Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Marketing through last.fm

I have had an account on last.fm for a while now. I send most of music listening to it. A few days ago I got a friend invite from TheHijacker. Looking at the profile it seems this is the profile for a previous member of Dodgy called Nigel Clark who decided to send me a friend invite because I was one of the top listeners to Dodgy in a last week (25 listens). I also a day later got a private message from him saying I should visit his website. I believe he it trying to promote his new album 21st Century Man. To be honest I don't mind this sort of promotion much, as it is obvious that I will quite happily listen to Dodgy and so will probably like his new album. This sort of promotion also isn't at the moment automated and so he obviously feels it is worth his time sending me the message. However I signed up with last.fm because it allows me to find other music rather than have it pushed on me. Although I'm guessing that Nigel Clark hasn't yet reached a big enough critical mass opn last.fm to be recommended to me as other people aren't yet listening to it.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Sakai Site.equals()

Took a little while to figure this one out but in Sakai the org.sakaiproject.site.api.Site equals() method will return true when passed a string if it matches the ID of the site. The reason they do this is so that they can save a list of site IDs and then have a collection of sites and call siteList.removeAll(stringList);. This can be seen is action in the CharonPortal where is is used to hide sites that the user isn't interested in.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Starting Rhythmbox in the Notification Area

I normally have Rhythmbox running on my desktop to provide me with music. However normally when you start up Rhythmbox it displays its window, now as I added Rhythmbox to the list of programs to automatically startup when I login I wanted it in the notification area (tray). The trick for doing this is to start Rhythmbox with the command: rhythmbox-client --hide Now if only gaim would have some way todo the same thing.