Here's a MySpace parser. Usage is straightforward; the constructor takes a MySpace URL or numerical ID, and profile, friend and comment details are exposed as attributes:

from MySpace import *
n = MySpace('soundofnorthwood')
total_friends = n.friend_count
last_comment = n.comments[0]

MySpace.py requires version 3 of Beautiful Soup to grok MySpace's miserable HTML. You could use it to make an RSS feed of your comments, or for a mobile-friendly proxy to MySpace content. I'm using it for some examples in a session I've giving at Media in Transition 2006 on Natural Language and Social Software.

Update: now at version 0.2. Thanks, Tim Hatch, for your entity-handling contribution.

Frosty, Jonathan and Laa-Laa. more...

Three photos from our week on St Agnes; Matilda, Loveday Lewin and Sofia. more...

David Mackintosh sent this clip from the Budapest metro, noting the similarity of the sweet train arrival signal to the start of the Charlie and Lola theme tune.

The Canadian music and fashion photographer Babak took these pictures of Northwood during our most recent performance in London.

This is an excerpt from Lionel Grigson's Jazz Chord Book, my favourite collection of jazz changes. I discovered this book when I was a shy sixteen year old on school holidays in Hastings, East Sussex, where I followed the town's rich but mostly unattended bebop scene. The musicians I watched (nursing a pint of Guinness, hoping I might be asked to sit in, as long as it was on something simple) all played from Lionel's book; one of them, the 'doughty bopper' Pete Burden, is namechecked in the introduction. Liane Carroll, an excellent pianist and singer who filled the small, empty rooms with passionate lyrics and scats, delivered in an uncompromisingly transatlantic accent, was the star of the scene. I see she won two BBC Jazz Awards last year, and that excerpts from her last two albums are available to download. more...

mtraffic.org is a new service providing free UK traffic updates for your mobile phone. It's a simplified, cached and searchable view of the BBC's TPEG feed. mtraffic is designed to be

• Fast: queries run against a parsed representation of the traffic data; the cache is flushed when a request arrives x seconds after the modification time stamp stored in the persisted feed; the BBC's feed publishes ETags and Last-Modified headers, which are respected by the fetcher; markup is minimal.
• Accessible: search results are returned in lightweight, compliant XHTML, which should render reliably on all modern mobile browsers.
• Convenient: frequent journeys can be checked with short, stable URLs, e.g. mtraffic.org/m25.

mtraffic is written in Python, and is currently running on my UML machine with Apache 2 and mod_python. If you'd like the sources or you have a bug report, please get in touch.

I've been using Beautiful Soup, Leonard Richardson's very forgiving HTML parser, in a couple of recent work projects. This software is so good, you want to indulge the author's peanut brittle plans. more...

This is Olly's photograph of the view from Les Grands Montets. It's the knee-weakening start of an 8km descent into the Chamonix valley, 2100m drop in altitude, which was the highlight of my trip. more...

Our first EP - The Sound of Northwood - is now available for £5 through the new Northwood website.

The CD contains four songs which we recorded during November and December 2005, and is encased in a lovely nostalgic/erotic package, designed by David Mackintosh and illustrated by Sren Mosdal. Three of the songs can be downloaded from the website, under a Creative Commons license; if you like them, you're encouraged to buy the CD versions in their uncompressed splendour...