Blog - David Singleton

1Bit player update

2010-02-06T21:17:00+00:00

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.

2010-01-22T15:19:00+00:00

Batch event importing to Last.fm

2010-01-06T22:20:24+00:00

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

2009-12-06T19:18:22+00:00

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

2009-10-25T23:15:00+00:00

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

2009-10-14T16:14:00+00:00

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

2009-10-07T15:45:32+00:00

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

2009-08-20T12:42:00+00:00

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 Bea… read more .

Using iTunes Mac to rip CDs at good quality

2009-07-26T23:23:33+00:00

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

2009-07-21T09:37:00+00:00

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

2009-07-17T13:41:27+00:00

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

2009-07-14T22:50:53+00:00

Open Tech 2009

2009-07-14T22:35:00+00:00

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.

2009-07-13T21:21:00+00:00

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 pi… read more .

Installing Playdar on OS X 10.4

2009-04-09T16:03:00+00:00

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)

2009-03-21T22:30:25+00:00

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

2007-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 .

Panels, gender, confusion and a rant

2007-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

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 .

@media London 2007

2007-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

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 .

Upgrading to PHP5 on OS X

2007-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

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"

2007-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

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)

2007-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

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

2007-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

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?

2007-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

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 limit… read more .

Dconstruct 2006

2006-10-10T10:00:00+00:00

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

2006-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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 .