Stian's shared items in Google Reader

Kartverket frigir kartene sine

2009-11-12T15:13:12Z

Shared by Stian
Det var faen meg på tide!

Statens kartverk kunngjorde i dag at de vil frigi kartene sine for allmenn bruk fra årskiftet. Det betyr at du og jeg kan bruke presise kart fra Statens Kartverk til å lage egne tjenester på nett.

Bilde: Miks mellom flere forskjellige visninger av samme område på Marienlyst i Oslo – alle levert fra Kartverkets servere på Hønefoss.

NRKbeta vil først og fremst gratulere Statens Kartverk og alle som som bruker kart på nettet. Ledelsen i Kartverket har tatt en riktig avgjørelse. Dette er en strålende nyhet og noe vi har ønsket oss og ventet på lenge.

NRK har alltid hatt mye kontakt med Kartverket. Vi bruker kartene deres på yr.no, selv om de leveres fra vår egen server. Det siste året har vi hatt spesielt mye kontakt. Både avdelinger og ledelse i Kartverket har hatt undertegnede på besøk for å snakke om sosiale medier, delingskultur, erfaringer fra NRKbeta og kartbruk generelt. Det har også vært mye kontakt i forbindelse med lanseringen av betaversjonen av ut.no, hvor vi bruker detaljerte kart fra Kartverket.

Mange i Kartverket, både utviklingsavdeling, infoavdeling og ledelse har vært interessert i å finne ut av dette, og nå ser vi altså resultatet.

Vi har det beste og ferskeste kartgrunnlaget i Norge og nå deler vi dette med alle. Dette viser at Kartverket er synlig til nytte for samfunnet og er helt i tråd med offentlig politikk om mer åpenhet.

…sier kartverkssjef Anne Cathrine Frøstrup i en pressemelding.

Vær kreativ og bruk kartene våre til å utvikle nye spennende tilleggstjenester, oppfordrer hun videre.

Data vi alt har betalt for

Artikkelen «Data som vi alt har betalt for» har 88 kommentarer i skrivende stund med en rekke forslag på offentlige data som bør slippes løs! La oss håpe at Kartverkets avgjørelse kan bidra til mer moderne tenkning hos andre statlige etater og andre som har data offentligheten alt har betalt for.

Hva kan det brukes til?

Så hva vil du bruke dette til? Om du sjekker ut Kartverkets tilbud, ser du for deg noen tjenester du kan få til nå – som du ikke kunne få til med Googles kart?

Og for en gangs skyld: Send en gratulasjon til Kartverket som har tatt steget inn i 2000-tallet!

Tjenesten åpner 1. desember.

Vilkår

Statens Kartverk setter følgende vilkår for å bruke tjenesten:

Vilkår for bruk av Statens kartverks visningtjenester:

Tilgangen gjelder for personlig bruk av tjenester for visning av kartbilder.

Tjenestene kan knyttes opp mot programmer som henter ut kartbilder. Det er begrenset hvor mange kartbilder pr unik bruker som kan lastes ned over en tidsperiode (se teknisk beskrivelse).

Kartbilder skal ikke systematisk lastes ned og lagres lokalt hos brukere eller på applikasjonsservere. Det er ikke tillatt å lage applikasjoner som kan skrive ut kartbilder i bedre oppløsning enn 150 dpi og større format enn A3.

Store brukersteder eller applikasjoner som har stor trafikk (over 50 000 treff per døgn), og som ønsker å bruke våre tjenester, skal registrere seg hos Kartverket. (Gjelder fra 1. desember)

Ved bruk av tjenestene i webapplikasjoner og lignende skal det være tydelig kildehenvisning til rettighetshaver (Kartverket, GEOVEKST og storby-kommuner).

Kartverket og de respektive rettighetshavere tar ikke ansvar for skade som oppstår som følger av bruk av tjenestene, verken direkte eller indirekte.

Dersom tjenestene blir brukt i sammenhenger som strider mot norsk lov eller skader Kartverket eller respektive rettighetshaveres omdømme og interesser, vil dette bli rettslig forfulgt og eventuelt anmeldt.

Kartverket forbeholder seg retten til å nekte bruk, endre leveranser, vilkår og spesifikasjoner. Endringer vil bli publisert.

Du finner teknisk informasjon om hvordan du bruker tjenesten på Statens Kartverks nettsider, samt en pressemelding om nyheten.

Riktig lisens?

Så kan man diskutere om Kartverket har valgt riktige vilkår for dette. Betyr f. eks. privat bruk at du ikke kan bruke kartene på en blogg med reklame? Hva med firmaer som ønsker å utvikle applikasjoner basert på kartene? Vi kommer tilbake til detaljer rundt dette.

VG Nett har også sak om dette i dag.

Tired of Flash? HTML5 Viewer For YouTube

2009-11-08T20:37:57Z

Shared by Stian
Flash-video må dø!

An anonymous reader writes "Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday Fun: Server Quest II

2009-11-06T13:00:00Z

Finally another Friday has arrived and you’re sick of dealing with your IT department because they never fix anything. Today take a look at Server Quest II which is a fun game from Microsoft’s TechNet that puts you in the roll of an IT professional.

Server Quest II

The game is aimed at Administrators and IT Professionals but if you think you can do it better try it out.

Choose between two characters, Matt or Alicia where each has their own geeky characteristics.

Decide what kind of geek you are…

The controls are very basic…just the arrow keys and spacebar.

You start out in your IT dungeon office and people come to bug you about things not working. Challenges vary from querying a database to a user’s monitor not working because it isn’t plugged in.

You can walk around to the cubes and talk to the other employees.

Mini games with different challenges come up. In this example, Matt is biking around to grab a bunch of emails that were accidently sent out to an entire contact list.

After you complete a mission, go back to your computer and check your email for another task.

If you work in IT you’ll find a lot of humor and fun in Server Quest II. If you are a worker who thinks they can get things done better than those lazy game playing IT geeks, you’ll have fun with this game as well.

Play Server Quest II

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Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug [Giz Explains]

2009-10-29T16:20:00Z

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who's ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida, you won't be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that's cool! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn't support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.

I'd hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country's culture, because they're plugs—they don't really mean anything. But in the sense that they're probably not going to change until they're forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it's kind of what they are.

What's Out There

Click for larger

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we're going to stick with U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing—they don't actually mandate anything. They're not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the 220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It's not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they're attached to probably are.

How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you've probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison's early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison's technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardization started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla's patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It's an old beef.

For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house's wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell's "Separable Attachment Plug"—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

My invention has for its object to...do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.

Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it's pretty much the type Americans use now.

Here's the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell's plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalized, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two(ish) which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. [Note: There are technically more than two voltages in use, which reader Michael clarifies rather wonderfully here]. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World War.

Take the British plug. Today, it's a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who's had a chance to use one. But it isn't Britain's first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles' cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, "we need a new plug, stat!"

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and '50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That's how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adapters' voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.

You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn't introduced until 1946, and didn't see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who's got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.

Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn't great. "There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is, really, everyone's invested in their own system. It's difficult to get away from that."

When Holland's International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee's spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realized that there were "limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe)." It'd be expensive to tear out everyone's sockets, and the need didn't feel that urgent, I guess.

Plus, the IEC can't force anyone to do anything—they're sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn't the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?

But the IEC didn't quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late 80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that even plans to adopt the IEC 60906, so, uh, there's that.

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:

Maybe in the future you'll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer Forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we'll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let's say, 2050?

She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we'll have at least two standards to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: "We have to move forward into plugs we can really control," Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone'll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.

In the meantime, this means that things really aren't going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the IEC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi's illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle

Still something you wanna know? Still can't figure out how to plug in your Bosnian knockoff iPhone? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

(via thememegeneration)

2009-10-29T15:37:45Z

(via thememegeneration)

#1163837

2009-10-31T09:23:41Z

Yesterday in Physics someone's phone went off to the tune of the Justice League. After the professor paused his lecture to acknowledge the phone, the kid answered his phone and replied, "The University is in trouble?! We're on our way!" The kid stood up, ripped off his t-shirt, revealed the Superman costume underneath, and exclaimed "Super Friends, Assemble!" Scattered across the class of about 150, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, and Flash all stood up and promptly left the class to save Auburn University. MLIA

I thirst!

2009-11-02T18:16:56Z

Skype For Linux To Be Open-Sourced "In the Nearest Future"

2009-11-02T14:39:00Z

rysiek writes "Seems like there might be a revolution in the works, as far as VoIP software for Linux is concerned. After mailing Skype support about Skype providing Mandriva RPM packages, Olivier Faurax got an answer which suggests that the Linux Skype client will be open-sourced. After asking for verification of whether that was the case, the tech support answer claimed it is going to happen, and that it's supposed to happen 'in the nearest future.' Now, this probably only means the client (the underlying protocol will probably be handled by a binary-only library), but even if that's the case, it seems like there is still reason to celebrate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Build a "Beeping Thing" to Prank Coworkers [DIY]

2009-11-01T20:00:00Z

We're not above a good practical joke here at Lifehacker, and today's electronics-based prank is a great one. Fire up the soldering gun and get ready to annoy with a vengeance.

The beeping thing is a simple circuit board powered by a 9-volt battery and outputting a high-pitched whining sound through a tiny speaker. The pictures above show it hidden in a gutted power transformer, but you could just as easily hide it in anything else big enough to conceal the device. Check the video below to see the construction process and hear it in action.

Have a great prank of your own, electronic or otherwise? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Evasive Beeping Thing [via Make]

A 90 Year Old Example of Forced Perspective Photography

2009-10-31T20:05:43Z

A few months back we published a collection of Forced Perspective images which was very popular with readers.

Forced perspective is defined as ‘a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is.’ (Wikipedia)

This is far from a recently popular thing for photographers to do. Here’s a great example from 1918 which was submitted by one of our readers – Graham Parkhurst – that illustrates it from 90+ years ago.

The picture is of 18,000 men preparing for war in a training camp at Camp Dodge, in Iowa.

A few facts about the image:

Length from base to Shoulder: 150 feet
Right Arm: 340 feet
Length of Torch and flame: 1000 feet
Total Length: 1490 Feet
Number of men in body and head of figure: 2,000
Number of men in right arm: 1,200
Number of men in torch: 2,800
Number of men in the flame only: 12,000
Total men: 18,000

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

A 90 Year Old Example of Forced Perspective Photography

How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA

2009-10-30T19:53:50Z

Shared by Stian
Flysikkerheten når nye høyder? Nå skal de sjekke om du har gjemt bomber og kniver i DNAet ditt og..

KentuckyFC writes "Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes, paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and 'frisk' people at distance. That's not to mention the great potential they have in medical imaging. Because terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionize electrons, it's easy to dismiss fears over their health effects. And yet the evidence is mixed: some studies have reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, have reported none. Now a team led by Los Alamos National Labs thinks it knows why. They say that although the forces that terahertz waves exert on double-stranded DNA are tiny, in certain circumstances resonant effects can unzip the DNA strands, tearing them apart. This creates bubbles in the strands that can significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. With terahertz scanners already appearing in airports and hospitals, the question that now urgently needs answering is what level of exposure is safe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA

2009-10-30T12:55:00Z

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Who Installs the Most Crapware?

2009-10-29T18:19:49Z

Shared by Stian
Jeg hører selvskudd type fot er inn for tiden..

Barence writes "PC Pro has done a thorough test of the software bundled by nine of the leading laptop manufacturers to find out who installs the most crapware on their PCs. Manufacturers such as Acer add as much as two minutes to their boot times by stuffing their machines full of bundled software, with own-brand proprietary software being the worst offender. HP's bundled apps, meanwhile, have a memory footprint of more than 1GB. PC Pro has also reviewed three pieces of software which promise to remove rubbish from your PC — with mixed results."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Asterisk Vishing Attacks "Endemic"

2009-10-29T10:00:26Z

Shared by Stian
Har sett masse brute-force angrep mot jobb-sentraler i det siste, kanskje det er relatert?

Ian Lamont writes "Remember the report last year that the FBI was concerned about a 'vishing' exploit relating to the Asterisk IP PBX software? Digium played down the report, noting that it was based on a bug that had already been patched, but now the company's open-source community director says that attacks on Asterisk installations are 'endemic.' There have been dozens of reported vishing attacks in recent weeks, says the article: 'The victims typically bank with smaller regional institutions, which typically have fewer resources to detect scams. Scammers hack into phone systems and then call victims, playing prerecorded messages that say there has been a billing error or warn them that the bank account has been suspended because of suspicious activity. If the worried customer enters his account number and ATM password, the bad guys use that information to make fake debit cards and empty their victim's bank accounts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NRK P3 Spotify Playlists – The beauty of open access to data

2009-10-29T02:59:28Z

Ved å bruke Spotifys nye Metadata API, kan vi nå lage en oppdatert side med Spotify-lenker for NRK P3s A, B og C-lister.

Empire State of Mind med Jay-Z og Alicia Keys ligger på P3s A-liste denne uka.

Resten av artikkelen er på engelsk.

Two days ago Spotify announced a public Spotify Metadata API. This API makes it possible to lookup track names and get a reference to the Spotify track. I know that NRK P3 expose their playlists on a HTML page, and I decided to create a mashup; a page showing the NRK P3 playlists, where each item was a link that starts playing the song in Spotify.

The result is available at spotify.erlang.no

This is a story of how good things may happen when multiple sources make data available for easy access to the public.

The rest of the article is the full source code of the site above, with explanations.

Grabbing the NRK P3 playlists

The first part is actually the difficult part. The NRK P3 playlists are exposed on a web page with XHTML that does not validate. In general it is not a good idea to put a web page through an XML parser, even if it works when the web page is well-formed, only a minor error in the web page, will cause the parser to be unable to extract anything.

The script is written PHP, and is split in two;

cron.php that grabs the playlist, lookup using the Spotify Metadata API, and store the result in a JSON cache file. This script is supposed to run every night to keep the list updated as the Spotify library changes, and the playlists changes. It is important to not lookup the full list on every request, so we cache the result for a full day.
index.php grabs the JSON cache file, and presents it in a simple XHTML page with lists of links.

Letting a script act like a web browser, and then extract content from the web pages, is known as WebScraping. Through years of making handy web-tools, I’ve ended up with a personal WebScraper library, that put any web page through libTidy, and then ends up with a XML document. Then I have some helper-functions to extract content using XPath syntax.

Let’s start of by including my WebScraping utility:

// Include an WebScraping library with helper functions to extract content from HTML pages.
require('wscraper.php');

Now, let us create a function that grabs the A-, B-, and C-playlist from the P3 web page.

function getPlaylist() {
    $scraper = new WScraper();
    $htmlpage = $scraper->getURL('http://nrkp3.no/spillelister/');

    $playlists = array();

We iterate through all three lists on the page:

    for($i = 1; $i <= 3; $i++) {
        $playlists[] = $htmlpage->textMulti("//div[@class='postarea']/ul[" . $i . "]/li", TRUE, TRUE, TRUE);

We use XPath, and this expression //div[@class='postarea']/ul[1]/li means find a <div> element with a class attribute set to postarea, and then get the first <ul> child and its <li> list-item children. The textMulti converts the content of the <li> to plain text and creates a PHP array out of it.

    }
    return $playlists;
}

Now, we have a function that returns an array of three playlists, each being an array of track names.

Preparing the search phrase

Next problem that we need to solve, is that the text in the NRK P3 playlists include some information that makes the Spotify API fail to find the content. Here is an example of an item on the playlist:

Black Eyed Peas – I Gotta Feeling (ned fra A)

First, the ‘-’ (dash) separator causes problems for the Spotify search engine. Next, all text in parenthesis on the playlists seem to be meta-text not relevant to the track name it self. So we create a cleaning function that gets a track name which is more likely to be found.

function cleanSearch($in) {
    $out = preg_replace('/ – /', ' ', $in);
    $out = preg_replace('/\(.*?\)/', '', $out);
    $out = preg_replace('/feat[^\s]+/', '', $out);
    return $out;
}

We use regular expressions to remove:

The dash
Everything in parenthesis
The words ‘feat.’, because Spotify seldom uses the ‘featuring’ word, instead uses a ‘+’ sign or similar.

The output for the example above will be:

Black Eyed Peas I Gotta Feeling

Which, in fact result in perfect match using Spotify’s search engine.

Using the Spotify Metadata API

Using the Spotify Metadata API is really simple. The query is generated using an URL with a query string parameter, and the result is returned as a complex XML document with a lot of information.

function getSpotifyLink($search) {
    $clean = cleanSearch($search);
    $res = simplexml_load_string(
            file_get_contents('http://ws.spotify.com/search/1/track?q=' . urlencode($clean))
        );

We now have the result of the lookup as an XML document, and we check if we have less than one results, if so we just return the search phrase without any Spotify links:

    if (count($res->track) < 1) return array('search' => $search,   'clean' => $clean);

If we finds one or more hits, we return more information, including:

The artist name
The track name
The spotify link
The search phrase before and after cleaning

Everything is collected in an associative array and returned:

    return array(
        'artist' => (string)$res->track[0]->artist->name,
        'track' => (string)$res->track[0]->name,
        'link' => (string)$res->track[0]{'href'},
        'search' => $search,
        'clean' => $clean,
    );
}

Putting it together and storing the result

Now we put all the above together, start off by grabbing a playlist, and populating a new result array with spotify links for all of the playlists:

$playlists = getPlaylist();
$spotify = array();

foreach($playlists AS $playlist) {
    $newSpotifylist = array();
    foreach($playlist AS $track) {

Here we collect the spotify links using the Spotify Metadata API for an individual track:

        $newSpotifylist[] = getSpotifyLink($track);
    }
    $spotify[] = $newSpotifylist;
}

When we are completed, we store the resulting array in a file, encoded using JSON.

file_put_contents('cache.json', json_encode($spotify));

Presenting the result

We, now need to create index.php a script that reads the cached JSON file and presents it in a simple XHTML page.

We start by reading the cached file:

$spotify = json_decode(file_get_contents('cache.json'), TRUE);

Defines the human readable names on the playlists (in norwegian):

$listnames = array('A-lista', 'B-lista', 'C-lista');

Sends an appropriate HTTP header:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Then outputs the content (somewhat truncated):

echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>NRK P3 Spotify Playlists</title>
    <style>[..snipp...]
    </style>
</head>
<body><h1>NRK P3 Spotify Playlists</h1>';

We now have the header, and iterate through the lists, and output them:

foreach($spotify AS $k => $spotlist) {

We create a list header, such as ‘A-lista’:

    echo '<h2>' . $listnames[$k] . '</h2>';
    echo '<ul>';

And we iterate through the tracks on each playlist:

    foreach($spotlist AS $spotitem) {

If there is a spotify link found, we creates a HTML link that opens the track in Spotify:

        if (isset($spotitem['link'])) {
            echo '<li><a href="' . $spotitem['link'] . '">' .
                $spotitem['artist'] . ' - ' . $spotitem['track'] . '<br /></a><span style="color: #999; font-size: 80%">' . $spotitem['clean'] . '</span></li>';
        } else {

If not, we just output the track name in grey:

            echo '<li><span style="color: #888">' . $spotitem['search'] . '</span></li>';
        }
    }
    echo '</ul>';
}
echo '</body></html>';

Download the full source code

The author

Andreas Åkre Solberg is working as a scientist for UNINETT and is more than average interested in open access to data. He from time to time make useful web-services, open source software, and likes companies and data owners that make their data available to the public.

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