Computer: April 2004 Archives

I haven't found my backup index template, and I haven't updated the 208 mp3 to something that will play, sorry. I've been busy. Its the rare time in Minnesota where there are no bugs, the weather is fair and cool. So I have been out bike riding and out and about doing other fun tings. I'll get to it soon.

Get it now, 208 in concert. (save to file, I don't think it will stream.)

This was a live piece performed by the 6th grade (I think) class at Manitoba grade school in Milwaukee. The music teacher tried to bring pop culture into the classroom. So as well as singing old standards like "This Land is Your Land" (sans the anti-corporate verses I later discovered), we sang "Africa" by Toto. This piece I believe was written by our teacher and had some roots in improvisational electronic music and may resemble superficially the work of Herbie Hancock at the time.

This recording is staticy. It sounds the same on my PC as on the original tape. This may be due to hardware, but I don't have any other hardware to try. I believe my 6th grade class was "taper friendly" and would allow the free trading of this material. I may be wrong.

Last week I finally resolved my "play mp3s in my car issue". Now it's time to whip my MP3 collection into shape. To start with I am updating all the id tags. I am doing this with the musicbrainz software. They have a windows client as well as a Perl API that make this very easy. Combinging that with MP3::Info, the current data, and a little help from the maligned File::Find module and I am home free. (Check out Identifying Audio Files with MusicBrainz on perl.com for ideas.)

The Minneapolis Perl Mongers met last night. The speaker was none other than Andy Lester. His comments on the event can be seen at use.perl.org.

Here are my very sparse notes.

• Keep testing simple, constantly, extensively. Make it part of the culture.
• if it's pain to write no will write and maintain them.
• smoke script, smoke bots
• human testing doesn't scale
• don't write untestable code
• code review must include test files
• Check out Junit, Test::Class, Xunit
• Need to look at WWW:Mechanize and the Test::* hierarchy

The most interesting meta-topic was how to find modules on CPAN and how one might find groups of modules that might work well together. I think this topic has been disussed numerous times in the Perl community and there have been a lot of ideas. Last night's idea was a spin on social networking where people would indentify which modules they use, and then share. This would work alot of the FOAF stuff or maybe the social networking websites. The idea is a lot like the amazon feature where you see "People who liked this book also purchased this book."

I think you could actually adopt FOAF for this purpose. Instead of filling in the friends with names they are modules. Then people could upload them, or publish them somewhere on the web and viola we could all share CPAN data. It's pretty clever actually. Here is an example I made in foaf-a-matic which was slightly edited to remove the field I didn't use Friends Email. I think this could work quite easily.

<rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
      xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/">
<foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="">
  <foaf:maker rdf:nodeID="me"/>
  <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:nodeID="me"/>
  <admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic"/>
  <admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:leigh@ldodds.com"/>
</foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>
<foaf:Person rdf:nodeID="me">
<foaf:name>tim burlowski</foaf:name>
<foaf:givenname>tim</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>burlowski</foaf:family_name>
<foaf:nick>timbu</foaf:nick>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>96a89b9e488e2af86f950313a1c0d1e6956dc7f2</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://timbu.org/mtblog"/>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Text::Format</foaf:name>
</foaf:Person></foaf:knows>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Yahoo::StockQuote</foaf:name>
</foaf:Person></foaf:knows>
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>DBI</foaf:name>
</foaf:Person></foaf:knows></foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

The best part of Andy's talk was to listen to someone who seemed happy, engaged, and actually cared about something. I remember feeling this way about technology a while back.

Christmas 2002, my lovely wife bought me a CD-player for the car I commute in. After 110,000 miles I finally decided the car was a keeper and deserved a stereo upgrade.

She got me a Panasonic CQ-DP171U, obviously named by engineers. It distinguished itself by playing MP3's which was a rarity on affordable MP3 decks at the time. While I enjoyed this new deck immensely with CD's, especially audio books from the library, I never got one MP3 disc to play until today.

What's the trick you ask. Well as the warranty wound down late last year, I sent it in to be repaired. Audio King now Ultimate Electronics sent off the deck to a local repair company who does warranty work for Panasonic. The repair tech had the same problems I had with my disc (which worked in other players, BTW) but couldn't figure it out. After a long wait he got through to a engineer at Panasonic who indicated you couldn't play anything with a bitrate greater than 128 kbs. So he sent it back. At this point Audio King promptly lost the deck for 3 months. My wife finally tracked it down in some dusty back room somewhere. After it was re-installed I dilligently burned a new disc, using MusicMatch, which has the option to downsample to 128 kbs. Still no luck. Then I decided to look at the files more closely. Sure enough they were still at their native 192 or 256 kbs rate. Of course software defects! So I downloaded LAME and RazorLame for Windows and downsampled to a verifiable 128kbs, burned another disc and ran out to the car.

Lo and behold it worked. I was playing MP3's in my car. Watch out world.

Now if only Panasonic had mentioned on their manual or on their web site, I could have been playing MP3's for 15 months but no! Hope this info is useful for someone else.

BTW, all my MP3's are legal, I have the original CD, and am only space shifting and I don't share. I would like to share if it were legal.