Pile of Dross

At the forge,
originally uploaded by drossy.

My brother married his fiance Caity last week - the ceremony was on Thursday, reception on Saturday, with some poor undeserving sod getting the best man duties (anyone keen to see the transcript of the speech from my index cards will be disappointed to learn that they were pressed into service to write down drinks orders and I don’t have the full set anymore). The speech itself seemed to go down okay, but I was conscious of going a touch too fast - obviously I’d not had enough alcohol to relax me. Still Colin referred to it as ‘cheeky’ so it obviously hit near the right note.

I’ve uploaded some photos to my flickr account. Some of them didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped - they’re rather blurry; which I’m going to attribute to the cold, wet windy conditions after the ceremony.

So yes, I’m still alive despite not having written anything here for 3 months.

So what have I been up to? Not a huge amount really. I spent a week in CERN at a conference in January but other than that have just been kicking around Didcot.

I have finally succumbed to temptation and bought myself a new tv - a Philips 32″ LCD HDTV (32pf9731d/10) which cost *mumble* quid and its very very nice.

March is shaping up to be a very hectic month for various reasons

So I’ve been using the setup described in Pile of Dross » Using iTunes to play tracks from an iPod it doesn’t manage for a while now and it works quite well; however I do have 2 gripes with it.

1. You can’t create on the fly playlists.
2. Too many things to do in sequence - connect Ipod, start IpodDisk, Start Firefly.

While googling for an answer to the first I found a partial answer to the second :

Do Something When is a bit of software that makes it easy to start applications when drives are mounted. I’ve set it up to start IpodDisk when my ipod is connected to my iBook, removing the need to go searching in my Apps folder for IpodDisk, Firefly has an icon in the status bar so is less of a hassle to start.
I’ve also set up DSW to start up SuperDuper! whenever I mount the backup directory over the network - I have occasional pangs of guilt about how infrequently I backup the laptop.

I suspect that if I poked into Automator and Applescript, these would have been fairly trivial to do myself, but DSW wraps it up in a convenient package.

I’m still looking for ways to satisfy my first gripe, all the solutions I found basically involved streaming the shared tracks onto the local disk and playing them from there. This may be the only way to do it, but it bothers me in some undefinable fashion - it just seems wrong, its entirely possible to make random interactive selections, so why isn’t it possible to queue these selections up?

For a while now I’ve been using IPodDisk to access the music tracks on my ipod (managed from my windows PC) from my iBook, to play them through iTunes. However this gets irritating when I buy new cds and rip them to my ipod, as I have to add the new albums manually into my iBooks’s iTunes library. At home, my ripped tracks are stored on a linux server’s filesystem which is samba shared with the windows box. The linux box runs mt-daapd (now called FireFly Media Server apparently) allowing my iBook to access tracks remotely, and it has the nice feature of periodically rescanning for additions, so I wondered if I could do something similar for when I’m away from home - a daap server running on my iBook serving tracks locally to iTunes.

I started initially looking at mt-daapd but didn’t immediately see any dmg packages for Mac OS X and I didn’t want to install Fink - the documented way to do it, so I looked around for alternatives and found Tangerine however it required Mono which caused sufficent load to make using my iBook painful.

Further googling lead to the Nighty mt-daapd build page which does have dmg packages. Installing the latest release at the time (Firefly-svn-1450) worked perfectly after I changed the path to the Artists directory of my Ipod disk. Another benefit to FireFly over Tangerine is a Status icon to turn it on and off.

[GIGO] has fallen out of use as programs have become more sophisticated and now usually have checks built in to reject improper input.

Hahahahaha.
Haha.
Hah.

*sigh* If only.

Twitter / Graeme Mathieson: Pubs have jukeboxes. Pubs …

Oh dear god no. Nononononononononono.

How many laptops would end up with pints of beer dumped unceremoniously into them to stop the pain?

Also, it’d probably a dodgy area legally - the tracks from someone’s laptop probably haven’t been licensed for public performance.

Laws of system adminning

As soon as you’ve understood the procedure for one upgrade a superceding upgrade will come out.

As soon as you’ve finished an extended downtime for one of your critical systems for which any downtime is frowned upon, a software update will come out for it.

Well that wasn’t a fun e-mail to write. I feel like a complete shit now. :-(

You look out of the window and exclaim that those clouds look very dark and ominous - only to realise its a mountain range.

Yes, I’ve made it to CERN safe and sound. It only took 1 hour to get to Heathrow from Didcot - I’m sure its taken 90 minutes previous times. Got pulled out for an x-ray scan as well, but other than got through the security checks without too much hassle, and then spent the best part of 2 hours wandering Terminal 4.

Plane left on time, and arrived on time, though the buses in Geneva had changed where they stopped from the last time I was here. Got pass for site, but I think something has got confused somewhere as I’m not sure its the correct one, but I’m only here for one night so probably won’t be a huge problem. I’m in building 39, rather than building 38 which I’ve been in all other times, so I’ve actually got wireless access in my room this time.

Damn Didcot and its town centre development - used to be that temptation was a 15 minute train journey to Oxford, after a 10 minute walk to the station. But now anyone can stroll into Argos, buy an XBox 360 and 2 games and be home setting it up 5 minutes later. My XBox has been uncermoniously dumped on top of the video recorder in my bedroom.

Related to my shiny new purchase, I’ve set up a Status page, which includes my XBox Live Gamer card.