac OS X’s text to speech API they created a DJ like experience.

Lonely Harps

The dating website Lonely Harps helps you find potential partners based on matching Last.FM profiles.

Last.FM events on iPhone

Handy little iPhone app that gives you a map with all the upcoming Last.FM events in your area. Very handy if you’re stuck ina  foreign city looking for a party.

My hack

My hack was really simple. I had the idea to map song lyrics onto locations around the world per decade, but discovered most lyrics actually don’t have that many place names in them. Instead I decided to go along the same route and explore other ways of visualisation musical culture shifts.

I decided to go for analysing the lyrics of the top 10 songs per decade an give them multiple visualisations. I only ended up doing a Wordle visualisation in the end, but I think it’s pretty cool. Go ahead and have a look at http://zeitgeist.cristianobetta.com/ and have a look at the different decades.

The hard part of this little app wasn’t actually the visualisation, but actually getting a top 10 list of UK songs per era. There is simply no API for it so I had to opt to make my own API (JSON) for the EveryHit site. For now it’s just JSON and only the cumulative decades (not the single years), but if anyone’s interesting I might write the rest too and maybe add a SPARQL layer too.

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• SaveIE6: Help us save the best browser around – IE6 needs our help
• Download details: IE App Compat VHD – Handy list of Windows VirtualPC images with various browser (IE6, IE7, IE8) that work fine in VirtualBox
• Cut the bullshit: BarCamps are about technology, and that’s why they are awesome – Tom gives his view on whether or not talks at Barcamp should be technical.
• wheresthegeeks | Telling Geeks where to meet – The Hodge's new project that involves a calendar of all Geek events across the UK