The Lyrical Explorer

I am pleased to announce The Lyrical Explorer, a website which searches for lyrics from around the Internet. It uses the results to expand its own database, which may be edited to improve future searches. All that you need to do is enter a song title and artist. What’s more, the site is very useful for developers as the API is simple and open, allowing programs to easily incorporate lyrics functionality.

My birthday: the year gone by

Today is my birthday,  and I thought that I might take this opportunity to look at what’s happened over the past year.

Galileo’s Physics

Another site that I’ve made for physics:

Galileo’s Physics

Nice one, Microsoft!

I had the extreme misfortune of using Windows XP today, and my experience was not brilliant. Upon startup I was greeted with this dialog:

Sure, it is true that closing Explorer will make your system more secure, but why not shut down Windows all together if Microsoft are going down that road? As it was, explorer.exe wasn’t terminated until the dialog was dismissed, so whichever imaginary security threat that caused this message was probably still running anyway.

Libre music

As an open source enthusiast, all forms of digital media that restrict rights get me upset. In particular I am referring to DRM, the piece of copyright protection which effectively restricts the usage of material which you pay for. Fortunately, there are some artists which see this as a problem and take it upon themselves to release music under free licenses. Many of these can be found on Jamendo, but here’s a list of my favourite Creative Commons and public domain albums:

• The Smashing Pumpkins – Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV
• Nine Inch Nails – The Slip
• Brad Sucks – I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
• Brad Sucks – Out of It
• Jonathan Coulton – Thing a Week
• pornophonique – 8-bit lagerfeuer

Javent

I have long been surprised by the fact that it is so difficult to raise events in Java. Adding listeners is easy, but as soon as you want your own event system, you’re out of luck. Through browsing the web I discovered that a commonly used “solution” is to piggy-back on existing Swing and AWT event queues. This isn’t good.

In order to fix this problem, I have started a small project called Javent. The Javent library is tiny (less than 20KiB), and makes event-raising code a lot cleaner. All of you Java developers should give it a try.

Fork

Inkscape source SVG [29.5 KiB]

Good old DOS games

The other day I came across DOS Museum, a website dedicated to the preservation of DOS games. I was instantly reminded of my childhood favourites like Hocus Pocus, Word Rescue, Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit… my eyes are beginning to glaze over already. I still have lots of respect for the old developers who had to optimize the hell out of their games to overcome hardware limitations, unlike modern developers and their GiB large products.

If you are a sad individual that never had the chance to experience pixellated madness, have a look through the catalogues and install a few games in DOSBox, an open source MS-DOS emulator. They are much better than a lot of Flash games!

What happens after death?

This is a review of some of the most popular theories of what happens to a deceased human being. Each is rated according to its probability of happening and the desirability of the result.

Nuclear history of Russia

For Physics at school I put together a website about Russian nuclear history. You may find the use of Ajax interesting…
http://russiannuclear.uuuq.com/