more on music collection and office organization

I'm still not sure how to manage my music files. Now that I have most of it on one big disk on a linux always-on machine (I hesitate to say server as I don't have a clear back-up strategy), I put our mac mini under the TV in the hearth, replacing the XO-1 laptop, in order to do video as well as just sound.

It doesn't make much sense, after all, to try to stay open-source-pure when it comes to listening to RIAA music and watching hollywood movies; I might as well have Steve Jobs negotiating my sharecropping deal.

mpd uses .m3u files. They're pretty simple, but for archival purposes, I try to stick to XHTML. I wrote another little python ditty to do the conversion: see m3uin.py in r423:4a5a8b2d237c of palmagent hg repo.

I run it like this:

$ python ~/projects/palmagent/m3uin.py
/var/lib/mpd/playlists/Three\ Chords\ and\ the\ Truth.m3u
>three_chords.html

and out comes:

1. from A Song's Best Friend_ The Very Best Of John Denver [Disc 1]
   by John Denver
   Poems, Prayers And Promises

2. from WOW Worship (orange)
   by Compilations
   Did you Feel the Mountains Tremble

3. from Family Music Party
   by Trout Fishing In America
   Back When I Could Fly

Not only can us humans make sense of that, but it's got RDFa attributes sprinkled here and there that make it yummy Semantic Web Data so that we can delegate processing to machines:

Jukebox$ xsltproc --novalid
http://www.w3.org/2008/07/rdfa-xslt three_chords.html 
>three_chords.rdf
Jukebox$ rapper three_chords.rdf -o turtle | less
rapper: Parsing file three_chords.rdf with parser rdfxml
rapper: Serializing with serializer turtle
rapper: Parsing returned 77 triples

and out comes:

@prefix h: <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix mo: <http://purl.org/ontology/mo/> .

 
 <three_chords.rdf#album1>
    dc:title "A Song's Best Friend_ The Very Best Of John
Denver [Disc 1]" ;
    mo:track
<artists-popular/John%20Denver/A%20Song%27s%20Best%20Friend_%20The%20Very%20Best%20Of%20John%20Denver%20%5BDisc%201%5D/1-04%20Poems%2C%20Prayers%20And%20Promises.mp3>
;
    a mo:Record ;
    foaf:maker <three_chords.rdf#agent1> .

 
 <three_chords.rdf#agent1>
    a foaf:Agent ;
    foaf:name "John Denver" .

 
 

In my March 2008 item, hAudio for microformats mixtapes, in progress, I tried using microformats but struggled since hAudio was still sparsely documented and changing. In contrast, RDFa and the music ontology were pretty easy to work with.

As I said in my Aug 2008 item, The details of data in documents; GRDDL, profiles, and HTML5, one of the options is that "People who want to put data in their HTML documents use RDFa".

I'm looking into getting metadata from the audio file, not just the path name. In particular, using the mutagen library I can see that iTunes stores CDDB IDs when it rips music and I'd like to use those to ground my data globally:

MPEG 1 layer 3, 160000 bps, 44100 Hz, 246.81 seconds (audio/mp3)
COMM=iTunNORM='eng'= 00000550 000001F3 00002A22 00002F25
00021A29 000219F5 0000707F 00006A4C 0003536D 0002B40A
TPE1=John Denver
TDRC=2004
TIT2=Poems, Prayers And Promises
TENC=iTunes v4.7
TRCK=4/20
TPOS=1/2
TALB=A Song's Best Friend: The Very Best Of John Denver [Disc 1]
COMM=iTunes_CDDB_IDs='eng'=20+F0DCFC688BB846194D1DA27AC6EAF16D+4607205
TCON=Country
TCOM=John Denver

Yet ToDo: connect this with ImmPort/PDB in neurocommons/science commons/creative commons work (pdb-immport code in SVN), Linked Open Data for the U.S.A. recovery IT infrastructure, and maybe XBRL stuff.

See Also:

• 2007-07-22 Music Collections and Office Organization

• 2009-01-01 Still struggling to catalog CDs

still outfitting this netbook... well, I brought the acer back and got the msi Wind U120 that I asked for in the 1st place.

The . key is tiny and shifte over a little. I regularly hit / when I mean . and I don't know whether I'll be able to retrain myself.

I'd like to try the Ubuntu netbook remix; Ubuntu recommends putting a jaunty jackalope daily build on flash drive; I tried that, but (a) it took forever to write 1GB+ to a flash drive and (b) the machine won't boot from flash drive.

Wubi worked, but having my Ubuntu world live inside NTFS doesn't feel right.

I have an external USB CD drive; I'll eventually use that to re-install, I think.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu doesn't seem to grok the wireless card. (There's a bug in launchpad and I subscribed to it. IOU one link...)

So I'm trying out Windows for the 1st time in years. I want to update one of my hg-backed web sites. TortoiseHg seems like a good approach... the 1st N attempts to download it yielded "file is corrupt" when I tried to run it; I didn't think switching from chrome to Opera would help, but it did. Hmm... could chrome really screw up downloading that badly?

Now I'm trying cygwin and ssh and such. Wish me luck...

I'm trying out a new netbook

The keyboard is quite small; at first, touch-typing didn't work at all, but I seem to be getting the hang of it. It's a good thing clicking on the trackpad works; the button is hopeless.

I hope/plan to have it run Ubuntu as well as the WinXP that came on it, but I'm really struggling to get Ubuntu on it:

* The ubuntu "jaunty jackalope" image (@@link) is 1GB, which takes quite a while to download and even longer to write to the SD card (I seem to get 1.1 Mb/sec sustained). * This machine won't boot from its media card slot (@@cite source)

I managed to boot debian-from-scratch with an external CD, but it couldn't recognize the ethernet card. What's the equivalent of lsusb under WinXP?

I'm using Opera rather than firefox just now; I figure if I'm gonna use a closed-source operating system (Win XP) I might as well try Opera while I'm at it. Boy, is Internet Explorer bloated with ads and such.

The google toolbar seems to bind a bunch of keys that I accidentally hit on occasion. Annoying.

This machine is an Acer; I could swear I asked the guy at Micro Center for an MSI Wind.

The USB disk enclosure is wrong again too: it's IDE when I need SATA. And the $20 wifi router won't play nice with my Brother HL-5250DN printer.

Let's try copying the image to a Lexar SDHC 4BG card and see if it's any faster...

connolly@pav:~/Desktop$ dmesg | grep Attach


 
 [82241.020775] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdk] Attached SCSI disk

 
 connolly@pav:~/Desktop$ sudo dd
if=jaunty-netbook-remix-i386.iso of=/dev/sdk bs=1M

wow! MUCH faster!

692+1 records in
692+1 records out
725796864 bytes (726 MB) copied, 14.9489 s, 48.6 MB/s

Family business blog: drupal or wordpress? self-managed or hosted?

The Kansas City Web Professionals meet this Wednesday. I started to post to their linkedin group about my recent trip to Web Directions North, but I figured hey: why drive ad revenue on linkedin rather than my own consulting business site, Midwest Web Sense?

But that site needs some maintenance. I set up drupal on nearlyfreespeech.net and tried to get OpenID working with it... when I ran into glitches, I learned I'm already a major version behind. And the other drupal site in my life, breadcrumbs is falling apart because the drupal guy in our research group moved on.

Yesterday, Kyle, my 9 year old son, agreed to help. So I explained about hosted blogs vs running your own, and where the ad revenue goes, and such.

We had a fun hack session in my office; you can see his work on choderbug and as wsouski on twitter. I think he's starting to grok the community values:

@wsouski don't be a spammer, wsouski. don't be a spammer.

Update: the WP domains clue from mhausenblas in #swig was just the ticket to set up notes.midwestwebsense.com: Web Directions North ski trip was a blast!

I found something I was looking for via ohloh tonight... the only thing it knows about me is that I made a handful of commits to the W3C validation service in 2001. I started a profile and registered cwm as a project, but there wasn't enough instant gratification to keep me at it...