University of Michigan Cellular and Molecular Biology graduate student.

March 2007

John McCain MySpace prank [∞]

Mike Davidson’s John McCain prank was featured on The Daily Show last night.

Adding PubMed search capabilities to Safari

Safari will by default search Google when you type a query in the search box located in the top right of the browser window.

David Watanbe released a great add-on for Safari named Inquisitor, which lets you perform a spotlight-like search in the built-in search box. The program also lets you specify links to additional search engines at the bottom of the results list and assign a keyboard shortcut to each engine of choice.

Since I have to pull up journal articles up at work quite often, I thought it would be useful to add PubMed to the list of additional engines. PubMed isn’t built in to Inquisitor’s list, so I made one from scratch. Here is the code if you are interested:

Site Name: PubMed
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed&term=%@
Shortcut: ^ return

You can also customize the PubMed search a little bit further by adding university support to the query. As a grad student here at the U of M, I like to be able to pull up SFX (U of M library) results directly in PubMed. This can be accomplished by adding “otool=umichlib” to the search query.

The U of M modified PubMed search string looks like this:

URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed
     &otool=umichlib&term=%@

I have found that I use this searching method almost exclusively now and only travel to the PubMed front page when I need to refine the search to reviews or a specific date period.

Which South Park character are you? [∞]

Apparently, I’m Randy Marsh.

UC, CSU again reach for students’ wallets [∞]

Tuition increases approved for both state university systems — 5th boost in 6 years. California’s 626,000 public university students got clobbered Wednesday with their fifth tuition hike in six years as the governing boards of both the University of California and the California State University agreed to raise the price of attendance.

“Survivalism” offered for GarageBand [∞]

Trent is providing a multi-track version of the song for remixing purposes.

Banana terrorism [∞]

If you buy bananas from Chiquita, you may be supporting terrorism.

iTunes 8 feature wishlist

Video

Apple has started selling videos on the iTunes store and the program has evolved from a music jukebox to a complete solution for music and video management. However, it is lacking some critical features. Here’s what I suggest Cupertino incorporates into the next release:

  1. The ability to purchase high definition 1080p media from the iTunes Store.
  2. Import of unencrypted Blue-ray, DVD, HD-DVD media (AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories) or conversion support to H.264.

iPod

The iPod has gone through a number of revisions and is a solid product that doesn’t need many revisions. Here are a couple of my suggestions for making the best portable media player on the market even better:

  1. Shuffle by Album support on the iPhone and iPod touch.
  2. The ability to browse by Album artist in the navigational menu. This feature is kind of supported — Cover Flow mode sorts by Album Artist.
  3. Enable transcoding of Apple Lossless to 128 kbps AAC on the iPod. Currently enabled for the iPod shuffle.
  4. Browse artists by the “Sort Artist” field tag instead of the “Artist” tag, if it is set. This will help get rid of duplications caused by featured artists or remixers entered into the Artist field.
  5. 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Metadata

iTunes is great for managing a large music library and I’m constantly using the search feature to find a song or album of interest. However, I think that the program needs to allow room for some new metadata fields:

  1. Ability to tag songs as clean or explicit. Currently songs downloaded from the iTunes Store come with these labels but you cannot add them to existing media in your library. This would be nice for parents to be able to restrict the music younger children could access in the library. This can be done in Mp3tag with the ITUNESADVISORY tag set to “1″ (explicit) or “2″ (clean).
  2. Automatic lyric import. iTunes already supports the addition of lyrics but this must be done manually on a per-song basis.
  3. Original artist field support (i.e. for cover songs).
  4. Fields for catalog number, music label, and release type (i.e. bootleg, deluxe/special edition, EP, promo, remaster, single).
  5. Fields for original release date and/or re-release date.
  6. Subtitle support (i.e. for remixes and alternate versions).
  7. Ability to modify play/skip count values, including batch addition and subtraction.
  8. Ability to replace existing album artwork with art downloaded from the iTunes store. Currently requires manual removal of existing artwork before downloaded artwork appears.
  9. BPM and key detection.

Interface

iTunes 7 introduced a number of changes to the interface, many of them controversial. I welcomed some of the new changes but still see some room for improvement:

  1. Ability to search lyrics and restrict your search to only the lyrics field.
  2. Make the grouping tag work like it does on iTunes Store. If you browse the Complete U2 collection that Apple advertised, you will see that the collection breaks down per disc with titles of each original U2 release in the set. You can hide or reveal the tracks on each disc by clicking the arrow on the left of the header. I would like to see something like this implemented in iTunes, especially for classical albums, which often contain multiple symphonies on a single disc.
  3. Support for lyrics display in iTunes, not just on iPod.
  4. Multiple artist support in the browser pane.
  5. Improved print layouts with album artist support.

Maintenance

  1. Find songs without artwork.
  2. Find dead songs.
  3. Rescan soundcheck, gapless values.