Archive for April, 2007

METAL MAPS

Published by Yuletide on April 19, 2007 in Energy, Environment, Geography and Metal. 0 Comments

I’m working on a mapping project for a cartography class. To map METAL around the world, and investigate its distribution. I’ve already compiled a list of all the countries which have bands listed on http://metal-archives.com (my main source of primary data thus far) and calculated a preliminary METAL RATIO, which is basically population divided by # of metal bands. While far from perfect, it certainly gets things to within an order of magnitude. Also, its clearly skewed by reporting error (internet connectivity is quite high in scandinavia, for instance). But still, the data remains useful.

I’m also putting out a request for anyone who has data I could use in this project. I’ve tried contacting the people at metal-archives.com to no avail, so I just scraped the data by hand. Ideally I’d like an excel spreadsheet (or at least an sql dump) of any kind of relevant music data with geographic relationships (music industry data, album sales, all that is good too). Also interesting would be user demographics for the popular metal forums and sites, though so far the responses have been so lacking on the forums I’ve tried I’m not hopeful anything will come up (at least for now, maybe things will change once I start posting the maps themselves).

random aside:

[posted with ecto]

OH, and as if we didn’t need more reasons to love Norway:
From USA Today: Norway aims to be carbon neutral by 2050

OSLO, April 19 — Norway wants to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 in the world’s toughest national plan for fighting global warming, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday.
He said that Norway, the world’s number five oil exporter, wanted other rich nations to set similar “carbon neutral” aims.
“Norway would be the first country in the world to take on such a concrete commitment,” Stoltenberg said in a proposal to his Labour Party that was met by a standing ovation.

I should add some extra bonus points to Norway’s Metal Ratio, no?

Granted, they’re just buying a crapload of carbon credits using money they earned exporting oil and gas… but it’s a start, right?

A Happy and Necessary Illusion

Published by Yuletide on April 10, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

“The notion that any of us is the Decider, the proactive plotter of our
most lubricious desires, scientists say, may simply be a happy and
perhaps necessary illusion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/science/10desi.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&8dpc&oref=slogin

Quicksilver: Increase iTunes Rating by 1/2 Star

Published by Yuletide on April 9, 2007 in Cool and OSX. 0 Comments

Update: I now use Synergy Advance’s builtin functions to accomplish this. Quicksilver is getting slow and bogged down enough already without having to deal with this iTunes crap. (http://wincent.com/a/products/synergy-advance/) Highly recommended.

Here’s a quick tip to alter the built-in Quicksilver iTunes triggers to increase a track’s rating by 1/2 rather than 1 star.
What I do is give the triggers (which are really just applescripts) hotkeys that I can hit whenever a song comes on I want to rate (I already have 1-5 stars mapped to cmd-opt-shift-1 through cmd-opt-shift-5, with 0 mapped to cmd-opt-shift-`)
So now you want to map the increase/decrease rating scripts to something you’ll remember, I’ll use cmd-opt-shift -(minus) and cmd-opt-shift-=
Now for the fun part… goto the following directory (shortcut: press cmd-shift-g then copy and paste the path below)
~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/PlugIns/iTunes Module.qsplugin/Contents/Resources/Scripts/
If you get to the Plugins folder but are stuck… right click on iTunes Module.qsplugin and select Show Package Contents

Now double click Decrease Rating.scpt and Increase Rating.scpt–they should open in Script Editor and look like this:

tell application “System Events” to if (application processes whose name is “iTunes”) is not {} then ¬
tell application “iTunes” to if rating of current track is greater than 0 then set rating of current track to (rating of current track) - 20

Now the only modification is to change the number “20” to “10”. The iTunes rating system is actually 1-100, so you could rate things even finer than 1/2 star, but it won’t show up in iTunes (half stars are displayed, but apparently they aren’t recognized by the rating-weighted shuffle modes… still useful though.)

So then it looks like this:

tell application “System Events” to if (application processes whose name is “iTunes”) is not {} then ¬
tell application “iTunes” to if rating of current track is greater than 0 then set rating of current track to (rating of current track) - 10

Done!
Huzzah…

So the way I’d use this is to first rate using a whole number, 1-5, then add or subtract a 1/2 as I saw fit. So if I was listening to a song and I decided it was a 3.5, I’d hit the command for 3-stars, then increase by 1/2.

Things for the future:
Would be cool if there was some way for the rating to show up onscreen with a quicksilver-like bezel that showed you what the rating is/what it becomes.

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