Play all lastfm:// links at once

A nice way to play all the "lastfm://" links in the last.fm player at once.
(applications used: textpad, ruby [windows])

• copy html sourcecode to textpad, replace all "\n" -> ""
  
• copy modified sourcecode to clipboard
• start cmd.exe, type: irb [ENTER]
  
  
  
• type following into the ruby shell for putting the sourcecode into a variable
  input = <<EOT
/* paste the html code here
important: use the shortkey
[Shift]+[Insert]
or it will take hours
to insert the text */
EOT
• now find all "lastfm://" uris:
  uris = input.scan(
%r|lastfm://play/tracks/[0-9,]+|).join("")
• join the found uris into one uri:
  uri = 'lastfm://play/tracks/' +
uris.gsub(%r|lastfm://play/tracks/|, ',')
• copy the result from the shell into textpad
• textpad: replace all "\n" -> ""

Now the result string can be entered in the address line of a web browser and when the "lastfm:" protocol-identifier is associated to the last.fm player all the tracks will be played there.

The next step would be to implement all the steps in javascript and put it into a greasemonkey script to automatize them.

Example Results
Here are some results, created by the procedure above:

• Top 100 of respectively
• U2
• Depeche Mode
• The Police
• The Who
• Skunk Anansie
• Genesis
• Def Leppard
• Justin Timberlake
• Some songs by Eagles

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PS: This Method is useful, when you want to create a playlist for recording the added tracks by e.g. TheLastRipper and hear a preview of the tracks before adding them to the playlist. Also it is useful when you want to play a playlist containing full-length available tracks on last.fm.

Rails Bug? Timezone in persistant models

Programming Rails I have realized that there can be a small bug.
When developing a web application there is an option in the "config/environment.rb" file that specifies the default timezone of Active Record, "config.active_record.default_timezone". I set this option to ":utc", so now I thought that I can expect that, when I set an attribute of an object being a model that accepts "Time" as type, then Rails should convert dates of any timezone to the default timezone of Active Record. But it doesnt happen. Only when I read attributes from the database they are handled as dates of default timezone:

# config/environment.rb
...
config.active_record.default_timezone = :utc
...

# db/migrate/002_create_user_model.rb
...
create_table :users do |t|
t.column :name, :string
t.column :created, :datetime
...

# test/unit/user_test.rb
...
def test_saving_time_format
now = Time.now # localtime = 9:32
bob = users(:bob)
bob.created = now
# bob.created == 9:32 (local) == 7:32 (UTC) == now.utc
# -> success
assert now.utc-2 <= bob.created && bob.created <= now.utc+2
bob.save; bob.reload
# bob.created == 9:32 (UTC) != 7:32 (UTC) -> fails
assert now.utc-2 <= bob.created && bob.created <= now.utc+2
# convert the time manually to UTC
bob.created = now.utc; bob.save; bob.reload
# bob.created == 9:32 (UTC) == now.utc -> successful
assert now.utc-2 <= bob.created && bob.created <= now.utc+2
...

it fails because rails stored (or better dumped) bob.created localtime to db:
db_record = 9:32 without any convertion and when reloading from db, it handles it as utc time
9:32 (UTC) = 11:32 (localtime).
Instead of dumping the localtime to the db, it would be better when rails converted the time object to UTC and dumped the UTC time to the db!

Maybe I should write a bug report if it is not a feature, but when its a feature its a stupid one!

Regards
Rudi