Harold's Home The moving finger writes...

As I mentioned in a comment to my previous post I did some more work on my iPhone library webapp.
I got widescreenview to work quite nicely, though there's still some minor bugs to sort out.

I also did work on the movies section (renamed to Films) so there's links to detailed records.

Here's some new screenshots.

  




Now I have to go through the book database so all authornames are consistent. I kinda made a mess of that over the years. I started out with using Lastname, Initials but sometimes I switched to Lastname, First Names or even Firstname Lastname.
This is annoying me no end now I see all books at the same time (my FileMaker Pro database only showed 1 book at a time).
Sorting this out will take a while I guess but when it's finished it will look loads better.

If you want to see the code in action you can go to my homeserver, for best results use an iPhone though Safari should work reasonably well if you make the screen small (320*480).

As I mentioned a while ago one of my thoughts when deciding to get an iPhone as whether it would be easy to get my media databases on it. It happens too often that I go out and buy a movie or a book that I already have. I looked at database solutions currently available for the iPhone but one that looked best was about 100 euros which is kinda steep for my modest needs. So I decided to build my own webapp which should be available everywhere as long as I have access to the internets.

After some snooping at the code used by iLounge.com for the iPhone interface they use I created some tables in MySQL and hacked together some code for the display and search function.

Here's some screenshots, they're in Dutch but you should be able to make out what does what even if you're not Dutch.

 
I'm pleased to say that overall I'm quite happy with the first results. There's some stuff to do of course, movies only show the title at the moment, while my database has a lot more fields like director, year, genre, imdb url etc.
So I'll probably link the titles there to go to more detailed records.

So how hard was it to create this? Well, most of the time went into creating the interface and making it look good in normal view. The interface doesn't look too good right now in widescreen mode (which is if you switch the iPhone 90 degrees) due to the usage of stuff like
max-width: 100px;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;

 

I can probably tweak that a bit with the CSS though but that's for a later date.
Exporting the data from FileMaker Pro wasn't too rough, I did have some problems with charactersets, wrong date formats and newlines in certain fields but a quick run through BBEdit fixed most of that.

I will be sad to leave my FileMaker databases that have been with me since 1999 but the time has come to embrace the web and it's been a lot of fun to actually develop something for the iPhone's browser.

As I said in my previous post that the iPhone only has a 2 megapixel camera, which many decry as being rather limited nowadays. So I was wondering what the resolution of the human eye was measured in megapixels. Turns out finding the answer was quite easy, though following the maths isn't.
In any case the following article states that human vision equates to more than 576 megapixels. It also tells us a lot more about obscure things like ISO and focal lengths and stuff I have no clue about but it seems solid and other sources on the interwebs give more or less the same numbers. 580 megapixels is pretty staggering, the amount of information processed by the brain on a continuous basis is, well, staggering. (I know I used the word twice but I'm too staggered to think of another word.) Of course the brain uses tricks and shortcuts, for example while I'm typing this my field of view isn't actually a full 120 degrees, not even close, I do have some peripheral vision but most of that is tuned out. Still and all. Stagger with me and marvel at the miracle of primate vision.

A busy year for music. I've just returned from the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany and right now the Summer Darkness festival is right around the corner here in my native Utrecht.
I mostly went to Wacken for Carcass who are doing a reunion tour. Carcass split up in 1996 but the band sure sounds refreshing and I must say they were probably the single best metal band at the festival. I first saw Carcass back in 1990 or something in a little venue called Scum. These were the early days of Grindcore, the sub-genre Carcass invented. Back in those days they were still only singing about horrendous medical stuff, accompanied on stage by police photographs of accidents, murderscenes and other gruesome stuff. Those days are gone and Carcass branched out into more melodic death metal. Carcass played a very solid set of about an hour with many old favorites from the first albums. Holy Moses singer Sabina Classen joined them on stage for one song and boy does she have a throat that many male metal singers would kill for. The most impressive moment though was when their old drummer joined the stage. Ken Owen has suffered a brain hemorrhage, spent 10 months in a coma, has had 2 brain operations but he's walking about again and even able to play a drumsolo, although not very fast anymore. I saw many hardcore metal-heads blinking away a tear at this point. Seeing Carcass again was definitely worth the admission price alone, but I saw many other great things including Mambo Kurt, Exodus, Nightwish, Iron Maiden (with an extremely sucky soundmix) and a chinese band called Voodoo Kungu with mongolian influences in their music which was surprisingly refreshing after so many regular trash metalbands.

The biggest surprise of the festival was Corvus Corax though, a band that plays medieval music inspired by the Carmina Burana. Accompanied by some 30 gregorian singers, as well as a complement of cellos, violins, bagpipes, drums and even a conductor it was a truly memorable concert.
I took some pictures with a friends' camera but unfortunately I haven't been able to get those yet.

Back in Utrecht, the Summer Darkness festival is here. On wednesday I saw Within Temptation, a Dutch goth-metal band who I never heard of before. Apparently this is some kind of sin as they're quite famous but there you go. Yesterday I saw Sieben in Ekko (Hi Matt!), where I used to work about 10 years ago. Afterwards I went to a dance evening in Tivoli, where I spent most of the evening chatting to old friends I hadn't seen in ages (Hi Willemijn and Sietse). I got my iPhone this week so I uploaded some of the better pics to flickr. The quality of the camera in the iPhone is a bit disappointing but then I'm a terrible photographer so I guess there are bigger problems than the 2 megapixel thing.

In any case, I must dash off now to have a shower before I meet my friends for an extra Sieben concert.

This year is the 150th birthday of the first publication one of the most influential books in history: "On The Origins Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection: Or The Preservation Of Favored Races In The Struggle For Life" by Charles Darwin. As such it's as good a time as any to get to know a bit more about the man and his works. Luckily plenty of opportunity exists on the interwebs to learn more, but if you're the bookish type you can find some more in-depth stuff in the bookstores.

When I studied Biology at the teacher's academy weirdly enough Evolution wasn't a required subject. The course was given once every 2 years and I never had the chance to follow it. I did get a 'free pass' on it though in exchange for some chemistry course, I still have that little piece of paper somewhere. In those days money was extremely tight and I remember visiting a local second hand bookstore and seeing some old leather-bound volumes by Darwin, his work on the emotions in man "The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals" and some volumes on barnacles were there. Unfortunately they were way out of my means so I never got a chance to purchase these books. I visited the second hand bookstore a few weeks ago in the hope to find some nice and rare specimens but alas I was disappointed. Some opportunities don't come along that often and if they do you'd better hope you can take advantage of them. Luckily the visit wasn't a complete loss as I did find a brand-new copy of "Darwin And The Barnacle: The Story Of One Tiny Creature And History's Most Spectectular Scientific Breakthrough" by Rebecca Stott. (Dutch readers can pick up the book for €7.50 at De Slegte where it is in the biology section in the Ramsj, international readers can find the book on Amazon.) This book details Charles Darwin's life up to and during 8 long years where he attempted to write the definitive monograph on the cirripedes. That's barnacles to you and me. Darwin's struggles with this task and his family life are the center of this book. We do not get the promised revelation about how this actually helped his Species work but we do get a fascinating insight into what it meant to be a gentleman scholar of independent means in the 1840s and 1850s. We get to read about Darwin's struggles with his health and his quack doctor with a revolutionary "water cure" which meant Darwin had wear wet towels and take ice-cold plunge baths (we'd call it a shower) outside, no matter if it was snowing or a sunny summer day. We also get to know about his correspondance with other naturalists around the world, facilitated by modern things like a postal system that actually worked and railway carriages (in which Darwin invested) that would ship specimens from around the world to his doorstep.

The 8 years Darwin spent on the barnacle work was a lot longer than he previously thought, but if you read this book you'll find out why, his ill health and difficulties struggling with tiny creatures that had unexpected anatomical oddities made Darwin spend a lot more time on these creatures than he envisioned. He was also troubled in the extreme by problems with taxonomy, the classification of animals in families and species. Often he would wait for months for a rare specimen to reach him only to find out it had been misclassified and turned out to be an already known species, albeit under a different name. It was Darwin's goal to reclassify and understand all the cirripedes.
It has been suggested that Darwin knew how controversial his evolution work was and that he purposely held off publishing about it because he felt the time wasn't right yet. This book demonstrates that Darwin didn't fear the reaction of theologians, many naturalists at that time were obsessed about the boundaries between and mutability of species. Many published about it. In the early 19th century it was recognised that the answers to many of the questions regarding species and taxonomy could be found in the sea. Sea creatures of all kinds were studied and described. Darwin took on the barnacles as a way to contribute to this debate, as a way to establish his credentials in the wider scientific community so his ideas were taken seriously. He also needed the time to hone his scientific knowledge and writing skills so he could present his views and theories with the clearest purpose. Classifying and describing barnacles was often frustrating stuff yet Darwin persevered. In 1849 he wrote "Confound & exterminate the whole tribe [...] I can see no end to my work" (Stott (2003), p. 134). And late in 1852: "I am now at work on the Sessile Cirripedes, and am wonderfully tired of my job[...]".

Darwin's years studying barnacles were not for nothing, the years spent firmly established him as a scientist of note, one who would get sent specimens from throughout the world, one who would be asked for references and advice. Darwin also learned a lot of things that would eventually help him with his species work. Sadly, as said, this book doesn't really go into that as much as the title makes us believe, it ends in 1854 when 'the barnacle years' are over, Origins will not be published for some years. Yet I still highly recommended this book, as it tells us an awful lot about the man who changed the way we view the world.
As I said to my friends a while ago: without Darwin we would still have the theory of natural selection. The scientific world was ready for it in the 1850s, we would still have evolution, but the entire world was made a better place by Darwin being alive and bringing us his meticulous works. Works of painstaking details and research.

For another interesting read about Darwin and the 20 year gap between first outlining his species work and the publication of Origins you can read a paper by John van Wyhe.

Rejoice, oh readers! I promised you an update on new movies and here it is.

First of all I got the DVD of Cloverfield and I must say it's a very nice movie, and it almost lives up to the hype. It's not a great movie, but it is extremely watchable and good entertainment. I was a bit annoyed that it only lasted about 80 minutes because I could have easily watched another hour. Yes, the protagonists do really stupid stuff like running towards a towering monster; a real person would have been changing his underwear constantly but thems the benefits of living in movieland.

Second: I got myself the DVD of Acción Mutante, the classic Álex de Iglesia title in which a band of mutants kidnaps a princess and takes her on a spaceship. Things go downhill from there, with half of a siamese twin dying and other problems besieging the odd bunch of anti-heroes. Remind me to write a full review of this and his other classics, such as El Día de la Bestia in which a hardrocker feeds LSD to his grandfather as it keeps him nice and mellow.


Third: after a rather disappointing Butthole Surfers concert last tuesday (srsly, who thought that touring with the school of rock was a good idea?) I came home to see the CD/DVD of Sieben's High Broad Field in the mailbox. Awesomeness! (Go to http://matthowden.com/siebenf.html and select High Broad Field from the menu.)

Really great stuff here, the naked lady I posted about previously is back, there's also some kind of knight wandering around, the song texts are great, including monologues from a CAT and GOD ("as a woman"). As well as a host of other characters (see Matt's site for a lot more info.)
As I had a day off on wednesday I put on the DVD with headphones and blissed out.
All in all not a bad week for movies.

"The ability to watch hours and hours of cat videos on Youtube is not a special power."

Huzzah, John Moltz is back with a new venture. After the success of Crazy Apple Rumors he's bringing us the podcast Technology! Whisky! Sexy!.

I don't listen to podcasts much as they require a bit too much attention while working or gaming and I like to have some peppy music while cycling, but this one is quite funny if you can spare a few minutes every week.
Hey, it's got Rush's Anthem from the Fly By Night album as a leader so you know it can't be wrong.

ooo. oooo. ooooooo!
Naked ladies on the internets!!!!

I found an extract of the movie High Broad Field online which is included with Sieben's album of the same name. Unfortunately this album can't be bought anymore in Holland so I'll have to mail Matt Howden to see if he has some left and can bring one with him when he performs at Summer Darkness this coming august*. But an extract of the film is on the internet archive which I just found. And it includes a naked lady. If your life doesn't have enough naked women you can watch this and pretend you're only in it for the art. Which is a good thing if you have a girlfriend. Just tell her I said you had to watch it for the music. Which is true, of course.

Technology! Whisky! Sexy!
(Internet Archive! Dalwhinnie! Redhead!)

Expect more movie-related ooohs and aaahs later this weekend or maybe next week, depending on how fast Amazon delivers one of the bestest movies ever made which has just been released on DVD.

* Update, matthowden.com now accepts paypal so I don't even have to wait till august.
Update2: now with 100% more links.