Hotness 1.6.c.1

Totally war­ranted subversioning!

My foray into MP3Toys was ulti­mately short-lived, brought to a halt when I found what peo­ple were doing with Sin­gle Col­umn Playlist for foo­bar, par­tic­u­larly the playlist-embedded album art. Back in the foo­bar sad­dle, I also gave in and tried out the “offi­cial” Play Count com­po­nent, which I had avoided for so long because it didn’t sup­port %FIRST_PLAYED%, and because I wasn’t sure I wanted my play­back sta­tis­tics only kept in the data­base — even though writ­ing them to the files posed a lot of trou­ble as well. Turns out, play­back sta­tis­tics stored by the offi­cial com­po­nent are less sen­si­tive to changes to the files it’s keep­ing track of than the unof­fi­cial one, which means I only have to be a lit­tle care­ful to keep all my stats intact, while being able to play and track files that I’m still seeding.

This, along with the invalu­able $cwb_datediff() func­tion pro­vided by Bowron’s new foo_cwb_hooks com­po­nent, called for a rewrite to the hot­ness code, which had been stag­nat­ing in some mar­gin­ally com­pat­i­ble 1.5 ver­sion since May. After severely trim­ming the code down and robust­ing things up, I thought of a new and totally non-arbitrary way to soften the blow hot­ness scores receive when songs are played. I hated see­ing them leap to 100 every time, and this new soft­en­ing method makes so much sense, uti­liz­ing exist­ing base­line cal­i­bra­tions to keep things a lot more inter­est­ing. How any­body tol­er­ated the old method is beyond me.

Any­way, here it is.

I also dug up a lot of old screen­shots this week and I’m plan­ning a nostalgia-fueled ret­ro­spec­tive in the near future.