Month: December 2002

An ingenious and elegant thing

Jon Udell: LibraryLookup homepage

If your local public (or college) library is one of these Innovative, Voyager, iPac, or DRA Web-enabled libraries, find your library on the list and drag its link to your browser’s link toolbar.

[ . . . ]

After you’ve “installed” your bookmarklet in this way, you can look up books at your local library. Let’s say you’re on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book’s info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results — see tips below.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library’s lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result.

This is is very clever, and since I belong to two iPac-using libraries, it’s twice as cool for me.

It makes me think I could do this to make affiliated links for Amazon a lot less painful.

For some reason, when I first tried it, it didn’t work until I replaced the encoded spaces (the %20 characters) with spaces. This morning, it works fine. Wasted the author’s time, I’m afraid, but I found that replacing “spl” with “kcls” makes the King County Library System just as accessible.


javascript:var%20re=/[\/-](\d{9,9}[\dX])|isbn=(\d{9,9}[\dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true)
{var%20isbn=RegExp.$1;if(isbn.length==0){isbn=RegExp.$2};
void(win=window.open(‘http://ipac.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?
index=ISBN&term=’+isbn,’KCLS LibraryLookup’,’scrollbars=1,resizable=1,width=575,height=500′))};

analog-> digital discoveries

Google Search: U2-3 Boy/Girl

I have a copy of this first U2 release from before they were signed. According to this page, I have the second pressing.

The sound is a more raw version of “Boy.” Interesting for collectors and fans, and I note from my Googling that the otherwise unpublished track (Boy/Girl) gets played in their shows pretty often. If you’ve seen them a few times, you may have heard it.

Wonder what else I’ll find?

More on how this not-so-rarity came to be here.

solved my cd burning/coaster making problem

I had some problems with cdrecord making audio CDs and some helpful person on the FreeBSD-questions list suggested I use cdrdao(1) instead. Well, that turned out to be the solution. I did try using ATAPICAM and cdrecord with an IDE burner I had on hand, but it doesn’t seem to be able to write (good thing it didn’t cost anything, though perhaps I see why).

The biggest problem I had with cdrdao was the need for a TOC file and the correct syntax. Turns out there are some samples in the distribution’s source files. They don’t work for me (you can’t specify a driver as I need to do, just a device, and the device is expressed in a linux-ish style), but it’s often easier to work from something that’s broken than to start from scratch.

It’s basic as can be, but it saves me from trying to remember this stuff, and isn’t that what scripts are all about?

[/usr/home/paul/bin]:: more wav2toc.sh
#!/bin/sh
# usage: $0 <dir where wavs are stored>
DIR=$1
TOCFILE=`basename $1`.toc

echo CD_DA > ${TOCFILE}
echo >> ${TOCFILE}
for i in ${DIR}/*.wav
do echo TRACK AUDIO >> ${TOCFILE}
echo PREGAP 0:1:0 >> ${TOCFILE}
echo FILE “$i” 0 >> ${TOCFILE}
echo >> ${TOCFILE}
done
echo File ${TOCFILE} written

Running with a path grabs all the WAV files, creates a file based on the basename of the path, then writes out all the particulars.

(paul@red.paulbeard.org)-(09:18 PM / Thu Dec 26)
[/usr/home/paul/bin]:: ./wav2toc.sh ~/cdimages/That_Summer
File That_Summer.toc written
(paul@red.paulbeard.org)-(09:20 PM / Thu Dec 26)
[/usr/home/paul/bin]:: more That_Summer.toc
CD_DA

TRACK AUDIO
PREGAP 0:1:0
FILE “/usr/home/paul/cdimages/That_Summer/new.wav” 0

TRACK AUDIO
PREGAP 0:1:0
FILE “/usr/home/paul/cdimages/That_Summer/side_1.wav” 0

TRACK AUDIO
PREGAP 0:1:0
FILE “/usr/home/paul/cdimages/That_Summer/side_2.wav” 0

Dunno if it will be useful to anyone (like anyone else is converting vinyl LPs to CDs) . . . .

and the incantation for cdrdao is as follows: I need to specify a driver for this unit (it’s branded as a Pinnacle CDR 5040S and is allegedly supported by cdrecord as a workalike for a similar unit).

sudo cdrdao write –eject –device 0,1,0 –driver teac-cdr55 toc

hmm, more than a kernel of truth to this

onfocus.com : free to the public

For many jobs I’ve applied for, these general knowledge skills like application design and user experience design rarely come up. In fact, I’ve often had to fill out a grid of numbers: years of experience with given technologies. I imagine they take these grids and input them into a computer, calculating scores for all applicants. I know it’s not that cut and dried in reality, but when programmers are hiring programmers it makes sense that they’d come up with an algorithm so they don’t personally have to focus on the task.

It’s not the programmers of technical folks who try to pigeonhole you: it’s the HR types who don’t know the technology and what skills are transferable. If you know C/C++, the various scripting languages or java would be easily grokkable (not so going the other way): the HR person reviewing resumes against job descriptions is going to pass on someone who doesn’t have the magic buzzwords on their application.

he’s right about this

bbum’s rants, code & references : bbum’s rants, code & references

Do not ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, store prefs in the app folder. It is a bad, bad idea no matter what way you look at it. It is just lazy. There are places to store writable stuff that are well documented and well convered in this thread. In the app wrapper is NOT ONE OF THEM.

Almost as annoying applications that insist on traveling in an enclosing folder (Mozilla, Archipelago). And I note that Archipelago stores its user prefs in whatever folder it’s in. If you take it out of its folder and put it in Applications, you get a prefs file at the same level. On a multiuser system, whose prefs are they? And there’s account information in there: how secure is that?

moving toward the light

The Seattle Times: Northwest Life

This weekend is the darkest of the dark days of winter, in a region that shares poster-child status with Scotland for Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s what travel books mean when they say about Seattle: “Overcast days and long winter nights have long made the city a haven for moviegoers and book readers.”

The shortest day today. The toughest part of winter looms ahead. It doesn’t feel like the days are drawing out until March or so which is a big reason why everyone goes to Arizona or Hawaii in February.

Firewire 0, USB 1

I was hoping to download some video from my sister-in-law’s Sony Handycam and play with it in iMovie. But as I sat down to do it, I realized it didn’t have a FireWire port (or I.Link in Sony parlance). And to make matters more frustrating, the USB connector was a mini-B5, ie, not the A or B you would see in everyday life. So I was foiled.

But I was interested to see that Sony had removed Firewire from their newer cameras in favor of USB: USB ports have been standard on PCs for 5 years and Firewire is still an option. Obviously, Sony isn’t waiting for Firewire to be as ubiquitous as USB.