Rasmus' Toys Page

A couple of early Christmas presents for the new house. A new iMac for the kitchen nook and a Sonos system. I guess I haven't bought ram in a while because it was under $100 to upgrade the iMac to 4G with ram from OWC. The iMac is a perfect fit for the kitchen. The black and aluminum matches the counters and appliances in the kitchen nicely.
I had been eyeing a Mac Mini for ages, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in the Mini and for the price the iMac seemed like a much better deal. Bought it from Amazon and it didn't come with Leopard but Apple has an update program so the upgrade is mostly free. They want $10 for shipping me the CD. I already have another copy, so it would be nice if they would just give me a serial number.

As nice as the iMac is, the Sonos system is more interesting. I have had various mechanisms for playing music from computers to decent speakers over the years, but they were all inconvenient hacks. I don't want to have to use a computer to control the music, and I definitely don't want to do it via a clunky TV-based interface either. The Sonos with its controller does a great job of taking the hack out of the system. It is basically a wireless meshing modular music system. You put either an amplified box with speakers connected, or an unamplified box connected to an existing stereo in each room and the single controller can then control each zone individually or you can link them all up so all the zones play the same music. Each box also has a Line-In that can be used as a source and played in any other zone

I wanted the iMac to be able to go to sleep without killing the music, so I used a 250G Simpleshare drive I had sitting around. One of these days I need to figure out a real NAS system for the house, but for now 250G is plenty as a Sonos media source. I pointed iTunes at the Simpleshare and copied all the music to the drive, then I pointed the Sonos system at the drive as well and it worked nicely.

Internet radio streaming, Rhapsody and Pandora are all working very nicely. I realize this turned out to be a bit of a boring post since there were no technical hurdles and thus no interesting hacks involved in getting any of this working. But that is afterall why people buy things like iMacs and Sonos systems. If they didn't just work without days of fiddling there are plenty of cheaper options that will let you hack and fiddle for months and in the end you get something that almost sorta mostly works.

Posted by Rasmus

http://pipes.yahoo.com is a cool toy, and by toy I mean it in the useful and cant-stop-playing-with-it sense. My first impression when I saw an early version a couple of months ago was, "How the heck did they do that?" I was reading the Javascript source code for quite a while. Once you get beyond the fact that this is a browser-based app doing this without Flash, or Java or any similar cheats, you get down to what the app actually does.

Years ago I wrote this silly little Mashup example:

http://buzz.progphp.com/?q=4

It grabs an RSS feed, in this case the top daily search term % movers from http://buzz.yahoo.com/feeds/buzzoverm.xml which gives you an indication of what is on the minds of web searchers right now. I took these searches and did a Yahoo Image search and a News search and combined them in that oval interface you see. I had to do a bit of RSS and XML parsing to take these different data sources and combine them. This is what Pipes is all about. It provides a visual environment for manipulating data sources and then provides a number of different ways to get the results and integrate them into other things. Directly in your RSS reader is probably the simplest, but you could also feed it to PHP and do further data manipulation.

A simplified Pipes version of the above takes the same Buzz.yahoo.com RSS feed and does a Flickr search on each search term. The result looks like this:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/DnudMlO32xGDcIu7pRr_og

The point here is not the visual output. It is meant to be fed to something else. Hover over the "Subscribe" link on the right there. Then click on the "How this pipe was made" image on the left to see how it works.

This is a particularly lame and simple pipe. Some much cooler ones include:

Blog Buzz for Pipes combines a couple of different blog watching feeds, filters out duplicates and gives you a combined feed in reverse chronological order. When you look at how it was made it becomes immediately obvious what it does. You can save a copy and make your own version that watches for whatever terms you want.

Another interesting one takes the New York Times front page, runs a content analysis on it to get a set of representative keywords and then does a Flickr search on each of those. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/vvW1cD212xGMiR9aqu5lkA/.

Here is a much more complex pipe that takes some user input. It finds apartments near things. In this case it looks for apartments within 2 miles of a Park in Palo Alto, California by searching Craigslist, then doing a location extraction and then doing a Yahoo! Local Search for that location.

Even if you have no use for processing data sources this way, open up one of these Pipes and drag the boxes around and watch the pipes react. Web apps don't get any cooler than this right now.

Posted by Rasmus

Want to work on some of the busiest and coolest web apps in the world?

Do you like Flickr, and want to work downtown San Francisco?

Or perhaps you are into music, movies or TV and want to work out of Santa Monica? Jumpcut? Or have you seen answers.yahoo.com? Address Book, Personals, Search, Premium Services, Hot Jobs? Want to do interesting things combining PHP and Flash?

Yes, I get a referral bonus, but I need more toys. You get a cool job though, so I think we are even.

Send me your resume and let me know what sort of stuff you are interested in or poke around on http://careers.yahoo.com/ and let me know which job interests you and I will forward your resume to the appropriate hiring manager.

[edited to remove RSS ad test I had forgotten about]

Posted by Rasmus