My One Lunar Cycle No-Post-iversary

Yeah, it's been that long. 28 Days Later, stuffs and things at varying orbitals of excitement have been happening with acceptable regularity:

• Not only am I the proud owner of a longboard, but this particular plank of my comprehensive transportation platform now bears the inimitable insignia of one Randall Munroe. (I can only wonder what joyous blasphemies #666 will bring.)
  
• Finally made it out to the infamous DNA Lounge; this SF institution has the peculiar distinction of being owned by ex-Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.
• Canadian Thanksgiving shindig, complete with full turkey and pumpkin pie. Need I say more? (No, but I should probably add this: there's another Canadian Thanksgiving dinner this Sunday hosted by the Stanford Canadian Club; despite what their (apparently infrequently updated) site says, it really is this weekend.)
  
• Pretty Lights at The Independent last night. If you haven't seen them, you really should.

How's Facebook? (Come on - if you care enough about me to read my pithy musings, you're probably expecting an answer to this question.) Intense. It pains me to say it, but Facebook has so far provided much more in the way of personal development and work-related awesomeness than Google ever did. How can that be? It comes down to recruiting strategy: Google casts as wide a net as possible, hoping to grab what it considers to be the best of the best before someone else does. In my opinion, this strategy is bound to backfire. You end up with a zillion interns and, well, less than a zillion interesting and/or useful projects; it doesn't take a math major to see that you can't pair each intern up with something worthwhile to work on. (It does take a math major, however, to look at the whole situation and start rambling about bijections.) Here's the point: half of the interns coming out of Google are extremely wary of returning, and that can't be good. ("Half" here is an extremely unscientific guesstimate, but several co-interns (who will obviously remain nameless in such a public forum as The Internet) have expressed similar sentiments.)

Quod Libet: First Day

Some thoughts/observations so far:

• I'm enjoying the automatic rating plugin, and expect it will be very useful in filtering out the detritus from my CBC Radio 3 crawls - just listen on shuffle for a while, then drop the worst-rated files.
  
• The default rating settings are weird - 4 notes? Usually 5 or 10 is standard.
• I haven't found a way to properly refresh the library without restarting - newly downloaded songs don't show up. Not a deal breaker, but annoying nonetheless.
• Relatively seamless transitions between songs. I like. Also, the interface is snappy in general - no slowdown when I rescan the watch directories, no strange loading pauses.
  
• The built-in config GUI hides most options from me. Why? Is it that hard to provide an advanced settings toggle?
• The Amazon album-cover-grabbing plugin is barfing on me with some expat errors. Not cool. (As an aside: there's a bewildering proliferation of XML-parsing libraries for Python. It's no wonder that the Python standard library has taken the "here's some reasonable defaults, plug your own in if you want" route.)
  

Overall, it's a positive first impression - most things work as they should, save for some minor gripes with plugins and general style.

Anything Goes

A growing music collection demands a powerful media player. While VLC will play just about anything you throw at it, it seems to choke regularly on larger libraries. I'm giving Quod Libet a spin for now:

# apt-get install quodlibet quodlibet-plugins

(The plugins aren't strictly necessary, but they include some nice features like album cover grabbing and automatic rating systems.) So far, the experience is pretty seamless, though I've only got about 2000 songs loaded into the library; I'll be chiefly looking for scalability as I put my 1.5 TB RAID 5 to good use!

Scripted Reality

As promised, here are the scripts.

The Sound of Scraping

After sitting on my CBC Radio 3 metadata for just over a week, I finally got around to throwing together a decent downloading script. Actually, the scraper/downloader is a loose federation of scripts, deliberately kept in separate modules so as to allow nice things like, say, running multiple copies thereof concurrently. I'll post a link to the source in the near future, along with a few words of explanation. Maybe I'll even write a README - after all, although CBC Radio 3 is afloat for now, there's no telling how long it will survive the budget axes of doom.

(And, to prevent the inevitable smartasses from chiming in with "you forgot wget, n00b" - nope, it's in there somewhere. That said, I think you'll find these scripts go a tiny bit further...)

Ow, My Hands

 

A few of us here in Ottawa (well, only three) hit up Montreal this last weekend to get a session in with some of the local traceurs. The Stade Olympique (less than fondly referred to as the "Big O", both for its shape and for the enormous debt incurred from its construction) is unsightly to most - and an absolute paradise for skateboarders, BMXers, and traceurs of all skill levels. The photos are up here.

In other news: if you haven't done so already, check out Pretty Lights. Who says you can't give away the music PWYC-style and make a good run of things? Oh, right - these thugs do.

And the total is...

76302. Of course, this is just the metadata - I wouldn't be so reckless as to hammer the CBC Radio 3 servers with 200 GB worth of download requests in a day! (Nor would my bandwidth permit me to suck down that much data in anything less than a couple of weeks. Oh well.) Next up: filter it down to a list of songs that I might actually want.

2017 Songs and Counting

Your guess as to what this does:

#!/bin/bash

for i in `seq 0 25`; do

echo "http://radio3.cbc.ca/nmc/artists.aspx?offset=${i}"

done | tee -a artists.log |\

./url-dumper 1.0 |\

egrep -o "/bands/[^\"]*" | uniq |

while read line; do

b=`basename "$line"`

echo "/play/band/${b}"

done | uniq | tee -a bands.log | ./cbc3-get-music-info 1.0

(Yes, I've left out some details - like what exactly those scripts do under the covers. I'll post about that when it's finished!)

Better make that 3156 songs. And counting.

Sonic Boom!

I happened upon an interesting web app today - The Next Big Sound - which lets users play the role of record mogul and "discover" talented independent bands. More proof, if needed, that the screw-the-customer-at-all-costs model currently pursued by the RIAA and its ilk is about to draw its terminal breath. Of course, I have no problem with the RIAA running itself into the ground, as it seems hell-bent on doing. I just wish it would happen faster, and that the courts would stop upholding a sorely antiquated and essentially unenforceable copyright model.