Auto sucks - Last rant of 2008

I hate automatic settings.
Well not always, but very often. Especially now when I'm in Portugal.


Blogger.com show login (and something else) in Portugese. Too tired to change.

Apple think I live in United States. Can not change.

Google is stuck in .pt mode... i never want anything else but .com. Too annoyed to find out how to change.

Spotify removes songs for me, since I'm listening from Portugal and was registred in Sweden. Unnable to change back to Sweden now when I thought I was smart and changed my location to Portugal.

See you next year !

4 steps to success for Spotify

- Community

What I Like about Deezer is the community perspective of a gigantic record collection. When I am out of inspiration I want to see/listen what other peeps dig. I want to see that I'm not alone while searching for cool new songs. This is one reason that I often switch to VLC / ShoutCast, that I want new music that other people choose for me. (Shoutcast/Electro/DIGITAL IMPORTED is a fav.)

- DJ / Party functions

Spotify at it's best is at a party. (almost)unlimited number of songs for all tastes. Whats missing in a part is basic DJ functions such as beat-matching, cross fade between songs and maybe visual effects. When we have the unlimited jukebox, please skip the booring gaps and fade-outs that makes the dance floor fade :)

- Mobile version

I want it in my SonyEricsson. I want it in my iPod Touch. Then I will never leech another pirate song again.

- API

As a developer I get all kind of crazy ideas, how to integrate Spotify and music in new web services. Please give me a API to play around with. Please crowdsource the tech developent to us.

OMG - App Store is a hassle.

Well, I know i'm not the bleeding edge, since I upgraded my Nano to iPod Touch the other day. I really like the little thing which made my flight to Portugal a little easier (watching S05 of a popular TV show :)) But i can't help complaining about what Apple could done better with this gadget.

First: Sorting music.

I have alot of mp3 music that are coded in different ways, for example "Acoustic covers vol1" that have it's songs coded for each artist and song name. I want to play this "album" which is a nightmare since all the songs are in defferent artists and albums. Whan I ended up doing is, creating a playlist for each album that I transferred to the iPod. I remember the good ol days when I had a iRiver which could play a "folder" without any problems.

Second: Downloading from App Store.

Cool, I can add apps to my iPod! Let's browse and install a random (free) app just to try it out...Login! Huh? How do I create an account? For App Store? for Itunes? for Apple? where in my iPod can I create an account? No freakin where!

Okay, lets try do open up safari and go to Apple.com and create an account using the iPod. No luck, I get no confirmation e-mail and no success downloading from App Store using that account. So finally, let's open up my computer and go to iTunes, and try to create the account from there. Oh, I need to add additional information to my account. Woot, Credit Card number? Oh well, i trust Apple, so they can have it. But what now?! They think i live in the US?, no I'm from Sweden, currently staying in Portugal. So how do I change country...lets see.... NOWHERE! Aw crap, I give up.. might just be easier to jailbreak it and add apps that way...

Deezer.com - The Spotify killer?

I have been using Deezer for a few weeks now, and I must say that it kicks ass! Although the (Flash) GUI is a a bit buggy, and the workflow is not too intuitive, the service itself rocks, with all that FREE streaming music... just click and play.

Above you ca see my embedable playlist, and if you like electro, there sure are some goodies for you there :)

The media delivery is super fast and i'd say that apx. 60-70% of the songs i play have a great bit rate compression. I used to have Spotify, that was really amazing fast and great quality, but it is still not very accessible to the public, and also it seems that they are removing songs from their database all the time. Allright, just get over to Deezer to find great free music now!

Great delivery Dell!

Yeah, every time DHL comes knocking on the door it feels a little bit like christmas. This time the delivery man had a big nice package from Dell, and it was our new 1U rack server.

I filled her up with 8GB RAM and 2x500Gb SATA HDD, that hopefully will be enough to launch our project for the beta test audience.

The hosting location is also pretty cool, it's a new server hall located in a nuclear proof cave inside a mountain in the central parts of Stockholm (söder). Thanks to my friends at Carismar, i will install the new server in their rack at Pionen which is the name of the server hall from the hosting company called Bahnhof.

Prototype docs sucks!

In our new super cool web 2.0 project I extensively use the JavaScript framework Prototype, because I use a lot of front-end intelligence and DOM manipulation. It is extremely useful and pretty easy to use, but there is only one problem. Some times when I need further explanation how some thing works, I tend to take a peek in the API documentation, and quite frankly it sucks.

First, I’m a long time .NET coder and I’m pretty used to the MSDN style documentation which is great once you get the hang of it. Also the Adobe LiveDocs are pretty OK (especially with the user commends below). But the guys at Prototype should spend a few seconds extra to write a proper description of the objects and functionality, AND some decent examples.
Let me give an example:
Under: http://prototypejs.org/api/element/writeAttribute
They tell you:

writeAttribute(element, attribute[, value = true]) -> HTMLElement
writeAttribute(element, attributes) -> HTMLElement
Adds, specifies or removes attributes passed as either a hash or a name/value pair.

What the hell does “attribute[, value = true])” mean? I could guess that the second argument is some Boolean value but does the *nothing*, mean??
What I was looking for in this method was actually a way to remove element attributes. I had to take a look in the source code for the writeAttribute method to realize that you pass a null or false as a value, in order to remove the element attribute as you can see here:

…
if (value === false || value === null)

        element.removeAttribute(name);
…

…and did I mention that there was no example what so ever of the different ways to create/remove attributes in this method?

Come on team Prototype. Your lib rocks, and so should your docs do!

Leaving Fi to start new company

Yes, it was short but intense. I have left Fi, to start my own company. This is super exciting and i'm currently working on a prototype for this world wide public web site.

Unfortunately I can not reveal the idea, but please stay tuned for information about how to participate in the upcoming beta test.