Blog
Scrobbling Heatmap Calendar
Written on Wednesday August 31, 2011 | By David Singleton
Created by Martin D., one of my ex-colleagues from Last.fm, this is an amazing visualisation of scrobbling activity by year, month, day of the week and even time of day. They’re manually generated at the moment, with a set for Last.fm staff past and present. The slideshow version is partic… read more.
Last.fm Now-Playing information radiator
Written on Sunday August 28, 2011 | By David Singleton
This is a litte project I started a while back but only finished/cleaned up recently. It’s a simple information radiator that shows you what a Last.fm user is listening to right now. It was designed to let one (or many people) know what’s playing at a glance. I’ve been using it … read more.
Leaving Last.fm
Written on Thursday August 11, 2011 | By David Singleton
8 years of scrobbling, 55,000 tracks and 4 years with the incredible Last.fm team, it’s been a blast, but it’s time to move on and do something new. It’s been a really difficult decision to leave. Last.fm was quite literally a dream job for me and at times a family. I’m pr… read more.
Facebook photo facial recognition
Written on Sunday July 3, 2011 | By David Singleton
[These are old, but I’m clearing my drafts queue] Last Autumn a group of us visited Berlin, renting a bit apartment, exploring the city and taking lots of photos. I don’t upload photos to Facebook, I’m more of a Flickr guy, but it was interesting to watch Becky upload hers and com… read more.
Artificial Scarcity and Entitlement
Written on Monday June 6, 2011 | By David Singleton
kapowaz: The dawn of ubiquitous computing and communications has had a disruptive effect on numerous previously-stable business models. Those affected most are usually those which relied upon the scarcity of a resource, be that news, music or television programs. Each one in turn has found itsel… read more.
Migrating scrobbling authentication to 2.0
Written on Thursday April 28, 2011 | By David Singleton
I received this email a few months ago, and it made me smile. Anthony from The Hype Machine here. (http://hypem.com) Good news! We’ve just connected your Hype Machine account to Last.fm using a new secure method recommended by their team (it’s similar to OAuth, if you want to get techn… read more.
Erlang: For an absolute beginner
Written on Thursday January 6, 2011 | By David Singleton
Last night I spent 30 minutes having a play with a new (to me) programming language, Erlang. Its a language that will stretch my brain a bit, teach me to think about programming in a different way, and I know some folks using it (Mostly Smarkets and IRCCloud) who’s brains I can pick in the pu… read more.
Tech Hub misrepresents Silicon Roundabout
Written on Tuesday December 21, 2010 | By David Singleton
Yesterday I had a brief conversation on Twitter with Elizabeth Varley of Tech Hub about their claims of 700% startup growth in the Old Street area. I’d suggest reading the original article and the Twitter conversation first. I was convinced to write up some broader thoughts by an excellent po… read more.
The importance of virtualised development environments
Written on Saturday November 6, 2010 | By David Singleton
Gareth Rushgrove just wrote a great blog post entitled Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation, which puts out a great argument for using virtualised development environments. The crux of the argument is that you should be testing and running your code in an environment as close as possible to produ… read more.
New Twitter favouritism
Written on Tuesday September 28, 2010 | By David Singleton
Twitter have been slowly rolling out access to it’s new web interface , to much discussion, arguing and complaining - not to mention recent security issues. Putting all that to one side the feature of #newtwitter I’m really fond of is showing your most recently favourited tweet. Favo… read more.
Last.fm vs Xbox at DIBI Conference
Written on Friday May 7, 2010 | By David Singleton
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Design It, Build It conference in Newcastle, where I gave a talk entitled “Last.fm vs Xbox.” It was a 30 minute presentation of our experience at Last.fm launching a radio application to millions of Xbox Live users. It was a mix of the Last.fm v… read more.
1Bit player update
Written on Saturday February 6, 2010 | By David Singleton
1Bit is a simple way to let you preview MP3s linked in a web page. It’s a combination of Javascript and (a tiny bit) of flash to automatically pre-pend links to MP3s with a little play icon, allowing you to listen to the track inline. It’s been quite popular, mostly with music blogs. It … read more.
Announcing: Design it, Build it.
Written on Friday January 22, 2010 | By David Singleton
I’m pleased to announce i’ll be speaking at Design it, Build it - A one day web conference on April 28th in Newcastle. It’s aimed at both designs & developers with a separate track of talks for each I consider myself a jack-of-all-trades most of the time, with my time (and passi… read more.
Batch event importing to Last.fm
Written on Wednesday January 6, 2010 | By David Singleton
Over christmas I sorted out some old boxes from University and found all the paper ticket stubs for gigs from 2002 to 2005. That’s some meaty data I didn’t want to lose, I copied it to a spreadsheet with plans to import it in to the Last.fm events system (where I track all my current gig… read more.
Music Hackday Boston
Written on Sunday December 6, 2009 | By David Singleton
A couple of weeks I made a trip to Music Hackday Boston. The 4th in a series of music hackdays, designed to bring together smart and passionate people to hack on music technology. I won’t go in to grand detail as there have already been some excellent write-ups from Ben, Anthony and Brian, bu… read more.
Jumping out of an aeroplane
Written on Sunday October 25, 2009 | By David Singleton
About 3 months ago I jumped out of a plane. From about 14,000 feet. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years now, and i’m glad I finally did. I’m not sure I’d do it again though. I raised just under £350 for Macmillan Cancer Support, thanks to everyone who sponsored… read more.
JSON, Octal Numbers & Validation
Written on Wednesday October 14, 2009 | By David Singleton
Now it’s launched in London I’ve been playing around with the Foursquare API. While it’s not the best API i’ve come across it gives you reasonable access to their data, so i’ve been pretty happily building some small tools using their data. hit a rather usual bug with… read more.
Music taste tube-lines
Written on Wednesday October 7, 2009 | By David Singleton
View the full map (PDF) covering almost 18 months of my scrobbled listening. I really want to print and wall mount this. This is from an internal Last.fm visualisation/tech demo. It’s not publicly accessible at the moment, though hopefully it will be at some point soon. If you’re des… read more.
Micro-San Francisco recommendations
Written on Thursday August 20, 2009 | By David Singleton
A week later I still haven’t written up my SF trip and as a friend asked for tips here’s a micro version! - @carlgaywood @dsingleton any tips for San Francisco? Disclaimer;These are mostly based in/around mission as that’s where I stayed. Papalote - Good mexican Thirsty Bear Br… read more.
Using iTunes Mac to rip CDs at good quality
Written on Sunday July 26, 2009 | By David Singleton
I haven’t had to rip any CDs on my current laptop till now. I didn’t have a decent ripper and I wouldn’t be using the one built in to iTunes (it’s rubbish). It’s such a rare task to setup a good ripper that I have to go searching for all the details again. This is a bi… read more.
Reblogging the past
Written on Tuesday July 21, 2009 | By David Singleton
Thanks to the beauty of the Internet Archive I was able to find copies of all my old posts. An earlier version of this site was powered by a Wordpress install and apparently I didn’t make backups of the database. It’s quite sad losing content, some of it was quite good and it’s le… read more.
Trinity, 64 year atomic anniversary
Written on Friday July 17, 2009 | By David Singleton
64 years ago, on July 16, 1945 Trinity was the first test of an atomic weapon. It’s no hyperbole to say that it changed the world we live in forever. This isn’t the kind of thing i’d usually write about, but it’s an important subject, and the quote from Oppenheimer is very … read more.
Testing the Tumblr API
Written on Tuesday July 14, 2009 | By David Singleton
Just testing the Tumblr API. I’ve been pulling content in to my personal site (http://dsingleton.co.uk) via the JSON API using the search parameter. Looking up by slug for each article works for all except Open Tech 2009. For some reason it doesn’t seem to be in the search index, as it&… read more.
Open Tech 2009
Written on Tuesday July 14, 2009 | By David Singleton
Recently I went to Open Tech 2009 “an informal, low cost, one-day conference on slightly different approaches to technology, democracy and community. This year’s theme is “Working on Stuff that Matters”. This year it was held at University of London Union, central London. Th… read more.
Using xargs like I mean it, a bash example.
Written on Monday July 13, 2009 | By David Singleton
Using xargs like I mean it. svn st * | grep “^ C” | cut -c 8- | xargs svn revert http://twitter.com/dsingleton/status/2616994594 A couple of people asked me to explain what this did, so here’s a quick 2 minute explanation (I’ll assume you’re familiar with unix pipe… read more.
Installing Playdar on OS X 10.4
Written on Thursday April 9, 2009 | By David Singleton
Congrutulations, you’re on an outdated verison of OS X, but you still want to play with cool things like Playdar. Here’s a hassle filled guide to compiling it from source. To do this you’ll need XCode (2.4 for Tiger), Macports and Git to start. XCode 2.4: https://connect.apple.co… read more.
Going public (again)
Written on Saturday March 21, 2009 | By David Singleton
I started using Twitter a couple of years ago, following the buzz of SXSW ‘07. I started out, as almost everyone did, with my statuses open to everyone. There seemed no reason to be private with my status updates. Twitter was a (relatively) new and tiny service, known only to power-geek types … read more.
Giving XFN more visibility through CSS2.1 Attribute Selectors
Written on Wednesday September 12, 2007 | By David Singleton
As I was redesigning a bit lately and making use of FamFamFam’s very nice Silk icon set (used under the CC Attribution License) and it occurred to me I could use CSS2.1 Attribute Selectors to show the relationships the XFN defines. If you’re not familiar with XFN this wikipedia article … read more.
Truck Festival 2007 Lineup
Written on Sunday July 1, 2007 | By David Singleton
There proper lineup has been announced and is available on the Truck Festival website. Finally! We can all stop hunting for semi-official rumours, know who’s actually playing and see what they sound like (if you don’t know them). I’ll certainly be glad to stop updating that list. The official … read more.
@media London 2007
Written on Monday June 11, 2007 | By David Singleton
My first @media and it was a lot of fun. Preperation Wednesday evening started with boxes, lots of boxes which contained @media bags to be stuffed, lots of bags. Job done we wandered down to the pub in time for a few pre-event drinks and to show off our dashing orange shirts. Day One Unfortunately … read more.
Panels, gender, confusion and a rant
Written on Monday June 11, 2007 | By David Singleton
I was going to include this little rant in my @media round-up post, but thought better of it, lest I get too ranty. So yes, this will be a fairly quickly written up little rant, please treat it as such. As I mentioned before the only negative I came away from the conference with was the Hot topics p… read more.
Upgrading to PHP5 on OS X
Written on Sunday May 27, 2007 | By David Singleton
I’ve been meaning to upgrade PHP on my macbook for a while now, today I finally got around to it with a little help from Marc Liyanage PHP Package. Download the installer (~50MB), un-tar and run it. You should not have PHP5 installed on your system. However, you might have to do a bit of fiddling … read more.
1 Bit Audio Player
Written on Saturday May 26, 2007 | By David Singleton
My good friend Mark Wheeler has been puting together a neat little embeded flash/javasript mp3 player called 1 Bit, which i’ve been writing the Javascript for. 1 Bit Audio Player is a very simple and lightweight Adobe Flash MP3 player with automatic JavaScript insertion. It’s main purpose is to … read more.
Fun with FAMFAMFAM Icons and jQuery
Written on Friday May 18, 2007 | By David Singleton
If you not familiar with the FAMFAMFAM Silk icons they’re a set of 1000 beautiful little 16×16px icons that you’re free to use under the CC-Attribution license. I’ve been using them a little recently for a few things, including this blog and some coding projects. The problem is, with 1000 ico… read more.
A last.fm tag-cloud generated from XSL
Written on Monday May 7, 2007 | By David Singleton
19/07/2009: The script in this post is currently broken, it’ll be fixed soon If you use last.fm the you can get some pretty interesting statistical data about your musical habits. Being a web and music geek I’ve put together a simple tag-cloud to show what i’ve listened to that week. Ev… read more.
Pixel Art Space Invaders
Written on Wednesday April 25, 2007 | By David Singleton
Note: We actually did this a few months ago now – But I lost the ‘making of’ pictures and only found them again recently. We’ve already got some art up on the walls in our dev room at work, but two walls were boring and mostly white. I decided to take some inspiration from one of my old Uni … read more.
ALA “Ruining User Experience”
Written on Tuesday March 27, 2007 | By David Singleton
Out of the three new ALA articles the one that really caught my eye was Ruining User Experience by Aaron Gustafson. It describes how a site should be built upon a solid base, and then gradual layers of enhancement (Images, CSS, Flash, Ajax) applied to create as good an expirience as is possible for … read more.
SXSW Day Three (and onwards)
Written on Sunday March 18, 2007 | By David Singleton
I’ve been back a couple of days now, so of course people have asked how it was, and my response has been ‘Amazing‘. I really do mean that, the entire week was great. It was a fantastic holiday, full of interesting panels, great people, delicious food and excellent parties. I’ve already start… read more.
SXSW Day Two
Written on Saturday March 10, 2007 | By David Singleton
So i’ve already fallen a day behind on my plan to throw something up here every day. I just got in on friday, so my recolection of yesterday is a little hazy. It turns out we get free breakfast, score! Decided to avoid the geekery and conference stuff a bit and walked down to part of South Congres… read more.
SXSW Day One
Written on Thursday March 8, 2007 | By David Singleton
Finally arrived in Austin, unpacked, had a shower and feel human again. Frances and I left hammersmith at the ungodly hour of 5am, this is not a real time, it deosn’t exist for normal people. Met up with Ben, Fatty and Steve at gatwick for breakfast and got ourselves organised for the 10 hour flig… read more.
Recent downtime & upcoming events
Written on Wednesday February 14, 2007 | By David Singleton
Sorry to the (few) people who haven’t been been able to access the site recently. For the past 6 months or so I’ve been hosting this blog on the server at work, so when we switched ISP’s (and thusly IPs) I completely forgot to update my DNS record. Although it’s handy to host this at work I … read more.
Teaching Bad Practice
Written on Wednesday January 10, 2007 | By David Singleton
I subscribe to the WSG reading list, an entertaining and informative round up of web-standards-related articles and blog posts. The usual IE bugs, interviews and handy tips, but one thing caught my eye this week was a PHP tutorial on handling forms. Let’s take a look… This chapter covers the bas… read more.
Code Golf: Whats your handicap?
Written on Saturday January 6, 2007 | By David Singleton
Over the holidays I came discovered Code Golf and got quite addicted to one of the challenges, for those unfamiiar with it: Based on the original perl golf, Code Golf allows you to show off your code-fu by trying to solve coding problems using the least number of keystrokes. You’re not just limite… read more.
Dconstruct 2006
Written on Tuesday October 10, 2006 | By David Singleton
I’ve been back from Brighton for almost 24 hours now and I’ve just about caught up on sleep. It was a blast. Thursday Night The pre-event part at Heist was good fun, meeting and talking with people I’ve met before at London events and some new ones. Unfortunately I don’t think th… read more.
Google Code Search
Written on Friday October 6, 2006 | By David Singleton
Yesterday Google launched a new search for source code, this is such a great idea that I can’t believe its not happened before. You can search by a variety of languages, licence types and best of all by regular expressions. There’s already been a lot of interesting, funny, and downright scary th… read more.
Programming Quotes
Written on Wednesday September 6, 2006 | By David Singleton
I came across a rather impressive list of ‘Programming Quotes‘ today, some humurous, some insightful, some neither, some both. Definately worth a quickskim through, my favourites: Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as p… read more.