04.16.06
Posted in Linux/FOSS, Music, programming, qkslvrwolf.com, web at 9:42 pm by qkslvrwolf
This has been a day of computing discoveries on a small but satisfying scale.
I don’t even know why I started playing with amarok today. It probably had something to do with my human computer interfaces class, where we’ve been talking about attention spans of people and how some people like to work with classical on. So I was trying that today. Don’t think I’ll go back to it, its still too distracting. I mentioned my sister’s and ex-roommates old prediliction for working with the tv on, and how it drove me nuts and was too distracting for me.*
Of course, since I was playing with amarok to get some classical tunes up, I endup up trying to figure out some of the options in amarok. See, I like dynamic playlists. I like to be able to define the mood I’m in, or the genre of music I want, and then play a random list that fits that characteristic. The dynamic playlists were what made me so beloved of my old favorite music player, wxmusik. Wxmusik is a good player, but its only being developed by one guy, and as it turns out, it doesn’t have nearly the useful feature set of amarok. Although, if any amarok devels ever read this, I found wxmusik much easier to figure out. Just FYI.
So anyway, I finally discovered the way to do a dynamic playlist on amarok. Its under the smart playlists type in the playlists widget. Maybe it was cognitive dissonance that stopped me from figuring this out…I had tried the “dynamic playlist” feature of amarok, which allows you to have a rotating, “auto-dj’d” playlist which, thankfully, won’t repeat songs. (Repeating songs was always a complaint of mine about winamp and xmms, both of which had an utterlly mind-boggling capability of repeating songs inside of a 3000 song playlist.)
So I’m enjoying that. The other thing that is absolutely outstanding its the automatic integration of amarok with last.fm. This allows you to put your most played music up on a website that does collaborative filtering and recommendations…so you can learn about new music, etc, based on the music that you have in common with other people. Which is sweet, and I love integration (when its based on an open API or standard, of course. ;-)
Anyway, this is also going to precipiate a little more work to re-integrate music with my life. First, I’m going to probably finally download and install foxy tunes…ok, thats done. I’ll play with that when I’m done posting here.
Second, there is a wordpress plugin (oh, you sweet, sweet plugins!) that allows you to show your recent played songs on your website. So when I get a little bit of freetime, I plan to hook that up too.
One interesting difference between wxmusik and amarok is the different way they rate songs. Wxmusik allows you to rate each song your self, whereas amarok simply rates the music by a combination of how often you listen to it and how much of the song you listen to.
I think both solutions are good, and really wish both were avaiable within the same player. See, sometimes you’re in a normal mood, and its good to be able to rate your songs just based on how often you play them. This solution gets jacked up when you’re in a strange or abnormal mood. Especially if you’re in a strange or abnormal mood fairly often. Then, you end up skipping songs that you think are good just because they don’t match your mood, which causes the rating based on listens and length of play to get jacked up.
Hence it would be nice to choose which system you’d like to use at any given moment.
Other than that one small complaint, I have to say, amarok rocks. Oh. did I mention that amarok will also go grab the lyrics for you. There is just no end to how much that rocks. Maybe if I go real crazy, I’ll modify foxytunes so that you can have it scroll lyrics across the bottom…how sweet would that be?
Hmm…it would have a bunch of problems too…for instance, there is no good way to make sure that the lyrics you’re looking at would match the part of the song you’re at. Better would just be a button that would pull up the lyrics on a new tab if you clicked a button. That would work.
Anyway…back to studies.
*Funny story. Ed (the roommate) and I used to bicker bitterly about a lot of things. We weren’t exactly suited to be roommates. He’s kind of an asshole, and I’m a different sort of asshole (its not a character flaw, in my case), and I have a low tolerance for stupidity. So, when we got into a months long argument about whether or not the tv could be functioning when I was doing homework, I eventually won by stashing the tv in someone elses room (locked away, of course), until he decided to negotiate. I don’t remember what we worked out, but I’m pretty sure I agreed to work during proscribed hours or go up to the computer lab that was nearby as long as he kept the bloody thing off when I was in the room working. I can still hear him…”Dude! You just don’t do that! Heh heh heh.
[edit 16 April 2006 2149] Foxy tunes is really sweet. Me likey, now I’ve got amarok going.
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Posted in General, Linux/FOSS at 3:58 pm by qkslvrwolf
Its the little victories that keep you going. The side projects that you didn’t even intend to do, that you ended up doing, that frustrate you, and then you figure it out and you win.
I moved a bunch of my hard drive from ntfs to ext3 today. On a whim. A two hour whim. First, I cleaned up my windows install, got rid of a bunch of games I wasn’t playing anymore, some old isos, etc. Then I repartitioned using the system recovery cd’s version of qtparted. This gave me 20 gig that I formatted with ext3.
Then I booted up ubuntu, created a temp directory, mounted the new drive to the temp directory, transfered over my home directory files, edited fstab to mount the new partition on /home, and rebooted. I had forgotten to change the permissions on the new drive so that my user could hit his own home directory. Oops. So back to SRCD, to remove the fstab entry, then rebooted and changed the permissions, then reset the fstab. Then reboot again. woot! Everythings working. So I went back to SRCD (I still don’t know how to access the main partition to get rid of a portion of that partition that isn’t mounted), and blew away the home directory.
As it turns out, you still need the file, /home, on the root partition so that you can mount to it. Oops. I almost despaired, for about half an hour of reboots, until I figured it out while I was posting a question to the ubuntu forums on my other box. Then I realized it, created the directory on the root partition (sans any data of course) and rebooted into ubuntu. It worked. Hallelujah.
This is why I want a job that is more than being a power point ranger. Even though I know that this could’ve been a trivial task, it wasn’t for me because I was learning some linux basics. But I got it done. And I got that glorius sense of accomplishment that I just don’t get as a manager.
Its the little victories that make you happy.
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04.14.06
Posted in Linux/FOSS, web at 6:00 pm by qkslvrwolf
Why didn’t I see this before???!? Google calender is live! Its awesome, too. Allows you to do everything I was hoping hula would, back when that progam was ramping up.
See, when hula was first ramping up, the creators were talking with one of the great open source gurus about what they wanted to do. He basically told them that if they wanted to make hula a popular project, they have to make it do things that could “let a college student get laid”. That would be how they would attract coders.
To this end, he suggested that they concentrate on making it trivially easy to publish your calender, send invites to people for events, and have them be able to RSVP to those events without having to have a login for the system. And let the sender be able to see the rsvp list. Also, it should be able to be shared, published, and basically viewed and collaborated upon. All in a “trivial” fashion.
Google calendar does a lot of this. Now, to be fair, I’d rather I could do this with a php or perl script from my website, a la this style calendering from within wordpress, but to my knowledge, that doesn’t yet exist.
Long story short, google calendar is sweet, and it makes me very happy.
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02.28.06
Posted in Linux/FOSS, Politics at 6:51 pm by qkslvrwolf
Ok, I’ve been in a link-spamming mood, but I wanted to help get these guys page rank up.
Communication Evolution is working on a film that will help expose the theft of the english language by the neocons, and explain why and how breaking the system of frames, or as I think Candice would say, shifting the semantic fields (it is fields, yes dear?) of the neocon talking points. You know what I’m talking about. “tax and spend liberal”. “tax relief”. “death tax”. The phrases that set people up to think about things in ways that they don’t actually exist.
You can see more frames that need to be broken here. Check the site out.
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10.13.05
Posted in Linux/FOSS at 6:24 pm by qkslvrwolf
So I don’t play with computers - in a serious way - nearly enough. Part of this is the fact that I don’t seem to have much spare time. Part of the lack of spare time, however, has to do with the fact that I pick up and play video games on a regular basis. Which isn’t so smart.
Regardless. Tonight I am upgrading my linux installs on both my desktop (which I haven’t even turned on in months) and on my laptop.
I tried, originally, to upgrade the one on my laptop without reinstalling. Unfortunately, that jacked up and wouldn’t even let me type at the login prompt. So I, lazy that I am, just downloaded the new version under windows, burned it, and am now watching it configure packages and praying that it will let me type.
I keep reading good things about it. Everyone says that it catches and uses all sorts of things hardware wise that have never been automatically caught before. So I have fairly high hopes that maybe it will actually pick up my wireless driver on my laptop. That would be miracle, and might actually cause me to use my linux instead of my windows for most things. If I got that, flash (for amd-64) and dvds/mp3s working, I could pretty much drop windows except for when I’m gaming.
And even that, if I modify my games a bit, has promise. I’m tempted to try installing cedega and try and play diablo 2 LoD/dod:source/ maybe WoW. Not that I want to pay $10 a month for gaming, but I know of a number of people tha thave been successful getting WoW to work, its a cool game, and it woudl hoepfully sooth the gaming fix. And then I could blow away my windows, which I think would be very good for me.
That, and maybe eventually actually updating my wordpress theme. :-)
Anyway…thats that.
Ciao.
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