While you might be sat in your busy city office with phones going left, right and centre over the sound of a hundred pairs of hands on a hundred identical keyboards as the sun sets in the grey sky behind yet another identical concrete building, I’m sat in my nice quiet office as the sun sets red over the countryside horizon, listening to folk music. There is possibly no way to be more relaxed at work.
‘Va va Va’ by Findo Gask (out December 10th), a marvellous upbeat electro/synth number heard via Radcliffe and Maconie.
This above is a screen shot of the new ‘now playing’ screen from the Zune software. You know Zune, Microsoft’s US only media player. I could be wrong here, but I’ve seen this somewhere else before, except this version doesn’t look as good. I outsource one little bit of software development in the hope of making project2 available to those outside the iTunes user base and this is what I get. Next time big M crew, do a proper job or I’m going to have to do it myself.
It seems that the sun is setting on the age of the letter, with the majority of everything done by email and the little that isn’t is usually stuck in a postal sorting office while the staff stand outside on strike (and still ignored when they’ve finished). But every now and then people do send letters and this is the story of one I got last week.
Rewind a couple of years to the point where I was still looking for a job. Back then I was registered with a number of local job agencies in the faint hope that one of them would come up with something. Despite the fact that they never really did succeed and more than likely not against data protection laws, some of them still try to get in touch with me, usually via email (one even had the cheek to send me a text asking me to call them). Last week I received a letter from one of the agencies I remember registering with. It asked me to come attend a meeting next week. A meeting in the cafeteria of a company that through them, it appears they think I work for (on the basis that they thanked me for my continued hard work).
Except that I’ve never heard of this company, let alone done any work for them. Mail-merge gone wrong? I’d hope that the person responsible would have noticed the hundreds of letters on the printer that would have been caused by selecting ’send to all’. I’ve never had anything like this before so either it’s a genuine mistake (and a big one at that) or I’m new to this other job. Either way, the letter had a number to ring if I can’t make the meeting. I’m not going to call, I doubt the person on the other end needs embarrassing any further.
Personally, one of the benefits of the new video on demand age is the ability to watch the shows that for one reason or another I’d have previously missed. Today’s case in point, Later with Jools Holland. It’s something I’d like to watch but when I’m at home I’m usually asleep by the time it comes on and when I’m out I’ve usually forgotten to set the vcr. So the iplayer is a godsend and it means I get to see those little musical gems that I would have otherwise missed. This weeks little music gem comes from badly named Japanese ‘death jazz’ group ‘Soil & Pimp Sessions’. Sure it’s not something you might listen to everyday but brilliant none the less. Check out the tracks played on the show, AIE and Makuroke.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I feel that now is probably the right time. So, I’m releasing the source code for Covered and here’s my reasons.
Firstly, like many of my ‘for fun’ home projects, I’ve run out of creative energy to develop it. This and it got to the point where improving it would take either a lot of work or a streak of genius. Plus I’ve already moved on past project2 (which it donated a lot of it’s source to) to start thinking about another project.
Secondly the number of visits to this site from people searching for “coverflow clone for windows” and variations on the theme are enough to convince me that there’s a demand for a finished version and I’m sure somewhere out there in interweb land there’s someone with both the skill and patience to finish the job.
So, if you feel up to the task then grab the batton zip file below. It contains a copy of the relevant parts of my Covered directory in Eclipse. There’s no licence (as most of the code that makes it work are part of other libraries) and all I’m asking for is a mention should it ever get finished. I’ve second link below is for my previous and last 0.4 release as the everything folder doesn’t contain a working version.