Schinckel.net

I came across an interesting question today: Why doesn’t iTunes store all of the data about each time a song is played? And also, how much of the song was played? It should be easy to write a daemon that monitors iTunes, and writes this data to a database. This database can then be cross-referenced against the iTunes database for a comprehensive breakdown of when songs are played. You can then find all of the songs that you listen to at a certain time of day, or season, and so on. You can also have a ‘how-often-played’, but cross referencing the Date Added attribute with the Play Count and so on. I’ve already started to write this program, but it will likely be MacOS X only.

I got a comment to a post that had nothing to do with iTunes. Whilst it wasn’t a particularly helpful or nice comment, I thought maybe I can answer the question I think he’s asking. (Unless he’s talking about the iTunes Music Store counter that shows how many songs have been bought for the latest contest…). Wach time you finish playing a song, the Play Count field is incremented, and the Last Played date is updated. If you skip a song before listening to the entire track, neither of these are updated. There are some scripts around for MacOS AppleScript that will update a Play Count and Last Played if you listen to more than a certain amount of a track. I could also add the same feature to iTunes Rater. But I don’t really use Play Count and Last Played that often, anyway.

I’m still not able to post with ecto on Blogsome: some of the functionality is there, but I get an error on posting. I might try MarsEdit or something else and see if that works, as w.bloggar does, apparently. I’ve also stopped using Dvorak keyboard layouts, as it takes too long to learn to type, and I hate not being able to keep up with my thoughts.

I read about some guy’s aim to poach an egg. It’s much simpler than this: just boil some water in a saucepan, with a little white vinegar added. When boiling, stir the water gently and break the egg into the pan. Use a slotted spoon to keep the shape, and to remove the egg when done. When you get good at it, you can try more than one egg at a time. (Not many words here due to Dvorak layout.)

Back in the heady days of BeOS, I at one stage taught myself how to type reasonably well using a Dvorak keyboard. I’ve clearly forgotten most of it. This was typed (slowly) on a Dvorak layout. I am getting faster, and more accurate, though. Using the CLI program dvorak7min will get me back up to speed soon, I hope.

I cannot post via ecto, or any other offline client at the moment: Blogsome has disabled XMLRPC support, due to a security issue. Since they use Multi-User WordPress, there is not fix for this build as yet.

I had possibly the worst cup of coffee I’ve ever had the other night. “Le Bon”, in the southern (station) end of the Adelaide Railway Station Underpass, sells coffees for $2.20, which is much less than most other places. But, you do get what you pay for. This was worse than instant coffee. And, it was so hot it burned the crap out of my tongue. Even then, I could still tell just how putrid this was. By that stage, I was on the train, so I had to hold on to a full cup of woeful coffee for 20 minutes, and once I forgot just how bad it was and took a sip. Don’t ever buy coffee there. Ever.

There is a man who catches my train in the mornings who looks an awful lot like Mr. Bean. I don’t mean he looks a bit like Rowan Atkinson, he really has the Mr. Bean expression and all. Oh, and I’m sitting right across from him. If this damn Zire 31 had a camera I’d take a photo.

I had planned to create a GUI wrapper, perhaps in AppleScript Studio, for Apple’s Chapter Tool command line program. My application was going to have an interface very similar to QuickTime Player, but with an extra section where you entered data about the chapter(s). You would be able to scrub through the track, and find the place to insert the Chapter Marker: then you would have a list of Chapter Markers, and the ability to edit the location, and the attributes. I did a bit of stuff with Python’s XML handling features, enough to basically figure out how to write out the required XML basic structure, and I think I know how to do the attributes. What I cannot do is figure out how to get a QT viewer in the AppleScript Studio progam (or Interface Builder, actually). There seems to be some templates for PyObj-C applications, I may use one of those. Or, I might just make an application that controls/gets data from QuickTime Player (iTunes isn’t so good for this, as it requires files to be imported before playing them). Then, all it needs to do is look after the XML generation, and bingo, easy Chapters. Actually, I remember why I stopped: Chapter Tool would not work on my Mac.

There you go. Visit http://schinckel.net/software/, and then visit http://schinckel.net/software/acronymmerpy/ No difference, even though there is a page in acronymmerpy/ I’ll put this in the blogsome forums when I get a chance.