Mary Rose Cook

Playmary is my audio autobiography site. You create an account and upload songs that you are listening to a lot, or that symbolise what is going on in your life.

Up until now, you would click on songs to play and pause them, and when one song ended, the next would play.

I’ve added some new code that lets you move through the playlist with the left and right arrows, and pause and play the current song with the space bar:

Code adapted from the source in this article.

The only downer is the space bar is a shortcut for scrolling in Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Dan W and I couldn’t think of any conventions for play controls in the browser. j/k/l seems too obscure, and I really want the controls to mimic iTunes. Hmmm.

I helped organise this Autumn’s London Barcamp. It was at the IBM building on the Southbank. We provided food, drink, some rooms, a bit of floor to sleep on and a blanket. Then, each of the 200 people who came did a twenty-minute session on something they know about. We had nine sessions running every half an hour from 10 a.m. on Saturday to 5pm on Sunday and there were lots of interesting discussions in the corridors.

I saw some ace talks about PubSubHubBub, the boardgame Go, custom fonts on the web, erotic writing, the design of the TV programme LOST, a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator in Javascript, the art of improvisation, live-coding a Scheme interpreter in Ruby, and the dinner game Werewolf.

My session was on 10 Fucking Awesome Bands You Should Be Listening To.

A malleable gender and sexuality. Living in a punk/DIY/anti-captialist environment.

These are some things I’m not working on, anymore, but that might still be cool.

• Kisses: compare the magnitude of stuff
• Lollipops and Gumdrops: music recommendations
• Ear Defender: decide what music to listen to
• Switch off the light before you leave

In preparation for December, I made a Spotify playlist for Ten Years of All Tomorrow’s Parties. It contains an album for each of the bands on the line-up. The following bands were not available on Spotify, so you can check them out at their Myspaces.

The For Carnation,
Papa M,
Fuck Buttons,
Sleepy Sun,
Sunn o))),
Alexander Tucker & Decomposed Orchestra,
The Magic Band,
Porn,
Tall Firs,
BEAK>,
Polvo,
youm.

A new app I’ve been working on. It’s a wunderkammer, or a cabinet of curiosities, or a digital scrapbook. You fill it with your favourite pictures, pieces of text, songs and film clips. Or, you could make a Slender for a wedding couple, or a new baby, or your Mum, or your girlfriend, and give it to them as a lovely present. I’ve made one for The Common Place, a social centre I was involved in when I lived in Leeds.

Actually, you can’t sign up, yet. Soon.

I have made a new collection on Kisses that compares the likelihood of different causes of death.

The words to a song by Stand, a hardcore band:

You are full of junk and junk fills your desires, but we know it’s easier to sit in a comfy chair with an ice cool beer and a kitsch pink horizon of how your life might take some form. Junk is cheap, junk is holiday romance, junk is beer and T.V. Junk is playtime. Junk is once in a blue moon in Hollywood U.S.A. Junk is a coffee shop, a bunch of actors and a monkey. Junk is bland and junk is your future, should you let junk into your life.

They talk about what they mean on the words page of their website.

The Waterfall method of developing software guarantees a result: a digital version of the requirements specification. Agile methods of developing software provide a service: software development.

Agile is replacing Waterfall. This means that software development is going from being fixed price to rate-based¹. With Waterfall, the developer would write the specification and then quote an estimate. With agile, the developer still writes a rough specification, but the features in it are not guaranteed to appear in the final product.

Instead, the developer says, “Let’s build this software together, and it will cost you $x per day.” It’s kind of like a cab ride: you tell the cabbie your destination, but you can settle up and get out at any time.

Which party, developer or client, is favoured financially by each of these methods? That depends on how good the developer is at estimating how long a piece of work will take. If they are great, Waterfall is better because they can sign a contract up front and get a guaranteed amount of money. If they are less than great, agile is better because they can’t dig themselves into a horrible underestimation hole.

Unfortunately, all developers suck at estimating work. To accurately estimate, you need to think through every problem you’ll encounter. To find every problem, you have to go through the work in detail. To go through the work in detail, you need to do the work. Some help is afforded by previous experience, but software development is rife with novel, tricky little problems.

So, financially speaking, Waterfall is bad for developers, and agile is better.

¹ Agile changes software development from manufacturing (secondary) to a service (tertiary). It was never quaternary, and it is also, finally, a developed country industry.

I am sad to see the little lady leave. However, $43 a month for hosting is quite a lot, so she has to go. The code is open source and on GitHub.