Simon Willison’s Weblog

russell davies: datadecs. Personalised christmas decorations made from data from Twitter, Doppler, last.fm and Flickr. The Twitter snowman came from a 3D printer—the size of the head varies depending on your number of followers. Best of all though is the Flickr decoration which represents the apertures you’ve used over the past year.

# 7th January 2010, 9:58 pm / visualisation, datadecs, russell-davies, flickr, twitter, dopplr, lastfm, 3dprinters

How we use IRC at Last.fm. With IRCCat, an elegant Java IRC bot that accepts Twitter-like messages to a network port (generally sent using netcat) and directs them to a user or channel.

# 8th January 2009, 7:04 pm / netcat, nc, irccat, irc, lastfm, richard-jones, java

A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1. Richard Jones explores Mochiweb, Erlang and linux kernel tuning for building a high performance comet server. Does this mean real-time web features are coming to last.fm?

# 16th October 2008, 2:16 pm / comet, lastfm, richard-jones, mochiweb, erlang, realtimeweb

Python + Hadoop = Flying Circus Elephant. Last.fm have released Dumbo, a Python module that lets you easily write Hadoop map/reduce tasks using Python and generators.

# 31st May 2008, 2:14 pm / hadoop, python, generators, lastfm, dumbo, mapreduce

LastGraph 3. Andrew Godwin’s last.fm profile visualisation tool, now in its third incarnation.

# 25th May 2008, 2:05 pm / lastfm, andrew-godwin, lastgraph, lastgraph3

LastGraph. Now Available. Andrew Godwin has relaunched his LastGraph Last.fm graphing application. The new version is built on Django and S3 and uses Andrew’s Graphication graphing library based on Cairo.

# 15th October 2007, 10:02 pm / graphication, django, andrew-godwin, cairo, lastfm, lastgraph, python, s3, graphing

Audio Fingerprinting for Clean Metadata. Last.fm have started using audio fingerprints to help clean up misspelled artists and duplicate track information.

# 13th September 2007, 5:46 pm / lastfm, audio, mp3, metadata, audiofingerprinting

SlideShare: Webapps scalability. Lots of great presentations on scaling, from Twitter, Digg, Vox, LiveJournal, Last.fm and more.

# 4th July 2007, 12:53 am / slideshare, vox, twitter, digg, livejournal, sixapart, lastfm, scaling

libketama (via) A consistent hashing algorithm for memcache clients, from the team at last.fm.

# 20th April 2007, 6:50 am / lastfm, hashing, memcache, les-orchard