PenguinSix

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PenguinRadio this week, but little of these changes are visible to the naked eye. One that is now resides on my homepage, a “”last played”” feature that shows the last five stations played in our database. Our database has dropped from 6,000 streams to 2600. Talk about the chilling effect of the copyright law and the RIAA. In addition, foreign broadcasts now make up a greater percentage of our stations, leading me to wonder about the “”trade advantage”” of doing a station overseas. If the PenguinRadio ever comes into being, the differences between borders for radio listening will disappear. There may actually develop some sort of trade imbalance due to the RIAA/Copyright licensing issue in the USA and the lack of those laws overseas. I envision a time when Congress is up in arms as radio listeners start to desert the US and turn to foreign broadcasts. As one who has listened to thousands of hours of overseas radio, I can tell you that in many cases, there isn’t much of a difference between US and other stations all playing the same top 40 drivel. I still have to work out one more major change to PenguinRadio–having a database that allows multiple fields for a single column. i.e. column: What did you eat today? answer: chicken, or tuna and chips, or spam eggs bacon and spam. How to make one column accept multiple numbers of items…. I think I know…]]>

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Wired has an article in the print edition about extreme programming, the use of multiple programmers on ONE terminal and how the practice helps weed out simple bugs that seem to plague software development. Programmers are considered (somewhat rightly) as a bunch of anti-social geeks locked into cubes working in almost pure isolation. Xprogramming puts them into pairs, working on one machine, for half a day, letting them bounce ideas off of each other and work through glitches. Basically, one guy knows how some parts work and the other a different section. This helps improve inneroperability between sections of code as it is written. Unfortunately, I don’t have anyone to team up with. Not that it really matters as I don’t have the time to do half of the stuff I intend to do. However, one idea they mentioned I’m thinking of implementing. They go through dozens of index cards with assigned tasks (add this button, change this text, etc). By making realtively simple tasks, almost everything they need to accomplish each day can be done in a matter of hours, unlike the burdens that face me and often are so “”open-ended”” that I refuse to work on them. Now to go find some index cards.]]>