i’ve been using mpd as my music player lately. it’s a neat little program; very minimalist but it does a good job with my music library and is a lot less flakey than yammi has been lately.

mpd doesn’t really keep track of the songs you’ve played though. i really like archiving that kind of data for some reason. i have to keep my packrat tendencies under control when it comes to physical stuff since my apartment would fill up, but with data, i figure disk space is cheap. so if there’s any chance i might someday find it useful, i try to figure out how to put it in a database.

so, a couple lines of python later, i had a little script that would detect song changes and fire off an http request with the info.

with the help of subway and a few more lines of python, i had a nice web interface to the database of what songs i’d listened to when. it’s open to the public too; the curious can check out the last 50 songs i’ve listened to updated in real time.

i recently installed trac on my work machine to manage my little personal coding projects like the engine behind this site.

trac is a pretty sweet combination of a subversion repository, a wiki, and a bug database. i’m quite impressed with it so far. it was a little painful to get it setup and configured, but it’s been nice to me since.

it’s up here if you’re curious. if you encounter bugs with this site or have suggestions for new features, the best thing to do is to add a ticket through trac.

Holy crap! I think I’ve reached an alltime high in boredom. What the hell does one do when one has such apathy for all things? You know when you get to the point of realization that everything you do is just killing time? I hate that, but this time, it’s beyond that. It’s like… I hit that several years ago, in Arizona. Now, it’s just pervasive, and I can’t even justify sleeping as a reasonable thing to do.

posting this from my new laptop, a nice refurbished thinkpad T23 that i picked up for $500 (1.1GHz, i spent some extra cash to upgrade it to 1GB of RAM, 30GBdrive, 14” XGA screen, 5.3lbs, and a PCMCIA wireless card that i picked up for $12.99. not the sexiest laptop out there, but for the price, i’m quite pleased with it.)

i’d been hearing a lot about the Ubuntu linux distribution lately. at the plone sprint i went to in january, there were a bunch of happy ubuntu users and people have been raving about how well optimized it is for laptops, so i burned an ubuntu install CD and put it on the laptop when it arrived today.

i’ve been a pretty happy gentoo user for a while now and i love its package manager, portage, more than toast. for a seasoned linux user who wants to keep on the bleeding edge and tweak the hell out of their system, gentoo is hard to beat. but today, i just wanted to play with my new toy as soon as possible and make sure everything worked properly and gentoo takes a long time to install.

ubuntu seems to have been a good choice. it took about 15 minutes in all to get it up and running with a nice Gnome desktop and all the hardware working and configured properly. ubuntu aims to be “linux for humans” and the founder, Mark Shuttleworth (remember the billionaire who bought his way onto a russian space launch?), has some strong opinions about how software should Just Work. well, ubuntu pretty much does. the install process pretty much consisted of booting off the CD, hitting enter a few times to select the defaults, entering a username and password and then rebooting. when it was done copying stuff off the CD and installing itself, everything pretty much just worked. the wireless networking was turned off by default but all i had to do was turn it back on; i didn’t have to configure it at all.

i’m quite impressed that after installing linux on this machine, i actually have no idea what models the videocard or soundcard are. it just autodetected them and they work. granted, thinkpads have a reputation for being extremely well supported by linux distributions, but it’s still a fairly novel experience for me. knoppix usually does a good job with the hardware detection too, but installing from knoppix is clumsy at best and the user experience lacks a lot of polish. ubuntu seems well integrated and planned. the install process doesn’t include any package selection step; it just comes with a base set defaulting to a nicely customized Gnome desktop. once it’s installed, it’s basically a standard Debian system so apt-get will pull down anything else you need.

i’m going to see how long i can live with ubuntu on here before the tweaking urges take over and i install gentoo on it. it probably depends on whether it becomes my main machine at home. if it does, i’ll probably want to do things that apt-get doesn’t let me sooner rather than later and that will be the end of ubuntu. but if it mostly becomes a travel machine that i only pull out every once in a while and want everything to work perfectly without having to think about, i think ubuntu will probably work out.

at any rate, unless i encounter anything really heinous in the next couple days of playing, i think i have a new distro to recommend to people who are looking to try out linux. the install process was almost identical to OS X’s (except that it runs in console mode and doesn’t really look very pretty; but the number of steps and the choices you’re presented with are about the same) and the polish of the resulting system is pretty close to what Apple gives you (and catching up quickly). so i would also recommend ubuntu to Mac fans who have some spare x86 hardware and want to run something nicer than windows on it.

Every time I try to post I have to pass the idiot-exclusion test. Is this because I didn’t log in first?

I don’t want to gum up the page, but Venice, you have changed your email address and I don’t know how to get in touch with you. CQ CQ CQ

some background for those who either don’t know jesse andersson or don’t know what he’s been up to lately:

jesse is an old high school friend of many of us. he has a strange and wonderful mind. for the last couple years, he’s been working as a trucker. driving back and forth across the country by himself with no one to talk to. lately, he’s taken to using his free nights and weekend minutes and leaving long messages on Venice’s voicemail just rambling on about whatever’s on his mind while he drives. she played some for me that she’d saved and they’re hilarious. i decided that i would be doing the world a disservice if i didn’t figure out some way to share.

luckily this whole “podcasting” thing’s been sweeping the blogging world lately and, while i’ve never had much interest in it, i realized that it’s ideal for jesse. so we took the liberty of creating a blogspot blog and an audioblog.com account for jesse and gave him the info. they have a feature where you can just call a number and leave a message and it turns it into an mp3 and posts it to a blog for you. so now he can post from the road with his cellphone and the whole world can share the amusement.

the site we setup is http://truckertroll.blogspot.com/

(he has a “troll” character and voice that he’s been working on. apparently it’s part of some scheme of eventually recording an audiobook or something. you’ll need to know that to make any sense of the first post and why he’s speaking with a british accent.)

i did this about a year ago but forgot to really mention it to anyone. now, there seems to be a renewed interest in all things javascript/dhtml, so maybe someone will find it useful. it’s basically just a little javascript hack that makes it so users can dynamically resize a textarea on a page. it works in every modern browser i’ve tried it in and degrades gracefully to a plain old textarea in any browser that doesn’t support it or has javascript disabled.

i’m trying to make a point of sharing more of these little tricks with the world.

the script uses a drag and drop implementation from elsewhere. i’m not crazy about it, but i wasn’t about to write my own. at some point though, i’d like to remove the little bit of javascript in the page that it requires to make it more in line with the idea of unobtrusive javascript. that will probably require modifying the drag + drop library though, or implementing the parts of it that i need on my own.

i’m also really interested in taking this technique and turning it into a greasemonkey script so i can resize the textareas on any page on the web.

i’ve spent the entire day catching up on email and RSS feeds after my trip to austin and tucson last week.

austin to see lani and for the yearly pilgrimage to SXSW to eat, drink, and geek out with the web elite. i reconnected with most of the people i met last year and met many more new people too. i know i met at least 58 people.

i had planned on printing out a whole mess of mfr stickers to hand out to people and generally coat austin with, but i was too much of a slacker to get that done in time. so the night before i left new york i got a bunch of colored 3x5 index cards, some fresh sharpie markers, and drew a bunch of robots. like this guy. about 20 different robot designs, repeating some on different colored cards. 60 cards in all. on the back i put my contact info. like business cards but much more personal and much cooler. everytime i met someone i gave them a robot (when i remembered at least). after the conference, i had 2 robots left. hence, i met at least 58 people.

all in all a good conference. no house fires this year, so i think that makes it pretty successful.

while i was in austin, my parents were in tucson visiting my grandparents and uncle, so i decided to head over there for a few days too since i was in the neighborhood. i haven’t been to tucson since i was in 5th grade and i hadn’t seen the arizona branch of my extended family for quite a few years, so that was good to get in. at SXSW, Molly found out that i was going to be in tucson, where she lives, and insisted that we meet up for dinner. so on thursday night (St. Patrick’s day apparently), my parents and i had some margaritas and grub with her. Molly’s always fun and my parents had been spending a lot of time cooped up in the RV park where my grandparents live so i think they really enjoyed having someone new to talk to for a bit.

the rest of my time in tucson was spent visiting the relatives, seeing various sights, and soaking in the warm weather.

getting back to new york yesterday was the real nightmare of the trip. i’d planned things so that i’d be getting into laguardia at 11pm which, taking the m60 bus, would have me back in my apartment by midnight. my flight from tucson to dallas was delayed long enough that i missed my connection to laguardia. the only other flight to LGA that night was solidly overbooked so they offered me a choice of a later flight to Newark, or a flight to LGA early the next morning. this was possibly the worst choice i’ve ever been offered. worse than the last election. arriving in Newark in the middle of the night or spending a night in Dallas? well, when it comes down to it, Newark is the lesser of those two evils so off i went. we landed in NJ around 12:30. the airport shuttle was running slow so i couldn’t get to the NJ Transit terminal in time to catch the 12:44 or 12:56 trains into manhattan. had to wait for the 1:30. all in all, i finally made it back to my apartment around 2:30. i’m fairly used to that kind of thing flying standby all the time, but this time, i was worried about all the spring break kids making it hard to get anywhere standby so i actually paid a bunch of money for a real ticket. so color me extra annoyed.

two days in the city, and i’ll be off to DC for pycon. then, maybe, some rest.

It’s been a long time since I was really into reading for the “fun” of it…probably like early high school…anyway, I’ve been reading All the Names by Jose Saramago, and I must say it’s quite enjoyable. I read his Blindness a couple years ago and was quite impressed…he’s a great example of contemporary literature that doesn’t suck (probably one reason he won the Nobel in ’98)…his style takes a bit of getting used to (he doesn’t believe in quotation marks…or identifying who is speaking…), but it’s incredibly difficult to pull yourself away from one of his stories…