*sniff, sniff* … *ha-choo!*
Yup. It’s pretty musty here. It’s probably high time to dust this corner of the Internets off.
But how? That’s a good question.
*sniff, sniff* … *ha-choo!*
Yup. It’s pretty musty here. It’s probably high time to dust this corner of the Internets off.
But how? That’s a good question.
Remember how I toiled away at loading a Musicbrainz mirror into MySQL? Well, I deleted that mirror.
Running queries on a database as large as Musicbrainz was remarkably sluggish with PHP, and joins were practically impossible.
Musicbrainz does offer an XML web service. So it wasn’t a terrible leap to write a simple class in PHP to query the service and parse the results.
M3U files, at the very, very minimum, are text files listing MP3s in a particular directory. Most of my playlists are located with their MP3s, so they don’t mess with file paths. There is an M3U specification, but I tend to be lazy.
How lazy?
I open up a command prompt in my directory of MP3s and type:
dir /b *.mp3 > "playlist.m3u"
I then edit the resulting M3U file in Notepad, if I need to change anything around. Usually, my files are named in a way to put them in their proper track order.
This technique applies to Windows. Not sure what other operating system users do.
Between the fliers in the mail and the spam on my answering machine, I’ve actually gotten curious about the brouha over Propositions 1 and 2 in the upcoming city elections.
When the screed hits the fan, I usually just tune out. Nothing turns me off faster than a political pissing match. Thing is, Proposition 6, which repeals a prohibition on domestic partner benefits for city employees, is on the ballot, and I’m making sure I vote for it.
So I can’t very well vote for one proposition without knowing about the rest.
I just want to give a big, warm FUCK YOU to all the drivers who made this morning’s commute to work feel like fucking Lord of the Flies. That is all.
There’s a strange thing happening with Google and my computer — the Cached and Similar pages links that accompany every search result is missing when I perform searches at home. But when I’m in the office, Google returns results with those links in tact.
I tried just a whole slew of different search terms to find whether someone else has run across this same problem. I finally used "google cache similar pages missing result" and came across this this thread on an Apple discussion board.
I haven’t tried deleting my cookies yet, but I will when I get home.
[UPDATE 4/20/06] Yes, as a matter of fact, you do have to delete your cookies to get the cached and similar links back. So that begs the question — where the hell was this cookie set in the first place?
For some unfathomable reason, I’m thinking about resurrecting the Musicwhore.org artist directory. That thing was a pain in the butt to maintain, and it burned me out.
So why bring it back? Well, this time around, I have no intention of maintaining it. That is, I’m not going to spend my spare time doing data entry.
Rather, I want the directory to be powered by Musicbrainz.
This mirror of an article describes how to aggregate and collate RSS and Atom feeds with MagpieRSS. It’s really effective, but in following the steps exactly laid out, you lose channel information. When you want to distinguish between different feeds, you may want to include the basics, such as title (the name of the site) and link (the base url of the site.)
So I devised a bit of a hack to append that information to the items array.
I was writing about post-break-up Supercar projects when I saw an interesting headline on Bounce.com. It read:
LGBTな雑誌、yes2号
Translated:
LGBT magazine, yes, vol. 2
In other words, the second issue of a new lesbian/gay/bi/transgendered magazine, yes, is now out. In this issue? An interview with Heath Ledger about Brokeback Mountain.
Hell, I didn’t even know there was a vol. 1. Japan isn’t that much better than the US when it comes to tolerance, but if the launch of a gay lifestyle magazine by a major retailer in Japan is any indication, the pink yen is about as attractive as the pink dollar in the US and the pink pound in the UK.
I think the thing that will ultimately tip the scales in favor of gay rights is business interest — the buying power of a gay urbanite will prove too lucrative to heed the threats of religious boycotts.
To put in less flattering and more demonizing terms, the clean-cut faggot is a far more attractive customer than the screech-happy white trash.
I don’t know how this happened.
One day, my help files refused to launch. Anytime I clicked on a CHM, nothing happened. I don’t know at what point it stopped working, and I don’t know what I installed to make it stop working.
Thing is, the components to launch a CHM file are part and parcel of the Windows operating system — there isn’t really an easy way to reinstall that particular portion of the OS without reinstalling the entire OS.
And my Googlefu was failing me — I don’t remember the search term I used to find a forum post that actually had a workable suggestion.