Grooveshark Update v2.0 r20100211.21.

I was fortunate to be talking with the Grooveshark crew as the latest VIP-only update was pushed just a few minutes ago. The latest update brings the following new features:

Instead of the old settings lightbox-style popup, you will notice a brand new settings page, complete with profile information, RSS settings, Notification settings and profile picture. Also, you will notice a new services tab...

Yes, Grooveshark has finally finished Last.FM scrobbling. I have not tested it (I don't use Last.FM) but people have already reported it is working for them. Note this is only for VIP members. On a side note, I can finally close all the discussions on the old (read: check Grooveshark Forums) GetSatisfaction posts.

Also, a feature requested in the forums was the ability to shut off the constant nagging to "Restore previous songs". This feature was enabled in the last update and allowed the user to restore the queue from the last session. There is now a "Remember my answer"-style checkbox on this dialog. I have suggested they accompany this with a checkbox in settings.

Finally, the team has added 2 new languages. Pirate and what appears to be Chinese (confirmed to be Chinese). Hopefully this addition will expand the Chinese market (at least until China blocks it...) and it will be interesting to watch the at-sea market grow as well.







Along with the above features, there were some major fixes and updates applied to ads, which hopefully will stop all those nasty browser hijacks. One way to get all the above features and totally dismiss ads is to get a Grooveshark VIP account. Enjoy the update VIPers!

Thanks,
James Hartig
@fastest963

Moving domains

In an effort to save me money and time, I'm in the process of moving some of my domains and putting them at Dreamhost. The only thing is that Dreamhost costs $9.95 for a registration transfer. Luckily this would be a one-time fee, but still, it is unfortunate that if I already have an existing domain, I'm going to have to re-register it at Dreamhost.

Also, I will be letting the following domains expire:

• isocy.com
• iservere1.com
• iservere2.com
• rachelfaciana.com
• isociale.net
• isociale.org

I think that is it, but there may be another that I'm letting expire. As far as the rest of my domains, almost all of them are already at Dreamhost, the few that are not include, this domain (jhartig.com) and fastest963.com. I will be moving fastest963.com closer to when it expires, a few months, and same with jhartig.com but not until mid-June or July. I have already sent in requests to eNom for fastest963.com and jhartig.com because I don't know how long they take for requests and I don't want to be waiting last minute for the transfer.

I will also be consolidating my Google Apps accounts, I have many and I would like to keep them to a minimum so I don't have to check a million emails a day (exaggeration). With deVolf, we have a bunch of Domain Alias's set up for all the deVolf domains and I plan to do the same with my personal domains. groovesharkday.com is being configured soon (Google takes 7 days to process this domain switch) and gs-status.com is already configured.

Among the other domains that I own, they are either already configured or they are secret. Along the way, I will be posting any problems that I come across.

Thanks,
James Hartig

Perfect regex for removing links when parsing HTML

After a few long hours:

PHP Version:

/\<a.*?href=('|\")(.*?)(?:(?<!\\\)\\1|\w+(?=\=)|.(?=\s))[^\>]*?>(.*?)(?:\<\/)(?=[a]).*?(?=\>)\>/i

Actual Regex

/\<a.*?href=('|\")(.*?)(?:(?<!\\)\1|\w+(?=\=)|.(?=\s))[^\>]*?>(.*?)(?:\<\/)(?=[a]).*?(?=\>)\>/i

That regex was designed for deVolf's new RSS Import feature. It takes an a link and removes the href link and the text inside the . It allows for empty links as well as links without href's. The regex return matches are as follows:

1. match 1 is whether single or double quotes were used, this is required for later on in the regex and is not usual after the regex is run
2. match 2 contains the href link
3. match 3 contains the text between the <a></a>

Things to consider:

• The regex matches anything after <a> until it hits </a>
• Between the href="" it looks for a closing quote (that matches the quote used to start it), a space or another html property. Therefore, I recommend checking the end of the url for a quote or space before working with it.
• It will NOT match newlines that are in the link anywhere. If you want to, add a s after the i at the end.
• It works with PHP 5.3. I have not tested other versions.

Examples of matches

Thanks,
James Hartig

PHP and twURLa

A few weeks ago I started work on a project, twURLa. Basically, it is a site that tracks domains on Twitter and ranks them. Over the course of the few weeks, I learned a lot about PHP performance and it has been very beneficial, yet stressful. Here are a few things I learned:

• Sockets are awesome, streams suck
• Non-blocking is annoying
• Debugging is very hard with very unpredictable data
• JSON is better than serialize
• Disks are extremely slow
• A simple VPS can power twURLa

Basically, we started out using streams to connect to all the sites we process, which ended up not being fast enough at all! After switching to sockets, I had a lot more control and I was able to get 1 PHP script to process hundreds of  URLs per second. Throughout the process, debugging was difficult with our test data being a stream of Tweets from Twitter. What we did was save portions of the feed and then I would manually process them and compare to what the script says. The thing is: it took me an hour to process what the script did in 2 seconds.

Our VPS is powered by Fivebean. Fivebean has been extremely helpful and without them twURLa would not be where it is now. We had a very low budget and Fivebean allowed us to work around this and get our site up and running without trouble. Their support is very knowledgeable and fast; the average response time was 10-15 minutes.

Thanks,
James Hartig

Personal Grooveshark Bug Tracker

If I'm on the computer, I'm using Grooveshark, therefore it is a big part of my life. As Grooveshark employees will be able to tell you, I often submit ideas and bugs to them. Some of them are fixed instantly and others are added to their massive Bug/Feature tracker. Well to make things a bit more public, I'm establishing my own simple bug tracker of bugs/features which I noticed and when I see them fixed, I'll cross them off. The list is hosted on Ta-da. If anyone notices a bug that I don't have or if one is fixed and I missed it, let me know @fastest963.

My Grooveshark Bug Tracker

Please realize that if a bug is marked as fixed, that means it was fixed in preview (VIP-only). The bug/feature should be transitioned to the production environment sometime after (weeks/days).

Thanks,
James Hartig

Twurla: My new site needs your help!

I will post more information regarding the service at a later date, at this point we are just developing and need your help to continue development.

TwURLa is a site where people can find stats for the amount of traffic that a site receives from twitter. We collect the amount of times that a domain is tweeted and aggregate this data by day and apply a rating to every site. Site-owners can now track and monitor their domain as it performs on twitter.

We have been in contact with Twitter regarding their API use and about what data we are "allowed" to show on our site. At this point, we are not allowed to show ANY of the data we were planning on showing. Twitter is not allowing us to proceed because we are not big enough to be allowed to do this. Who says that we will not be huge when we launch? Twitter should not have this power! If you wish to give us a chance and allow us to continue development:

Tweet for TwURLa

I hope you choose to help us, it is only 1 tweet and it will greatly help us. For everyone that tweets, we will publish your username on our new site.

Update (1/26/10): We have been given upgraded access to the StreamingAPI feed, however the agreements to sign for Firehose and to display stats are not available yet.

Thanks,
James Hartig

New WRT610N Router and Wireless-G is Better Than N

After unboxing my new WRT610N router and configuring all my various ports and network settings, I replaced my old WRT300N router with it. I went back to my desktop (sporting my new WMP600N card) and noticed that the Wireless-G connection was stronger than the Wireless-N connection. The G connected at a stable 54Mbps and the N was barely stable and around 6Mbps. I changed the 5Ghz settings to N-Only and 20Mhz on channel 153. I adjusted the wireless card to channel 153 and the same thing. By the way, I moved the 2.4Ghz to BG-Mixed and channel 4. No matter what I changed, the G connection always trumped the N. Any ideas? In the meantime, I will just use the old WRT300N as a repeater bridge and use the G connection.

Update: I changed the 2.4Ghz to full Mixed and changed the WRT300N accordingly and now I'm getting 130Mbps, would have like to use the 5Ghz though.

Thanks,
James Hartig