Across the Business Wire today is the trumpeting that Miley Cyrus has two albums in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200; a feat last achieved by the late Ray Charles. The two albums would be the now triple-platinum Hannah Montana 2 / Meet Miley Cyrus and the new Best of Both Worlds Concert CD + DVD. That is not so amazing—considering the awesomeness of the material and the low-key advertising—but it is amazing to me when one considers that the Best of Both Worlds Concert CD+ DVD is exclusively available from Wal-Mart (Hannah Montana Headquarters). The concert album is ranked #42 in sales on Amazon.com at the moment and they can’t even ship it until April 15th.
This almost seems like a no-brainer when you consider the Disney + Miley Cyrus + Wal-Mart equation, but it’s fascinating to me that just one retailer can move enough units to push two albums into the Top 10.
I’m a big fan of Netflix’s recommendation algorithm, and have often used it for deciding on movies on TV as well. For years I have always clicked screen by screen on my DVR and entered the movie titles in to Netflix’s search box on my computer and used it’s predicted rating to help plan out my recordings. I’ve long wished there was some mash-up application that could make it easier, but was never really up on JSON and things like that to dig at Netflix’s site. Oh and something about it being against the Terms of Service. But I needed a change of gears the last few days and went to town.
This is just a proof of concept and certainly not the final UI. I was envisioning something Muine style with box art and such as well, but went for a quick and dirty Gtk.TreeView UI to test it out. The yellow stars are movies I’ve already rated, and the red stars represent Netflix’s predicted rating, or average rating of everyone’s vote if a prediction is not available. The heart denotes if it is a recommendation, and the arrows correlate to the predicted rating being higher or lower than the average rating. I’m also collecting if the movie is available on Netflix’s Watch Instantly service but I couldn’t find an icon I was happy with to throw it in the UI.
Behind the scenes I’m using Banshee’s excellent (in development) Hyena.Data assembly for managing an SQLite database. I was really impressed with how reusable it was, and it saved me a lot of time. I intend to dig into Hyena.Gui at some point as well. There is some cool stuff there, but it may be overkill for Heartflix.
I started with HDNet Movies since that was what I am most interested in, but I’ve tried to make the core classes generic enough that it will be easy to add other data sources. Right now I am comparing by title, year, and MPAA rating to ensure an exact match. Nice and simple. I looked at HBO’s site and unfortunately they do not appear to provide a year in their listings, but they do provide a director entry. So it looks like I may have to make it easy to match actors and directors as well.
So say you want to include embed an image into your web page, like this one of my dad taken by my step-mom:
It’s not a bad image, but doesn’t quite have the same impact in this scaled down form factor. It would be nice if you could make my dad a little bit bigger. You could crop the image but then you lose the interesting expanse of the background. There is another technique… called content-aware image resizing that performs seam carving on the image. You might have seen the video created by the algorithms creators a while back. Since their paper was published various implementations have cropped up, including this Liquid Rescale plugin for GIMP by Carlo Baldassi. It works much like you would expect; create some additional layers with masks for important and unimportant features of the image, pick a target size, and go.
By not being too aggressive this is what I came up with:
I messed up the mask on his left foot so it started to distort and there is still a tiny trace of red from the date. Obviously this totally changes the aspect of features if you scroll and compare the two images, but that’s not important here. The goal is to produce an image for the target size (in this case 474 pixels wide) while maintaining the features and important information of the original image.
It works in the reverse direction, too:
It’s really fun to play with and it’s Free/Open Source Software, too!
Aaron Bockover has been working on a nice patch for Banshee that allows for better parsing of the title metadata found in most shoutcast/icecast/etc internet radio streams, such as those from SomaFM.
The neat thing about this is that the data is properly guessed into artist and title, and the Metadata Searcher Plugin takes it from there to figure out what the album name is and retrieve it’s cover art. This also allows the Recommendations Plugin retrieve proper data from Last.fm for the panel across the bottom.
Okay, that might be premature since I haven’t even bothered checking out the other networks. But tonight was the series premiere of Chuck and the season 2 premiere of Heroes. Heroes was fantastic, but I think I enjoyed Chuck even more. And it’s not just because of lovely Julia Ling, who didn’t get much screen time in the pilot, unfortunately.
The Wikipedia link above summarizes the show better than I can, but the gist of it is that Chuck, in a sort of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes moment (but without the lightning) absorbs a stream of photos and videos containing government secrets. World saving ensues! It’s a fun cast, including Adam Baldwin. This show is definitely on my must watch list.
Jordi Mas has begun the roots of a Brain Age type game for GNOME called gbrainy. It’s a logic puzzle engine only at the moment but it’s hopped it can evolve into a more complete brain training game with arithmetical puzzles, memory puzzles, and color puzzles. He released version 0.1 yesterday and it’s looking great. It certainly could use some polish but it’s an exceptional start after a few weeks work. I look forward to contributing to this project as it evolves. It’s built using Mono, C#, and Cairo.
This evening I decided I didn’t really like the generic USB Hard Disk icon my My Book Premium Edition created on my GNOME desktop when plugged in. I found a few images online and took a photo of my own to make some. I figured I’d share them here since my first inclination was to search and didn’t find anything to my liking. Here are mine as transparent PNG files.
Since updating to the latest Windows Live Writer beta I became unable to post images to Geekport using the WordPress API. After some Google keyword tweaking I was able to find the answer here. Just a quick tweak to a WordPress .php file.
I decided to go for some all-you-can-eat fried chicken at Golden Corral the other day and noticed two things which are awesome relief for people who get itchy with the thought of people going to the buffet line with dirty hands. First, they had sanitary patty paper boxes scattered around at the register and the buffet counters to pick up the food tongs with. You know–those wax paper things that go between hamburger patties when packaged. This is a neat idea as having “sanitary” on the box makes the intention a bit more obvious than just having napkins in the same place. The other thing I noticed was that the bathroom did not have paper towels–only air dyers. Not surprising, but this is usually annoying as you have nothing to grab the handle with on the way out. But lo! An interesting device on the door!
You can just use your forearm or wrist to open the door, keeping your squeaky-clean hands clear of the handle tainted by proper hand wash-challenged folks. Check out their website. This is a great idea. They aren’t as inexpensive as one would think ($70-80 for a pair) but hopefully they can become less expensive with success, or maybe a larger company can pick up the product for these guys.
Last night’s premiere of High School Musical 2 appears to have broken all kinds of ratings records. The most interesting of which is that it was watched by 17.2 million folks nationwide according to overnights. That would make it the highest rated basic cable showing ever. That still doesn’t even begin to compare to the series finale of Cheers or M*A*S*H and such on broadcast networks but still pretty darn impressive considering the number of options viewers have these days.
As to the content, I was rather disappointed. The setting doesn’t work at all. The songs, while fantastic, seemed overly optimized for radio play/soundtrack sales and worked into the story. The original was much more charming. You’ll no doubt get plenty of chances to see an encore over the coming months if you really do want to see it, but in hindsight I would have rather picked up the soundtrack and come up with my own setting/plot in my head.
