Anu Sarma

It's Anu Sarma. I apparently forgot the important Sarma bit that makes Google catch it.

Anu Sarma.

This blog will now return to it's regularly scheduled withering commentary on random stuff.

This one goes out to...

My lovely wife refuses to let me mention her by name on this blog. I don't understand why this is. I've threatened to mention her by cheesy expressions instead - "the old ball and chain", "she who must be obeyed", etc. - but this doesn't move her.

Our good friend Anu, on the other hand, chastises me gently each time I see her for not mentioning her by name in my blog. She claims she wants the fame, exposure and general coolness that comes from standing even virtually in my presence.

Both somehow seem to be under the misguided impression that I have more readers than the fourteen or so people I know off.

Clever

Exciting things I've learned at my new job

For great success, do not eat an entire packet of wasabi peas in one sitting.

ISS & The Shuttle

I just watched the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis whiz by overhead. They were separated in the sky by about 2 fingers held at arms length. They disappeared into the Earth's shadow almost right overhead. For something that seems pretty mundane these days, it was actually kind of thrilling to witness. Timings were courtesy of the Heavens Above web site. Heavens Above is a nifty service where you can create an account, create observation sites and get information on interesting things happening in the sky above your sites. Interesting things include basic information like sunrise/sunset times, when you can see certain satellites, Satellite flares, star maps, etc. All jolly good stuff.

Thanks to the Bad Astronomer for the reminder.

Not knowing how to cook...

...is, apparently, like not knowing how to fuck. Sin City breakfast tacos:

Crows

Anyone else seeing lots and lots of crows around this year? We live in Sunnyvale, and our neighborhood is swamped by them. Our friends live about 5 miles away in Los Altos, and they're seeing the same thing. Normally, we get a few Red-shouldered Hawks living in the trees at the edge of the park behind our house, but I haven't seen them at all this year.

LOLCODE

I've mostly watched the current fascination with Lolcats with a kind of bemused disinterest. Finally, two I can relate to: LOLCODE and LOLPython.

(Thanks, Jeremy.)

Wow - last.fm is crap

I saw a blog somewhere that had a neat little sidebar widget showing the last songs the writer had listened to. This service was provided by the cutely named last.fm. "Neato," I thought, "why don't I sign up and try something similar?" My first step was to set up a last.fm account. That bit was fairly easy, but the site seemed a bit laggy. More on this later.

Then I downloaded the SlimScrobbler plug-in for SlimServer (which serves up music to my house.) A few minutes later, I had a my Squeezebox notifying last.fm of the music I was listening to. Yea!

Then the fun began. The first thing I noticed was that last.fm was taking a few minutes to notice that I had actually started playing a song. I'm guessing that their front-end stuff is aggressively caching it's database reads. Well, I can live with that: the music showed up eventually. Then I really started to notice the whole lag issue. Their front-end is really really slow. Slow enough that, about 25% of the time, I got a blank page after a long timeout. About 50% of the time, I got my page but only after a long wait. My net connection is no slouch, and other web sites were doing just fine, so this was definitely a problem on their end. Maybe they thought that they actually had to locate their servers in the Federated States of Micronesia?

So, what do we have? So far, we have a laggy front end and a laggy back end. Hmm. Well, let's assume that it's functional and they just have bandwidth issues to figure out. Maybe if a large corporation buys them up, they'll get all the bandwidth they want?

Anyway, let's create one of those widgets for WordPress and see how it all works out. Clicking on the obvious tab ("Widgets", along the top of the page) brought me to a page that said "Sorry, you can't make a widget from this radio station. Please choose another." That's a bit rude. I don't even know what a radio station means in this context - perhaps that's the cheesy marketing name for a widget? Anyway, let's choose a more likely option: "Charts". Blank canvas with a "show me the code" button. Click. Spinner, then nothing. Okaaay - this is turning out more difficult that it should. There's also a link to their old image-based charts, so let's try that. This time I get a page of samples with my actual music in there. It's not pretty, but it is more than I've seen up to this point. Clicking on the link to go back to the flash-based chart maker, I'm told that I haven't listened to enough music yet. This didn't seem to be a problem for the image-based charts, so what gives? They have a pointer to their help, but nothing there really described why I might have seen this in the chart creation context.

I leave my SqueezeBox running for a few hours and when I get back, I check my account again. This time, I'm up to 131 songs played, representing a fairly good cross-section of the kind of music I listen to. But there's also an error saying that some songs I played had been tagged badly and therefore weren't added to my playlist. No indication was given of what tags exactly were problematic, no indication of how to actually fix the problem and no information in the FAQ about any of this.

There's an interesting caveat on the old image-based charts page: "Images are saved locally on our servers, so don't fret if your chart is slightly behind your profile page from time to time." Considering that my profile is behind reality quite a bit of the time, too, this doesn't bode well. Add to that the fact that the horrible horrible lag is likely to slow down loading of my blog page, and I think I'll pass.

last.fm seems like a neat idea that's been really badly executed. One thing I noticed in the FAQ is that there apparently is a paid-subscription-based service. I can't imagine paying for any of this at all.

GoogleWifi: Any moment now...

Today, the painters came to paint our house, so we had to vacate the premises. After breakfast, we decided that staying out of the house for a few days was probably preferable to inhaling paint fumes, so it was time to book a motel or hotel. "Don 't worry," I said, "I'll log on to the Internets using GoogleWifi and book a hotel that way!" Foolish foolish geek. GoogleWifi is slow. So slow, in fact, that I gave up entirely on the idea after about 15 frustrating minutes of driving around downtown Mountain View looking for a good signal. Actually, I take that back: getting a good signal was never a problem. I always got between 3 and 5 bars. Getting a reliable network connection was much more difficult. I don't know if Google is using carrier pigeons or something else like that to shuffle the packets back and forth, but I never got beyond a web page title appearing in my web browser window before giving up and trying something else.

Scuttlebutt has it that metropolitan WiFi isn't doing so well. Well, duh! I can't actually imagine ever relying on this crapitude as my primary net connection. Maybe some day this will all just work, but we're a long way from there right now.

The Danish Language