Grr. Windows. Grr.

February 14th, 2007

My windows laptop has developed the interesting personality flaw of (wow, they added some nice features to LJ) not letting me log in as myself. All other logins (i.e. administrator, owner, kayti) work fine. I’ve been told to back up my home directory (C:\Documents and Settings\Sheer) and blow away the directory, then recreate the user profile and restore the directory. Hopefully this will work.                          

p.s.

February 13th, 2007

On the WinAmp side, I’m a defector. While I will still probably use winamp when I want some visualization eye candy, for most audio playbacks I’m now using DeliPlayer 2. I got it because WinAmp wouldn’t open some of my favorite MODs, but it has a lot of good behavior that winamp doesn’t have. Unfortunately, it’s a audio only player, but it handles many things far better than WinAmp.

speaking of things I should have done a long time ago

February 13th, 2007

Long ago and far away, me and JL used to use the ‘at’ command to schedule alarms to wake ourselves. We both had disturbingly large stereos connected to our PCs, and the advantage was you had to remember waht the mp3 player command was called so you could do a killall on it – if you really wanted to torture yourself, you could log out afterwords and then you’d have to log in, run killall mpg123, by which time you were at least approximately awake.

Well, it’s been a while.

For a long time, I didn’t have any sort of audio at all hooked to my linux machine. THen it was doing audio in tasks so it had a sound card, but the only jack in use was the input, and I feared having the output driven to the mixer that was feeding the input because linux is not always the most reliable OS in its choice of volume levels on the audio hardware..

Lately, I’ve been staying up way too late.. I think I’m a touch manic.. and there’s no one to remind me to take my pills until Kayti wakes up at 6 am or so.

I think I have a solution – I need to work out some of the bugs – but..

I hooked the new file/mail server to the audio input of the machine next to it via a jumper (until I can get another RCA -> 1/8″ that is long enough to handle the task of hooking it up to the DJ mixer that drives my Mackies and the little Rokit speakers – I should really replace this thing with a Big Knob, it would be better suited to the task it’s doing, but anyway..)

Then, I submitted a job via at. Two, actually – one for a few minutes from the time I submitted, to test my syntax, and another for 3 am, to remind me to take my pills.

Then, I started thinking of other cool things I could do with a linux server hooked to my speakers.

The most obvious is a text command that will support some additional features. Below, I’ve typed out a example of behavior (I’ll write this command RSN – probably meaning never – but it would be fun):

audioslave>play some roxette next
OK
audioslave>stop playback
OK
audioslave>play some roxette now
OK
audioslave>play joyride now
OK

If only I didn’t have to work. 😉

Maybe some other night.

Apparently I’m just in a scripting mood

February 13th, 2007

I added another of my possibly-useful-to-people-elsewhere scripts to my code directory. At some point I should round up everything that I intended to share with the world, code wise, and dump it in there. If nothing else, if the wayback machine is working it means a free backup – I think. Or is that only for html?

Request

February 13th, 2007

Does anyone know of a really kick-ass free web-based calandering package?

One of those things you never needed to know

February 12th, 2007

mysql> select is_spam,avg(processing_time) from spam group by is_spam;
+———+———————-+
| is_spam | avg(processing_time) |
+———+———————-+
| 0 | 3.3227 |
| 1 | 3.9323 |
+———+———————-+

Addition to code directory

February 12th, 2007

For those of you with spamassassin and old maildirs lying around full of spam, we have a solution for you – sheer’s excessively overwritten but possibly still buggy spam cleaning script. Feel free to peruse/critique.. it’s in my code directory. If you want to use the optional mysql logging (helps speed things up when the process gets interrupted) you’ll also need to import spam.sql, included

Just for fun ..

February 12th, 2007

I’m thinking of writing a RIA application that is a interface to search engines like Google that makes it easier to search for things, bookmark results, keep results archived, etc.

Does anyone have any features that they’d want in a search engine front end? Is anyone else interested in such a application? It would run inside a browser as a .swf, although it would probably depend on a LAMP backend..

Techno and ST-mods

February 12th, 2007

I’m wondering how much of the format of modern dance/techno music is derivitave of the format of soundtracker modules.

ST-mods had, by default, a 64 line frame, and they liked to reuse patterns – ‘songs’ were built up by tying these 64 line frames togeather. By definition, you only had 4 channels of transmit to work with, and generally you were best off sampling a entire drum loop. The format begged to have modern dance music made out of it..

st-mods

February 12th, 2007

I had forgotten how much fun st-mods are.. I have quite the collection from my amiga days, and I found the place (finally) where I had backed up my Amiga’s hard drive to.