xmms with id3v2 APIC support

07 Jun 2002

A demo screenshot of my cover art patch to xmms.

Tunetagger progress

07 Jun 2002

Ugg…

I couldn’t sleep last night and I had no internet, due to a massive power out on the north side of town, so I played with the mozilla embed widget in python. I now have a fully usable browser (back/forward/stop/location bar/status bar) in about 150 lines of python.

One problem I had was when submitting to a form it wanted a new window to tell me about submitting form insecurely is a bad idea, but the gtk signal handler was expected to hand back a handle (pointer to a pointer) to a new mozilla embed widget. Python didn’t know how to do that, and the way they have it designed is funky (the signal handler could return this instead of setting the handle). I also can’t set the prefs without pyxpcom which I don’t feel like going to trouble of building.

Perhaps it would be easier to actually write a better thought out wrapper for wxWindows and then use that. Then it should be reusable on the mac and win32 (I hope!).

Off to work… oh wait… I work at home…

Getting RAID 1

06 Jun 2002

Recent events have proved that hard drives suck sooo… Tell me how to get RAID 1.

You could do it in software or your could get a $50 dollar card that does ATA 100 as well. I would like to go this route since my motherboard only does ATA 33

Next you need a matching hard drive to what you already have. Here’s what I want Maxtor DIMONDMAX + 80GB.

Now… I just need some money….

More on music merging

06 Jun 2002

My mergeing project has gone awry. While I did pick off the easy duplicates (the ones with matching audioSha1’s), I decided it would be better to finish TuneTagger.

TuneTagger (project at sf.net is way out of date) is a music file renaming/tagging utility. It’s greatest feature will be making use of Musicbrainz. Once a track as been id’ed by one person, Musicbrainz remember the sound signature (aka TRM) of the song so the next person that points a Musicbrainz enabled tool at any file that is the same song it will know right away what that song is.

I figure it probably won’t need that many users before you will be able to sort out and rename your music collection without lifting a finger.

At first I was going to use wxPython, but I have gotten to play with pygtk/pygnome and the mozilla wrapper pygme and it looks like that will be an easier route to take with just has much portablity.

Hard Drive Troubles

06 Jun 2002

Wow… what a week for hard drives

1. The hard drive holding /var on k92 (the sever that hosts this) starts kicking out errors, almost exactly one year after installed. Steve, the guy who’s ISP this k92 lives at, had to drive 80 miles to Fry’s just to find they wanted to rip him off, then installed another hard drive that was more trouble than the current one was, until getting a 60 GB that worked. Lot of fun.
2. A 60 GB hard drive that Bob left in my care while in the Peace Core for 2 years makes funny noises as certain times. ASAP I’m going to get another drive and do the hard drive hokeypokey with it (“you put one in, you take one out, you call up maxtor and scream and shout”)
3. Bob’s computer that I’m trying to set up for my wife, Laura (Bob is her brother) has major hard drive problems to the point that I’m not sure if I can recover all his data before I fdisk it (I believe it a “windows has crappy filesystems” problem, not a hardware error.
4. My good buddy zooko just had his laptop hard drive crash, losing a lot of irreplacable data.

I’m thinking …. RAID 1 is the only way to fly, Baby!