code

Updated to drupal-7.0 to check if the yolink module would suddenly be awash in pink screen of death.

According to functionality and the Coder module (so awesome!), it seems to be okay.

I'd hoped to have written the bulk of human knowledge to Freebase by now, but I came to a screeching halt when I found that I'd need cookies and sessions and such.

That is, you have to authenticate to write data in bulk to Freebase. Here's one way to do so using OAuth and PHP.

1. Sign in to Freebase and register an app. Take note of your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret.

2. Get oauth-php and add it to a directory where your code can see it.

I just added the yolink enhanced search module to drupal.org.

I've been admiring the Wikipedia of databases, Freebase, from afar for a long time. I've kept my distance because if you think learning wiki syntax is a challenge, try figuring out where to even put factoids about your favorite books or musicians on Freebase. If you want your data to be useful to more people than just yourself, though, it is critical that you get the organization right.

I'd nearly given up learning the Drupal content management system, after it took me two hours to change a font on a static web page. But I needed to procrastinate something even more difficult than changing fonts in Drupal, so I decided to try, try again.

I got an email asking for tips on writing a playlist maker script.

For programming practice, I've been writing PHP scripts that will turn various lists of musicians into playlists for Windows Media Player.* Basically, you find a list of musicians that you'd like to listen to as a set, put that list in the appropriate script (see below), and out comes a playlist you can open with Windows Media Player to listen to your list of artists. For long lists of artists, this saves a lot of time over the usual method of putting them in one at a time.

The musician lists you can use for this purpose so far with my little tools are:

I've been making decent progress learning PHP and MySQL since I finally got started last month. My proudest achievement thus far is a podcast finder, called "Podcast Finder", that recommends podcasts based on a couple of podcasts you know you like. I'm a total podcast junkie (try doing PCR in a dead-silent lab for two years, then winning an iPod shuffle, and see if you don't turn addict).

Here's my first PHP and SQL program, called CSV to WPL. It creates Windows Media Player playlists from comma-separated lists of bands.It's a niche program that has football stadiums worth of room for improvement (it's not a beta -- it's an alpha), but I know I'll use it a lot just as it is.