Finally finished a script a couple weekends ago to synchronize data between Amarok, Rhythmbox, and iTunes. I now use Amarok exclusively, and it’d been bugging me for a long time that my old metadata from multiple machines and multiple apps was locked away and unexploitable. So i fixed that, for myself at least. I harvest everything into a common format and populate a big ol database with everything. Then I merge all the metadata together (averaging and adding, whatever, where necessary).
The code is ugly for now, so no public release. I might clean it up some time if anybody else wants it. Just ask.
Back now. And married, too! Strangely enough, not much is different, with a few subtle exceptions:
- our kitchen is a bit more well-equipped from the wedding gifts
- I get to wake up every morning next to a beautiful woman
- our apartment is an absolute mess from all the moving boxes
- I suddenly have a little free time, because there’s no more wedding to plan
- I don’t have to say goodbye to Mindy at night any more.
The wedding turned out wonderfully, if a bit hectic (all the “usual” last-minute wedding preparations, plus the emotional strain, plus moving Mindy’s stuff into my apartment, plus the wonderful-but-tiring opportunity to host 6 out-of-country guests (bridesmaides, plus the parents-in-law, plus my sister-in-law-in-law (err, my brother-in-law’s wife… what’s the name of that relationship?) ). It was Mindy’s parents first time in the states, which meant it was the first time our parents met, and also the first time that I got an opportunity to really host them. That last bit was really good–the opportunity to host them. In the past, I had always been visitting them, which meant it was them driving me around, them treating me to good restaurants, them cooking for me. I find it hard, generally, to serve Taiwanese parents. (don’t misunderstand, the hard part is not in finding motivation to serve, but in getting them to let you serve them. From my ?? perspective, the parent-child relationship is so fixed that it’s almost awkward for them to receive care instead of giving care). However, now that they were on my home turf, heh… I finally got to treat them at restaurants, drive them around, cook for them. It was wonderful to be able to return the love, finally.
But man, that last week before the wedding was hectic.
More later–hopefully plenty of pictures, an itinerary of wine tasting (the blogosphere was disappointingly uninformative on good santa barbara vinyards to visit), and santa barbara food.
Cold-medicine induced altered mental-state yesterday gave me an interesting idea:
Right now all the mapping companies (mapquest, yahoo maps, google maps) use NavTeq to gather data. Once (if ever) cell phone usage data tied to GSM becomes public (a la MIT’s Mobile Landscape), I wonder if you can aggregate data of people going from point A to point B, and lookup solutions to the travelling salesman problem.
Similar to the concept of emergent garden paths in landscape architecture and the wisdom of crowds, let’s let public agreement decide the best way to go from one place to another.
What do you think?
More interesting reading:
Wikipedia on the Wisdom of Crowds
IAWiki on Emergent Architecture
A friend of mine’s recent hard drive catastrophe finally got me around to implementing a decent, cron’ed backup implementation for all the stuff I don’t store in my svn server (mp3s, photos, and other media just don’t change enough to merit the overhead of checking them into a VCS).
RSync would work well, you’d think… Except that I have all this stuff on a fat32 drive (for the rare boot back into windows). And RSync does NOT play well with fat32, and I’m finding.
mote@server1 /media $ rsync -av -e “ssh -l mote” server2:/fat32/data/media/test_dir /media/test_dir
receiving file list … done
created directory /media/test_dir
rsync: failed to set times on “/media/test_dir/test_dir”: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: mkstemp “/media/test_dir/test_dir/.1.txt.3FfWKE” failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: mkstemp “/media/test_dir/test_dir/.2.txt.IT6nr2″ failed: Operation not permitted (1)
rsync: failed to set times on “/media/test_dir/test_dir”: Operation not permitted (1)
sent 56 bytes received 212 bytes 21.44 bytes/sec
total size is 22 speedup is 0.08
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(1173)
Google brings up this blog entry dealing with similar troubles. It suggests some rsync workarounds, and looking into FullSync (supposedly rsync with a solution to the fat32 headaches) .
Unison (slick but crashy from what I hear) is also a possible option. (Feature comparison for rsync and unison)
UPDATE:
for a quick get-rsync-working thing, “rsync –rvt” works while “rsynv -av” don’t. It’s that damn “-a” that was causing the problems. I’ll still look into unison, though.
Some day, I need to go to SXSW–if only for the experience of being around so many creative nerds at the same time. I never see some of my friends so brimming over with ideas and vitality of life as when they come back from something like this…
In the mean time, i can live vicariously through my blogroll…
Someday I’d like to build a clock made from old-school nixie tubes. There’s something warm, reassuringly retro about these things. Like the comforting clicks of old keyboards when you juxtapose them with the cold feedbacklessness of touchscreen inputs. Slick and streamlined makes for professional and productive user interfaces, I’ll grant you… but there’s something soothing about these dinosaurs–soothing like the smell of old oil, sawdust, and electronics in your grandpa’s garage…
Anyways…
I’ll need to cultivate some quality electronics-hacking-skillz before I can attempt something like this.
Why is the world filled with so many things to learn?
Google image search for nixie clocks.
a recent mefi post suggests a wonderful google query.
This basically finds webcams that (un)intentionally publically broadcast on the internets.
It’s so weird to see slices of everyday life from remote corners of the world…
It’s so weird, how the internet mixes the public and the private. And what is it like for the new generation, that has grown up with the net like we grew up with calculators and Apple ][s?
Finally got down to it and installed a wiki.
MoinMoin was easy to config on Gentoo but a pain for Fedora Core 1. MediaWiki, in contrast, was a breeze to install on both. It feels like a little overkill for my needs (way too much cruft for a personal “offboard brain” with only one user), but at least it’s there now. I’ll look into customization later.
The only bad part is that all the page data seems to reside in mysql. That means no filesystem access for easy hacking (script-generated pages, or pages that scripts can read). Disappointing, because I was looking to hacking something similar to the app described in this page: a unix calendar-like script that takes a wiki page as input.
Time, time, time…
Edit:
A year later, I find MoinMoin has matured a bit and is now easier to install. It’s a lot less of a Heavyweight Bruiser, much more suited to my needs.
Just got Mozilla Calendar installed. Now, as of version 0.8, it can finally read Apple iCal format files, which is what I’d been waiting for. Looks nice and shiny, lots of promise. Still, there’s things that need to be done
- Import all the base holiday dates (Apple’s iCal library page has them)
- Write a script to import unix calendar events (has anyone done this yet? hello, lazyweb? (it won’t be that hard to do, but, hey, that’s why it’s called the lazyweb, right?)
- Get this to sync on machine at work (bleh, this will be a little harder)
- iCal-related links. The “studies” section has a lot of neat ideas
Looking for a good personal wiki. There are too many choices out there. Need something robust/fully featured enough to do what I need, and simple to install. Blog integration would be nice, as would facets/labels (a la del.icio.us and gmail).
