Tristan Pemble has posted some cool iTunes Music Store hacks, which include one tool that can grab the full size album artwork from any given album. All you have to do is find the album on iTMS, right click the title, choose Copy iTunes Music Store URL, and paste it into the field. It’s great for filling in missing artwork on ripped/downloaded music. Other cool hacks include a music video and movie trailer tool, and also one to view the raw XML response from iTunes’ servers (for debugging or general poking around).

Update: This method no longer works, but try my new PHP script here.

Here’s a great little article on how to control devices using your Mac and a USB interface board. For similar projects, I may also reccommend Delcom Engineering USB I/O chips, which are dirt cheap and not too hard to communicate with using the included OS X drivers. Good for a Mac Mini robot project, perhaps?

Sites like del.icio.us organize data through the use of tags, which I think is a brilliant idea. However, I disagree with the occasional comment lamenting the lack of tagging standards. I think the absence of a standard encourages a diversity of categories, bringing in more related content that would not otherwise be found.

The idea behind letting users tag their own content goes beyond simple per-user categorization. The theory is that, when enough users have tagged the same piece of information, it should be possible to find similarities between tags and produce an “average” list of tags for that data. While some users may append not-so-common tags, if enough do, the popular ones will rise to the top with the rest and create a new commonly used tag.

I’m wondering, though, what cutoff should be used to gauge when a tag or grouping is “popular enough”? And what tag sample size is necessary to determine that, as well?

When you ask a colleague for help, particularly in programming, you want him to know less about your project… so he will ask the stupid questions you sub-consciously avoided asking yourself because you thought you knew the answer, when in fact you didn’t.

I’ve thought about this many times while programming, and I’ve never seen it said so well. Sometimes, when some code of mine isn’t working, I’ll take a break and do something else and work on it later. Quite often, taking a new look at the code forces you to (inadvetently) ask yourself those stupid questions. I almost always find that I’ve made an assumption somewhere along the lines, and my thoughts were not consistent with the actual workings.

A note to web application developers — Google has finally opened their maps service via an API, allowing you to programmatically make use of their maps, as well as plot routes and markers. Previously, the only way to do such a thing was by disassembling the JavaScript which Google uses and creating your own unsupported solution. Now you can create a web application which reliably uses Google Maps without worrying about infrastructure changes affecting your code. You will need a (free) API key to make use of the service, which can be obtained here. I’m excited to see what new web-based tools can be built using the new Google Maps API! Any suggestions for a small project which makes use of it?