Gray's blog

Since nobody has posted anything on this yet:

Did anyone see that huge apartment building on fire? Black smoke all over, surprising that the news hasn’t already covered it (As of, 2:10AM, the fire was going strong with 100ft flames and black smoke around 7pm).

Any updates on this? When they come up I will post the links here.

Well this blog isn’t anyways.

I will be posting more / deleting this post when I have something useful to say. Right now most projects are under wraps, so it’s hard to say a lot.

As for Axcid 2.0 updates, it has been decided that the entire backend portion of the site (the API, the search tools, the database, the index, the relational DB) will all be powered by a Java servlet backend.

This means data processing will be faster / more extensible & clean. The API will include an insert API in 2.0 for private use (Internal crawling). More types of data will be indexed (bitrate, id3 tags, file size).

The server situation will be changing, built on 2 dedicated servers, one will be a workhorse, and one will be a datastore.

The workhorse will be the server used for streaming content, running large indexing operations & holding large amounts of data.

The indexing/logic machine will be used for the larger, more complex data manipulation systems. It will also manage searching/api responses/site control.

Song checking & large operations that require multiple machines will be operated under clusters, using a popular Java distributed operations API.

This is just some of what is planned / in development for Axcid 2.0. The wait will be well worth it, taking a music database to a proper, music search engine.

After a while of running this music DB, and noticing lag spikes and slowdowns due to poor, old coding, I made a decision. It’s rewrite time.

Now I know I’ve been saying that forever, but this time Axcid changes itself from a database to a search engine. I’ve engineered a new storage format / searchable database that can store music data, literally 50 times as fast as before. Queries that once took 50 seconds now take 20 milliseconds.

The new system will be much more scalable. Work starting with multiple servers, splitting the ‘powerhouse’ load (streaming, content checking, ‘heavy lifting’), from the database load (searching, indexing, database handling).

The XML api’s will also be re engineered. They will use a better / more standard format.

There will also be many new features, including album indexing, better art retrieval, users / sessions & playlists. The software version will be rebuilt to a more solid, complete application.

We’re moving out of the prototype days, and into the real software days. The beginning was fun, but it’s time to buckle down and launch a real music service.

Well, I’ve been a bit off for the last week or so. Not got a lot done or whatever.

I’ve been studying and just getting stuff done, I’ll be back in the full swing of development by Tuesday or so.

In honor of my new G1 I purchased today, I’m showing off the development on Tunebin/Axcid Mobile.

The application is called Tunr. So far it’s bug_free and supports Tunebin Playlists & XSPF Playlists.

When I am done, it will be available on the Android Market, free of charge.

At the moment I’m writing my Media Services background service, the app will use it for playing songs, and it will of course support multitasking, so you can listen to your playlist whatever your doing.

Tunr supports(/will support) searching for songs via Axcid, it supports live music archive / Axcid search.

Downloading support will also be implemented sometime in the near future. I don’t have a ton of time to work on this due to paying jobs, but it will get done, don’t worry.

Hopefully in a couple days, I’ll get an SVN up for the packages:
org.graysblog.tunebin
org.graysblog.xspf
org.graysblog.http

so basic xspf playback can be implemented before the whole app is done. (Because who actually pays attention in class when there is 3g and music..),

Made something to spit TuneBin playlists into XSPF or M3U format.

http://graysblog.org/tunebin_xspf?p=6

where p=Your Playlist ID

and for m3u add &type=m3u

http://graysblog.org/tunebin_xspf?p=6&type=m3u

Alright this is just great. Will started to mess with the axcid api the other day, and came up with something cool. It’s like IgniteMusic, and uses the same api. But on the other hand, it doesn’t suck.

http://tunebin.info/

Powered by the axcid api, works on pretty much everything. Great way to listen to music like I do in class.

Some of my favorites:

Rap:

http://tinyurl.com/csnpuh – Gucci Mane – Icy (remix)

http://tinyurl.com/c4oloz – Eazy E – Eazy Does it

Alternative / BritRock:

http://tinyurl.com/cztwm6 – Arctic Monkeys – Scummy

Chillout:

http://tinyurl.com/dm7wfu – Sublime – Real Situation

Alt. covers:

http://tinyurl.com/d3re95 – Dynamite Hack – Boyz in the hood

just some good ones this week. gives me an excuse to post.

So, I’m trying that ‘build my own custom phone’ thing again. May seem stupid but hey, at least I’m learning something in the process..

The chip I’m planning to power it with is the Marvell PXA310 processor. It’s extremely easy to port code to (ARM11) and I’ve already built the android/kernel to run on it.

http://www.marvell.com/products/cellular/application/pxa310.jsp

It was _not_ difficult to do this.

The other major hurdle is finding somebody who produces a board with that chip. Once I’ve done that I modify a standard candybar phone design (I’m ripping off an iPhone one since there are plenty of CAD’s available.).

I’ll update you on how this goes, and see how many other chips I can port android too.

http://graysblog.org/printr/

sometimes people get REALLY bored and have 5 minutes..

The breakdown:
this is a 5 minute practice script (wanted to do more regular expressions and strip_tags) and I got really bored.

So when you run this bookmarklet, it formats the page so it can be printed and read wherever you got 5 minutes.

Mashup API (early stages) was released publically:

See axcid.org