Karaoke for snobs

Those of you who know me well enough will know I’m a bit of a karaoke fiend. Stick me in a room with beer and some friends and a load of backing tracks and it will be very hard to get me to put down the microphone. The trouble is: my musical tastes and karaoke don’t strongly intersect. A karaoke playlist will always have a bit of Radiohead, REM, Kings of Leon… if I’m lucky I’ll find some other moderately popular artists like Mumford & Sons or the Manic Street Preachers. Sometimes there’s an absolute gem like Alabama 3 or Guillemots but this is really pushing it. What we need is a karaoke bar for snobs. A place where Kylie and Girls Aloud are banned and the playlist oozes with quality songs that really test a singer’s...

Posted by on Feb 28, 2012 in Thoughts | 3 comments

XKCD progress indicator

You all read today’s xkcd and wanted to incorporate this formula into your programs straight away. Here’s my Ruby implementation, if you would like a quick fix: require 'date' class XkcdDate # Progress indicator formatted as a date, as in http://xkcd.com/1017/ def self.progress(amount, total) percent = (amount.to_f / total.to_f) years = Math::E ** (20.3444 * percent ** 3 + 3) - Math::E ** 3 Date.today - (years * 365.25) end end It takes two arguments (amount and total, used to form the ratio) and returns a Ruby Date object, which you can format any way you like. And examples of its uses, as in the comic: >> [7.308, 31.12, 47.91, 70.33, 90.42, 100].each {|p| puts "#{p}: #{XkcdDate.progress(p, 100)}"} 7.308: 2011-12-18 31.12: 1995-02-15 47.91:...

Posted by on Feb 15, 2012 in Tech | 0 comments