I’ve been very distracted by a new job since the end of April. Thus, quiet.
1. sudo aptitude install mt-daapd
2. Edit /etc/mt-daapd.conf so that mp3_dir = [your music directory]. (Also any other configuration changes you might want to make; the file is well-commented.)
3. sudo /etc/init.d/mt-daapd restart
Really this would work on any Debian-derived distro… but I’ve only tried it on Ubuntu.
Update: It looks like mt-daapd puts an admin interface on http://localhost:3689/ (with the default password being ‘mt-daapd’), which you can use to configure things like the location of your music. So you might not even need to do any config file editing…
Yesterday when leaving work I stepped out the back door of our building and almost blundered through someone filming a scene for something.
The back doors of our building had been made over into a hospital entrance, and someone who was the very embodiment of The Wise Old Bum was dispensing advice to people in scrubs, while some sort of faux-homeless band played on the bridge crossing the alley to the parking garage.
Weird.
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
New version of my
del.icio.us widget.
The only real change is that it now allows for multiple instances of the widget. So you can have one showing the ‘food’ tag, and the other showing the ‘yodeling’ tag, say.
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
WordPress’s API documentation is weirdly incomplete.
The
official function reference, for instance, was last updated for WordPress 2.1, and we’re now on 2.5.
This is making updating that widget I wrote be more of a hassle than I expected.
I’ve been running
Ubuntu on my home computer for a week and a half now. That’s right, I’ve
joined the “A-list blogger circle-jerk”. For certain values of “A”. Specifically, the value “F”.
I’ve mostly found alternatives for all the programs I used. The only area where I’m not quite satisfied is a music player; I used
foobar2000 on Windows, and I haven’t found one to match it yet. (I’ve settled on
Quod Libet at the moment, though its UI is a bit lacking.)
WoW works, but I seem to be paying a ~10fps tax for running it under Wine. It’s a pain, but it’s still playable.
I still have XP on a partition, but I haven’t yet run into anything I need to boot into it for. This is a promising development.
I’m looking forward to Hardy Heron’s release. It’ll come with the newer nvidia drivers, which
apparently
improve performance. This will be appreciated, as I’ve been unimpressed by canvas in Linux-Firefox so far.
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
A bug report for
maphilight lead to me becoming aware of a fascinating quirk in IE. A quirk in which IE holds to published standards with fanatical zeal, contrary to everything one might have come to expect, and far in excess of Firefox/Opera/Safari.
When you use the .innerHTML property to add an element to the DOM, IE will fire an “unknown runtime error” if that element is incorrectly nested. So trying to place a <div> inside a <p> (as was the case in the bug report) will error very unhelpfully.
Surprising behavior.
Anyway, this led to the release of
maphilight 1.1.1. (Which also includes an official minified version of the file, for convenience’s sake.)
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
I couldn’t find a WordPress widget that produced output similar to
del.icio.us’s linkrolls script. (You can just put their script into a Text widget, but its output doesn’t always mesh well with WordPress themes — it hardcodes h2s, and so forth.)
The
Automattic example widget came close, but was a bit lacking on the customization front.
del.icio.us for WordPress also came close, but I disagree with having your server fetch the RSS feed, instead of using the perfectly good JSON API.
So I took the Automattic widget, hacked some extra features into it, made it configurable, and you can now see it in my sidebar. Well, footer currently. It’s a theme thing.
If you want it yourself, here’s the link:
del.icio.us plus
Edit on 2008-03-27: This is now in the wordpress.org plugins repository.
Edit on 2008-04-16: Version 1.1 released, granting multiple widget instances.
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
As one naturally does, I noticed that my blog wasn’t validating. It turned out that I’d forgotten to escape the << in the
Ruby on Rails PDFs example.
So I installed
Code Markup, a plugin that does all that escaping for me when it notices a <code> block.
It seems to Just Work, and lets me skip having to write < all the damn time.
I was asked how I made
the map in my examples earlier.
I wrote
a small script to do it. (The script is quite limited — I only made it complete enough to handle the SVG files I was using. Others might break it. Also, it requires pyparsing… and hoo-boy is that slow.)
Example!
Wikipedia is good for this, and has provided me with the example file I’ll use,
a map of the USA. If you have some GIS data already, I believe that ArcGIS 9.2 has native SVG support, or it looks like you can convert ESRI shapefiles with
shp2svg.
My example file is filled with all sort of crud that isn’t a definition of state boundaries, though, so I need to get just that. Perusing it (in a text editor or a SVG editor like Inkscape) reveals that all the state borders are in a group named “States”. Helpful!
So I run my script: svg2imagemap.py Map_of_USA_with_state_names.svg 960 593 States
(The “960 593″ is the size of the image I’m creating from the SVG file.)
This creates an html file named [svg name].html, so Map_of_USA_with_state_names.html. It only contains the area tags, so I dump them into an image map in a page set up like the one in the other examples…
And we get:
A map of the USA.
Just to disclaim again: That script is unlikely to be immediately useful for any particular SVG image. You would almost certainly need to tweak it significantly to make it work for your purposes. But it’s a good start, at least.
