WeirdLooking.com: Michael Barton's Blog

I may have no convictions left

2006-10-17T07:12:45Z

I ordered some new guts for my computer tonight. Nothing top of the line, but my system is about 18 generations old and anything would be a nice upgrade. SOCKET 754 4EVER!

I almost broke down and bought a Core 2 Duo since they’ve edged out AMD’s processors in value, but the AM2 motherboards seem to have more bang for the buck in my price range (which is cheap). I wound up with one of them dual core Athlons. I did have to get over an emotional attachment to ATI – the Geforce 7 series is just too nice. It’s almost as bad as when I had to buy a Gateway monitor.

God forgive me if Apple ever comes out with affordable hardware.

happy birthday, xp installation

2006-09-09T21:59:58Z

psinfo:

System information for \\IDUNNO: Uptime: 5 days 5 hours 34 minutes 40 seconds Kernel version: Microsoft Windows XP, Uniprocessor Free Product type: Professional Product version: 5.1 Service pack: 2 Kernel build number: 2600 Registered organization: none Registered owner: Michael Barton Install date: 9/9/2002, 9:32:46 PM

Well XP installation, we’ve been together for four years now. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs together: three monitors, a few motherboards, some service packs… Remember that time your CPU heatsink fell off? Good times…

I know I installed Fedora over your brother and Ubuntu over your sister, but I’ll never reformat you.

Er…at least not until after I see what the OEM prices on Vista are like.

good deal!

2006-02-15T22:13:44Z

My Linux box died yesterday.
Don’t cry, it led a good life.
I could rebuild it, make it stronger, faster, better than it was before. But I don’t really have that kind of time.

So I went to a pawn shop, figuring I could pick up something cheap that would run Apache and PHP. I noticed that one machine, a 2.4 ghz P4 with 40 GB drive and all that, was marked strangely low at $150. The guy said it was marked down because they didn’t have the password. “It could probably be reset by taking the battery out or something,” he said. Bios passwords are a pain, but for the price, I figured I could take the time to get around it. “Actually,” he said, “I could probably knock off another $50 because it’s been sitting there a while.” SOLD!

So I started it up and… it booted to XP! They were just missing an XP password! We knows how to deal with those, don’t we precious?

Of course that’s just to see if the previous owners left anything interesting on it before I install Linux.

creating mp3 cds from itunes playlists

2006-01-02T04:19:42Z

As you may know, I’ve been thinking about MP3 CDs entirely too much lately. I quickly realized there was a problem. My music is currently formatted on the computer as such:
My Music\artist\album\song.mp3

This has worked fine so far because I can create playlists that group music independent of where it lives in the filesystem. iTunes can create a flat MP3 CD of a playlist, but that’s not ideal. What I’d like is to have a directory for each playlist on the CD, with the files from that playlist in them.

Luckily, iTunes keeps your playlists in an XML file. I hacked up something in C# to parse the XML and enumerate my playlists. Then I mucked around all afternoon trying to figure out the best way to tell the CD burner what to do with that list.

After toying with mkisofs and XP’s IMAPI CD burning interface, I figured out I can just copy the files to XP’s CD staging area. So I rewrote my program to create directories for each playlist in the staging area, then copy the files from those playlists into the directories. Once that’s done, XP’s wizard takes care of the burning. Tada!

This is the first thing I’ve written in C# beyond “Hello World!”, so if you look at it, please be gentle :P

CDSetup.cs

mp3s and drm

2005-12-30T22:23:01Z

My parents got me a CD/MP3/WMA receiver for my car for Christmas. I haven’t actually managed to get it installed or anything yet, but I’m beginning to wonder how exactly one could legally create a CD of MP3s.

The first option is to purchase CDs and rip them. This is not very cost-effective if I only want one song on a CD, and CDs are beginning to include DRM software (you can see Matt's rant on this). Online music stores are handy and more cost effective, but they all include DRM as well.

Any DRM scheme can be defeated (some trivially), but the DMCA makes that illegal in most cases. So I guess I’ll wind up breaking the law one way or another. I wonder how the legal penalties compare between pirating music and breaking the DMCA to fairly use songs I own a license for.

They should really wink at you when you buy one of these things.

atom enabled-ing

2005-12-19T07:38:12Z

Does anyone know of an Atom equivalent to <wfw:commentRss> and/or <slash:comments>?

I have read that this should work for comment threads, but no luck (at least not in my reader):
<link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="" />

assignment 7

2005-12-02T19:03:15Z

I’m unable to describe assignment 7, except to say I’m glad it’s 1998 again. True to the nature of the required scripts, I have made a Web page about my dog and also hosted it on geocities.

Most of my effort was put into re-implementing the “dragging clock” so that it works in both Firefox and IE. I haven’t gotten the dragging effect quite right, but I expect I will. I wasn’t sure what he meant by “a banner with scrolling text”, but I didn’t want to just write a poor man’s version of the marquee tag. So I made some text that moves along a sine wave — something I’m fairly sure marquees can’t do.

On the plus side, the semester is over in a week.