What is it about the need to put things in a particular way? What is it that drives us to achieve order? In this series, I probably won’t attempt to answer these questions but I’ll look at some examples and ask some more questions.

First up, how do you order your CD collection? If you look at a given set of CDs in someones house they have order. This has a very obvious purpose: lookup. If CDs aren’t in a fairly predictable order, finding something becomes tricky.

Originally, I had a single rack for my CDs. Alphabetically ordered by artist, sub-ordered by release. The standard method. Easy look-up, and can listen to an artist progressively. This was fine until multiple racks were necessary to accomodate my growing collection. At a rack change, should one start with a new letter or overflow? Also, adding new CDS got to be a problem. Everything after the position had to be moved down somewhat. If we assume an even spread of artists over letters, that’s half of your collection moving every time. Not fun.

The first and most naive solution is to place new CDS into a separate pile and then periodically insert them all. This takes less time over all, but is a royal pain in the arse and is the sort of thing that is procrastinated over endlessly.

Another solution is to introduce buffering space after each letter. This means that only CDs in the section in question need to be moved. This has two problems. Firstly, slack space. No-one likes having empty slots everywhere. Secondly, it still needs a periodic move around. Not perfect, but getting better.

For some reason, I then started separating by genre. One rack had CDs from a particular (and very broad genre) while a different rack would contain another. This did make finding CDs much quicker.

For a good while now, they’ve been arranged by association. The racks form an essentially 2D space (depth doesn’t really matter), and CDS are placed into the racking such that bands are grouped with bands that are somehow connected. These connections are loose. Some sound similar, others supported each other, some just seem right. This works remarkably well for me. Knowing where the single band used to form the origin are, I can place my hand onto the racks within 2 CDs of the one I was looking for (which itself is easily within eye range). It also makes mood based browsing exceptionally easy, just pick an area and move. CD insertion also seems to work fairly well as bands tend to release albums every 2 years and the local space around them changes fairly well.

Problems? Periodic changes are needed (less frequently I find, because finding new music tends to branch outward) and are a pain. Also, some people who approached particular bands from different routes from me find it difficult to pick anything out.

Obsessive? Perhaps. Just helps to have an order that works for me. Anyone got any better ideas?

The last time I checked out the GreaseMonkey Repository (which will be moved to UserScript.org at some stage), I was a little underwhelmed. Greasmonkey is a great idea (allowing people to change sites at will is a game changer), but at the time the scripts just didn’t do anything that I was interested in, beyond the occasional advert blocker.

A quick look through the greatly boosted number of scripts reveals some really nice efforts. The best ones I installed are below (all can be found in the repository):

• Javadocs 1.4.2 – I’d have killed for this during my project. It automatically redirects Java 1.5 api pages to their 1.4.2 equivalent. Handy in conjunction with javadocs.org.
• Hotmail Single Window – I’m using my Hotmail accounts less and less due to GMail but one or two I can’t close. It annoys me that they use javascript to open external links, but this little script fixes that. Nice.
• Inline MP3 Player – The killer app, in my opinion. It adds an inline play button next to any mp3 linked on the web. Want to preview what an mp3 blog is offering? Just hit the button. Outstanding.

There are more available, and more to come I’m sure, but the great thing about GreaseMonkey is you get what you want. Worth a look.

The best Tom Hanks sequels never made:

1. Turner, Hooch And Moggy – Hooch gets rabies, so Turner (played by Hanks) teams up with a smart ass cat to fight crime and save Hooch before the local government put him down. Voice of Moggy provided by Steve Guttenberg.
2. The Red Mile – Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is a moody prison guard who moves to an all woman facility in North Dakota. On his arrival, he is befriended by wrongly convicted female murder with bad sanitary towels. Dark, gripping and messy drama.
3. Bigger (And More Extreme) – When bored with his executive career, a fortune telling machine turns Josh (Hanks) into a hideously disfigured giant working in a Mongolian circus. He fights the locals and cruel circus master to regain dignity and his freedom from a life in chains. Features sky-diving and nudity.
4. Apollo 14: Search For Spock – Admiral Kirk and his bridge crew risk their careers stealing the decommissioned Enterprise to return to the restricted Genesis planet to recover Spock’s body.
5. Philadelphia Reborn: The Dead Rise Again – The story of a lawyer who returns from the dead to take his revenge upon Philadelphia, creating a zombie army as he goes. Meg Ryan leads a team of international biologists intent on finding a cure to “the disease”, falling in love with Hanks in the process.

Man, forget this computing lark, I’m going to be a big Hollywood producer. Show me the money! On that note, Tom Cruise tomorrow…

As my plan for working on both my UGC cinema listing RSS Feed and Actors RSS feed has not progressed as well as I had hoped (I haven’t really started the overhaul yet, by which I mean I haven’t looked at either in months), it’s good to see someone else doing something about it. Jonathan Paisley has created an experimental WAP interface for UgcRss. It’s running over home ADSL so may break, but it seems fairly solid to me. Thanks for that!

A good start to the month with former kings of Glasgow indie-pop, Bis, reforming under the new name of Data Panik (they are being clear that it is pronounced Dah-tah.) Eight or so songs have already been recorded, featuring all three Bis members. Live they will have a real drummer, where formerly they had a drum machine.

This month also began with a normally joyous event, the release of a new Idlewild album. Although the band have been moving slowly away from their punk-tinged debut over the years, it is still quite shocking to hear an Idlewild album that is so resolutely bland. Where previous albums had intelligent lyrics wrapped up in fervent Scottish rock or indie lullabies, Warnings/Promises has a continual acoustically focused sound; all strumming with nothing to stand out from the mire of mediocrity. The thoughtful lyrics remain with some truly outstanding and amusing lines, but without the musical hooks to back themup the album might as well be wallpaper.

The Mars Volta released the first single from their newest album, Frances The Mute. The Widow features a slightly tighter version of the album track, as well as 14 minute b-side Frances The Mute (suprisingly, not on the album of the same name.) Frances The Mute (the song) is one of The Mars Volta’s few weak moments; 4 minutes or so of excellent prog rock, wrapped in another 10 of noise.

As sophomore albums are all the rage, Hell Is For Heroes followed up the excellent debut album from the beginning of 2003 with Transmit/Disrupt. Although lacking the vibrancy of The Neon Handshake, this album still manages to deliver a sizeable slice of rock. The opening number, Kamichi, sets the pace with a fast but fairly straightforward jaunt of drum-led music, with later tracks laying down serious and extremely tight riffs.