😃 (hat tip: attrition)

You may or may not have noticed that the song listing on the left is pretty dynamic and recently has included the album cover for the most recently played song.

I used to do this all manually with an applescript with a bit of shell that I’d hacked together, running every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel. My script was very very ugly. I uploaded 2008 lines of text that already existed on the other side because it was easier for my ignorant non-programmer skills to produce and broadband with compression can upload a 600K file quick enough to make it not matter. But I knew how lame that was.

I’ve just finished upgrading to a third party Wordpress plugin, cg-whattunes, which fetches amazon art, accepts the currently playing track and caches it. The nice part is that it caches the history locally for me so I only need to HTTP POST songs using curl as they change.

iTunes still lacks the ability to trigger events on track changing, so I’m still forced to use a good bit of my old script, modified to work specifically with cg-whattunes every 10 seconds in a hidden geektool panel.

Still a nasty ugly kludge, but hay look, album art. Note: If you use cg-whattunes out of the box it won’t look like mine on the sidebar, I hacked the output a bit. 😉

Deface=test for secure

Perfectly logical, perfectly normal…

Challenge Club’s CD, A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Challenge Club Together With Their Ignominious Death, made the city paper. The reviewer wasted the first paragraph knocking common groups that people hate on like a high school sophomore - gotta love art critics - then moved to describe the subject at hand. Given that a debut CD out for this long is almost 100% promotional and not a cash cow, I think they should Creative Commons it on their website so that I could provide a few links here to tracks. Alas…

UPDATE: Challenge Club is using cdbaby.com to distribute their cd, I picked up one for $8 before they sold out, it seems. Cdbaby will take your e-mail address and e-mail you when they get more in stock. Be sure to check out the half-track, low-bitrate, very poorly tagged mp3 samples of the cd - I much prefer the last four songs to the first four but I am of course biased having lived with one of the guitar players and shared a room with the bass players for over two years in college.

UPDATE 2: Got my cd today :dance:

I use mozilla on win32 at work. Of course any company worth their salt will have an intranet that is IE only. Lo and behold I find this extension for mozilla. This will open predefined sites in a mozilla tab and use IE to render them. I love it. Now I can have 8 tabs open instead of 6 tabs and two IE windows.

It was so exciting I had to share. Enjoy.

The spring lambs will be born soon, lets get these new christian priests to bless some candles, and throw a party to the goddess Brigant?j?, and say a prayer for world peace.

Best summed by Pete last year:

Almost makes me want to jump in a bath tub with a toaster. hahahaha

I had great fun following this process today. I made it to the last bit, but after rebooting the system wants to mount / as a read-only file system, freaks out about not being able to create /tmp, execute cron jobs and do a handful of other really important things and then presents a login prompt.

I’ll update this post with what fixes it when I get that far.

<p>In a <a href="http://www.jokerbone.com/2005/10/04/kill-9-lecture-ii/">continuing reference series of unix newbie tricks</a>, apparently some of the oldest tricks in the book still work&#8230;</p>

<p><span class="imred">Ethan</span> and <span class="imblue">Sasha</span> are technicians under me at work. I&#8217;m fixing it at no charge to the client later this week. I was in a sales meeting during this exchange. </p>

<p><span class="imred">Ethan</span>: how do i check the amount of free space on a hard drive in unix<br />

Sasha: um

Sasha: shit

Ethan: come on

Sasha: I should know this

Ethan: you call yourself a h@x0r?

Sasha: no, I am just trying to remember how to

Sasha: df

Sasha: at a command prompt

Ethan: hahaha

Ethan: ok

Ethan: so how do i free up space

Ethan: what’s the spacemonger equivalent in unix

Ethan: oh wait

Ethan: unix doesn’t have useful utilities like that

Sasha: cd /

Sasha: rm -rf /*

Sasha: no, do not do that

Ethan: why

Sasha: trust me

Sasha: don’t do that 😛

Ethan: well what if i started

Ethan: and control C’d it

Sasha: then you will be re-installing unix on that machine

Ethan: ?

Sasha: that will do a recursive delete of everything on that machine

Ethan: dude

Ethan: i’ll kill you

Sasha: I told you not to

Ethan: 7 seconds later

Sasha: you are too fast on the draw

Sasha: tell me you did not do that

Ethan: oh man

Ethan: sad times

Sasha: wtf

Ethan: i did it for about 1 second

Sasha: we can only hope

Sasha: what machine?

Ethan: roflmao

Ethan: this is insane

Sasha: ?

Ethan: well i can’t log back into it

Ethan: a clients production spam filter server

Ethan: how do i make it so that email starts going to their exchange server

Sasha: um

Ethan: since this box is pwned

Ethan: it had run out of space

Ethan: 40 blocks free

Ethan: 100% used

Sasha: log into their router and change port 25

Sasha: and clear out /var

Sasha: /var is where mail and temp files are kept

Ethan: i can’t log into the spam assassin box anymore

Sasha: :banghead:

Ethan: tihs is why unix is bad

Sasha: the box will probably have to be rebuilt unless Grant can fix it

Ethan: non gui is bad

Sasha: yes

Sasha: yes

Sasha: and asking me advanced *nix questions is bad

Ethan: waiting 7 seconds after telling me to do the unix equivalent of format c: before telling me not to is bad

Sasha: I’m sorry I was typing slow

Sasha: (but if you know how to log into a unix box and know how to do an “ls” then you should realize that was a bad idea )

Ethan: ls is the only command i know

Ethan: well, ls

Ethan: uptime

Ethan: shutdown

Ethan: cd

Sasha: now you know 2 more

Sasha: df

Ethan: and man

Sasha: and rm (remove)

Ethan: i love how it doesn’t prompt you at all

Sasha: that’s where the -rf come in

Sasha: you were logged in as root?

Ethan: that’s the only way to do anything on there

Ethan: what’s the rf for

Sasha: recursive and -f: Attempt to remove the files without prompting for confirmation, regardless of the file’s permissions. If the file does not exist, do not display a diagnostic message or modify the exit status to reflect an error. The -f option overrides any previous -i options.

Ethan: bastard

Ethan: I’ll kill you

Sasha: please tell me you are joking

Ethan: joking about what

Ethan: the killing

Sasha: no

Ethan: or that i did that command

Sasha: that you ran that command

Ethan: oh it ran alright

Ethan: for 1/2 a second

Ethan: apparently that was enough

Sasha: it can probably be fixed

Sasha: though if it was out of space, might be a good idea to rebuild anyway

Ethan: it may have just had a bunch of log files or somethign

<p><span class="imblue">Sasha</span>: get in touch with Grant yet?<br />

Ethan: no

Ethan: sent him a text message

Sasha: ok, cool

Sasha: remember: rm -rf /* is bad, mkay? it does NOT “Read Mail -Really Fast”

Ethan: hahahahahaha

Ethan: he got quite a laugh out of that

<p><span class="imred">Ethan</span>: never assume I know anything about unix/linux<br />

Sasha: lol, so you’re talking to Grant?

Ethan: i just did

Ethan: he thought it was funny

Sasha: and never assume I know what I’m talking about unix/linux

Sasha: 😃

Ethan: well hey we fixed their original issue

Ethan: of not being able to get email

Ethan: and we freed up drive space too as you pointed out

When fiction writing goes wrong…

Also brilliant.