liquidx.net

most of my open source code had been hosted on my personal svn repository and trac instance. the problem with this set up was that i could not invite others to join and contribute to projects without creating accounts for them on my web server. moreover, i was wasting resources on my webserver hosting a wiki and source browser.

so instead, i've decided to move all my opensource code to code.google.com and retire my trac and svn instances. this way it will be much easier to invite contributions from others and also relieve me of spamcop responsibilities on trac instances.

all the projects are now available here:

http://code.google.com/u/alastairtse/

and they are all linked to from the liquidx projects page.

itunes 7.7.1 has changed in the way it returns a track when queried for a persistent id. this change happened in the latest 7.7.1 release and is briefly described in dougs applescript site.

Simon Haertel sent me a fix for this problem in the current EyeTunes framework trunk. this patch is now committed.

another important eyetunes.framework related news is the project is moving from my personal server to its own googlecode repository. so if you have an svn checkout of eyetunes, please change it to point to:

http://eyetunes.googlecode.com/svn/EyeTunes/trunk/

there is a massive price difference between buying a macbook air in the united states versus buying it in the united kingdom. in short, for the cheapest price you can get the macbook air for in the uk, you can afford to buy a round trip ticket to new york and buy it there instead.

the price of the macbook air in the uk is £1199.

macbook air in the US is $1799 (£916)

and a cheapest flight from london heathrow to new york jfk on british airways is £271.70.

therefore, if you fly to new york and buy a macbook air, it will cost you (£916 + £271 = £1187). if you get the macbook air in the uk, it will cost you £1199. you would still have £12 left over.

of course, it would only just break even as you would have to pay for a ride from the airport to the apple store on the 5th avenue. but it is open 24 hours, so you could forgo a hotel room and just sleep there overnight.

and that is with the cheapest version too, if you wanted to get the solid state hard drive option, you could probably even fly business class there.

web clips is an awesome feature in the new mac os x. any part of a web page that you find interesting, you can click a button and put it into your dashboard. move over igoogle, my yahoo and any other those widget/gadget pushing pages.

i have my super flexible and sexy "homepage" right here and its accessible with just one click (of F12):

for geeks on macs who have sshkeychain, a new 0.8 version is out! hurray!

another wwdc keynote has come and gone. i haven't read the general reaction from the "community", but what i've read from engadget sounds like a pretty good keynote. i wasn't expecting much since there is supposed to be only a couple of "top secret" features left that was going to be announced.

i love the new finder -- love the "touched today and touched yesterday" shortcuts, love the new coverflow view, love quicklook.
i love the new itunes-variant of the unified look.
i love the new time machine (i'll probably get an airport base station and plug my lacie as soon as leopard comes out.)
i love the new smart address, dates and phone number detection in apple mail.
i love the new spaces (virtual desktop) (still not better than beryl on linux)
i love the new 64 bit os (so geeky)
i love the new web clips (pandering to the widget authoring side of myself)
i love the new dock.
i love the iphone safari engine as an SDK (stop whining, it is better than writing java!)
i love the new dvd player.
i love the new "find inline" feature in safari (yes, firefox had it years ago)
i love the new xray and xcode developer tools. (dtrace on osx!)
i love core-animation. it's like prototype.js for cocoa. haha, just kidding.

i feel indifferent to boot camp (parallels is so much more useful)
i feel indifferent to stacks.
i feel indifferent to mail templates.
i feel indifferent to safari on windows (why? there must be some secret reason for this.)
i feel indifferent to $129 for leopard, i'm going to buy it just like i did for tiger.
i feel indifferent to dashcode.

i don't like the new frontrow - i like the old front row theme better, or even centerstage!
i don't like safari 3 with css rendered controls like buttons and text fields (but i'll get over it.)
i don't like the rss feeds in mail, but i expect some do.

i expected .mac to be set "free" and partner with google, didn't happen.
i expected ilife 07, didn't happen.
i expected more dashboard innovations, like multiple dashboards, didn't happen (and great for apple for sticking to simplicity!)
i expected ZFS, after the leak from SUN. but that didn't happen.

all in all, seems like a net-win for me. woohoo, now i have to wait till october.

and btw, i love the new apple.com theme, and their gratuitous use of the lightbox effect.

tagencoder is a mp3 tag converter that converts chinese, korean or japanese mp3s to unicode tags that are compatible with itunes.

for a while i have been using a private version that fixes many bugs and is also universal. finally i thought i should roll a release, so here it is, TagEncoder 1.1.

just in case i forget, in order to partition a disk with a FAT16 partition:

diskutil partitionDisk /Volumes/NDS 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "NDS" 1000M

that is:

* /Volumes/NDS: the mount point to partition, could also be /dev/disk1
* 1: the number of partitions
* MBRFormat: the partition format, MBR is the usual default for removable storage
* "MS-DOS FAT16": partition type
* "NDS": partition name
* 1000M: 1000 megabytes (size of the partition, if it is the last, it will span to the end of the drive)

i have my own custom keyboard layout to turn my uk keyboard to a us one. namely it maps the tilde character back to the top left corner.

however, every time the keyboard is focused on a password entry box, either keychain access or anything that is an NSSecureTextField, it will reset to the system default one. grrr..

i whipped a little home mashup of a tv tuner, mplayer on linux and the apple remote.

background

patricia has a samsung laptop which i have hijacked and replaced windows with linux. right now it is in our living room where it is connected to a USB1 tv tuner i bought a couple years back (i never got it to work on my powerbook.) so with the magic of the usbvision linux module and mplayer, it acts as a tv.

the only problem is that we have to get up off our lazy asses to change the channels, and that is no fun. given that we both have macs with the apple remote, i decided to figure out a way to control it using the apple remote.

by combining a udp server, running mplayer in slave mode and with some public domain code for listening to apple remote events on the mac, i now have a mplayer powered apple remote controller tv player on a laptop.

mplayer controls over udp

i'm sure there are other network control protocols for mplayer, but i didn't look very hard. i initially wrote a 20 line python udp server that pipes the output into mplayer's stdin. you can switch mplayer into slave mode so that you can type commands on the console to control it.

but after thinking about it a little, my 20 line udp server was really just:

netcat -l -u -p 8070 | mplayer -slave -quiet -flip -fs tv://bbc1 ...

apple remote control

the apple remote control uses infrared. i couldn't really find much about getting it working under linux, but then again, i didn't have many infrared receivers on the hardware side of things. so instead, i just took some sample code from here on controlling the apple remote and hacked it to send a UDP packet on each keypress i was interested in containing a mplayer control string, eg:

tv_step_channel -1

conclusion

although it would be more interesting to hack apple remote support in linux, this is the second best thing that can be done easier if you happen to have a macbook pro connected to the same network as your linux tv viewing machine.

for kicks and giggles, where is the python code that i wrote before i remembered that all that could boil down to a netcat command, and also the patch against the AppleRemote example code that controls mplayer over the network.

downloads

tv_serv.py
apple_remote-mplayer_network_slave_control.diff