Another stupid IE quirk
Can’t edit post categories in IE 6. Worked fine in Firefox last night. Categories show up fine for new posts.
Dumb dumb dumb.
Think I may install a Wiki tonight to run my FAQ and wishlist.
Technology
Whoops
Patched my version of WordPress, forgot the kids. Will do that tomorrow.
Have to think about creating flickr accounts for them. Or finding some really, really good Gallery hacks, but man Flickr has blown me away.
Except I went and used all my bandwidth this month. Whoops, need to blog pictures this weekend still.
Test Post from Gaming Party – January 03
Let’s see if this flickr thing is working and embarass some folks.
Upgrade Complete
What started as a small project finished 2+ hours later with great results.
Started with getting the domain (MovieTuesday.com setup and hosted on silwenae.com.
That has had me thinking about the engine required to power it, and WordPress has a small security update out. Installed that here on the blog, and then installed the Kubrick template as the style I was using wasn’t doing that much for me. I dig Kubrick, it even comes with the Photoshop files to add the header picture, we’ll have to see if the Gimp can open those. If not, the readme has the file dimesnions, but I’m not much of an artist anyway. I would like to get links along the bottom of the header picture like the author used.
We (Kelly had to help me) spent a half hour trying to update my links in the sidebar, had to flesh out some PHP errors, but in the end it’s working, which gives me hope for the other things I want to add (Random photo’s, wishlist, desktop screenshot, now reading and listening, list goes on…).
And last but definitely not least, I’ve strugged over the last month with my former blog running B2evolution to get the XML / RSS output to be XML compliant so WordPress would import all my old posts.
Upgrading my old blog installation to the latest and greatest of B2Evo always resulted in database errors. I must have gone through that half a dozen times the last time I tried a month ago, and the kicker was whatever error the database schema encountered, I wasn’t able to delete the database when done. Tried again tonight, no luck. Being the smart feller I am, I installed the second latest verions of B2Evo, upgraded, and what do you know, the import took! It only took the last 5 entries I had done last November, spent 5 to 10 minutes figuring out how to get all posts to show, imported again and the magic box worked.
I’m guessing there were about 70 posts from the old blog from Jan ’03 to Nov ’03. I’ll need to go back through them over time and assign them categories, they’re all in the General category at the moment. The other odd thing is the links don’t look like they worked when scanning the posts (pick a month) – but if you actually click a post for the details, the links did work. So if I’m really motivated, I can fix those too through the edit portion.
I’m just happy it’s finally imported! Even if I had a huge break between posting, I have my evil company posts, my rants on radio (with the Rev105 tribute). EFF support way back when, and some early looks at Howard Dean.
In other site news, I registered for a Flickr account. I may try using that to photo blog the gaming party this weekend in Chicago. I’m uploading the Jan ’03 LAN Party pictures as we speak to try it out.
My Music
So I have a lot of music. With over 700 CDs ripped, and some other misc. music, it’s quite a bear to manage it all.
For the last few years, I’ve used Netjuke on my Linux server. During the upgrade process this past spring, I put my music on two seperate hard drives, seperate from the third which holds the OS. What I love about Netjuke is that it’s database driven, making it very easy to search, and a nice web interface, that is semi-skinnable. It’s also GPL.
The downside is that Netjuke 2.0 has been in development for almost (or just over?) a year. Netjuke 1 was released in Aug. ’03, and no updates since. Netjuke 2.0 development has been quiet for almost 6 months, with no updates, and the CVS is unusable. And there is talk that it will be propietary, not GPL, which doesn’t make me happy.
I’ve been looking at other projects, first Andromeda, which is a PHP script that is not database driven. I had used Andromeda before Netjuke, and purchased it again this past spring when I had some installation problems with Netjuke 1.0, but still wasn’t happy with it.
On the Netjuke forums, I came across Jinzora, which looks similar to Andromeda, but has more functionality through PHP scripting. Features include ID3 tagging, server side playback (which Netjuke can do kind of), file downloading, RSS feeds, and a slim version for adding via an iframe.
I still have some questions that the FAQ, Wiki and forums didn’t answer around multiple directories (I have my Ogg and MP3 files in seperate directories, but those directories have identical artists, but different albums).
I still have some work to do to finish cleaning up some ID3 tags, and getting some newer music on the site and syncing it all up, but this is another project to add to my list. I still have to figure out why the ID3 tags for some live Dave Mathews stuff isn’t working in Netjuke too.
In addition, I need to get a linux box up with a sufficiently big enough hard drive so I can rsync nightly or weekly to back it all up. My Mirra won’t back up a network drive, and I had mapped my music directories on my linux box over Samba to my extra Windows box hoping it would. Dammit.
Speaking of music, I need to find out how Windows serving works. A while back I received Omnifi for the car and my home receiver. While pretty cool to transfer my music to my car’s hard drive, the car version was way to sensitive and doesn’t work. I still have the set top box hooked up to my home theater, and that works streaming from my extra Windows box where I have some of my music duplicated from my server. The downside is that Omnifi uses software to manage your music collection called SimpleCenter. This is one of the worst designed music interfaces ever created. The one neat feature it has is “Watch Folders” where you point it towards your music folder, and it automatically notices when you add music to that folder and adds it to your collection. It does not support Ogg, but does support Rhapsody and some internet music stations.
I had purchased The Killers new CD, ripped it to MP3 (bleh) and put it on my Windows box. Firing up the Omnifi, lo and behold I see a Musicmatch server on it – sure enough, from my Linksys boombox installation, Musicmatch has the identical ability that SimpleCenter, including watch folders, and what not. So I import all the music on that Windows box into MusicMatch, and can use that on my Omnifi. From managing my music on my PC, I prefer the MusicMatch interface – it’s not my favorite either, but it has some better features built-in including ID3 tagging, and the interface is cleaner to use, but it has too many advanced features to get you to buy crap.
So the questions becomes what is the SDK that they’re using – terminology is identical (Watch Folders, etc) and what would it take to get it ported to Linux. If I could have my whole collection on my server serving my house (with the exception of Ogg dammit, and I’m not re-encoding that stuff), I would be golden.
So much work, so little time.
Mark Cuban and I have things in common
Who would have known that Mark Cuban and I have multiple things in common?
No, we both don’t own basketball teams. (I’d buy an NFL team first!)
Mark Cuban was in the news last week for donating $100,000 to the EFF to fight the INDUCE Act. It appears to be working, as INDUCE is dead for the rest of this year.
Oh, and we’re on some mailing list together.
Go Go EFF!
The EFF is suing the FCC over the Broadcast Flag.
The brief argues that the FCC has no authority to regulate digital TV sets and other digital devices unless specifically instructed to do so by Congress. While the FCC does have jurisdiction over TV transmissions, transmissions are not at issue here. The broadcast flag limits the way digital material can be used after the broadcast has already been received. “Bowing to a group of copyright holders led by the MPAA, the FCC promulgated a rule drafted by those corporate interests that will dictate design aspects of a vast array of consumer electronics – televisions, DVD recorders, TiVos, digital VCRs, iPods, and cell phones – for years to come,” the brief reads.
ALA legislative counsel Miriam M. Nisbet said, “Two years ago Congress passed a law allowing for use of copyrighted works for distance education. Yet now the FCC through the broadcast flag would prevent schools from using an entire category of those works — high definition television programs — in distance education.”
Filing the brief along with EFF, PK, and the ALA were the Association of Research Libraries, American Association of Law Libraries, Medical Library Association, Special Libraries Association, Consumer Federation of America, and Consumers Union.
This is a great thing to see. and I’ll continue to publish other links that cover it, such as Boing Boing. Building a HDTV HTPC is a priority for me, along with getting the basement done. With pcHDTV’s out of stock on Linux HDTV cards, it will be interesting to see if I can get this done in time. I firmly believe the Broadcast Flag is an evil, evil thing. I want to record the shows I want to, when I want, without the government interfering.
Actions like this make me proud to be a Pioneer level member of the EFF.
Nice Design
I recently received a Linksys Wireless-B Music System. The device is pretty cool, and designed fairly well.
Using a wired or wireless connection, you can stream MP3 (no Ogg!) from your PC, internet radio and Rhapsody if you have a subscription.
Fairly good design, including ethernet, optical audio out or RCA out. Detachable speakers so you can even just hook it up to your stereo. But where the block is for all these outs, there’s still a fairly large hole – like where batteries should be.
So it’s a wireless music system – as long as AC power is plugged in. They couldn’t have found room for two C batteries? Of course, checking the wireless settings and streaming from a PC would probably drain them pretty quick, but still.
The speakers don’t even sound too bad.
So close, but yet so far in design.
More Firefox
Man, after using Firefox for months, and especially after Firefox PR1, it’s harder and harder to use IE.
Especially after installing extensions to make Firefox better. I can’t recommend the Adblock extension enough. While it’s a bit of a bear at first getting the ad blacklist created, it’s gorgeous to use on sites you surf a lot. (Basically you’ll see a little “Adblock” button on ads, click that and it blocks the ad on a per site basis. It also has the ability to do recursive directories or wildcards to block lots of stuff).
Between the extensions, built-in pop up blocking, and tabbed browsing, the best browser gets even better. I’ve also installed the Gmail checker, and Web Developer extensions.
Take back the web!
I’ve been meaning for a while to blog about Mozilla’s Firefox . A week or two back they released 1.0 Preview Release 1, and it blew away their previous version. The built-in RSS reader is worth it alone.
Tabbed browsing, built-in Google search bar, built-in pop-up blocking, and most of all, speed. This is true innovation in software development.
They had a goal of 1 million downloads in 10 days, and almost doubled that. Even a few friends of mine who aren’t aware or believe in the open source movement use Firefox. This is the kind of application that will educate people to the beauty of open source.