Things That Work

Grooveshark Lite is now officially live.

Grooveshark Lite takes all the long-tail P2P musical goodness of Grooveshark.com and distills it in a handy quick interface to find and listen to whatever you want. Unlike the main Grooveshark site, you don’t have to have an account or install our Sharkbyte client in order to listen to music. However, signing up for an account (it’s super easy!) allows you to save playlists, and your login will work for both Lite and the main Grooveshark site.

We’re hoping that you’ll find Grooveshark Lite to be the easiest way to listen to whatever you can think of.

We have tons of things planned that didn’t quite make it into this iteration, so keep an eye out for exciting new features over the next few weeks. And if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, wishlists, problems, or just want to say hi, drop us an email at feedback@grooveshark.com. Or you can leave me a comment here and I’ll do my best to answer you personally.

We just upgraded a few other systems at the same time, so if things are a little shaky, just give us a little time and things ought to smooth out.

I’d love to talk more about Grooveshark Lite, but I’ve been here at the office for over 18 hours straight now, trying to make sure my baby gets off the ground right, so I’m not entirely lucid anymore.

Enjoy the music!

Just over 1 Month…

Average of 67.5 hours a week…

Over 21,000 lines of MXML and Actionscript 3…

Me and Jay have been working our asses off for the last month, and all that effort is about to pay off. I’m going to sleep for days…

So, just writing a quick note while I wait for Skyler, Colin, and Jay to fix this error on one of our development servers, since I can’t really continue to debug the thing I was currently debugging in Grooveshark Lite until it’s fixed.

I’d like to share this error with you:

Apparently this is an error that we’re throwing. A typo, of course, but an unintentionally hilarious one.

Edit: Ah. Apparently it’s more of an Easter Egg than a typo, albeit one that a user would never see on the production server.

So for the longest time (a few months now), I had *not* been able to get Flex Builder to play nicely with version control. At Grooveshark we use Subversion.

First, naively, I tried just committing the whole project folder to the repo. Then I realized all the various hidden files that Eclipse makes (like .project, etc) would also be committed, and if any other developers also starting committing work, we’d break each others projects every time one of us updated after the other committed.

So then I committed only the /source folder where the actual code lives. However, then all the hidden .svn folders that SVN created showed up in the tree view of Flex Builder’s Navigator. I could ignore that, except it also completely broke Flex’s code hinting, Outline view said nothing but ! Root, and Design mode (which I almost never use, but still…) would say nothing but, “An unknown item is declared as the root of your MXML document. Switch to source mode to correct it.”

Looking up the Design mode error on Google found a lot of people mentioning it, but no real solutions, except really stupid stuff like, ‘delete all the whitespace in your code.’ (Which, when I tried it on a small test project, surprisingly did work, until you closed Flex Builder and opened it again. Then you’d have to delete all your whitespace all over again. Obviously, this is NOT a viable solution.)

The only solution I found that looked promising was to install Subclipse into Flex Builder, and create a new project by checking the code out from the repository. So I went about trying to install Subclipse.

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Today I got a digital voice recorder (Sony ICD-B5000). It’s fairly basic as voice recorders go, but I think it will suit my needs, especially since it was under $50. It doesn’t have USB to transfer notes to computer, but since a lot of the USB voice recorders I saw were significantly more expensive, had less record time, and weren’t necessarily compatible with Macs anyway, I decided it wasn’t worth it. If I really want to back up a note off the recorder I can hook its line out to my computer’s line in and just record it with Audacity or something.

I was also considering the Olympus 4100 (not the 4100-PC, since the only difference is about $20 and non-Mac-compatible USB), or one of those things that turns your iPod into a digital recorder by plugging into the dock slot. Those were tempting, as I already carry an 80gb iPod video everywhere I go, but most of the reviews implied they drained the iPod battery super fast, and I also want to be able to easily use the recorder at work (where my iPod is usually already plugged into my computer). So if I wanted to record something, I’d have to unmount the iPod, wait for the “do not disconnect” indicator to go away, unplug it from the USB cable, plug it into the recorder adapter, wait for the iPod to change to record mode, and honestly by then whatever I had wanted to record would probably be gone.

Both the Sony and the Olympus are pretty similar in feature set. I picked it up at Best Buy, so if I decide I want to compare the two before making a final decision, I can easily return/exchange it in the next couple weeks.

There’s a lot of things I plan on using this little recorder for. One is better dream retention. Lately I’ve been having a lot of dreams in which I solve some sticky programming issue that’s been bugging me, except by the time I’m fully awake, the actual solution is gone, and all I can remember is that whatever I came up with was really cool. Hopefully I can train myself to hit the recorder when I’m still half asleep and mumble something useful into it. If nothing else, I’ll find out that my subconscious is full of crap, and my insightful sleepy solutions are actually worthless. At least I’ll know.

Another use, of course, is as a ubiquitous capture system. I can just dump whatever comes to mind into it, and then later process the notes, GTD-style, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting them later. Even easier than pulling out a pen and notebook, I can just ramble into the mic and worry about sorting it out it later.

And then there’s the number one use I have planned, the one that pushed me to finally go buy a recorder in the first place: lately at Grooveshark we’ve been having a lot of discussions of processes and organization, and I find that while talking to/ranting with other people I can easily come up with many ideas, but later on when the time comes to try to explain these ideas in an email I get so caught up in grammar, semantics, and word choice, that my passion (and often my entire point) gets lost in the shuffle. I’m hoping that if I can record these discussions in the heat of the moment, that later on I’ll be better able to distill them into something that is both meaningful and constructive.

If you’d like to see where I work, look no further! Office Snapshots, a very cool blog that showcases the offices of various tech and web 2.0 companies from around the world, has posted some pictures of Grooveshark’s offices.

Tech startups tend to be full of really creative people, and it’s awesome to see what various places have done with their space. It gives you a little insight into the sort of people that work there, and the culture they’ve created. Some of the featured offices are truly inspiring.

PS: My desk is visible in the 3rd and 4th pictures. It’s the one with the plant, but not the plant with the lamp.