Project
So I think that my next real.. project of sorts will be to write an MPD client. MPD is a pretty neat music manager I found a few days ago. A fair amount of Linux programs and services run on the client/server idea, most notably X the graphical display server (what draws the pretty graphics and frees you from the "horrors" of a command-line only interface). This seems like an odd idea for a music manager and player, but it's a neat way of approaching it and I think it does a great job. The obvious connotations of "client/server" are a user connecting to a remote box from his home desktop or whatever. I do not know if this was the express purpose of MPD, but I assume that it would work very well if one had a multimedia computer hooked up to their stereo/TV (I do not have such a computer, so I do not know). Using another computer in the house, one more easily accessible, they could just connect to the server using one of the many clients available and change the music playing from the stereo in the other room. All fine and dandy, but fairly useless to me. Within the past few months, Amarok has started to shit out on me. I don't know what it is. I got rid of all my user settings and ran it fresh and it still had terrible slowdown and hanging issues when doing things such as loading playlists (some of mine are huge, yeah) or switching tracks (that should NOT happen). I've tried Rhythm Box, Audacious (which seems to be a prettification of xmms, which is basically a winamp clone; a.k.a. amazing), Exaile, etc. None of them ever felt... right.
I have always been of the minimalistic point of view. This is evident in my no icons on the desktop belief as well as my attempt to use programs that take up the least amount of resources. Amarok did get a bit heavy at times, but it was really nice so I kept using it. That is until I just got fed up with its performance (it's really a good piece of software, no one else seems to be having the same problems as me). Well, I haven't really listened to music much on my computer in the past few months. Until I found MPD the other day. Because it's server/client, it's inherently light on resources. The server end runs as a daemon, it plays your music and manages your collection in the background. When I want to switch tasks or load a playlist, I can load up one of the quick-launching client programs (I currently switch between a nice command-line one and a Rhythm Boxish GUI one), load a new playlist/song, and close it and everything is great. This also frees up a spot in the system tray that would have an icon for the program (though I just installed an XFCE panel MPD controller that takes up like quadruple the visual space a system tray icon would). It really is a neat way to implement a music manager. There's also a webclient that I am interested in trying that will stream my music to another computer over the internet. That'll be nice when I'm back at the reg office next semester.
So, basically, with the little bit of python I have done for extending the Mumbles Pidgin plugin, I decided that I should learn more about the language ad use it to develop a client for MPD. I could then stick in what features I want and make it exactly how I want it; I could even make it send dbus messages and intercept them with Mumbles! I bet the hardest part will be figuring out GUI stuff. It'll be interesting getting used to Python's method of Object Oriented programming, I'm sure, but once you've done that stuff once, you've really done it a million times (I'll probably end up eating these words).
So, with the recent discovery that my graphics card no longer displays low resolutions (boot screen, Linux TTYs, etc.), the possibility of my computer failing has suddenly become very real. While I really do not have the money for a replacement (nor should I spend the money on one in the near future), I should at least ready a list of parts so that I can make a sudden order just incase AndrAIa decides to call it poops. What? Yeah, I could just buy a new video card, but I'd essentially be wasting money. Why should I buy a graphics card for a deprecated interface? AGP cards are no longer the standard. It's all about PCI-X. But to get PCI-X, I'd have to upgrade my motherboard and with a new motherboard comes a new everything else. I wanna go something midrange, sorta like David's which was a total cost of $450 while reusing as much as possible from his old machine. Mine'll probably cost maybe $100-$300 more than his due to the fact that I will be reusing VERY little from AndrAIa. Andy originally cost $850 when I bought her four or five years ago. I'd say she was fairly high-end at the time. She's served me well, and I hope she would continue to do so even after I build Ophiuchus (which I hope you'll remember is the thirteenth zodiac, because I'm an asshole like that). Maybe she could be that media centered machine hooked up to a TV and stereo. Maybe. She'll serve some purpose, I just don't know what yet. Anyway. Back to Ophiuchus. I'm thinking he'll (yeah, Ophi is a he) look good in either this case or this one. Neither seem to have all too powerful power supplies, but I haven't done my research yet. The problem with whitey there, despite how sexy it is, is that the power supply is of an incredibly ODD shape and quite weak to boot. The only other similar power supply that newegg sells is... well... the same one. So, whitey is out of the question. Blackey seems to be using a regular power supply, but even at 400W, it seems a bit... weak. But again I must first do my research and confirm that I should actually buy another power supply. At least blackey is still pretty cool looking.
But wait Tony! I know computers and that case looks kinda small!
Yeah, it is. It's a Micro ATX case. Brian got a Micro ATX machine last summer and, while his case is a normal ATX Mid-Tower case, it's a fair bit smaller than a normal ATX motherboard and... I could do with a size reduction. As stated earlier, I am not going for a high end machine here, it's not going to need everything a full ATX motherboard will offer (namely PCI slots). Plus, you know, size.
Ugh, I wish I were in Windows so I could whip this up really quickly in Fireworks... I haven't quite gotten used to The Gimp yet..
It's not a whole lot, but is definitely enough. Considering that, at the moment, I lay Andy on her side so that I can place a fan on her graphics card to account for the fact that the card's fan died almost a year ago. It actually keeps it pretty cool, I'm surprised. But yeah, imagine skinny little Ophi taking up no space on my desk. I would have so much room to.. do things with, maybe. It'd be nice.
This was probably a pretty boring post to you not-so technically inclined/interested. I've been writing a lot of stuff down while at work lately. Maybe I'll post that eventually?
Boom
I think I just got hit with the biggest wave of apathy ever. Here I am up at 4AM, class in eight hours, and I don't feel the need to go to sleep anytime soon. Just finished the new Futurama movie (The Beast With a Billion Backs, out Tuesday), and I have to say that it's pretty good. Definitely some sort of message thing going on there, will have to rewatch to pick up on it all. S'all about love. With a tentacle. Who's a polygamist. Also the League of Robots.
I've been having some troubles with Sovereign (formally Frank(enstein)). I copy over the console only debian live install to a USB drive, boot from it, but I am unable to find an install script. OK, fine, we'll do it the easy way: copy a gnome version to the USB. "Failed to load kernel: linux." What a jerk, eh?
It's definitely my graphics card, as Sovereign displayed low resolutions perfectly on my monitor. Well poop.
Did some math while talking to Jason earlier: At twenty-four hours a week, ten dollars an hour, I should be pulling in four hundred-eighty dollars every two weeks pre-tax. That's nine hundred-sixty a month pretax. That's... maybe I can finally start thinking about replacing my ailing computer.
WordPress is saying "Draft saved at 2:05:05 am" even though the timezone is set to UTC-5 and it displays 4:05 am just fine there. Weird. I wonder what it'll say on the main page when I finally post.
Caught the last forty minutes of the program on National Geographic about Lakshmi, the girl with eight limbs. Neat stuff. Apparently the other limbs belonged to a partially developed, parasitic twin. And right after that? The Science of Dwarfism. This kind of stuff intrigues me immensely. I am so glad we get NatGeo. I don't think we did last semester, or maybe fall semester.. I remember there being commercials for stuff that I was sad I couldn't watch because we didn't get the channel. The Science channel has also had some cool stuff on it, specifically How It's Made. The glove making process was especially badass: they had a hand glove inverting machine!
I FINALLY found an mp3 of the american Pokemon theme. Kinda lame quality, though. Now to find the japanese opening. Actually, I just found a better quality one. It's itunes m4a, though. Conversion time!
Done. Much better.
Played some Audiosurf the other night because Casey's playing it really made me want to. Good stuff. It's really neat, I'm rediscovering some of the songs I have in my collection.
Sovereign won't see my second 120GB for some reason. That's the one with the backup of all my movies and such. This is bothersome. I'll have to whip out my ide->usb controller card and see if I can't read it on AndrAIa. Problem is that the USB cable is on my printer currently and that's an awful lot of work (not really, I just don't feel like unhooking it because my printer is under my desk).
POKEMON OHHHH YOU'RE MY BEST FRIEND
IN A WORLD WE MUST DEFEND
Perl script worked perfectly once I figured out how the XML libraries were parsing Microsoft's shittastic XML.
Seriously, what is this?:
<media src="C:\Music\The World Ends With You OST\01 It's So Wonderful.mp3" albumTitle="The World Ends With You OST" albumArtist="Square Enix" trackTitle="It's So Wonderful" trackArtist="Square Enix" duration="99082" />
Shouldn't it be more like:
<media> <src>C:\Music\The World Ends With You OST\01 It's So Wonderful.mp3</src> <albumTitle>The World Ends With You OST</albumTitle> <albumArtist>Square Enix</albumArtist> <trackTitle>It's So Wonderful</trackTitle> <trackArtist>Square Enix</trackArtist> <duration>99082</duration> </media>
It's almost like they're trying to embed the song in a webpage or something.
Nevermind that the time is soooooo ridiculously wrong. Is it in milliseconds or something? I'm pretty sure m3u uses plain old seconds.
But yeah, the perl script worked perfectly on all my Zune playlists. The only problem is that I now have two music libraries (one in Windows and one in Linux) and changing "C:\Music" to "/home/satoshi/Music" ended up with a couple of missing songs... enough so that I edited the script to "/WINDOWS/Music." Kinda lame... I really need to consolidate my music libraries, but putting it on one drive or the other... Actually, why do I even have them separate? I remember there being some trouble with colons and that the Zune didn't read all of my linux directories? But I could be making that second one up, and the colon thing affected a whopping three directories (perl scripts are fun). What I really need is a third harddrive formatted FAT32 dedicated soley to my music. Good thing WinXP allows one to mount drives as directories (though the process is sort of contrived), so there's no need to change anything in either OS. Huzzah. Now to find another drive :/
Ugh, the sky is lighting up: the first rays of day. Time to hit the hay.
Last edited by Tony on June 23, 2008 at 04:29
Draft Saved at 2:38:33 am.
What could that possibly mean?
I'm debating whether to go to sleep or just pull an all-nighter and go to sleep at a normal time for work on Tuesday. I've had a terrible sleep schedule this weekend and this would be a good way to right it out.
Probably going on a trip to the Apple Store today! Not to buy anything, just to look around. Should be fun. Went to Best Buy the other day, those new Apple keyboards are damn nice.
Though I should probably sleep just a bit, my tonsils started hurting more around 1AM or so. They had been fine all weekend too. I highly doubt it will develop into GRAY GOOP COVERING EVERYTHING this time, or even just ew little yellow guys like the first time.
Yeah, sleep it is. I am getting tired.
Casey had a friend over Friday and Saturday. Margie, I believe. Tall, about Casey's height, I'd say. Totally didn't expect her to sound and basically act just like Alyssa. Like, personality and everything. It was the weirdest thing. Cool gal (well, she'd have to be if she's basically Alyssa's clone).
Things are kinda sad socially. Two breakups last weekend, one this.
Yay Xbox Live! demos. Armored Core 4 is a must purchase, even though we don't even own the Xbox :razz: I had so much fun with AC3 on the PS2, and from watching Casey play the AC4 demo it looks to be even better.
Great
So either my monitor or my graphics card is going. I doubt it's the monitor, as it's not yet a year old. I can display X at 1440x900 no problem, but the BIOs and whatever res the TTYs run at won't display, instead giving me a black screen (not even lit black, just black) with a green light indicating signal (instead of orange indicating sleep mode). If it really is the graphics card, I just hope it can hold out until the paycheck after next. I'll test with the All-In-Wonder in Frank tomorrow.
Casey and I built Frank last weekend or so with spare parts from his old machine as well as Din. I looked at what remained of Din in the trash room and thought it woud be wise to hold on to the Geforce FX 5200 just in case. I didn't. Maybe I should have. This is immensely poopy. I mean, yeah, I don't need to drop to the TTYs too often (or ever, if I'm not actively breaking something), and the BIOs screen isn't useful to me (I can manipulate GRUB and get to Windows without actually seeing what I'm doing); but it sure would be nice to see everything.
I did a quick test with Quake 3, still runs at ~400fps. Though that was for only like half a minute or so.
I dunno if it's just me being weird or anything, but I think I've been noticing performance decreases under Windows as a hole and when booting and logging in under Linux. Maybe it's just my startup apps causing the slow login, but... :???: I'm probably crazy.
I wonder if I can still get a decent AGP video card. Or maybe I should hope that this thing lasts until I have enough spare money to buy a whole new machine (a modest one, of course). A year from now, if I'm lucky.
The card is at 60C. Normally it idles at 66C. It might be because of the AC, though.
I honestly haven't done anything that could cause this, so I bet it's normal hardware failure or something. Initially I was restarting X to clear up some processes and it dropped me to a black screen. I could get to the TTYs fine, so I checked my xorg.conf to see if anything was off. Nothing. Restart X again, nothing. Reboot the computer, nothing all around. Take the card out, inspect it, see nothing wrong, put it back in, boot, no BIOS screen, booting sounds, login screen. Kind of confused here.
That was a lot work
Corey suggested that I try playing with the 'Album Artist' ID3 tag because that allowed him to consolidate two problem albums in Windows Media Player 10. Sure enough, that fixed the problem of the Zune software splitting up albums based on artist. Totally dumb, but... now that I know what to do.. I also went through and tagged a bunch of songs that weren't tagged and fixed other albums that had songs out of order or missing. I did this all on my Windows' music collection. Meaning I need to figure out what I've done and copy over the updated files to the Linux collection. Hopefully I only played with mp3s and not mp3s that used to be FLAC or OGG. Perhaps I won't bother. I mean, yeah, FLAC and OGG versions of songs sound better, but I've been listening to my Zune even while at my computer. I wonder if the Amarok hanging problem is because I fucked up DBUS at some point. The only way to fix my particular problem with DBUS is to do a complete reinstall of Ubuntu. I think I'll wait 'til 8.04 is out to do a clean reinstall, which will be sometime this month.
But yeah, everything looks to be in order now! As for the afforementioned not updating the tags problem, I just had to drag the songs into the Zune software for it to update. Even when I hit "Sync to Blacky" on albums that I fixed (i.e. ones that were split by artist), they were still split on the Zune itself, yet deleting the albums from the Zune and then syncing it over produced the desired results. Because of the sheer amount of work I've done, I just decided to erase everything off the device and let it resync it all while I sleep.
Man, despite my belief that the user should never have to adapt to the software, now that I know what the Zune software expects of me, things should be a lot easier from here on out. I feel relieved that I no longer have to fight the software to such a degree. It should still be better designed, though. I should not have to use two different tagging programs (one for ease of use, the other for editing the 'Album Artist' tag because I can't figure out how to edit extended tags in the first) just to make an album appear correctly. I should be able to do that directly within the Zune software.
4007 total items to be synced. There are 45 pictures/images that I cropped to fit the Zune's display for use as backgrounds and 270 Brawl pictures, only 31 one of which are mine. The rest were saved off of /v/.
Anyway, it's 7:20AM and I really need some sleep. I need to start on my precalc before 11PM today.
Last night (I think?) Corey reminded me of the existance of the CIS degree. Computer Information Systems. It requires Calc 1, but I'll have done that after this semester of precalc is done. It also requires one of two Bio classes (which I've already done), Chem 1, and Physics 1. Now, neither Corey nor I have heard much grief about Chem 1 or Physics 1, mostly the pain seems to be from Physics 2. It also requires a bunch of CS classes that I have already taken/am currently taking. There's one CS elective (that I saw), and two or three CS technical electives. CIS requires a minor, however, and that'll probably end up being ITM if I go the CIS route. Bauer has been pushing me for an ITM minor since second semester. ITM, however, has specializations if you major in it. The two that stand out to me are "Software Design" and "Systems Administration." "Software Design" looks like what I wanted to get out of the CS degree: Programming experience without all the heavy math and theory bullshit. Systems Administration sounds pretty fun though. I like setting up and managing computers. The thought of keeping a whole network (or multiple!) of computers and servers from shitting on themselves is oddly (read: masochistically) appealing. I have a phone conversation scheduled for 1PM on Tuesday with Bauer. We'll figure things out then. I really wanna go the ITM route, but Corey says I should go CIS. Erm. Physics and Chem are mathy. I'd rather not do that. I'd rather focus on what matters. But we'll see.
Namingway
I need a better name for my Zune. It used to be called DOOP. I believe I was watching an episode of Futurama that had Zapp Brannigan in it or something. It's currently named Blacky because it is a black Zune 30. I'm just not in the habit of naming all of my devices. My Wii's nickname is Satoshi, just because it needed some sort of identifier. People like Joy and Amber name every single one of their devices. Both of Joy's external harddrives have been named, Amber's little wireless device was named too. I was told their names at one point, I didn't make it a point to remember them. My router has no name, per se. I think I put both the router name and SSID as "Tony's router" or something lame like that. My external drives have no names. My internal drives have no names. Heck, even my car doesn't have a name. (With the way it's been behaving, it doesn't deserve a name. Especially if I keep thinking about selling it. Who in their right mind would buy it, though?)
What do I name? I will name my computers. AndrAIa and Din. But that's it. Yet everytime I load up the Zune software and it says "Syncing to Blacky" I just wanna punch it. Small devices don't get names! Argh. Yet it needs a name that isn't crap. This means that the comments zone is suggestion zone.
Also, Microsoft's ClearType font smoothing thing in Windows XP makes my eyes bleed. Why do people say it's required for LCD screens unless you're in the mood for stabbing your eyes? ClearType induces the urge for eye stabbing. The font smoothing under Ubuntu, though? That's pretty.
I love how the Zune software decides to truncate song names if they're too long. So I get crap like WarioWare Touched - Ashley's S. What? That's actually the Japanese Version. Because it truncated the song name, the English version doesn't show up. Way to go Zune. If I load the song up in Foobar my mp3 tagging program, it's all correct. Stupid piece of shit.
Oh, and the other day while I was updating a bunch of tags with Mp3tag so that the Zune would read them properly, the Zune software just up and decided to stop paying attention to the tag fixes part way through. Still doesn't want to listen.