Blog for 2007
28/11/2007: Sharing Music with Apple iTunes
OK, so a few weeks ago my old G3 iBook broke down. Yesterday I took delivery of a brand new (well, eBay-sourced, but new for me) G4 iBook and was about to start synching my music collection from my Linux desktop when it struck me that that’s just a dumb idea. I’ve got a 54 Mbps wireless network, so why not put it to good use. There must be a way to get iTunes to be able to play my OGG files directly off the Linux server.
One option is Rhythmbox which I happened to already use as my main audio player on Linux. It is able to participate in iTune’s music sharing function by virtue of its DAAP plugin. However, this solution relied on me always being logged into the Linux box with Rhythmbox running. What if someone else was logged in?
Then I discovered Firefly Media Server a DAAP daemon capable of sharing a whole directory of music files (including several formats which iTunes doesn’t support — Firefly transcodes them into WAV on the fly!). This seemed like a great solution, so I installed it…
28/11/2007: Attention Spammers!
I get probably about 10 to 20 spam comments left on this blog every day. However, nobody ever sees them because, firstly, the most obvious spams are automatically filtered out using content scanning and IP blacklists, and secondly, the remaining messages are checked by a human moderator (i.e. me) before they appear on the site.
So spammers, your comment spam will never be seen. It’s a waste of your time and mine.
21/11/2007: It’ll be in the Last Place You Look
Oops! The HMG (trading as Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) has misplaced the personal data of about 40% of the UK’s population, including 15 million children. There is “no evidence that it has fallen into the wrong hands”, but there is no evidence that it has not.
This is the same government that plans for us to entrust them with fifty different pieces of personal data as part of their flawed National ID Card scheme.
This is one of many reasons why I support NO2ID.
Links:
20/11/2007: The Queen & Prince Phillip
Today, HRH Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary.
Little known fact about Prince Phillip:
The Yaohnanen believe Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is a divine being, the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit and brother of John Frum… When the cult formed is unclear, but sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. Their beliefs were strengthened by the royal couple’s official visit to Vanuatu in 1974 when a few villagers had the opportunity to observe the prince from afar.
Source: Wikipedia
All the best to HRH and the Duke! I know they read this blog.
18/11/2007: USD/EUR Exchange Rate Graph
The chart above shows the fall of the US dollar against the Euro over the last eight years, with some key events in American politics and economics noted, which may or may not be seen as causes or effects of the falling dollar.
18/11/2007: William Tell: 700 Years On
Today marks 700 years since the date traditionally regarded as the day when William Tell shot an apple off the top of his son’s head with a crossbow and kick-started a resolution against the Austrians which led to the founding of Switzerland.
The legend goes that the Austrian Hermann Gessler was appointed vogt (sheriff) of Altdorf. The power went to his head, and he had erected in the town square a wooden pole; Gessler’s hat was placed atop the pole and the townspeople were expected to salute the pole whenever they passed it. Perhaps as an act of defiance, or perhaps because no-one had told him about the new rule, Tell happened to walk through the town square without saluting. Gessler ordered him to be arrested.
Upon hearing of Tell’s reputation as an archer, Gessler decided on a very unusual punishment: for Tell to be ordered to perform a seemingly impossible task, and shoot an apple off his own son’s head from a great distance. If he refused, or failed in the task, both William Sr and William Jr would…
18/11/2007: Dhyana.pl Updated
This release works around errors in capturing screen shots from certain WMV files. It also changes the default geometry from 240×180+0+0 to “auto” which is an automatically calculated, hopefully appropriate, geometry.
17/11/2007: Belgium
A story that seems to have had surprisingly little coverage in the British media is the fact that for almost half a year, Belgium has had no official government. Since the elections of 10 June, no government has been able to form a working majority, despite a lot of effort from the Belgian royal family to broker a deal between rival parties.
Much of the problem stems from the fact that Belgium is a somewhat artificial nation. By the early 19th century, a large number of formerly separate micronations (the “low countries”), each with their own cultures and histories came under the rule of the House of Orange-Nassau. William of Orange united them, establishing the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. (William was also Grand Duke of Luxembourg, but the Grand Duchy was not incorporated into the Netherlands, and due to differences in inheritance laws in the two countries, the royal families of the Netherlands and Luxembourg have…
17/11/2007: Kitties!
I’m told that the only thing that will bring me more traffic than pirated MP3s and hardcore porn is photos of kitties…
19/08/2007: TrivialEncoder/0.2
An update to my PHP encryption class. Despite the name, it’s becoming a pretty sophisticated encyption machine. New encryption algorithms added:
- Vigenerè cypher
- One-Time Pad
- Bruce Schneier’s Superencyption
- Various other methods using the MCrypt library
The TrivialEncoderManager class has been obsoleted by TE_Machine, an abstract class with several different child classes for encoding, decoding and analysis. TE_Machine has a greatly improved parser for methods, which has made it a lot easier for me to add additional functionality such as the ability to analyse an encryption technique to see how strong it would be, and to check whether the output would be ASCII-safe. TrivialEncoderManager is still present, but is deprecated and will be removed next release.
19/08/2007: Sequential Video Thumbnails on Linux
So, I was looking for a way to create sequential video thumbnails (like this one) from a video file on Linux. I found that my options were severely limited. On Windows there are a plethora of tools capable of this fairly simple task, including Media Player Classic, but on Linux all I could find was QFrameCatcher. The QFrameCatcher website was inaccessible yesterday; today I managed to download the source code, but couldn’t get it to build.
Anyway, I decided it probably wouldn’t be very difficult to build my own so…
dhyana.pl
dhyana.pl is a small Perl script that co-ordinates mplayer and ImageMagick to create a lovely montage of thumbnails. (Dyhana — roughly pronounced as “jahna” — is the Sanskrit word for a deep meditation.)
16/08/2007: Elvis
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the day Elvis Presley faked his own death.
13/08/2007: Fake Steve is Dead; Long Live Fake Bob!
Now that fake Steve has been outed, I’m sure everyone is looking for the next fake blog.
Well… Fake Bob Keefe
12/08/2007: PHP Debugging with Style -OR- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bug
PHP lets you define your own error handler, so I decided to get a bit fancy. MegaErrorHandler (MEH) outputs its errors as specially-formatted HTML comments, with the details of the error encoded using JSON.
A small client-side script, with an associated stylesheet then pulls this data out of the comments and formats it as a nice little interactive bug-viewing console, allowing you to view a stack trace for each bug, inspect superglobals, view the syntax-highlighted source code for the file where the error occurred, check the list of defined constants and other useful things…
02/08/2007: Command Line Interfaces, Again
I posted a couple of years ago that the command line is the interface of the future. Today I stumbled on a couple of articles that seem to agree with me:
Quicksilver blows away both Apple’s Dock and Microsoft Windows’ Taskbar in terms of speed and usability. And what is it? A command-line interface with a bit of eye-candy.
Command-line really is the way to go.