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Richie Hawtin recently started to post the records he is playing on twitter. He is using Traktor while he plays, which now has a new plugin which allows this functionality. Others have posted about this and what it means for techno music enthusiasts, DJs and the music industry. I think it is one of the few good applications of twitter and I decided to hack something together to display this information in a little bit nicer way. I created a site at sets.krass.com which gets the tweets from twitter and generates a list of DJ sets and a top10. As Hawtin is the only DJ I know who uses this application the overall top10 is not much use, but it shows the potential. This is my first project using symfony and I was surprised how good it worked for this task and how easy it is to get started. If you have problems accessing the site, come back a bit later, there seems to be a problem with one of my secondary DNS servers. Some thing I have planned for the future: add links from the tracks to krass.com, discogs and co. It is a bit difficult, because artist names are not always present or correctadd more DJs, if you know of someone also using this kind of tweets give me a shoutmake the combining of tracks into sets better (at the moment I just use the day) and allow more sensible names for thesepages with tracks listed by artists and links to the artist pagesThat is enough for today though, because it is bloody hot here in Barcelona.

New recipe for me, inspired by something I saw Rick Stein doing in some cookery show. Put clams in a hot pan, add a cup of white wine. Cover and cook until they opened. Drain with a colander, but keep the liquid. Discard the clams which did not open. Put some spaghetti or tagliatelle into a pot with boiling water and cook according to package instructions. Meanwhile put one sliced onion and some sliced garlic into a pan with olive oil and fry them until soft. I added some small and medium peeled prawns and some leftover cod pieces. Then add the clams with shells and the white wine liquid you kept. Finally add some aioli. Season with salt pepper and herbs. Reduce this a little bit. Add the pasta straight from the other pan and stir until it is covered. The result should be creamy with not too much liquid. Ingredients (for two really hungry people). 200g pastaclams (four handful) 1 cup of dry white whine 1 onion (sliced) 4 cloves of garlic (sliced)two table spoons of aiolisome prawns or other white sea foodolive oilsaltpepperherbs

Ok, lets see how I am doing on my New Year resolutions: loose weight not much to see there. I think it is mainly because I am not going to the gym enough and haven’t started mountain biking yet because of various illnesses. But I am teetotal now, so that should make a difference in the future. use my motorcycle more that is a no. I blame it on the weather. sort out my music collection ripping CDs is done and I have deleted all mp3s from questionable sources. I also removed all duplicates, which was quite a bit of work. I still have to digitize my tapes, but I wrote the software for it and have bought a new tape deck for the task. travel somewhere new we have planned some kind of summer holiday, but we don’t know where yet. Cat prefers the Atlantic either France of Spain, but I would love to see some the south of France and some of the island in the Mediterranean. As I want to go with the motorcycle, this are pretty much the areas we can travel if we have one week of holiday. do more programming I did a bit of work on my small open source projects. I also have three packages in Fedora now. At work I started to help sanego.de, which is a rather busy health portal for the German market. This is fun, because it is just programming without a CMS or lots of HTML to get into my way. take more advantage of Barcelona fail blog more better than last year, but still not good. I also started to use twitter more, which is nice. According to wikipedia I am doing not too bad, but there are still nine months to go…

This is the second list of podcasts. These are all the talk, radio and video podcasts I listen too. At the moment I have a bit of a problem of lacking behind. This is a sign of me skipping the gym to often. It is a mix of news, technology, documentary and comedy. Most of the podcasts are from the BBC Apple Keynotes rss www Book Reviews With Simon Mayo rss www Broadcasting House rss www Daily Mayo rss www Digital Planet rss www Discovery rss www Documentaries rss www Excess Baggage rss www From Our Own Correspondent rss www Gastrocast rss www Global News rss www Great Lives rss www H&M Fashion TV rss www In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg rss www iTunes: Meet the Author rss www John Cleese Podcast rss www Jonathan Ross rss www Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Film Reviews rss www Men.Style.com: Fashion, Gear & Style for Men rss www One Planet rss www Open Voices: The Linux Foundation Podcast rss www Open Web Podcast rss www Pods and Blogs rss www Radio 1 Stories rss www Radio 4 Choice rss www Russell Brand rss www Science in Action rss www Snowmail Podcast rss www Start the Week with Andrew Marr rss www Stephen Fry’s PODGRAMS rss www The Economist rss www The Film Programme rss www The Moth Podcast rss www Thinking Allowed rss www World Book Club rss www You and Yours - Environment rss www

View Larger Map I returned yesterday from a four day trip to Amsterdam. As I met my Cat there we tend to go every February and celebrate our anniversary. The last years we stayed at the Winston Hostel in the red light district, but last years experience was so bad that we looked for something new this time. We found the Sunhead 1617, which is a nice small B&B in the centre of town. I tried to book the red room, which has views of the canal, but because of some confusion we ended up in the yellow room. I suggest you book early and get the red room, because our room contained some kind of boiler which was extremely annoying. And bring backpacks instead of a suitcase, because the stairs really are steep. Otherwise the B&B was perfect, the rooms was nicely decorated, the bed comfy, the breakfast was very good with home made jams and fruit yogurt. Our host Carlos was also very nice, even though we annoyed him on the first day by getting up at eleven for a very late breakfast. Amsterdam tends to be a bit wet and cold at this time of the year and this was no exception. But it gave me a good excuse to spend most of the time shopping, in coffees and restaurants. The shops seemed even better than the last time, but maybe that was because of the area around the Sunhead. Here are some of the restaurants we checked out: wagamama: I can't keep Cat away from wagamama and the chicken chilli ramen were perfect as usual. But the raw juice seemed a bit on the orange juice side and the raw salad was a disappointment. I really have to learn how to make the salad from their cookbook and maybe they should have to look into that one too. The service wasn't very good either, but it was very crowded. Top Thai: This one was recommended by Carlos and it excellent. The food was near perfect and the restaurant is also pretty small and cosy. There are obviously a lot of asian restaurants in Amsterdam, but I think this one belongs to the top. Some pancake restaurant in the center: I can't remember the name now, but it wasn't any good anyway, neither the service or the food. If you like pancakes I would recommend the Pancake Bakery, which is much nicer. De Struisvogel: A tiny romantic restaurant which serves a three course set dinner which includes a very good ostrich steak. I had a homemade poultry pate with bruchetta and then a flemish stew, both very tasty. The stew was a bit on the salty side, but maybe that is just me. None of the restaurants allowed smoking, which was a nice change from Barcelona, where the smoking ban is not enforced enough. I personally can't understand why anyone would allow smokers in their restaurants and just hope this will be sorted out in Barcelona soon too. I think next time we should go in the summer, so we can see a bit more of the city and the parks. And I also want to check out some of the museums if they every finish the renovation of the main ones.