The Beautiful Butterfly

27 Feb 2010 08:40 by Mark

"Crapping arse!" I shouted as I flexed my wings willing them to harden. I tried to think erotic thoughts but that didn't appear to help anywhere.

I looked back at the chrysalis from which I'd just emerged then towards the glistening pool of water near my spindly feet at my reflection. I was a beautiful butterfly.

"Crapping arse!" I shouted again, louder.

"Whoa! Mind your language there gorgeous!" said a voice from nearby.

I turned and pretended to chew on something hard in my mouth to lend my pathetic face an air of menace. "You talking to me?" I asked the new arrival with the best attempt at a growl I could muster.

"Yeah, this is a nice area. You look like you should fit in well. Just, you know, tone down the language a tad."

"Fuck off beetle!" I told the beetle.

"Hey! There's no need for that! What are you so angry about?"

I took the deepest breath my miniscule lungs could muster and then slowly - punctuating every word with a flutter of my attractively-coloured wings - I replied: "I. Am. A. Beautiful. Butterfly."

The beetle rolled his eyes.

"A butterfly! Me! That's why I'm angry!" I half-yelled at the bug.

"Yeah, I can see why that would make someone angry," the beetle said with dripping sarcasm. "I should be angry, not you."

"And why's that?" I said, feigning indifference as I beat my wings faster and glanced towards the sun in the sky wondering if it was going to ever harden the wings into something approaching usefulness.

"Well, I'm a beetle," he began. "Have you ever tried getting a date over the phone when you're a beetle? Of course you haven't. It goes like this: Hi, fancy a date with a beetle? No, no I'm not Ringo. No, I'm not the one with a penchant for one-legged weirdos either. No, I'm not the car with a mind of its own. Yes, that's the sort. Hello? Hello?"

"Very upsetting, I'm sure," I hissed back. My wings, I thought, might actually be getting more rigid.

"You're still angry," said the beetle.

"I'm not a happy bunny," I replied.

"Did someone call my name?" asked a beaming, furry abomination from the undergrowth. The rabbit emerged with a grin from ear-to-ear.

"Oh, fuck me," I half-whispered to myself.

"This beautiful butterfly right here is apparently deeply upset because he's a beautiful butterfly," explained the helpful and irritating beetle.

"You'd be angry if you were a beautiful butterfly, believe you me," I added.

"I'm never angry!" smiled the rabbit. I treated it to an invented swear word that still carried across deeply offensive intention and watched its smile waver, but only briefly. That annoyed me too.

"You can't help some people," said the beetle and he made as if to head off to wherever it was he'd been heading in the first place.

"Nonsense!" laughed the furball. "Owl can help anyone! Owl knows all."

"Really?" I asked. "Because if he's just twice as useful as the pair of you combined then I'll just throw myself off a cliff right now."

The beetle sighed and the rabbit rolled about in hysterics for several seconds while I watched with piddly little mouth agape. Eventually, I conceded that it couldn't make my life any worse to at least see what the owl could do for my situation and the three of us left the glade in which my new life had recently begun so badly and set off for the allegedly helpful Owl.

Owl, as her name indicated, was an owl, and an apparently wise one. As such she was surrounded by scholars from the animal world and would-be scholars or never-would-be scholars from the animal world too. A hush fell upon the court of wisdom as the rabbit bounded in, the beetle walked in casually, and I flapped and sputtered all over the place bouncing off trees, sticks, the owl twice, the rabbit, and finally the ground.

"What a beautiful butterfly!" said Owl serenely. There was a murmur of approval from the throng and I made sure my under-the-breath exclamation of "Oh fuck off!" wasn't too under-the-breath to be completely missed.

"Mariposa," said Owl, ignoring my comment if she heard it at all. "That's what they call butterflies over the seas," she explained. There was an audible "ooh" from the surroundings.

"I've learnt something!" grinned the happy bunny.

"If it's that you're mentally retarded then I'd have thought one of your friends might have mentioned it earlier," I spat back at it.

"We've got a beautiful butterfly with a lot of rage," the beetle said directing his statement to the bird.

"Why are you so angry?" the owl asked me.

"Because I'm a beautiful butterfly," I said.

"You entered a pupa stage and formed a chrysalis around yourself and have come back to the world of light and colour a most majestic specimen of beauty," Owl said with a slight tilt to her head. "We all go through changes in our lives and yours is dramatic indeed, but it's a wonderful change, a beautiful change, and surely things are better now than they were before?"

"How the fuck is this better?!" I gasped.

"Caterpillars are no butterflies," said Owl. The beetle nodded and there were rumblings of "that's true, that's true" from the various examples of animal life gathered around.

"Caterpillar? Who said anything about a caterpillar?" I asked. "Last week I was a pterodactyl with laser eyes and a machine gun and today I'm a beautiful butterfly and someone's nicked my machine gun."

Owl looked shocked which was an impressive thing to witness from a creature with eyes already wide open and no discernible eyebrows on its white face. "That would piss me off too," she said quietly.

"Oh man, I'm so sorry," said the beetle patting my side with condolences.

"We didn't know!" cried the happy bunny.

And I felt my bitterness lift a little.

MP3 Song Cover Art Thing

24 Feb 2010 21:31 by Mark

MP3 Song Cover Art Thing (MP3 SCAT... no, that's horrible... I'll call it MP3 Friend instead)... MP3 Friend version 0.1 (the 0.1 means I haven't spent much time working on it) is a little Windows application I knocked up over the weekend in order to turn these:


into these:


Firstly, if you don't know what they are then let me explain that the first image is the image you see in Windows Media Player when the song you're playing doesn't have any embedded cover art whereas the second is an example of some album cover art for an MP3.

Secondly, my application does not add the cover art for Bert Kaempfert's A Swingin' Safari to every song without art because that way lies madness.

Here was my issue: I had a lot of MP3s and a great many of them didn't have any cover art. It was unpleasing to my eyes. So... I had a look online for a utility that would get the cover art automatically for MP3s. I was quickly disappointed. And that's why I whipped up my own.

The application makes use of the excellent UltraID3Lib.dll to scan and update the MP3s and uses the rather lovely Last.fm API in order to try to work out what cover art to grab.

Here's what my little MP3 Friend does...

• adds cover art to your MP3s based on the files' artist and album or track title tags
• allows you to delete cover art from one or more MP3s at a time
• allows you to edit the artist, track, or album text for one or more MP3s at a time
• works on Windows 7 and Vista (because I checked) and it probably works on XP with .Net 3.5 installed too (but who knows?)

And here's what my little MP3 Friend does not do...

• guarantee any accuracy of results returned (the first, best match is applied, and it's pretty good most of the time but it's not always right because it's nearly wholly reliant on Last.fm supplying correctly-weighted search results)
• work 100% of the time (expect the odd exception raised with badly formed MP3 tags; I might address them in version 0.2 if you're lucky) or utilise worker threads to slickify (it's a word) things
• look attractive (damnit Jim I'm a developer not an artist)
• work very fast (there's a reason for this: I deliberately throttle the requests to Last.fm so as not to abuse their service)

Here's how to use MP3 Friend:

1. Install it from here - setup.exe - and ignore any warnings about it being unsigned (I didn't sign it) or it being perhaps untrustworthy (I have an honest face).

2. Pick a folder and choose whether to scan subfolders, look only for MP3s with no cover art, or music files with no album details.

3. Click 'Scan', sit back, and the program will come back after a while with a list of MP3s along with some information for each. Click on any song with a 'Yes' in the cover art column to see the cover art displayed in the top right.

4. If you want to find cover art... select the files you're interested in (click on a file to select it, hold down control and click on a second file to select that too, and/or hold down shift and click on a file to select a range of files) and then press the 'Get Cover Art' button. MP3 Friend will then try to find each song based on the artist and album name first; if it can't find that it will then look for the artist and track name. If there are two or more identical artist/album combinations in your list of files then the program is smart enough to only look once and then apply the same cover art to all similar files without looking up again. If cover art is found you'll see the cover art column change to 'Yes'. This process may take some time if you select a lot of files. Again: MP3 Friend deliberately throttles requests to Last.fm. It is deliberately slow. It's still faster than doing it yourself.

5. If you want to delete cover art... select files as in step 4 and then press the 'Delete Cover Art' button. Couldn't be simpler.

6. If you want to edit the artist, album, or track for a song... double click on the artist, album, or track and you can edit it.

7. If you want to edit the artist, album, or track for more than one song at once (e.g. you want to change all your songs apparently by the Beesty Boys to the Beastie Boys)... select the files as in step 4 but, with the final click while still holding down the control or shift key simply double click the artist, album, or track. You should see all the files you selected are still highlighted and once you finish your edit all the files will have the change applied to them.

8. If you want to know why one of the buttons on the screen is disabled then it's because there's unfinished functionality behind it that might be visible in the next release.


Finally:

• you use this program at your own risk so if you accidentally delete the cover art from your precious collection of Backstreet Boys MP3s the very last place you'll want to complain about it will be here
• it was an afternoon's playing about so it's unfinished but I'm nice enough to let you play with it too since I don't know when I'll get around to tidying it up and adding some new features
• it was written using Microsoft C# Express (which is free should you wish to play around with it), the aforementioned UltraID3Lib.dll (which is free should you wish to play around with it), and the also aforementioned Last.fm API (which is free should you wish to play around with it) - can you spot a pattern?
• it's free because the spirit of John Inman haunts the code

If you like it then great. If you don't like it then great but slightly less so.

Top 10 Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books (*)

30 Jan 2010 16:42 by Mark

(*) That I've read and own.

It's an old internet law that lists of favourite things are a requirement of all websites annually. Well, this year I'm getting mine in early.

I used to read a lot of fantasy but the genre holds less interest now that I'm older; science fiction has far more depth to it. Nevertheless, fantasy is represented here as there is a particularly cracking novel by C. J. Cherryh that I couldn't omit. To prevent the rest of the list from weighing too heavily in one author or another's favour I decided to limit my choices to only one book from any given author.

Enough waffle... to the list!


10. The Forge Of God by Greg Bear

The Earth's about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route... no, wait, that's something else entirely. But the Earth is about to be demolished and for the vast majority of the people on it that means a quite awe-inspiring description of death.


9. Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks

How do you like your dark novels? Dark? Well, has Iain M. Banks got a treat for you! Not only is there the word 'dark' in the title, but the story is a masterpiece of dark and depressing science fiction at its finest.


8. Engines Of God by Jack McDevitt

McDevitt's books are, essentially, archaeological sci-fi. Yes, you're right; that's a pretty specific genre that might not appeal to those who like their science fiction devoid of exploration and digging. Me? I like it. Engines Of God is in this list, though, not because of its archaeology and interplanetary historical detective work but because it contains a sequence of chapters that I can only describe as unputdownablehighoctanepageturners. One word: tsunami. Ooh! Lovely bit of writing.


7. The Chronicles Of Morgaine by C.J. Cherryh

The only fantasy representative on this list is actually three books in one! You're being spoiled! And there's more than a hint of sci-fi to satisfy the science fiction fan too. Gates to worlds separated by space and time, a sword called Changeling which has terrifying powers, and the best description of climate change gone awry you'll ever find.


6. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Essentially a tale of revenge... and teleportation! What more could you possibly want to know?


5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Another internet law you may already be aware of is that all science fiction lists must contain Brave New World or 1984 or both whether you like them or not. I do like them both but of the two Brave New World pips George Orwell's classic to a place in my list due to its more prescient nature in depicting the world we live in today; one of luxuries and pleasure and inconsequential oddities to turn the population into sheep rather than pain and oppression.


4. The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison

One of the first books I read that introduced me to the concept of the anti-hero. James Bolivar DiGriz is a master criminal turned to the good side by former criminals to fight crime. Honest. His wife is a former homicidal maniac now reconditioned to be good. Honest.


3. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Forget the films. Really, really forget the films. They do not do justice to this stunning novel. The lone man fighting the world-turned-vampire you know about. The ending - the awesome twist ending - you need to read.


2. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

In a very short time Alastair Reynolds has established himself as one of the finest science fiction authors of our time with his incredibly realistic vision of man's future; humanity split into different species by their lifestyles mix or fight in a galaxy without faster-than-light travel or wormholes. The sense of plausibility to Reynolds' universe lends a depth to the many stories.


1. Chung Kuo by David Wingrove

To finish with there's not one, not two, not three, not... I'll cut to the chase... there's eight novels at no extra cost to you. Chung Kuo is a richly detailed picture of a near-future Earth ruled by Chinese emperors in continent-spanning cities. Everyone has their place and, as is the case with these things, some people aren't happy with their place. The result is rebellion, intrigue, political plotting, and the most sadistic character/architect of destruction you'll likely ever read.