I’m going to continue my spree of posting Nightwish songs in lossless format. This one, the first track from their 2004 album Once, could be described as a 4-minute tour through a number of different metal genres, hitting symphonic, power, gothic and pure at a number of points in the song.
I love it, especially the end. Perhaps it’s my “dark” personality!
Nightwish - Dark Chest of Wonders (M4A, 32.8M)
Lyrics after the break.
Apologies to those whose throats I’ve already forced this song down, but I really love it. Perhaps Nightwish’s most accessible song yet.
Amaranth - Nightwish (M4A, 28.4M)
Lyrics after the jump.
(more…)
Let’s have some more recent photos, since the subject of Li Yuchun gets continuing interest on this blog from fans.
Here’s a late 2007 photo signing. Black hair!
Moving to England, and a more poppy (and well-produced) sound. This is a perfect 3 1/2 minute pop song, distinguishing itself with excellent lyrics (which I personally really like - rare for me!) and musical sequences innovative for the genre. Sometimes, the charts do get it right, and MIKA’s solo debut album was deservedly popular.
My Interpretation - MIKA
Lyrics after the break.
Thanks to testing by friends, I can now report that I’ve achieved my lifelong goal of becoming an Enemy of the Chinese State - this blog, and domain, is now blocked in the People’s Republic of China.
Interestingly, the block is keyed by domain - the block is not on the IP itself, as other sites operating on this IP remain unblocked. The actual mechanism seems to be the good ol’ TCP RST trick.
No idea why. I can only assume that my dangerous levels of awesomeness presented a threat to social order in the Middle Kingdom.
UPDATE: unblocked.
The videos are up for the recent Lone Star Ruby Conference 2008, and a lot of them look great. Rails Envy have compiled a short (21m) summary video of the talks which you can view or download here.
Just want to get downloading? Here’s a handy wget file so you can grab them all.
Continuing my run of one-man American power pop auteurs, here’s Roger Joseph Manning Jr. with The Quickening, the killer first track from his surprisingly excellent album Catnip Dynamite. Which is only available in Japan, a fact I am not sure what to make of.
Anyway, it’s another Queen-meets-ELO blast from the future past, and has a fucking synth solo, which basically guarantees I like it. Hope you do too.
The Quickening (mp3, 7MB)
No lyrics for this one - we’ve now dug so deep into obscurity that I cannot find them anywhere.
No kidding on the “excellent” comment, either - barring any surprises this album is a strong (top 3) contender for Album of the Year.
Here’s my initial stab at a Rails Session model for CouchDB. The marshalling stuff is taken from the example SQLBypass class in the ActiveRecord code.
You’ll need a recent and trunk CouchDB, probably.
class CouchSession < Hash @ = CouchRest.database!('http://localhost:5984/sessions') attr_writer :data def self.find_by_session_id(session_id) self.new(@.get(session_id)) rescue self.new(:id => session_id) end def self.marshal(data) ActiveSupport::Base64.encode64(Marshal.dump(data)) if data end def self.unmarshal(data) Marshal.load(ActiveSupport::Base64.decode64(data)) if data end def initialize(attributes = {}) self['_id'] = attributes['_id'] ||= attributes[:id] self['marshaled_data'] = attributes['marshaled_data'] ||= attributes[:marshalled_data] self['_rev'] = attributes['_rev'] if attributes['_rev'] end def data unless if self['marshaled_data'] , = self.class.unmarshal(self['marshaled_data']) || {}, nil else = {} end end end def loaded? !! end def session_id self['_id'] end def save self['marshaled_data'] = self.class.marshal(data) self['data'] = data self['updated_at'] = Time.now save_record = @.save(self) self['_rev'] = save_record['rev'] end def destroy @.delete(self['_id']) end end
Nice and short - possibly the shortest Rails session class I have seen. The beauty of CouchRest/CouchDB! And we descend from hash so we can just save the object straight - after marshalling, of course. Cool, huh?
Note that I am actually writing the raw data as well as the marshalled data into the saved doc, for troubleshooting/interest purposes. Feel free to remove that.
Not pretty, but it works. Just save it like a normal model. You’ll need to put these into environment.rb:
config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore.session_class = CouchSession
Note also that I have ignored any differentiation between the record ID and the session ID, negating the need for any special overrides in ApplicationController. However, the session IDs Rails generates are large and you might find them unattractive in CouchDB - it would be fairly simple to separate them, but then you’d need a new map view and an override. I feel it’s simpler to just use the Session ID as the doc ID and damn the torpedoes. YMMV.
Improvements? See something wrong with it? Let me know! 
My friend recently asked me which new car she thought I should buy. I answered without hesitation - the Chery Amulet!
The Amulet has a lot of things going for it - stylish good looks, fuel economy, and its excellent build quality, but what I really like is its safety. The Chinese have really pulled out all the stops with this one - one look at the video below and you’ll see why, should an accident befall you, the Chery Amulet is the car to be in.
It was harder than I thought to write a useful method_missing class for Hash object, so I thought I’d share the fruit of my labours here.
class Hash def method_missing(m, *args, &block) method = m.to_s is_assignment = method[-1,1] == '=' key = is_assignment ? method[0..-2] : method[0..-1] self[key] = args.first if args && is_assignment raise NoMethodError if !self[key] return self[key] end end
The difficulty lies in detecting and acting correctly in situations where we want to assign a value to the hash. Annoyingly, we have to go and actually check for an = which inexplicably gets attached to the end of the method if present.
Anyway, let’s see if it works:
>> hsh = {'ping' => 'pong'} => {"ping"=>"pong"} >> hsh.ping => "pong" >> hsh.ping2 NoMethodError: NoMethodError from /path/initializers/hacks.rb:31:in 'method_missing' from (irb):3 >> hsh.ping2 = "pong2" => "pong2" >> hsh.ping2 => "pong2" >> hsh.keys => ["ping2", "ping"]
Yes, pretty basic, but I tried and failed to find anything that handled assignation that wasn’t a overblown nightmare or didn’t actually work so thought I’d share. As far as I can see this is the Simplest Thing That Can Possibly Work™ for this case, any improvements welcome.
Also note that we are standardising on hash keys being strings here. If you want to use that code with Symbol keys (popular in Rails), you’d have to extend it a bit. I had actually been under the impression that symbols and strings in hashes were going to be considered equal in Ruby 1.9 but apparently just in comparison, not access.
Another useful addition might be a hash of “acceptable” keys and their types as a class variable, which you’d feed with a DataMapper-style list of properties for the class. Check any inserts against that and you’ve got basic validations, sans the 20,000 lines of impenetrable black box magic of the popular mega-libraries.
One more thing: obviously I would not recommend actually putting this on Hash proper. Monkeypatching such a basic class is asking for trouble. Instead, create a new class descending from Hash, create your objects in that, and use it from there.
UPDATE: looks to be a decent library for doing something similar if you don’t trust my hacks or if you prefer a gem. Personally a gem has to do something pretty fucking special for me to require it these days but you might prefer otherwise. It’s too big for me and tries to do too much, most of which I don’t want. But, it’s a *lot* smaller than going for a full AR object or something.
On another note, something to bear in mind is that method_missing is slow. Using it to look inside a hash is about 5 times slower than accessing the key directly. That probably doesn’t matter, but it might pay to think twice before putting a method_missing call inside a loop that’s going to run a lot.
1,000,00 lookups (in seconds):
string hash: 1.041939 symbol hash: 0.699153 method missing hash: 4.645116
UPDATE 2: I’m a sucker for writing these little mini-benchmarks. The above was this code:
def self.test count = 0 hsh = {'ping' => "PONG"} time = Time.now 1_000_000.times do count += 1 if hsh['ping'] == "PONG" end puts "string hash: " + (Time.now - time).to_s count = 0 hsh = {:ping => "PONG"} time = Time.now 1_000_000.times do count += 1 if hsh[:ping] == "PONG" end puts "symbol hash: " + (Time.now - time).to_s count = 0 chsh = CouchHash.new # monkeypatched hash ; ) chsh['ping'] = "PONG" time = Time.now 1_000_000.times do count += 1 if chsh.ping == "PONG" end puts "method missing hash: " + (Time.now - time).to_s end
Note the speed. Not *that* bad. I thought about posting the code, as I always do, but thought “guh, I’m not posting that ugly crap. I can clean that up” .. so did. But the only way I could think of to trigger the different lookup methods was via an eval(), and what that did to the results is instructive.
def self.test hsh = CouchHash.new hsh['ping'] = hsh[:ping] = "PONG" tests = ["['ping']", "[:ping]", ".ping"] tests.each do |call| time = Time.now 1_000_000.times do raise if !(eval("hsh" + call) == "PONG") end puts call + ': ' + (Time.now - time).to_s end end
Wow, doesn’t that look better! Well, one thing doesn’t look better .. the results:
['ping']: 6.494104 [:ping]: 5.557214 .ping: 9.39655
Woah. The eval slowed us down by a factor of 10 in the case of the symbol lookup. Lesson: don’t use eval. Especially in combination with method_missing!!
Running about 6 months late with the new music here, but this one has to go up, better late than never. From Josh Fix, who basically sounds exactly like Freddie Mercury, comes yet another bombastic rock production - I can’t tell whether I like the actual song, or I’m just ecstatic that someone, somewhere, is still making music like this.
As anyone who knows me could attest, I’ve been incredibly down on American music for the last .. well, decade. After a brief explosion of creativity in the early 90s, the mainstream sound has degenerated into endless derivative Creed/Maroon 5 sound-alikes; not my taste at all. Some of the hiphop has been good, but that too started to sound awfully formulaic and most of the innovation has been in the production. There’s no dance output worth the space on one’s iPod and the “alternative” is anything but. Local bands might sound great to the drunken punters at a bar in Boston but don’t cut it compared to the global and historical corpus.
So I’m still down on American music, but like all things American, the average is low but the peaks are high, and one thing that America does seem to do well is produce these “auteur” types who get all depressed, get hepped up on goofballs, go hide in their house for a few years and then come out with some self-produced opus which happens to be fucking amazing. These albums are inevitably one-offs and the artists never live up to their debut. I’m thinking Bryan Scary, Jonny Polonsky, and now Josh Fix. There are probably more; they’re hard to find. My tastes seem to be so dissimilar to the US “music media” that they’re useless for finding new music; I have to rely on “carpet bombing”, serendipity and “guided randomness” in locating new music in an opaque market. Anyway.
This song starts like Radiohead circa “Iron Lung” (ie the last time I liked them), turns into Queen meets ELO, all made in LA in 2008. Awesome. Lyrics after the jump.
Josh Fix - Whiskey & Speed (mp3, 14.5M)
Open terminal and execute:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE
Then restart iTunes.
Really annoying changes there Apple. Especially overwriting previously selected preferences to not show these features - then removing the preferences themselves. Probably only a matter of time before they remove the ability to disable them at all.
An open source replacement for iTunes, cloning the interface but without the crap, can not come soon enough.
Output from my trusty svn_up script, which also pulls git:
git detected in arkx executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in arkx, retry manually? git detected in couchrest executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in couchrest, retry manually? git detected in globalite executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in globalite, retry manually? git detected in masquerade executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in masquerade, retry manually? git detected in rack executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in rack, retry manually? git detected in relaxdb executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in relaxdb, retry manually? git detected in rest-client executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in rest-client, retry manually? git detected in thin executing: git pull github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Connection refused fatal: unable to connect a socket (Connection refused) !!! command ‘git pull’ failed in thin, retry manually?
Does anyone else think that it is not really acceptable for a large number of important source repositories to just go down at the drop of a hat?
UPDATE: from github.wordpress.com:
github 7:46 pm on August 23, 2008 | 0 | # |
We’ve taken the site down for approximately 3 hours while we’re upgrading our servers.
THREE HOURS??!!!
There’s a bit of a gotcha I encountered recently with OpenStruct. If you create a new one from a Hash with the key, uh, “hash” - then try to read the value back out by doing mystruct.hash - you’ll get the object ID instead. No idea why, I’d certainly never realised .hash was a synonym for .object_id before, but it fails in the worst possible way - looks like it works, accepts the information, and then casually hands you back the wrong value when you least expect it:
>> require 'ostruct' => true >> hsh = {:hash => 'hash!'} => {:hash=>"hash!"} >> os = OpenStruct.new(hsh) => #>> os.hash => 18782890
Can’t have that. I had already extended Hash to ease OpenStruct creation, so I modified that to check for key/keyword collisions first.
class Hash def to_struct if self.keys.map {|k| OpenStruct.respond_to?(k)}.include?(true) raise 'reserved word as hash key' end OpenStruct.new(self) end end
Gotta love those Ruby one-liners : )
So why do this kind of thing at all? Well, Rails has spoiled me with all its method_missing sugar. So if I’m doing something like this:
SITE_CONFIG = {:default_language => 'en'}
I don’t want to access it like this:
SITE_CONFIG[:default_language]
OK, pretty silly reason, but it makes a difference to me! Hey, that’s why I use Ruby in the first place.
>> SITE_CONFIG = {:default_language => 'en'}.to_struct => #>> SITE_CONFIG.default_language => "en"
It’s the little things.
Of course the real lesson here is not to use common keywords/class methods as hash keys or anywhere else.
I think this is the only way to do it.
>> Time.now.strftime("%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S.#{Time.now.usec} %z") => "2008/08/20 01:22:28.367899 +0000"
At the microsecond level, it’s possible for Time.now to change mid-evaluation, so if you *really* care about timing you could freeze the time object first and read from that:
>> now = Time.now => Wed Aug 20 01:40:26 +0000 2008 >> now.strftime("%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S.#{now.usec} %z %Z") => "2008/08/20 01:40:26.597940 +0000 UTC"
Happily, Time.parse will read that straight out of the box:
>> n = now.strftime("%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S.#{now.usec} %z %Z") => "2008/08/20 01:40:26.597940 +0000 UTC" >> Time.parse(n) => Wed Aug 20 01:40:26 +0000 2008 >> Time.parse(n).usec => 597940
To celebrate Nightwish’s promotion to a probation A-list band, I’ll celebrate by uploading their 14-minute track The Poet and the Pendulum, the bombastic, overblown, teen-poetry-esque but very enjoyable first track from their most recent album.
The Poet and the Pendulum - mp3, 32M
If 14-minute Finnish symphonic power metal rock operas aren’t your thing, I recommend this previous post of a 15-minute Japanese symphonic power metal rock opera, still available.
Lyrics after the break for those who love to sing along!
I promoted Nightwish to A-list status, and demoted a few to B-list - let’s see how long that lasts. I also deleted any C-list bands, since there’s so many of them a list becomes kind of endless and futile.
Interesting to maintain a “list of favourite bands” over multiple years. Revisiting it every year or so certainly weeds out the spurious entries, and re-affirms the deserving.
Song of the week is from the “new” Bryan Scary album, Flight of the Knife.
Imitation of the Sky
I’ve been on a bit of a new music spree recently, having gotten sick of everything I had, so expect a mini-flood of “songs of the week/day/hour”.
Gee, I guess centralising source control around a single website might have some downsides after all.
Australian ABC’s new iView internet service, in which they offer good-quality streaming flash video of most of their interesting shows, is fantastic. ABC is Australia’s tax-funded government broadcasting system; it’s generally pretty good.
This is exactly what I want ABC to be doing with my tax dollars. We pay for all this content to be made, it should be available free to everyone on the net, in good quality, at any time. This first version is an excellent start. It’s still a bit slow and the quality could be better, but I’m sure that will come in time. Much better than the BBC’s “iPlayer” application. Now hopefully they will drastically increase not only the quality but the range and back catalogue, and add more download options.
Now if only SBS would offer something similar - that is the only other channel worth watching on Australian television and as soon as they do so I won’t be able to see much point owning a television at all.
Check it out if you’re interested in watching Australian taxpayer-funded TV programming. ABC News, 4 Corners and Foreign Correspondent are best for news. If you’re after comedy, the Chaser is currently on break but The Gruen Transfer is high quality.
Oh, and it’s unmetered for iiNet : ) Internode to unmeter it soon too, apparently.