Ronald Prettyman

On the job hunt again, wish me luck. Hopefully I’ll find something full time but in this climate temporary is just fine too.

I was looking at my google results waiting for them to update after I saw the google bot’s come through. When I noticed on the old results it was picking up text off my flash video. I figured it was a text tip or something so I check and I never put them in the video which is really strange. Its amazing that it can do that. Crazy stuff. Here are some images to baffle the mind as to how it is after to read text in the form of an image inside of a flash video.

Just did a major update to my ampache server, and did some updates to the dns server that controls the hostname for said music server. Also discovered this little program called EasyTAG, wow, pretty kewl shit. Now all my random mp3 that never got proper tags will have them. Which is nice if it can help sort though half of the 400+ songs that as of today are being put into the unknown artist and album category.

So let me know if you experience any problems with the ampache server, or "Music Collection" section of the site. I’m finishing up an upgrade and updating the collection, adding a few new albums and updating all the tags and album art for the 4000+ collection, could take awhile, but at least I don’t have to do it by hand, that would just not happen, even I don’t have that kinda patience.

Some interesting information for you. This webserver is running on a Linux box, I believe its somewhere in Arizona. The ampache server is on a Sun Solaris 10(sparc64) machine it doesn’t have the uptime that the main  server does, but then again its amazing its up right now. A tree feel on our cable line the other day and its laying on the ground, I’m gonna call them tomorrow to try and get it fixed, I’m just amazed it didn’t snap.  Hopefully Comcast will be the one to fix it, I really don’t want to have to go out their and fuck with it. But I guess its as good a time as ever to pick up a chainsaw and learn how to reattach cables to utility poles.

Well its taking longer then I thought. I also found this program called, Picard, which work great at labeling tracks I didn’t even know I had anymore. The update is huge, around 28 gigs that need to parsed updated, reorganized, uploaded, imported, catalogued and then have album art downloaded. No easy task. But its mostly automated.

On a positive note I figured out a whole lot of tricks to parse files on the command line, extracting duplicates and merging directories. This would of taken years to do manually. Around 4500 tracks after getting rid of duplicates and facks. Around 20,000 files were erased and 10 times as many database entries were purged……

So I was reading earlier about a couple different people building or trying to build an operating system written almost entirely in Java. Now I heard some silly shit, but this has gotta be near the top. Now I could see writing a kernel that interpreted java natively. So that the OS could be written in java with the exception of the kernel. The only catch is these guys would have to know java better then sun. But it would be possible. Then all you’d need to do to port, in theory, is reopptimise the kernel for each architecture you want to run the O/S on. Be interesting to see. But it would be silly to write EVERYTHING in java cause so many things are already written in c, and c is just much much faster then java. A poor c program will almost alway out perform the most streamlined optimised java version.

Though looking at the last few releases from Microsoft I don’t think speed is on too many people’s minds these days. Its like we have this supper fast processor so now we get to be lazy and write sloopy code and bog down the system with crap code and over sized images, animation and video. poorly imlimented at that.

Note: It should be taken with a grain of salt, I’m a huge sun fan, but I really hate java. I mean really really hate java. Its slow, the interpreter the trash collector, the whole things sucks IMO. But it works for some ppl, just please, please, stop writing your web plugins in java, when java goes beyound a few 100 lines of code it just turns into slide shows and loading screens. Its not your network connection, its your CPU screaming at you to quick it with that shit.

Had some free time, so I redid quite a bit of the site.

• Added a new section for photo galleries.
• Finally setup the apache link, wrote a little script to check if the server is up and if it is it redirects.
• That means that you can get to my entire music collection (well its slighly out of date by maybe 10 albums at the moment).
• I setup the registration feature of ampache on the SunServer.
• Redid the flash intro page
• Added some new graphics
• Redid the background graphic
• Tweaked some settings in serendipity
• Cleaned up the server
• and Finally replaced Imeem with a local player. Tired of having my tracks deleted.

Why 64 is better then 32, 2^32 is 4gig or (4,294,967,296), while 2^64 is 16 peta or (1.84E+19).

Note btye metric is divisible by 1024 not 1000 like the metric of the measurement metric system

Not talking about an object here, more an object lesson? But any way this entry is more or less about trying to explain a directory structure and a shell to a windows user. Well its very complicated in deed. I have no idea how i got off so lucky just knowing. I don’t ever remember not. I remember how confusing it was that cd \ became cd / and that c: doesn’t excist and understand mounts and /etc/fstab. but really it was just learning that copy is cp, mv is move, mv is rename, cd, /dev, /usr, /bin, /proc, ls, grep, |, so on and so on. But I guess it is sorta complicated, but not really. Complicated, well I can’t say I’ve come….computer books, that fucking complicated, how they take a simple idea and turn it into rocket science. Its like they get paid by how many pages they fill. Here a notion, remove the fluff and enlarge font. lol. But really, computers are pretty simple when your talking about the english part of it, command, hi level languages, its the machine side thats fucking confusing. The way it compiles sinals to create music or video, or this font. Thats fucking complicated. Its amazing that the thing even works. To me at least.

The single most important thing I’ve learned was the behaviour of the tab key in bash. With out that I’d be lost, well not completely, but stuck memorizing more then just 2 or 3 letters till I eventually memorized it all though repetition. In which case I have memorized most of it, but I still find myself looking at man pages for the lesser used commands. But I do find that once I learn a new command chances are I’ll be using it alot, just can’t beat a good shell. I write more scripts with echo and vi then anything else. I mean I love a good ide, but most of the time vi and echo are just faster.

I just converted or added, kubuntu to my ubuntu setup, and I really like the new kde4.1. I played with it 6 months back or so, and didn’t like. But the latest version is really nice. Looks good feels good, lots of options and over complications. Kinda shit I like. If it ain’t broke, I’m doing something wrong. So yeah its not for the casual user, but then again thats what got me into linux in the first place, lack of a social life….. So yeah the reason is well, I wanted to do some gui programming, I started playing with GTK and overall I didn’t like it, played with QT for 5 minutes loved it. It has better support in my opinion. I’m all for open source, but a good proprietary backing is good for a products quality. I mean open source is great, and qt is opensource. But its a profitable api as well which probably add’s to its quality. I mean I love gnome too, kde and gnome are both my favorites out of the other options. I’ve played with all of em at one time or another and I’m sure the others have gotten better since my last glimpse….

But any way, I setup it up, and won’t you know sound was fucked up. I managed to restart pulseaudio and made it the definative option. I was trying to figure out were all the options in Amarok were. Thats when I released they were all incorporated into kde system panel. WOW thats fucking progress, one place to change to control my audio settings.

Any way I’ll leave you with some screenshots.