Year: 2010

Because somehow that makes a difference

June 15, 2010 5:27 pm

We were sitting on the couch reading this evening when there was a knock at the door.

I got up to answer it to find a representative from the Democratic Party. Having taken my name from the list of registered voters (upon which I’m registered as an independent, not to be confused with the American Independent party), which apparently, in California is recorded as “decline to state”. It would seem the assumption in California is that everyone is really part of a party, but some people just don’t like to say so publicly, so you get registered as “decline to state”.

Anyway, this representative from the Democratic Party just wanted to see if he could change my registration to be a Democrat if I didn’t mind. I don’t really see why this matters much, but after declining his offer to change my party he proceeded to tell me about the Republican candidate for governor, Meg Whitman, who was apparently not going to be good but not for any specific reason.

After rambling on for a bit I interrupted to again state I wasn’t interested in changing my party affiliation.

The funny part is, he left and I still know nothing about the Democratic candidate or any reason why I should vote for him or her, but I do know that the Republican candidate is Meg Whitman. I have a tip for the Democrats, that’s not great marketing. You had someone at my door talking to me and didn’t give me a single reason to vote for your candidate or even drop the name of your candidate. Instead you gave some vague generalities about how the other candidate was going to be bad but didn’t actually give any reasons why she’d be bad.

Not effective campaigning, at least to me. If anything you made me annoyed that your platform is apparently “the other candidate is bad.”

Happy Birthday to Me

June 12, 2010 9:56 pm

Wednesday was my birthday. It started out with an exciting day at work where I fixed bugs and watched Google lectures on Map Reduce.

I get to come home for lunch which is nice and when I came in the door I discovered Jess had decorated for me!IMGP2471

After work I went and used the gift certificate Jess gave me at Christmas for a massage. My shoulders and lower-back had been rather tweaked so getting those knots worked out was rather nice.

Then I went home and waited around for Jess to get home from cub scouts so we could go to dinner. We went to Black Angus steakhouse in Dublin which was pretty good. They sang a birthday song and brought a giant cookie-ma-jig which was very tasty.

Jess made me a lovely chocolate with chocolate frosting cake:IMGP2472After dinner I blew out candles, but we were both too full to eat any cake.

IMGP2477Jess ordered me a really nice frame to put my diplomas in. They’ve just been sitting in a box ever since I got them and I’ve been wanting to do something with them. So we put them in the frame and I took it to work and put it in my office which is nice. It’s almost like I’m a professional!

IMGP2497Thanks for all the birthday wishes and gifts. One year ago was a very different time. I was still in Provo, unmarried, still in grad school. Quite a change in my life from 24 to 25. It’s been a great year, here’s to another for 25 to 26.

Migrating from Songbird to Rhythmbox

June 4, 2010 4:40 pm

Once upon a time a company created Songbird. A music player designed to supplant all other music players and have Linux compatibility with iPod support. So we set Jess up with it and she started using it to organize and play her music. And it was good.

Mostly.

Turned out that the iPod support was flaky at best, but they were supposedly working on it. Then Songbird announced that they were dropping iPod support. A few months went by and then Songbird announced they were dropping Linux support. So now they’re just another music player in a sea of existing and mature players with nothing much to distinguish them from the rest.

So lacking iPod support and getting no further updates for the Linux version we needed a new solution for Jess’ music needs. However, she’d already gone through all the hassle of getting her music library setup just right in Songbird with all her ratings and playcounts and playlists. Since she has several thousand songs she didn’t want to try to redo all that by hand.

Being the master of computer science that I am I decided to take it upon myself to figure out how to automagically migrate her music out of Songbird and in to Rhythmbox. (When combined with Gtkpod these 2 make an acceptable and working solution for music management and iPod syncing.)

Unfortunately, for unknown reasons neither system used any kind of normal standard for storing their data. Well, that’s not entirely true. Most of the data is just fine. But file location data was a mess. Songbird stored it in some weird convoluted ascii encoding of unicode. Rhythmbox stores it in some randomly/partially url-encoded form of unicode. But lacking any clear documentation on the matter I had to reverse-engineer both formats. It was a pain.

But I did it! And now for your benefit I present my automagic music migrator to get you successfully and as painlessly as possible from Songbird to Rhythmbox.

I’m hosting this project on Github: http://github.com/kdickerson/Export-from-Songbird

Download the file songbird_to_rhythmbox.py file and then run it:

#python songbird_to_rhythmbox.py

or make it executable and run it:

#chmod +x songbird_to_rhythmbox.py
#./songbird_to_rhythmbox.py

It will ask you 2 questions. 1. What user you’d like to migrate (the default is the current user, so most people will just hit enter). and 2. If you would like the script to overwrite your existing rhythmbox library or just output the migration to a new file for you.

I wrote and used the script with Python 2.6.5

What this script WON’T do:
It won’t migrate playlists. Jess already had an export function for playlists in Songbird and exporting the playlists as M3Us and then importing to the migrated Rhythmbox worked with only a very small percentage of errors for files with special characters.

I thought about spending the time to automate migrating playlists, but I don’t feel like it. Rhythmbox stores playlists in another xml file and Songbird stores them in the same database as the other data, so you can use my script as a guide to write your own playlist migrator if you’d like.

Our day off

May 31, 2010 10:02 pm

Today we finally got around to renting a Rug Doctor and getting the carpets cleaned. Overall they hadn’t been too bad, but there were some spots near the kitchen. Several months ago I knocked the syrup bottle off the counter (or dropped it or something). Plastic bottle, no problem–except when it lands on the brittle plastic lid, which explodes sending syrup all over and then allowing syrup to pour forth all over the floor. Luckily most of it was on the tile, but some of the splashes from the explosion got on the carpet. We cleaned it up as best we could, but over time the spots held on to more and more dirt and grime.

So we finally got that all cleaned up. After moving the furniture off of the carpeting (as much as possible) and vacuuming it only took about an hour to do the actual carpet cleaning.

So then we got to leave and let the carpet dry as much as possible. So we went and got lunch and then went to the park. But the sun decided to go hide behind some clouds and with the wind it wasn’t very warm. So we went and watched Iron Man 2, which was about what you would expect from a summer action movie. It wouldn’t have been quite so ridiculous if they didn’t have two gaping problems: 1. When Ivan is wielding his light-saber-whips (for lack of a better term) why doesn’t anyone just shoot him? He’s not wearing any armor! Instead he gets to destroy things for awhile until Tony finally puts him down. Then cops show up with their guns and arrest the guy. 2. Tony’s multiple suits are designed for his body, which means they’ve been designed to use his implanted-into-chest power source. However, Roadie (however you spell it) is able to just hop into one of the suits without a problem.

Anyway, it was about what you’d expect from a summer action movie. Not as good as the first one though.

After the movie we came home to check on the carpet which was drying satisfactorily. So we lounged about for a bit and then went and got dinner. After dinner it was time to put the apartment back together. And here we are. An exciting day overall.

It’s really nice to have the carpets clean again.

Is copyright actually beneficial to society?

May 26, 2010 9:32 am

Copyright law is one of the areas that keeps coming up for scrutiny as more of our daily life occurs within a digital (and thus trivially copied and shared) world.

There is a TED talk by Johanna Blakley entitled “Lessons from fashion’s free culture” in which she discusses the lack of intellectual “property” protection in the fashion world (and in a myriad of other industries). It is very interesting and I highly recommend watching it. It’s only 15 minutes and is available on the TED website here: Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion’s free culture or on YouTube here: Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion’s free culture. She refers to a website for more information which has currently been Slashdotted (that’s slang for “collapsed under the strain of trying to serve up content to all of the Slashdot readers, like me, trying to view the site”). When it comes back to life it’s available at readytoshare.org.

One of her best points is that copyright is always touted as the protection which drives innovation and investment into an industry. She then shows a graphic comparing the gross sales of industries with no or little IP protection against gross sales of industries with lots of IP protection. It’s absolutely staggering how small industries with incredibly strong copyright protection like film, books, and music are when compared with industries with no copyright protection like clothing and food.

She has a quote from Stuart Weitzman, a shoe designer, who says that while the lack of copyright protection is frustrating it actually forces him to innovate far more than otherwise because he has to stay ahead of the curve before the cheaper knock-offs catch up rather than making one design. He also has to try to come up with designs that will be difficult for the cheap knock-offs to copy.

Sounds to me like he actually has to work, unlike one-hit-wonder music artists who live off of a single song for 30 years and feel entitled to never having to work again.

If you haven’t gone to watch the video you really should. As I said, it’s only 15 minutes and it’s very interesting.