Author: Leon

Categories
Random Generators

Automatic Album Cover Game

In the past few weeks there was a game/meme going around on Facebook that instructed you to put together an imaginary (record) album cover by randomly selecting text from wikipiedia and images from flickr. Of course, it occurred to me to write a program to do it. But it took Lee Springer nudging me to actually spend the time. Here are some examples from the random album cover generator.

Instead of pulling text from wikipedia, I generate the album name and the artist name using the routines I have already. Luckily flickr has an API and they even tell you which images are OK to use in derivative work. I pull recent “interesting” pictures, scan for the ones with rights that allow me to use them and I layer the text over the top.

At any given time there are mayb 10 – 20 images available, but it changes over time. It’s really just another way to view the random text out of the generator. Sometimes having it in the context of an album cover is surprising enough to make me chuckle.

When I first wrote these generators about 10 years ago, they used to make me laugh a lot. After a while, my brain seemed to automatize the rules behind them and they stopped making me laugh. They are vaguely pleasant to me, but they rarely make me laugh out loud.

Original images for the album covers above are here:

Categories
News

No More Bailouts: Appearance with a Super Genius

John Villarreal captured me on his YouTube show. The topic is the “Porkulus” bill going through the senate right now.

Categories
News Programming

New MySpace Apps: Random Band Names and Random Advice

I now have two apps live on MySpace, Random Advice and Random Band Names. The core functionality is exactly the same as what’s on Leon’s Random Generators. Both of them place content on your MySpace profile. You can see them in action on my profile page, myspace.com/leonatkinson.

It’s somewhat obtuse to get the apps on your own profile. Visit the app’s profile page (linked above). Click the button to add the app. Then, modify your profile and add the “module”. (I’m hand-waving a bit here). I think you must be upgraded to the 2.0 version of profiles.

Despite my bickering about how I was fighting with the approval process last month, I did get the advice generator active. The band names app was approved within hours. So maybe they like to hassle unproven developers. In any event, the advice generator has been live for less than a month and has 116 “active users”. I’m not clear if that means installs, or if people have activated the module in their profile. I can’t find any examples of profiles with it installed.

Categories
News

My 1&1 Account Has Been Down For Days

I’m now into day 2 of my account over at 1&1 being down. Their estimates for recovery keep going up, from 4 hours, to 12 hours and today they say it will be two more days. Luckily, I don’t trust my main site, www.leonatkinson.com, to them. I leonatkinson.com with he.net and I might have had a couple of hours of downtime in the 10 years I’ve been with them.

I have all my emptyz.com stuff with 1&1, and that means a couple of my Facebook apps are down. Plus, I stuck some client work on the server last week. It’s a huge drag to have that stuff unavailable for two more days.

I suspect this is an isolated event, unlike the widespread outage from a couple of years ago that made it to Digg. I can’t find anyone else talking about it. Anyway, it seems like a good time switch providers.

Categories
News

Google Notebook Going Away

Google announced that they will stop developing Notebook, a tool I use every day. This is downside to using free-as-in-beer tools. They aren’t planning to shut off the service (right away). And it’s easy enough to export the content. There are alternatives that might take me a while to evaluate. Here’s what I’ve found so far.

You can export each notebook directly to Google Docs. I don’t like the interface. I like to switch quickly between notebooks. I don’t want a heavy MS Word replacement loaded on multiple Firefox tabs. This solution doesn’t work for me. Neither do the tasks functionality in gmail or building something custom with Google Sites. The suggestions given on the Notebook blog indicate that the team doesn’t understand how I use their product.

Zoho has their own Notebook. The interface is radically different, but the overall data architecture is the same. I suspect it would take me a while to move the data over given Zoho’s way of implementing pages. I do like how Zoho let’s you make a page be a spreadsheet instead of free text. In my limited playing around with it, though, I found that opening up directly to a saved notebook showed me a twirling progress indicator for longer than I cared to wait.

Evernote offers a Web interface as well as a Windows executable (that I don’t care about). They show one, small screenshot of the Web interface, which looks overly graphical. The big fail for me, though is that after getting through the annoying captcha, I had to wait for an email with a confirmation code. It didn’t come right away, so I moved on.

I won’t bother to look at Microsoft One Note. I assume it won’t work well on Ubuntu. I might go back to writing notes as email drafts. I can’t find an open source project that duplicates Google Notebook, so I might write something myself.