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Archive for November 5th, 2003

The obligation of Smart Playlists.

without comments

So, now I’ve got this “Un-Rated” playlist on my iPod (as detailed in an earlier post). Now I feel this compulsion to listen to all of my unrated songs and assign them ratings.

This is a bad thing because I have approximately 4000 unrated songs (excluding Audio Books) on my iPod. However, this is also something of a good thing because I’m listening to my music collection a song at a time (instead of as general background noise) and running each song thru a simple, mental, rules-engine that looks something like?

  • Do I hate this song? = 1 star (not 0 stars as this would leave it in the un-rated playlist)
  • Do I not want to hear this song again, but don’t hate it? = 2 stars
  • Would I not mind listening to this song again, but wouldn’t seek it out? = 3 stars
  • Do I want to listen to this song again soon? And probably again soon after that? = 4 stars
  • Would this be one of the songs I would want if I could only listen to 100-odd songs for the rest of my life? = 5 stars

    You can see that I’m making this whole 5-star range cover a very wide range of emotional response. As you can probably guess, there are a lot of 3 star songs out there!

  • Written by jthurber

    November 5th, 2003 at 3:46 pm

    Posted in pointless

    WinFS and the promises of the file-system.

    with 17 comments

    Two somewhat interesting articles on the potential uses for an need of more powerful file-systems in Longhorn.

  • One from eWeek about the evo-not-revo-lutionary nature of Longhorn’s file-system.
  • A WebLog from JupiterResearch about, well, pretty much the same thing.
    Just thought these were interesting reading if you’re a metadata and database-type geek.
    As a relevant aside: I am continually amazed by the lack of innovation we see coming out of Redmond, when they’ve (supposedly) got both the $$ and the people to make it happen. One could well ask Microsoft, where was iTunes for Windows? We saw the standard FUD after the fact, but where was some real competition from WMP?
  • Written by jthurber

    November 5th, 2003 at 7:00 am

    Posted in General