A Man and his Penguin

3 minutes ago, a bug existed in Blacklight2 which caused an error message to be printed if there was no PPP (Post-Process Plugin) specified.

2 minutes ago, I fixed it with one line:

if parameterString == "": raise Exception

I love Python.

Video IS WORKING in Blacklight2. That’s right - Blacklight2 is now in a properly usable state. I’ll continue to apply some love to it, but I envisage a release soon.

A funny thing happened at work today. It was just Linda and I working on the floor, and Michael, the rep from Emilia (cooking appliances), came in to set up a display of his products. Suddenly, it got really busy. As I was serving a customer, I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw the rep talking to some of the customers who were waiting.

When I had finished serving, I turned around and Michael was holding a calculator up to me. "That’s the cost price of a cooking package that these customers want to buy." I looked at him quizzically and he explained "They asked me about ceramic cooktops, and I showed them our brochure. I said that the Recommended Retail (Price) of this pack was $1200 and they’re interested in what the cash price would be."

I worked out a cash price of $1000 based on the figure displayed on the calculator screen, and we got the sale! The rep actually sold his own products directly to the customer!

A few minutes later, I was serving someone and Linda was having difficulty talking about air-conditioners to someone. She knows even less about air conditioners than I do (she asked me "This guy says he wants an inverter - what’s that?"). Not her forte. But I heard Michael talking to Linda’s customer about air-cons, and even knew the model numbers of the Conia air conditioners (not really a surprise; he worked as a Conia rep for a couple of years).

But something serious happened too. I got the cheapo courier bloke who we occasionally use to deliver a Samsung LCD, and then after work I went to the customer’s house to set it up. As soon as I turned it on, I noticed something awry - there were flickering pixels. It was dead on arrival. It’s very uncommon for a big-name TV to be a D.O.A, but this TV and the Sony TV last week, both delivered by the same guy, were both D.O.A.

Tomorrow is supposed to be my day off, but now I’ve got to organise a replacement TV, deliver it myself in the boss’ car, set it up, send back the old one, pick up a Conia TV from the shop, deliver it and set it up in another customer’s house, and then help someone else with their Panasonic DVD recorder. That’s a sizeable chunk of my day gone. Damn.

I had a nice productive evening, hacking around on Blacklight.

I added support for Flac as an input filetype - that’s basically the only major audio file that Sox doesn’t support! Conversion of audio files is now working perfectly. I also wrote the Easytag plugin, which opens Easytag to the correct directory on the Walkman once the conversion / copying process is done. Post-process plugins are now working perfectly.

So, what works:

1. Input and post-process plugins work, at least for audio (video not tested)
2. Input in FLAC format for audio files works - conversion goes off without a hitch, both stages (FLAC to WAV, WAV to MP3). Input in MP3 format works - files are simply copied to the Walkman. Other filetypes not tested yet, but presumed to work.
3. User is prompted for a foldername for their music files - the Walkman can deal with having all the MP3 files loose in the /MUSIC/ directory, but let’s be nice and organised. I will add code so the default foldername is whatever directory the source files are in, assuming it isn’t just "tmp" or "blacklight".
4. Once conversion occurs, the post-process plugin is run.

What notably hasn’t been tested:

1. VIDEO! (will give that a workout when I’m ready to do those Spice Girls music videos)
2. Exotic file formats for input - what can’t Sox convert? Also, non-FLAC formats have not been tested.

What is yet to do:

1. Check if Video works
2. Check if other file formats work
3. Write a simple DVD ripper acquire plugin. One that supports audio ripping would be cool.
4. Implement photo support (easy, I just don’t find any need for it myself)
5. Reverse-engineer playlists and add a GUI and support for it
6. Add Preferences dialog and hook it into the program.
7. Document the plugin interface and some foibles about the Walkmans.

Playlists take bottom priority, and photos take second-bottom priority.

——–
In other news, Kdenlive works on my computer, and I used it for some basic editing. It involved clipping a video, putting a fade-in on it, and a text title for the first few seconds. Then I output it to MPEG-4 format. It worked very well; I’m impressed!

From the vault of Bad Things To Do.

I’ve been trying to install Kdenlive lately. There’s a dependency problem in the version from Trevino’s repos - it depends on libfreetype6 (>=2.3.5) but Feisty only has 2.2.1 or something like that. I tried compiling from source, but there were some fatal errors during build.

So my next idea was to compile libfreetype 2.3.5 and use Checkinstall to install it with the correct name and version, so that the Trevino dependency would resolve and I could install Kdenlive. So I tried that - and promptly found that I could no longer start graphical programs!

I Control-Alt-F1′ed to the terminal, and was trying to think of solutions. Apt-get install -f proposed a dumb solution - to get rid of libfreetype6-dev, which wouldn’t have done anything.

I was thinking along the lines of "reinstall libfreetype6", but that would likely only reinstall the faulty version. So I thought "Maybe I should remove the .deb package I just created", but then it might complain that it couldn’t reinstall libfreetype6 because it couldn’t find the package! (and then I’d really be up shit creek).

Luckily, Aptitude saved the day, and from the textual-graphical mode it came up with the correct solution - downgrade libfreetype6 to the Ubuntu version. It also thought it would be fun to reinstall Gaim and remove Exaile, but at least it got me out of a tight spot.

Now, I’m sure there would have been other solutions, such as locking the libfreetype6 package to the older version and then running apt-get install -f; but I couldn’t be bothered to look up how to do that on the command line. But the point is that I’m now back to my fully-functional desktop, thanks to Aptitude

I’m watching the DVD of the Spice Girls Greatest Hits. I saw the video for "Headlines" yesterday. It strikes me how the Headlines video is comparatively boring and uninspired.

Wannabe: Done in one take (actually not, but it’s been made to look that way)
Say You’ll Be There: Sci-fi theme with the Girls taking on characters (Geri was "Trixie Firecracker", Emma was "Kung-Fu Candy" etc) and throwing various metallic weapons.
2 Become One: Everything going in superspeed in the background
Mama: Home videos - some presumably true, some faked.
Who Do You Think You Are: Nothing really unusual about this one
Spice Up Your Life: Bleak ("disutopian"?) sci-fi theme where the Spice Girls are the dominant force of the world. Trivia: one of the things you see on the video screen, "Spice Wars", was actually an anti-Spice-Girls animation created by a Spice hater
Too Much: Each of the girls is in a totally different movie genre - Mel B from sci-fi, Emma is supernatural, Mel C from Kung-Fu movies, Geri from WW2 period, Victoria from spy films (?). Plus clips from their own movie. Visually very striking - lightning, explosions, etc.
Stop: Not very striking or memorable, except that it seems to be set in the 1960s in a small town. They go to a county fair.
Viva Forever: The most striking and memorable video the Spice Girls have done - probably one of the most memorable and puzzling of all time. It has a fairytale theme with two children going on an adventure. Check it out on Youtube if you haven’t seen it - it’s a beautiful piece of video art. I can’t really describe it any further, because the story is puzzling and slightly disturbing. Trivia: Debate raged for years as to whether it was two girls, or a girl and a boy. I’m sure Spice fans are still debating whether the Spice fairies in the video were good or evil.
Goodbye: Mel B wearing a strange hat is interesting enough :-)  But seriously, the Spice Girls go into this mansion and discover frozen people inside. Toward the end of the song, the people start thawing and coming back to life. It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s another memorable video.
Let Love Lead The Way: Each of the Girls represent elements. But they really just sing the song.
Holler: More of the "elements" theme, but really just singing and dancing.
Headlines: You just see them singing the song. Alarmingly, you only see them together in the same shot for the first 20 seconds of the video - once the song kicks in, they are only ever shown individually or in twos. Makes it look sorta like the launch party for Forever :-)  I shouldn’t laugh, as it’s not exactly inspiring confidence in their ability to stay together if they barely even appear together in the video.

But you see what I mean? So many Spice Girls music videos were interesting, with more going on than just the song. Headlines is the third video in a row which hasn’t had anything going on *but* the song. And I’ve now heard the song "Voodoo" - first impressions are that I don’t like it.

Oh, and I can’t access the damn extended "Golden Ticket" part of the CD on Linux. I should probably boot up into Windows. (Co-incidence that "Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory" was on TV last night?)

I’m watching the DVD of the Spice Girls Greatest Hits. I saw the video for "Headlines" yesterday. It strikes me how the Headlines video is comparatively boring and uninspired.

Wannabe: Done in one take (actually not, but it’s been made to look that way)
Say You’ll Be There: Sci-fi theme with the Girls taking on characters (Geri was "Trixie Firecracker", Emma was "Kung-Fu Candy" etc) and throwing various metallic weapons.
2 Become One: Everything going in superspeed in the background
Mama: Home videos - some presumably true, some faked.
Who Do You Think You Are: Nothing really unusual about this one
Spice Up Your Life: Bleak ("disutopian"?) sci-fi theme where the Spice Girls are the dominant force of the world. Trivia: one of the things you see on the video screen, "Spice Wars", was actually an anti-Spice-Girls animation created by a Spice hater
Too Much: Each of the girls is in a totally different movie genre - Mel B from sci-fi, Emma is supernatural, Mel C from Kung-Fu movies, Geri from WW2 period, Victoria from spy films (?). Plus clips from their own movie. Visually very striking - lightning, explosions, etc.
Stop: Not very striking or memorable, except that it seems to be set in the 1960s in a small town. They go to a county fair.
Viva Forever: The most striking and memorable video the Spice Girls have done - probably one of the most memorable and puzzling of all time. It has a fairytale theme with two children going on an adventure. Check it out on Youtube if you haven’t seen it - it’s a beautiful piece of video art. I can’t really describe it any further, because the story is puzzling and slightly disturbing. Trivia: Debate raged for years as to whether it was two girls, or a girl and a boy. I’m sure Spice fans are still debating whether the Spice fairies in the video were good or evil.
Goodbye: Mel B wearing a strange hat is interesting enough :-)  But seriously, the Spice Girls go into this mansion and discover frozen people inside. Toward the end of the song, the people start thawing and coming back to life. It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s another memorable video.
Let Love Lead The Way: Each of the Girls represent elements. But they really just sing the song.
Holler: More of the "elements" theme, but really just singing and dancing.
Headlines: You just see them singing the song. Alarmingly, you only see them together in the same shot for the first 20 seconds of the video - once the song kicks in, they are only ever shown individually or in twos. Makes it look sorta like the launch party for Forever :-)  I shouldn’t laugh, as it’s not exactly inspiring confidence in their ability to stay together if they barely even appear together in the video.

But you see what I mean? So many Spice Girls music videos were interesting, with more going on than just the song. Headlines is the third video in a row which hasn’t had anything going on *but* the song. And I’ve now heard the song "Voodoo" - first impressions are that I don’t like it.

Oh, and I can’t access the damn extended "Golden Ticket" part of the CD on Linux. I should probably boot up into Windows. (Co-incidence that "Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory" was on TV last night?)

I just read on the Spice Girls website that their Greatest Hits album has been released in Australia - it was released yesterday (I was working yesterday).

So it looks like I’ll be going into town for the 2nd time this week to buy the album!

(Reminder to self: Join up with the other Spice fans online again so I can keep properly up-to-date).

Well, in reality I don’t know exactly the Spice Girls’ position on DRM, if they’re even aware that it exists.

But you can now buy the Spice Girls’ Greatest Hits album from their website; at 320kbps MP3! That’s right, no DRM, no conversion necessary! I know that the Girls are with EMI, so even on the iTunes Music Store it wouldn’t have DRM, but it’s a pleasant surprise for them to be using MP3, as many MP3 players don’t play AAC. And the high bitrate is excellent.

Then, the Spice Girls have very loyal fans who will buy the album and won’t pirate it. That’s something you can’t say about the fans of many other groups.

In other news, Blacklight2 is coming along nicely. I removed quite a few bugs and successfully used it to copy existing MP3s to my MP3 player. I also added the (completely untested) Post-Process Plugin (PPP) support. Maybe later today I will write an "EasyTag" PPP, which invokes the EasyTag id3 tagger. And I’ll have to test the other functions of Blacklight2.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but I solved the synchronisation bug in the original Blacklight, and uploaded the new version to Sourceforge. I’m still using Blacklight1 to encode my video files until Blacklight2 is tested and ready.

Well, in reality I don’t know exactly the Spice Girls’ position on DRM, if they’re even aware that it exists.

But you can now buy the Spice Girls’ Greatest Hits album from their website; at 320kbps MP3! That’s right, no DRM, no conversion necessary! I know that the Girls are with EMI, so even on the iTunes Music Store it wouldn’t have DRM, but it’s a pleasant surprise for them to be using MP3, as many MP3 players don’t play AAC. And the high bitrate is excellent.

Then, the Spice Girls have very loyal fans who will buy the album and won’t pirate it. That’s something you can’t say about the fans of many other groups.

In other news, Blacklight2 is coming along nicely. I removed quite a few bugs and successfully used it to copy existing MP3s to my MP3 player. I also added the (completely untested) Post-Process Plugin (PPP) support. Maybe later today I will write an "EasyTag" PPP, which invokes the EasyTag id3 tagger. And I’ll have to test the other functions of Blacklight2.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but I solved the synchronisation bug in the original Blacklight, and uploaded the new version to Sourceforge. I’m still using Blacklight1 to encode my video files until Blacklight2 is tested and ready.

Today I opened my inbox and found three e-mails sent by Storm-infected computers.

Anyone who lets Storm onto their computer is a nincompoop. Not even my grandfather was naive enough to open the Storm binary or even click on the "http://253.124.76.92/" address in the e-mails.