When I'm listening to music I like to know what tracks are queued up. Call me a control freak.

One doesn't normally have enough screen space to leave iTunes visible though, so I figured what I wanted was a heads up style panel, floating above all other applications, showing the current and upcoming songs. Something like the image on the right:

Surprisingly, no such app existed. There are many heads up controllers (which I don't need since I control tracks and level from my Apple bluetooth keyboard media function keys), or artwork viewers that display the current track only. There was no alternative but to suspend my study plan for an evening and write my own.

The result is heads up 'tunes. It's lightweight, nothing fancy (although I will add animation to it one day). You can download the current version at the software home page:

http://mark.aufflick.com/software/heads-up-tunes/

Here's the blurb from the about box:

This is a preliminary version of heads up 'tunes.

Pretty much all this program does is display the current and next two iTunes™ tracks in a "heads up" style window. It works fine with genius and party shuffle as well as manual and smart playlists. Results will be disappointing when using regular shuffle mode since it is not possible to determine what track will come next.

Please visit http://mark.aufflick.com/software/heads-up-tunes for future releases.

Please email any bug reports to mark@aufflick.com.

© Copyright 2008 Mark Aufflick. This software is free for you to use. No warranty is provided with this software except that which cannot be excluded by such disclaimers. This is free pre-release software - use at your own risk :) iTunes™ is a Trade Mark of Apple.

Oh, and it also sets its dock icon to the current track artwork. It's a Universal binary and has been tested on PPC (by me) and Intel (by Matt B and DB). Enjoy!

Sorry to anyone unable to acces the site for a few hours this morning.

I have some plans for how to beat them that I'll gradually roll out, we'll have to see who wins!

(For the uninitiated, DoS means Denial of Service.)

Update: I'm not winning :(

What a privilege it was to be at tonight's Stevie Wonder concert. Great man, great singer, great band :)

The start of the night had me worried. There was way too much kick drum in the mix for the bass drivers which sounded bad itself and just exacerbated the problems with the arena echo. I kept looking at the sound engineer hoping to see him trying to resolve the situation, but no action. I had to put in my ear plugs.

Mercifully though, after the solo's, where the levels of each band member was raised for their part, when the engineer reverted to the regular mix it was much better. How he didn't notice the problem before is beyond me.

From then on the night was fantastic. Dancing in the aisles, singing along--awesome. Stevie's daughter did an amazing song. No encore, but Stevie promised to come back and floated the idea of doing a benefit gig for less than fully abled people. Count me in on that Stevie.

You may have heard of it - in February this year a Washington court granted class action status to a suit brought against Microsoft for "unjust enrichment" by labelling PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" which no reasonable person could bear to run Vista on.

Since then, Microsoft has "repeatedly said it cannot identify the people who bought PCs under its Vista Capable marketing campaign in 2006 and early 2007". The cunning lawyers, however, have suggested that Microsoft deploy a script via Windows Update which could identify relevant PCs and alert the user of their eligibility to join the class action suit.

Genius! The Microsoft lawyers must be absolutely livid. A hired "expert" has suggested that it would take Microsoft no more than a few hours to develop and QA the update. I think that is on the low side, but there's certainly not more than a few days work in it -- which is still peanuts in the context of the case.

One wonders what the update would do, and who would collect the data. Make the dialog incomprehesive enough and noone will be able to join the case :) Unless, of course, they own a copy of Dealing with Windows Dialog Boxes - for Dummies.

There are plenty of Perl golf O(N) implementations of Fibonacci generators (and in other languages also), but I wondered in the shower today if I could do it without either an explicit initialisation or explicit previous variables. While I feel tracking both values in a single string is kindof cheating, this is the best I have come up with so far:

perl -le 'print$2while s/(\d*):?(\d*)/($1+$2||1).":$1"/e' |head -10

At 45 characters it's not a size winner (see this thread for implementations as short as 27 characters and 21 in Ruby) but I like it for a few reasons: it is complete (many other implementations skip the leading 1); it contains no initialisation (or indeed any implicit assigment operations); it uses only one state variable ($_).

Update: Perl golf is addictive! I had to let go of my "no implicit assignment" rule, but here is a similar 37 character solution. A weakness this version suffers from is that since it requires both single and double quote characters it's tough to fit into a shell one liner:

$_="$':".($'+$`||1),print$`while x./:/

Update 2: As pointed out on the related perlmonks thread, I can save a few chars with perl 5.10 using say:

perl -E 'say$2while s/(\d*):?(\d*)/($1+$2||1).":$1"/e' |head -10

$_="$':".($'+$`||1),say$`while x./:/