Planet Damian

Richie Hawtin recently started to post the records he is playing on twitter. He is using Traktor while he plays, which now has a new plugin which allows this functionality. Others have posted about this and what it means for techno music enthusiasts, DJs and the music industry.

I think it is one of the few good applications of twitter and I decided to hack something together to display this information in a little bit nicer way.

I created a site at sets.krass.com which gets the tweets from twitter and generates a list of DJ sets and a top10. As Hawtin is the only DJ I know who uses this application the overall top10 is not much use, but it shows the potential.

This is my first project using symfony and I was surprised how good it worked for this task and how easy it is to get started.

If you have problems accessing the site, come back a bit later, there seems to be a problem with one of my secondary DNS servers.

Some thing I have planned for the future:

• add links from the tracks to krass.com, discogs and co. It is a bit difficult, because artist names are not always present or correct
• add more DJs, if you know of someone also using this kind of tweets give me a shout
• make the combining of tracks into sets better (at the moment I just use the day) and allow more sensible names for these
• pages with tracks listed by artists and links to the artist pages

That is enough for today though, because it is bloody hot here in Barcelona.

Only two more weeks and I have to leave Munich and move to Berlin. I am a kind of sad about it. I really love my flat here! I love my friends and I love the nature around Munich. But I also look forward to Berlin, my new flat, my new area Kreuzberg and to all the exciting events waiting for me ;-)

New recipe for me, inspired by something I saw Rick Stein doing in some cookery show.

Put clams in a hot pan, add a cup of white wine. Cover and cook until they opened. Drain with a colander, but keep the liquid. Discard the clams which did not open.

Put some spaghetti or tagliatelle into a pot with boiling water and cook according to package instructions.

Meanwhile put one sliced onion and some sliced garlic into a pan with olive oil and fry them until soft. I added some small and medium peeled prawns and some leftover cod pieces. Then add the clams with shells and the white wine liquid you kept. Finally add some aioli. Season with salt pepper and herbs.

Reduce this a little bit. Add the pasta straight from the other pan and stir until it is covered.

The result should be creamy with not too much liquid.

Ingredients (for two really hungry people).

• 200g pasta
• clams (four handful)
  
• 1 cup of dry white whine
  
• 1 onion (sliced)
  
• 4 cloves of garlic (sliced)
• two table spoons of aioli
• some prawns or other white sea food
• olive oil
• salt
• pepper
• herbs
  

Ok, lets see how I am doing on my New Year resolutions:

loose weight
not much to see there. I think it is mainly because I am not going to the gym enough and haven't started mountain biking yet because of various illnesses. But I am teetotal now, so that should make a difference in the future.

use my motorcycle more
that is a no. I blame it on the weather.

sort out my music collection
ripping CDs is done and I have deleted all mp3s from questionable sources. I also removed all duplicates, which was quite a bit of work. I still have to digitize my tapes, but I wrote the software for it and have bought a new tape deck for the task.

travel somewhere new
we have planned some kind of summer holiday, but we don't know where yet. Cat prefers the Atlantic either France of Spain, but I would love to see some the south of France and some of the island in the Mediterranean. As I want to go with the motorcycle, this are pretty much the areas we can travel if we have one week of holiday.

do more programming
I did a bit of work on my small open source projects. I also have three packages in Fedora now. At work I started to help sanego.de, which is a rather busy health portal for the German market. This is fun, because it is just programming without a CMS or lots of HTML to get into my way.

take more advantage of Barcelona
fail

blog more
better than last year, but still not good. I also started to use twitter more, which is nice.

According to wikipedia I am doing not too bad, but there are still nine months to go...

This is the second list of podcasts. These are all the talk, radio and video podcasts I listen too. At the moment I have a bit of a problem of lacking behind. This is a sign of me skipping the gym to often.

It is a mix of news, technology, documentary and comedy. Most of the podcasts are from the BBC

• Apple Keynotes rss www
• Book Reviews With Simon Mayo rss www
• Broadcasting House rss www
• Daily Mayo rss www
• Digital Planet rss www
• Discovery rss www
• Documentaries rss www
• Excess Baggage rss www
• From Our Own Correspondent rss www
• Gastrocast rss www
• Global News rss www
• Great Lives rss www
• H&M Fashion TV rss www
• In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg rss www
• iTunes: Meet the Author rss www
• John Cleese Podcast rss www
• Jonathan Ross rss www
• Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews rss www
• Men.Style.com: Fashion, Gear & Style for Men rss www
• One Planet rss www
• Open Voices: The Linux Foundation Podcast rss www
• Open Web Podcast rss www
• Pods and Blogs rss www
• Radio 1 Stories rss www
• Radio 4 Choice rss www
• Russell Brand rss www
• Science in Action rss www
• Snowmail Podcast rss www
• Start the Week with Andrew Marr rss www
• Stephen Fry's PODGRAMS rss www
• The Economist rss www
• The Film Programme rss www
• The Moth Podcast rss www
• Thinking Allowed rss www
• World Book Club rss www
• You and Yours - Environment rss www