Category: it could be called work

Albums in MP3 Format (Sun Jun 13 21:17:21 2004)

I spent some time cleaning up the lack of useful ID3 tags in my iTunes music collection. When you rip from vinyl to mp3, cddb won’t help you. (Caveat: there are some tools that purport to do all that for you: given an LP, they will look up the track names, break the tracks on timed boundaries, and write out your choice of file formats with well-formed names. I have never gotten any of it to work.)

Morbus’ script does a nice job of organizing all this stuff, but his collection is not at all like mine. I have quite a few single tracks and partial albums (on Led Zep’s ‘four symbols’ LP, “When the levee breaks” is the only decent track, as far as I’m concerned, so the I didn’t even rip the rest of it.)

I made a couple of small mods to the script and sent a diff to Morbus. One of them was the option to add your Amazon affiliate tag to the Comments field in the ID3 tags: this means when you run iTunes2HTML against your iTunes library, the HTML page would have your ID and you might pick up a buck or two.

Morbus rightly points out that hardcoding your affiliate ID in the ID3 tag links the file back to you. I hadn’t thought of that, but the modification I made makes it possible to preserve your anonymity: it allows you to populate the Comments field with URLs but the affiliate ID would be appended only when you run the iTunes2HTML script.

Political Correction: The White Man’s Burden:

Most of the people there to view the casket are in shorts and flip-flops — maybe they’re Kerry supporters or something, but if we ran the Capitol, we’d be handing out jackets and ties and turning people away if they had a visible panty line. And, you know, putting a flag on an article of clothing doesn’t make “nice.” Sheesh. At least they seem to have left their beer helmet hats at home.

A cheap shot? Maybe. Is it asking too much for someone in the viewing line to wear long pants and a shirt with buttons? I don’t think so, at least not if you’re there to respect the person. And the flag code — that thing that the flag burning amendment folks refer to without showing that they’ve ever read it — proscribes using the flag as clothing.

The Washington Monthly:

Guys who look like Wolfowitz think power is an aphrodisiac. Guys who look like Richard Gere know it isn’t.

Click through to the rest of the comment: she may be onto something.

Like it will help . . . . .

E-mail Bill O’Reilly

E-mail Bill O’Reilly and ask him to grant Media Matters for America President David Brock’s request to appear on The O’Reilly Factor to respond to right-wing attacks on philanthropist George Soros.

OREILLY@FOXNEWS.COM

Please cc:

mm-actions@mediamatters.org on your letter to let us know what you sent to O’Reilly

May 19: O’Reilly: George Soros is “a real sleazoid”

May 19: Brock asks O’Reilly for time to respond

June 1: O’Reilly smeared Soros… again

June 1: O’Reilly Factor guest smeared George Soros

June 3: O’Reilly doctored Soros quotation

June 3: O’Reilly Factor Denies MMFA Time to Discuss Soros Attacks

June 4: O’Reilly lied about Soros speech

[Media Matters for America]

I have been struggling with some brittleness in my FreeBSD installation here: the ports tools which have worked flawlessly have started breaking on me, for reasons I can’t work out. Usually, all that’s needed is to type portinstall archivers/rpm or portupgrade archivers/rpm4. Dependencies are looked up and built, the package database is updated, it all just works[tm].

But lately, I have been having to build ports by hand, making the dependencies as I go. Tedious.

In the course of this, I find some strange stuff: why on earth does a command-line packaging/archiving tool like rpm need the qt libraries?

Qt is a C++ toolkit for application development. It lets application developers target all major operating systems with a single application source code.

Qt provides a platform-independent API to all central platform functionality: GUI, database access, networking, file handling, etc. The Qt library encapsulates the different APIs of different operating systems, providing the application programmer with a single, common API for all operating systems. The native C APIs are encapsulated in a set of well-designed, fully object-oriented C++ classes.

Likewise, doxygen:

Doxygen is a documentation system for C and C++, Java, IDL and to some extent C# and PHP. It can generate an on-line class browser (in HTML) and/or an off-line
reference manual (in LaTeX/ps/pdf) from a set of documented source files. The documentation is extracted directly from the sources.

But there they are.
---> Installing 'rpm-4.0.4_2' from a port (archivers/rpm4)
---> Building '/opt/ports/archivers/rpm4'
===> Cleaning for libiconv-1.9.1_3
===> Cleaning for db3-3.3.11_1,1
===> Cleaning for doxygen-1.3.6
===> Cleaning for gettext-0.13.1_1
===> Cleaning for gmake-3.80_2
===> Cleaning for libtool-1.4.3_3
===> Cleaning for popt-1.6.4_2
===> Cleaning for gsed-4.0.9_1
===> Cleaning for qt-3.3.2_2
===> Cleaning for rpm-4.0.4_2


It doesn’t build anyway, so I can ask the maintainer.

Chad Dickerson @ InfoWorld has touched on a provocative question that is certain to raise hackles on IT managers (and vendors), especially if they fail to read beyond the headline.

Chad has written on the issue of IT as a commodity before: anyone who has worked on a project (as opposed to a “click here to install” installation) understands that while the components become more manageable or commoditized over time, gluing them together still requires some effort that the vendor frequently glosses over or handwaves away.
Continue reading “depends on what your definition of IT is”

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It:

The […] hypocrisy of the blame-the-culture crowd is that “normal Americans” . . . . don’t partake of the “secular” entertainment that is doing all this damage. In other words, the porn that led to prison abuse is all ghettoized in the blue states. The facts say otherwise. Phil Harvey, the president of the North Carolina-based Adam & Eve, one of the country’s largest suppliers of mail-order adult products, said in an interview last week that his business has “for years” been roughly the same per capita throughout the continental United States, with those Deep South bastions of the Bible Belt, Alabama and Mississippi, buying only 10 percent fewer sex toys and porn videos than everyone else. Even residents of the Cincinnati metropolitan area — home to Citizens for Community Values and famous for antismut battles over Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe — turned out to be slightly larger-than-average users of porn Web sites, according to a 2001 Nielsen Internet survey.

If late 20th Century porn is responsible for the Iraq prison scandals, explain the picture below the jump from August 1930.
Continue reading “Abu Ghraib scandal rooted in porn?”

Sit through the ad, if you’re not a member: it’s worth it.

Salon.com | Washington’s Chalabi nightmare:

Washington, which was just weeks ago in the grip of neoconservative orthodoxy and absolute belief in Bush’s inevitability and righteousness, is now in the throes of agonizing events and being ripped apart by investigations. Things fall apart; all that was hidden is revealed; all sacred exposed as profane: the military, loyal and lumbering, betrayed and embittered; the general in the field, Lt. Gen. Sanchez, disgraced and cashiered; and the most respected retired generals training their artillery on those who have ill-used the troops, still dying in the field; the intelligence agencies, a nautilus of chambers, abused and angry, its retired operatives plying their craft with the press corps, seeping dangerous truths; the press, hesitatingly and wobbly, investigating its own falsehoods; the neocons, publicly redoubling their passionate intensity, defending their hero and deceiver Chalabi, privately squabbling, anxiously awaiting the footsteps of FBI agents; Colin Powell, once the most acclaimed man in America, embarked on an endless quest to restore his reputation, damaged above all by his failure of nerve; everyone in the line of fire motioning toward the chain of command, spiraling upward and sideways, until the finger pointing in a phalanx is directed at the hollow crown.

Things fall apart? Passionate intensity? You doubtless remember where those come from . . .
Continue reading “Yeatsian imagery matched to Shakespearian tragedy”

Well, in spite of my steam-powered hardware, I can still cobble together some tracks and make a tune with GarageBand.

All sorts of time-wasting potential here . . . .

anyone can do this