/var/log/irl

last.fm is back in my life

It seems last.fm is making a reappearance in my life once again. It seems to fade in and out, but one of my long-term projects is to record data about myself, produce some graphs and see if I can learn a bit more about myself.

One of the biggest problems I face with last.fm, that I’m sure others also face, is making sure the data gets there. I cannot fault last.fm for the audioscrobbler API as it’s well documented and anyone can implement a client but I found a couple of instances where no one has.

Security. When is it overkill?

My answer to this question is usually never for anything I’m setting up for myself, as long as it’s economically viable and allows me timely access to any data, process or network I need to access. I haven’t, for example, decided to live in a fallout shelter with a huge bulkhead door as the only entrance to keep anyone from gaining physical access to my computer. If it was economically viable though, I would. There is always a trade-off with security against convienience but deliberately introducing flaws in the security of a system purely for convinience doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

Days 4 and 5 - Thursday and Friday

My only scheduled session on Thursday started at 2pm, so I didn’t go into Uni until I’d made sure that I had a good lunch. The session was a practical for Distributed Systems, although no task was set, only to work on the assessment due the next day. Some had nearly finished, some had finished and some had hardly started.

Our group project normally meets on a Friday morning, but we had already agreed that this would be moved to Monday due to the deadline.

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz