tdistler.com » YouTube

Microsoft SongSmith… Let the Hilarity Begin

Tom — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:06:51 +0000

I have to hand it to Microsoft… if this is a supposed to be a serious tool (the promo seems to sell it as such) then they should just throw in the towel now before they tarnish their image anymore. The idea behind SongSmith is that you sing the melody and it will auto-generate the backing music… I’m sure you can already see where this is going. Many people have run the lyric tracks from popular songs through it with funny results. I’ll let you find the actual SongSmith demo video on YouTube yourself… I’m posting my favorite SongSmith results below.

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

Video: Charlie Hunter – Recess

Tom — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:58:50 +0000

I found my Charlie Hunter CD recently and I’ve been enjoying listening to him again. He’s an amazing musician apart from the fact that he plays the bass and guitar simultaneously. YouTube didn’t exist when I first got into him, and it’s nice now to be able to watch him play. Enjoy!

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

If this video ever gets deleted from YouTube, you can download it HERE.

YouTube’s Architecture and Scalability

Tom — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:36:54 +0000

High Scalability has a great link to a video TechTalk with Cuong Do, YouTube’s engineering manager. He talks about the challenges YouTube faces (past and present) to meet it’s skyrocketing user demand, as well as the infrastructure that allows them to scale. I enjoyed the anecdotes: especially the frantic email sent at 2am alerting the dev team that they only had 3 days of storage left… I always thought Google/YouTube would be immune to emergencies like that… ignorance on my part

(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)

I found this information interesting:

The application code is written mostly in Python (the web app is not the bottleneck… the database RPC is)
They use Apache for page content and lighttpd for serving video
Thumbnails are now served by Google’s BigTable
They’re running SuSE Linux with MySQL
HW RAID-10 across multiple disks was too slow. HW RAID-1 with SW RAID-0 was faster because the Linux I/O scheduler could see the multiple volumes and would therefore schedule more I/O

You can read a good summary of the talk HERE from the High Scalability website.

TechCruch has a good article of the YouTube API.

Website validation and embedded YouTube videos

Tom — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:34:43 +0000

So I took the plunge today and got my website to pass CSS and XHTML validation tests. This ensures that my site renders correctly in most browsers and on mobile devices. Check out UITest.com for links to several validation tools.

The hardest thing to get validated are embedded YouTube videos. The tag they use is depreciated in XHTML 1.0. As soon as you embed a video, your site will fail validation. I found several code samples for fixing this, but only one of them actually worked. I just had to tweak the size so the output matched that from the YouTube script.

Here’s the HTML:

The original script came from HERE.

The only problem I’ve had is with the visual editor in Wordpress auto-replacing this code with the original YouTube code.