I refuse to believe that this picture (via Popbitch) is for real. Surely?

I am not totally convinced by Which (Middle) Class Are You?, apparently I am a loft-winger, which I can’t absolutely identify with. Still, the questions are quite interesting, as a cross-section of current lifestyles.

(via badly dubbed boy)

Michael Howard David Cameron Sings The Smiths

Quickly, before I go to bed. Audioscrobbler, as I might have mentioned before, has lots of potential, all that aggregated data from lots of music fans, the trends and links between different artists has plenty of applications. And I’ve just come up with an idea while thinking about organising mp3 collections.

If you want a set of songs from your (legitimately acquired) mp3 collection of similar bands or artists, you could use Audioscrobbler’s data. You have an app that would first scan through your mp3 collection and group your files by artist. It would then ask you for a ‘pivot’ artist (say you wanted to listen to bands like Oasis) and then screen-scrape (or better still, we ask AS to provide an RSS version of) the “Related Artists” page for that artist. Any file that you have by an artist on that list, it adds to a playlist file, which it then saves and launches for you.

I haven’t the time to do that at the moment, what with the course and me being in a permanent state of mild panic (plus my client-side coding skills are not what they used to be), but any bored music-loving geek might want to give it a go…

Why does everything have to be converted to RSS these days? The latest suggestion is bank statements and bills should be delivered via RSS.

I don’t think this is in any way a good idea. Let’s say I want to have my itemised phone bill via RSS. Each line is an RSS <item>, and each has a <description>. In this description, it has to tell me the time of call, its duration, what number it was dialled to and the total cost. But RSS’s structure cannot really handle this, so we’ll just have to combine them all together inside the <description>…</description> tags, separated by say, spaces.

Fine, us humans can read it. But the real point of markup schemae like RSS is so that machines can parse them more easily. Say I want to transfer the data into an accounting or spreadsheet application. As we’ve arbitrarily piled all the data together inside the item description, we have to write something to parse that data out again. Which is stupid.

We could come up with an XML namespace for bills or statements that is standardised and easier to parse (or even just provide the data in CSV format), and add it in as an extension to the RSS feed. But then why bother having the RSS there in the first place? The only reason we have it is so we as humans can read it in an RSS reader. But we could equally access a human-readable version in good old HTML using a web browser (an equally valid ‘opt-in’ technology).

This would be OK, if the disadvantages of the above were somehow outweighed by the advantages of RSS. But none of them really help. Take automated aggregation - which is damn handy for blogs and news services. What possible use is aggregating your itemised phone bill and bank statement together? Or for that matter, aggregating your current account and credit card statements? They are perfectly fine on their own - individual items on a statement are only relevant in the context of that statement. Combining two or more statements would only make them more confusing. Other features of RSS, like providing per-entry permalinks or links to comment pages, are absolutely useless for financial data.

By RSSifying a statement or bill, we remove the markup that is useful (i.e. that which keeps cost entities and descriptive entities in separate columns), and the markup that is added has very little real-world use. By all means explore the potential of RSS, but any ideas for it should be ultimately in some way more useful than before.

This is one butt-ugly font. The Windows screenshot is just awful. The emphasised punctuation marks, rather than help the programmer, instead make code much less legible and distract any sort of reading.

Much nice fonts for coding with are discussed here.

(via Typographica, via Kottke)

While enjoying the delights of Edinburgh’s pubs and bars last night, I was introduced to some very nice Swedish people, and they were kind enough to let me try snus. Snus is (initially I didn’t believe it, but it is all true) a Swedish variant of snuff - little tea-bags filled with tobacco which you wedge under your upper lip (trying to do this and talk and drink at the same time is tricky). The nicotine hit is suprisingly fast and intense but also quite pleasurable. With too much alcohol it can make you a bit dizzy, though.

Being asthmatic, I can’t smoke, so up until now nicotine intake has been off-limits. I have to confess that I briefly entertained the idea of getting some snus in on mail order, before worries about mouth cancer and the like made me think it’s probably not a great habit to take up long-term. But as a try-it-once sort of thing I recommend it.

John Kerry may have done well in last night’s presidential TV debate, but there’s still a month to go. Still, he can at least rest assured that his share of the Klingon vote is secure. (via NTK)