I discovered a pretty cool and useful Facebook app named iLike a few days ago. It implements the "show me bands I like who are touring near me" very well, and it has all other nice kinds of social features built in. It's done way better than something that I could hack up in my spare time, and hence, I quit!

My only complaint is that it's very much designed for itunes and it doesn't provide a way to automatically import data from anywhere else. The interface does support a comma separated line input for favorite bands, however. So I hacked up a Pandora scraper. The Pandora scraper will get not just favorites, but also bands that you simply thumbed up more than once. As a bonus, it will print scores for each artist that are in your stations. It will run with any non-ancient version of Python, I tested with 2.4.

Here are the top 5 scores for me.

rob:~/code/more_live_music/src$ python pandora_parser.py rrenaud@gmail.com | head -n 5
Alanis Morissette 30
The Doors 28
Foo Fighters 26
Oasis 20
Red Hot Chili Peppers 18

The scores are simply the number thumbed up songs + 10 bonus for being in favorites.

Speaking of Pandora, please, please get a clue with your ads. I was listening to a station titled "Brett Dennen Radio", my location is set to New York, NY, and Brett had a show in New York in 3 days. What kind of ads was I seeing? McDonald's ads. Hint, I am a vegetarian, that's also in my profile. With ads targeted that poorly, maybe they just don't want to earn any money?

Four months ago, I posted an idea to the Battle for Wesnoth forums. (I still highly recommend Wesnoth). The idea was basically to be smarter about how the order in which units are selected when traversing your army. The previous code had some cases where it could be pretty jarring because of the heuristic used.

I just uploaded a patch with a smarter heuristic. Hopefully it gets accepted. It's kinda sad that it took me so long, but my ML class took away pretty much all of my free "brain energy", and I basically had to scrap my first implementation of the patch to keep the select previous unit behavior working reasonably.