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At Coco, we are starting to build out some e-commerce sites. In order to expedite the process, we are using Substruct as a solution. While working with it, I have noticed a few things that needed to be fixed.

With engines setup properly, you are capable of extending routes beyond what's provided with the substruct engine. This was not the case beforehand. I was able to track down the bug and submit some patches to mend the problem.

If you are using substruct and want to customize it (adding additional controllers either to the admin or outside the admin) you'll need to get the latest substruct. Check out the issue here.

You can find download links there.

Working on open source projects is a lot of fun. It's interesting to see how other people do things. Contributing gives developers like me a boost of confidence. I plan on finding and fixing more bugs in the future for this project and others.

Labels: hacks, programming, ruby on rails, software

I added some new features including:

• Ability to refresh the list of playlists


• Reload playlist data functionality


• Status area indicating the current track being updated and overall progress.

Most of these features allow you to keep the app open (as long as it doesn't crash). Check it out!



Download now

Labels: apple, cocoa, last.fm, lastfmtagger, lastfmtaggercocoa, mac, osx, programming, ruby, software

I've once again improved my little Last.fm script for use with RubyOSA. It needed updating badly. There were quite a few things bugging me.

What's new:

• Nice console messages telling you what's happening.
• Support for skipping over identical genre's.
• Ability to continue or abort tagging process. So if you don't like that tag, type 'n'.
• Use -q to subdue tagging confirmations.
• Full UTF-8 support, as well as proper URL escaping.



Download it now! And have somewhat useful genre's to choose from.

I will tackle cleaning it up later. Add me to your RSS reader if you want script updates.

Remember, you can get RubyOSA with the Last.fm Tagger here.

Labels: computers, last.fm, lastfmtagger, music, nerd, osx, programming, ruby, software

I finished a v0.1 of my eMusic.fm Greasemonkey script. What it does is pretty simple. On an album page, it will pull the 10 most popular tags from last.fm and inject them into the page below the description.

I found myself looking at last.fm for a particular artist to see what the community has labeled it as. This provides a more insightful look into artists you may not be aware of.

Download my eMusic.fm greasemonkey script

Labels: computers, firefox, last.fm, music, nerd, programming, software

Laurent Sansonetti was generous enough to ask me if I wanted to contribute my little Last.fm script to the RubyOSA samples directory. And of course, I was more than willing to do that. He actually updated the script to make it even better! Now, you simply select which track in iTunes you want to tag, and run the RubyOSA script. The script will then query Last.fm for the most popular tag, and set the genre to whatever the tag on Last.fm is.

Here's the updated code:

begin require 'rubygems'; rescue LoadError; end
require 'rbosa'
require 'net/http'
require 'cgi'
require 'rexml/document'
include REXML

itunes = OSA.app('iTunes')
selection = itunes.selection.get
if selection.empty?
  $stderr.puts "Please select some tracks."
  exit 1
end
selection.each do |track|
  feed = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/album/#{CGI::escape(track.album)}/toptags.xml"
  doc = Document.new(Net::HTTP.get(URI(feed)))
  track.genre = doc.root[1][1].text
end

Remember, you can get RubyOSA with the Last.fm Tagger here.

Thanks to Laurent for making an awesome library. It makes playing with Ruby even more fun!

Labels: last.fm, lastfmtagger, osx, programming, ruby, software

I love Volumouse. I use it at work a ton because I don’t have a volume control on my mouse.

I find it burdensome to activate a media player window in order to change the volume. With Volumouse you can specify a hot key to hold down when rolling the mouse wheel to change the system volume. It comes in handy when you need to immediately mute or lower the volume.

Labels: apps, software, windows

While I’m not particularly fond of the name, musikCube has exceeded my expectations. First of all, it’s open-source. On top of that, it has a relatively low footprint and it’s fast.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a [Last.fm]http://www.last.fm/) plugin.

Here are some nice features I noticed off the bat:

• filtering while you type (like in explorer, but more robust)
• customization of the view panels (add as many as you wish: album, artist, genre, year, etc)
• dynamic playlists
• tag editor with automatic capitalization features, etc

If you have some spare time, I highly recommend giving musikCube a whirl as an alternative music player.

Labels: apps, software