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My number one reason for not buying Spotify. For the FIFTH time now Spotify has randomly, without notice, removed a vast number of tracks in my playlist. I can understand that there might be changes in publishing policy, but if I had owned the tracks, I'd never be in this situation. (the album in question was Mark Isham's Castalia, which luckily I do have a CD of, but also _every single track by Cesaria Evora was removed last night :( :( :( )



The very least they could do is notify me that they disappeared so I don't spend time wondering whether I've gone crazy.



Spotify seems to be having licensing / communication problems.

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Buzz by Julian Harris from Buzz

My number one reason for not buying Spotify. For the FIFTH time now Spotify has randomly, without notice, removed a vast number of tracks in my playlist. I can understand that there might be changes in publishing policy, but if I had owned the tracks, I'd never be in this situation. (the album in question was Mark Isham's Castalia, which luckily I do have a CD of, but also _every single track by Cesaria Evora was removed last night :( :( :( )



The very least they could do is notify me that they disappeared so I don't spend time wondering whether I've gone crazy.



Spotify seems to be having licensing / communication problems.

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J Jr

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I wonder whether there's a good business opportunity providing high quality hosting for open source apps. Tried to use another 'free' GTD Tracks site (gtdify.com) and it was down for critical parts of yesterday.

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Totally loving this site. Takes snapshots of a page loading every 0.1s. Then you compare over time.



Check out all the major search engines:



http://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=100321_6533,100321_6534,100321_6535,100321_6536,100321_6537



Google.com: visible elements at 0.5s, fully loaded at 1.8s

Bing: visible elements at 0.4s not fully loaded until 3.2s

Ask.com: don't even... ask

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Jet ski + jet pack = "Jetlev" - MAKE Magazine

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Gtug lon chrome and html5 2010-03-16-17-59-12

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Now Google bookmarks has a very high profile discovery point, Matt Cutts pointed out the neat 'Bookmarklet' feature.

Here's a small tweak to the Google Bookmarklet to include the selected text in the 'Notes' section:

Drag this to your bookmarks bar:
Add to Google Bookmarks

NOTE: Chrome / Firefox only currently. Testing and refining with other browsers.

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What Pengiun books is doing with the iPad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdExukJVUGI

page turning cf http://vimeo.com/8217311 which I think is better

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I've started getting a regular trickle of users subscribing to my new blog, http://thingswellmade.com. It's lovely and everything, but I'm not really sure why they are :)



I don't see any spam.

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Really enjoyed the Twitter Developer Nest last night. Ewan McCloud (http://ewan.net/) is a hilarious and exemplary speaker whose vitriol on the mobile industry is entertaining and informative.

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Really enjoyed the Twitter Developer Nest last night. Ewan McCloud (http://ewan.net/) is a hilarious and exemplary speaker whose vitriol on the mobile industry.

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Snow in Barcelona in March! Insanity!

http://news.google.co.uk/news?sourceid=chrome&q=barcelona+snow&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&ei=LiuWS_XRMNG6jAep4cWeCg&sa=X&oi=news_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CAsQsQQwAA

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DLL hell on the Mac. OMG what waste of life :(

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Autotranscription for everyone on YouTube -- finally! wohoo!

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/future-will-be-captioned-improving.html

Well. English speaking anyway. But can translate the resulting text into 50 languages.

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Opera brunch at brasserie St Jacques

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Opera brunch at brasserie St Jacques

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Internet Vitalstatics: interesting

http://mashable.com/2010/02/26/state-of-internet/

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http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/

Online version is free!

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Spread the word: http://chilepersonfinder.appspot.com/

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Chat roulette: a movie



http://vimeo.com/9669721





cheers @Jonathan Markwell

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Sorry. This blog is a bit messed up right now because I accidentally routed my Buzz posts to it and the system that does it has no unsubscribe :(

How to access an arbitrary Document from jQuery.

I've had great difficulty finding this on the web so here it is, and as usual its super simple but that didn't stop me taking hours to find it.

jQuery uses the notation $('div#test') as shorthand to access node 'thing' in the current Document.
If you are processing an XML document you read from an external source and want to just grab a bit of it and use jQuery, then you use this (assuming xhr is the XmlHttpRequest):

var xmlDoc = $(xhr.responseXML); 
var myValue = xmlDoc.find('towel#colour').attr("blue")


So once again, if you want to use selectors on documents other than the current DOM Document, use find().

View find() docs which, ironically, are hard to find on jQuery.com

Knowledge nugget: What is the maximum number of static files that you can upload to an Google AppEngine application?

The maximum number of static files you can upload is 3000 (not code files). Read more

Sometimes you just need to take a step back.

Check out this FAQ on Streetcar:

Some common mistakes which prevent your [car rental] extension going through:

Wrong: "Extend 1hr"	Right: "Extend 1"
Wrong: "Extend 30 mins"	Right: "Extend 0.5"
Wrong: "Extend my booking 1"	Right: "Extend 1"

Can I suggest that if this is a common mistake, how about making some really simple changes to the SMS parser to support common mistakes? Is it really so hard to strip out the bits above? No it isn't. It's amazing how little things like this are so annoying for users, yet technically are so, so easy to implement.

Yours in eager anticipation for this change,


Julian,
Streetcar user.

Update 26 Jan 2010. Twitter rocks:
streetcarhq@julianharris Thanks for the comment, I have the Tech Team looking into it now...


(Wouldn't it be cool if this blog automatically took twitter comments and stuck them here? That's what Salmon is all about it turns out...)

Android has a useful GTD (task mgr) app, 'Shuffle'. Can't find a direct link to it but 1.4 is awesome in that it syncs to the cloud via Tracks which is an open source GTD web app. Create an account at http://my.gtdify.com and link it to your phone. Very nice.

Useful things Shuffle does:

1. As for all GTD apps, it has a context for a task so when you shift contexts you can filter tasks based on that. For instance I have a context 'at home before work' which I check before I leap out the door. 
2. Also has Google calendar sync -- it can create appts in your calendar. Although current version doesn't allow you to select the account. 
3. Its all free and open source (Shuffle | Tracks)