jtolds.com - Miscellaneous

More TV

JT Olds — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:54:21 +0000

Haha, I just found episodes of a TV show I grew up watching. I love this show.

Chuck

JT Olds — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:47:25 +0000

I have a confession to make. Over the past few weeks, maybe actually over the past month or so, I have gotten incredibly hooked on the TV show Chuck.

Now, I have to say, it's not that great of a show. In fact, some of the plot and character developments are downright terrible. As my friend Zach put it, the eponymous character is really more of a cartoon: incredibly one dimensional.

I don't want to say that it's anywhere near National Treasure as far as believability goes (because I can't stand National Treasure for the same reason), but it might be in the same order of magnitude. I think that says something.

Here's the kicker: boy am I hooked. I've watched every episode released so far. And the reason I bring this up is two-fold:

Hulu is amazing. I have seen the future of TV, and it's here. Hulu, Sling, Roku, Boxee, Lala, Pandora, Grooveshark, all of these services are spelling the end of traditional broadcast mediums. Forget about radio, cable, or satellite TV; don't worry about the new DTV upgrade this February. Just make sure you have broadband: the media of the future will stream over TCP/IP.
My life is so boring. What an awesome TV show. Like seriously, what am I doing with my life? :( I'm having a quarter-life crisis or something over here, all because of an unbelievable spy show. Also unbelievably awesome, but mostly unbelievable. I've totally lost interest in personal projects in favor of figuring out how to get into Stanford so I can be recruited by the CIA.

Google Friend Connect

JT Olds — Thu, 4 Dec 2008 21:42:11 +0000

My website now uses Google Friend Connect to manage comments on selected posts.

You may have noticed earlier this month that I turned on comments for a few newsletter entries using JS-Kit. Now, I've moved that all over to Friend Connect, which launched today.

If you didn't notice the JS-Kit business earlier, yes, now on some of my newsletter entries you can leave comments. I pick the ones on which I feel like allowing comments. :P

Specifically, I've enabled comments on this entry so you can try it out if you want.

Update: stupidly, it looks like I don't get email notifications when comments are left, so I may be slow at getting back to you. Or just switch back to JS-Kit.

Pre-cooked bacon?!?

JT Olds — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:28:54 +0000

Oh my goodness. How I have lived my life without this?

Seriously, pre-cooked bacon? Either I blacked out due to the awesomeness last time I heard about this, or I have somehow never heard about this in my life.

I'm going to have to rebudget my monthly expenses now.

Website ported to Google App Engine

JT Olds — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:09:40 +0000

I just converted my website to Google App Engine (you can tell if any website is running on GAE if the /form URL returns a Google error). As you may notice, there is now a feeds page. Furthermore, the categories for my "newsletter" are now more useful. A newsletter entry can be in more than one category, and there is an RSS feed for each category. So, if, say, you want to subscribe to my website's feeds about math and programming but not politics, you are now able to do so.

Grooveshark: Awesome

JT Olds — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:24:00 +0000

I got this email back from Grooveshark a day or two ago, responding I guess not to my email, but to this blog post. Evidently they are either working on or at least aware of the issues I pointed out. Yay.

To: me. :)
Subject: Greetings from Grooveshark

Hey JT,

First off, thanks so much for all your help and interest. Incredibly thoughtful feedback like yours is something we don't see too terribly often, and it really makes my day. We're a small bunch, and we're insanely grateful for you checking us out--and doubly so for taking the time to give us all your thoughts and kindness.

The biggest suggestion/critique you mentioned is the duplication of results in searching/displaying/adding to your queue--which is definitely valid! I understand exactly where you're coming from, not just as a Grooveshark employee, but as someone who uses Grooveshark on a daily basis. Ironically, this is also something we have spent a long time analyzing and trying to figure out the best solution for. We've considered audio fingerprinting, something like CDDB (Gracenote), and various kinds of internal sorting. We made a large push to map many-to-one relationships in our database, so that the 500 copies of Money for Nothing would be collapsed into one display result that is then linked to all the versions users have uploaded. Unfortunately, it was a bit more difficult than we anticipated (as huge database shifts seem to be :-).

Though we're working on ways to fix this (our Editing system is nearly complete), we've been having to focus a bunch of time on keeping all of our servers/load stable and everything generally working.

Other points:

Search! If you do a search for "Honey, as an example, then click artists, it does actually parse through both artist names *and* songs by artists with the given phrase. So when I search for Honey and click on artists, I see Van Morrison (thanks to his song "Tupelo Honey"). The results aren't as refined as we'd like them to be, but fortunately the basic infrastructure is there. But you're still right on about it filtering the displayed songs under the given artists based on the search query.

Favorite Playlist, or add to your queue: I agree!

Autoplay Distinction: Since Autoplay is a pretty new feature, we're working on exactly how we think it should work, in both implementation and the backend algorithm that determines that songs are suitable. If there is any runover between songs recommended during a soft rock session and a jazz session (there should hopefully be very little), you can see which songs you have Hearted or Smiled/Frowned in the past, and adjust how they make you feel during this particular current Autoplay. Also, since we're still gathering a bunch of data on what songs *should* be recommended to other songs, this should get better. We're soon going to start mapping song-to-song recommendations, so the overall feeling of one Autoplay won't be compromised as much as they are with artist-to-artist recommendations (what we have now).

But in essence, songs that are chosen as recommendations during Autoplay are only based on what songs previously appear in the queue for that particular Autoplay. Basically, as you wished, the integrity is maintained because it only recommends based on what you've been listening to during this session, but we still want to make the song-to-song recommendations much better.

Recently Played being actually useful: again, completely agree! We will!

Phew, that was quite a mouthful to type! Hopefully I cleared up some confusion and answered your questions satisfactorily--but I know I get pretty confusing sometimes. If there's anything I was too vague about, or if you have absolutely any other questions, suggestions, requests, bugs, or anything else on your mind, I'm more than happy to help!

Again, thanks so much for everything, JT. It means so much to us, and I wanted to personally reply to your amazing email. Don't hesitate to get in touch with me personally at [email removed for spam harvesting reasons], or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/grooveshark. You rock, and I hope to hear back soon!

Regards,
Ben

To Grooveshark: So close to awesome.

JT Olds — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:35:29 +0000

Another update: They responded.

The following is a (slightly modified) email I just sent to Grooveshark's feedback system. If you haven't seen Grooveshark yet, it's so close to awesome, but check it out! http://listen.grooveshark.com/

Update: So, the email below laments the song fragmentation on Grooveshark. Since sending, I've decided that my suggestions just might already be implemented on Grooveshark, and I'm not noticing them due to user interface crappiness. Basically, I'm upset that when I search for a music artist, I want to add one of each of their unique songs into my play queue. The easiest way to add all of an artist's songs is to search for them, go to the artist search results, and drag in their name into your queue. That ends up with tons of song duplicates though. However, the initial search results do seem to do a pretty good job of removing duplicate songs. But there's no way to just say "add all these to my queue." So, that would be easy to fix.

To: feedback@grooveshark
Subject: So close to awesome!

Grooveshark is amazing, and potentially a complete game changer. I've found that while I used to listen to my meticulously organized music collection, I now find myself using Grooveshark in many cases instead.

Completely ignoring the possibly uncountable future directions Grooveshark could move [(they have so much potential! they could become the universal music gateway, streaming any music you want to any device you have!)], here's the biggest problems [(besides a worrisome revenue model)] with Grooveshark I've found that prevent it from replacing my music library completely, in decreasing order:

Grooveshark suffers from massive fragmentation of songs. Popular songs are listed thousands of times in a search, while unpopular songs are listed maybe once or twice. This is to be expected for a service that culls its musical library from its diverse users. However: this could be easily fixed by employing some sort of audio fingerprinting to identify duplicate songs, and only list songs once. I vaguely understand that users get compensated when their version of a song is used, but this is a huge user interface problem. Implement audio fingerprinting-based duplicate removal, and choose which user gets compensated via round robin selection. Or whichever song is of the highest quality. Or something. Suggestion for audio fingerprinting? Look at http://musicbrainz.org/.

All the other problems below are tiny compared to the huge, glaring one above.

The search interface is unintuitive. When I search for a term, I want the initial response list to be every song that matches the term. Then, when I click "Artists", I want to filter those results, not get a list of all artists that matched that search. When I click a specific artist, I want the songs that matched my search from that artist, not all songs from that artist, since the artist matched my search. Really, the iTunes interface is great. You can search, and then add filters by selecting Artists or Albums by which to filter. Just do it that way.
I want to be able to drag my whole list of favorites (a new feature, I understand) into my queue.
I want to have profiles for the autoplay feature. I want to train the machine learning algorithm behind it with soft rock when I'm in a soft rock mood, and not have that affect the training of jazz I did when I was in a jazz mood. [Haha, as an example. Smooth jazz rocks.]
Update: Please cache the most recent play queue between website visits! That way, if someone accidentally closes a window or navigates away from Grooveshark, they can return and not lose their play queue. You could even do it just for logged in users.

All in all, a great product, but please add audio fingerprinting-based duplicate removal! Please!

(I'm posting this to my blog, too)

-JT

Wii!

JT Olds — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:52:16 +0000

So, I usually don't use this as venue for posting links, but I just want to point out that Nintendo is finally making good on my predictions. This is probably the single best thing that Nintendo can do with the Wii, in my opinion, and I predict this will catapult the Wii in the future into even more of a must have home accessory.
Click here for the article.
In tandem with this, I would like to take the opportunity to predict Nintendo announcing, if not releasing, an upgraded Wii with more interal space for saved games, probably within the next two years.

Clarification

JT Olds — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:16:32 +0000

So, I was linked to this page by someone who was also featured, and I just wanted to clarify some slight factual errors. :)
First, I would like to say I don't recall any standoff, but, you know, my memory is flakey. I'd also like to point out that if I did indeed revoke any root passwords, it was system wide, and I probably disabled that feature in its entirety. I may have, however, forgotten to distribute sudo access.
Lastly, I suspect that I was hardly anyone's first lesson in security, and that certain people who seem to be well-enough established in the field to have articles written about them probably have had prior security experience.

Anyway, so, that's that.