Jamie Thingelstad

I was browsing through Last.fm’s “Best of 2008” coverage. There have been a number of blog posts and articles about the best new music of 2008, and I’ve found some great stuff reading these. Last.fm’s “Best of” is interesting since it is based on analysis and ranking of all the ‘scrobbled’ songs that they track for users. I wasn’t that surprised to find that Coldplay’s Viva La Vida was the #1 album of 2008. It was played by 1,907,044 users a total of 12,584,691 times. On top of all that, it didn’t come out until late in the year!

I was surprised by this comment in the excerpt though.

It’s probably not a stretch to say that Coldplay are the biggest band in the world today.

Now, I’ve always understood that the title of “biggest band in the world” was solely, and strongly, held by U2. So, I figured I’d check out some numbers.

The first place to look is Facebook. Facebook has pages for bands (and anything else) so I checked out the Coldplay page and the U2 page. Drumroll…

Coldplay: 1,175,125

U2: 335,374

How about Last.fm weekly charts. The most recent week’s data ended on Sunday, December 21 2008.

Coldplay: 116,299

U2: 50,867

Maybe Coldplay is the “biggest band in the world”. It also seems this isn’t a new debate at all. It has been debated for 3 1/2 years, U2 vs Coldplay in May 2005.

Are “Hip Hop” and “Rap” really the same genre? They seem totally different to me.

Trying to thaw a frozen pipe.

AirTunes FTW in a big way – blog post to come in the future. Happy camper this morning.

git seriously needs tab-completion for branch names.

Getting 5 (!) countertops replaced today. Process starting now.

Guys are here taking large mirrors off the walls to facilitate counter replacements. Hoping to not hear any large crashes.

The 9 1/2’ by 4 1/2’ mirror, with three outlet holes, came down safely. Yeah!

Mirrors all removed from the walls. Counter installer here now to start the replacement. Everyone on time and no hiccups thus far. Great!

The sawsall is going upstairs. Best for me to stay downstairs and not worry.

I started down this rabbit hole tonight trying to make a bash script do more than I probably should make it do. But I didn’t want to move to something else. This may be some of the ugliest stuff I’ve ever written.

for file in $files; do
    if [ "$file" != "./00000000000001-tSQLVersions.sql" ]; then
        echo "Checking if $file is already loaded..."
        # oh this is ugly, oh so very very ugly
        # the tr on the end trims the newline out of the return from SQL
        check=`$MySQL -u$MyUSER -h$MyHOST -p$MyPASS $MyDB --execute="SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tSQLVersions WHERE message = '$file';" | tr -d '\n'`
        check=`echo -n "$check"`
    else
        # ridiculously ugly hack to hardcode updater to always assume this special file isn't loaded
        check="COUNT(*)0"
    fi

    if [ "$check" = "COUNT(*)0" ]; then
        echo "Loading $file..."
        $MySQL -u$MyUSER -h$MyHOST -p$MyPASS $MyDB < $file
        $MySQL -u$MyUSER -h$MyHOST -p$MyPASS $MyDB --execute="insert into tSQLVersions (message) values ('$file');"
    else
        echo "File $file has already been loaded!"
    fi
done

The tr -d '\n' at the end of line 6 is my personal favorite. MySQL was dumping a newline in the STDOUT and screwing up my comparison. Fix it right? Nah. Just rip that newline out of there. All better!

I share this for others to know what not to do.

But hey, it works. :-) Who needs any fancy pants migrations.

Have had the fireplace going for four hours. Birch, oak. Love fires.