So I’m going to give it a whirl, it might be rubbish - but lets hope not.

However instead of posting on this site under an F1 category I decided to start a new site entirely dedicated to my F1 musings, to keep it separate from all the techy stuff I write here, so behold F1heat.com.

The elevator pitch for Where to Start With goes like this:

Where to Start With helps you when you’re trying out new bands and artists by providing community-powered recommendations written by die hard fans.

If that new band you want to try has 10 CD’s out, then Where to Start With will give you… well, where to start with them!

The whole idea behind this site came from a need me and my friend found ourselves having; many times we would hear a song or read about a band that sounded interesting but then when we did go to try that band we would find they had a handful of releases out already. Where is the best place to start with them? Traditionally unless you got a specific recommendation for an album you would just try the lucky dip approach and hope you found a winner. If you got lucky you might have just found your new favourite band, however if you picked a rotten egg you may dismiss your potential new favourite band based on your opinion of one of their poorer releases.

A personal example was when I was recommended to listen to Porcupine Tree and given one song to try. That song was awesome, however Porcupine Tree have a massive back-catalogue (9 albums, 6 live/compilation albums and 4 EPs) and from trying a few releases out I found that they are very diverse and I still haven’t managed to get into them, although from that initial song I really wish I could. What I really needed was a guide to tell me where to actually start with Porcupine Tree, for example something that said "for starting out with Porcupine Tree what you really need to buy first is their album X".

This is how Where to Start With was born and also basically how it works — each band or artist will have an article about them which gives a short history/description of the band and each of their main releases (e.g. Albums & E.P.’s) with a little description. Any user can add these articles and each article is in the wiki-style, e.g. anyone can edit the descriptions to add new information and fix mistakes etc.

The real core of the site comes into play when people start adding their opinions on artists, once again anyone can do this, but it is better for people who are currently fans of the artist to add their opinion. Each opinion includes a rating, a recommendation (more on those later) and a personal comment on each of the albums for the artist. We then take these opinions and produce an article that gives you recommendations on where to start with the artist, what to try after that and even sometimes what to avoid.

What makes this different to other sites?

Well, whereas other sites, software and services may give you reviews, the most popular or most listened to albums those may not necessarily be the best releases to start off with a new artist.

For instance Reefs debut album "Replenish" is absolutely amazing and one of my all time favourite albums, however pretty much anyone interested in starting with Reef would be best advised to start with their second album "Glow", which is much more accessible in general. Another clear example would be Nirvana, I personally hardly ever listen to Nirvana’s "Nevermind" album any more (as I know all of Nirvana’s albums inside and out, every cough and guitar string noise included) and I would rate "In Utero" as my favourite album however "Nevermind" obviously would be the album I would recommend anyone new to Nirvana should start out with.

But going further than that after you have tried the "essential" release Where to Start With helps you with which release to follow the essential release with, a wildcard album and even sometimes what to avoid - these can be really difficult to determine from the other methods.

About the recommendations.

Each Where to Start With article can have the following recommendations for each release to help guide you:

• Essential: The the first release to try, the best introduction to the artist.
• Follow with: The next release to try after the essential release.
• Also recommended: Another good release to try.
• Wildcard: A release that may not be "the norm" for the artist but still could be interesting. If you try the essential release and weren’t so keen this should be different enough to be worth a try.
• Avoid: Yes, some users will also tell you what to avoid.

The votes of each person on each release are added up to ensure that each article has one of each of the above recommendations (where applicable) and the more opinions that are added the better the recommendations become. You also have access to personal comments of each person who gave their opinion to give you a better insight into why they voted how they voted. And finally, just in case there is a close call between releases you can also see the breakdown of the votes for each release.

Sounds great, how do I get started?

Well we’re currently in private beta and have been running with a small handful of users for the past couple of weeks but are accepting applications to the beta and adding new users on a daily basis. The reason we’re currently in private beta is to ensure that the platform is solid and discover any issues, we’re not sure how long this will take but we obviously want to be out of beta as soon as possible. We also have setup a dedicated blog for Where to Start With which you can follow if you want to be kept up to date with progress of the beta and other new things (as we’re not finished adding features yet).

It’s working for me already!

Even with the small handful of users in the initial phase of the private beta I’ve already found one new band who I would have probably a) never heard of and b) not known where to start with without the site. There is more on this in the post It’s working for us on our blog.

So give it a whirl, and do get in touch to give us your thoughts etc.

Hulu is a (US only) website which allows you to stream TV shows (in pretty good quality) to your computer via Flash, it has deals with some of the major US TV companies and has shows added very shortly after they are originally aired and seem to stay available online for a long time (e.g. much more than the 7 days you get with the iPlayer). You get very few advert interruptions, roughly 4 or 5 for a program that would run an hour on TV, and the adverts generally only last around 15 seconds or so, aiming to take the amount of time that you would normally spend fast forwarding through 3+ minutes worth of adverts if you recorded a program on your PVR.

It really is a top-notch user experience and it is the kind of thing that could really take off big, and from what I’ve seen of other services is the closest thing in to my In an ideal world thoughts when I wrote about the BBC iPlayer over a year ago.

boxee is a wonderful-looking piece of media centre software (which by the way is going to be running on my next media centre when I get round to doing that) that not only allows you to play media on your machine or from DVD’s etc. but also connects to some popular TV streaming websites — such as the BBC iPlayer, Hulu and more.

The "situation" is that Hulu has been forced by the content providers to not support boxee any more, their blog post on the situation and on the boxee blog for a start).

I personally don’t understand it, I assume that the TV companies don’t pay Hulu to support their distribution costs - so it probably costs them next to nothing — but will probably be currently providing them less revenue than traditional broadcasting. However why they see a difference between using a piece of software to make getting TV programs onto your TV a little bit easier than using a browser on the same machine really makes no sense.

This is the kind of thing that leads people to fall back to other almost-as-frictionless means of getting the same content we currently have available, which of course currently means torrents. And that is what the rebuttal on lifehacker basically says and shows you what to do if you were so inclined.

My guess is this whole situtation thing is because the media companies are currently doing deals with set-top box companies to make hardware to do the same thing as the boxee/hulu combination, but obviously with more control, more revenue for them and probably more adverts, more restrictions and a less polished user experience.

While that is working perfectly adequately for my current setup it does have one downside, when I setup a new server I will have to setup the crontab file too. With this method when I deploy my app my scheduled tasks would get deployed and be running out of the box. Nice.

I had been referred to a dentist that specialises in doing root canals, so this was my first visit to this dentist and he did a few things that showed he really empathised with his customer.

When I arrived one of the first things that the receptionist asked me to do was to pick a music CD from a list of 100, which seemed a little strange but I didn’t ask any questions.

What the dentist did when I entered his room really showed me that he empathised with people who had to undergo this (hour long) treatment. It included the following:

1. He spent about 5 minutes explaining the procedure in detail with me, explaining what each step would entail and what the goals of each step were and answered any questions clearly.
2. When he was giving me the injection to numb my mouth he gave me extra just to make sure - as my tooth had been causing me some pain before hand.
3. And here’s the big one. As I couldn’t do anything for the hour I was there, except sit still, the music "CD" I’d chosen from the list turned out to actually be a music DVD which he played on a plasma screen on the ceiling directly above me.

How considerate is that? Now I couldn’t hear it all the time, but most of the time I could, and in any case it gave me something to help pass the time and to think about/concentrate on during the hour I couldn’t do or say anything. If I’d know that’s what the choice of music was for I’d have spent a little longer looking at the list.

I don’t know if other dentists do this, as I have been with my dentist my entire life, or if this one came up with it all by himself, but either way it shows that he empathised with the customer and their situation by doing a few small things that made the process easier for me (and in turn probably easier on him too).

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I also tried on different browsers and get the same issues - is anyone else getting this? Either way it’s a little disconcerting that a bug like this can find its way into Google, but also in its own way a little reassuring that everyone has bugs.

Update: Yep it appears to be everywhere, this TechCrunch story covers it.

Update: The BBC have a bit more detail, seems an import of data from Stopbadware.org flagged everything as dangerous - do you think someone updated the query recently and missed out the WHERE id = [id] part, I know I’ve done that on in dev more than once. :)

The solution we came up with was not too dissimilar to the one discussed in this months A List Apart article Progressive Enhancement with CSS and that article is well worth a read. But I also thought I’d write a little about the setup that we came up with and how it worked out for us.

The basic setup was as follows:

• Split the styles into their three components of the CSS make-up: layout, typography, skin (with the skin file containing the colour and graphics). As this kept things nicely compartmentalised and meant that we could re-use some styles from one site (e.g. the layout generally was the same for most content across all the sites) while applying extra changes specific to that site.
• The stylesheets were organised into directories based on the section (or sometimes specific page) of the application. So for example home/layout.css, home/skin.css, news/layout.css and news/skin.css etc.
• We could then also import specific stylesheets for each of our sites on top of these (both at a global and section level) which usually just overrode a few style declarations to keep these site-specific style rules to a minimum.
• All of this was managed server side using a configuration schema which knew where to look for the stylesheets for a given section of the application (as well as the global ones) and include them as appropriate for the given site.

We also had common comment styling for breaking the larger stylesheets into sections (which makes it easier to find things) and tried to alphabetise our properties within each style rule (although it’s not something that I personally could always stick to).

This was quite a good system, it may have looked complex based on the number of stylesheets that were imported for any given page but it worked out really well and we never really had any problems with our CSS system.

I’ve even used it on a few of my own larger side projects with minor tweaking to the system (e.g. dropping the configuration schema and following a Rails-like "Convention over Configuration" setup), and as I say it is very similar to the one described in the A List Apart article Progressive Enhancement with CSS — that has a really good idea for handling the different media types, which we handled via our schema.

It’s quite a nice idea and really well executed. What I really liked is the fact that they’ve obviously spent a little time designing this thing (both from a UI and functionality point of view). It’s really quite refreshing to see something like this appear in an era when most simple ideas I see like this end up running on a blog or a wiki platform.

So if you’ve got an iPhone head over there and vote, if you haven’t head over and take a look at the design.

I, like many others no doubt, thought that it was all based on the money that we deposit in banks; they invest some of that and keep some aside to let other depositors (and me) have access to some of that. But that still didn’t answer the question as to where the rest of the money comes from but the video does a great job of explaining it.

And if after watching that you’re not a little concerned then you must be a banker.

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