RasterWeb!Oops! I knew I should have double-checked everything! Fixed a problem with renko, and now renko v0.2.3 is available…
It’s an RSS enclosure aware aggregator written in Perl that should run (almost) anywhere…
(See Audio, Enclosures, renko, etc… for details.)
I’ve been very interested in what Adam Curry is doing lately, promoting the ‘iPod Platform’ as it’s being called, though I have no iPod, I still get involved here, as does Dave Slusher at evilgeniuschronicles.org
While these guys are both from the world of radio, I have very little radio experience, only appearing as a guest a few times many years ago. What I do have a background in is publishing – of all sorts – from print, to music, and stuff in-between, so while I’ve got a face for radio, and a voice for the written word, that’s not gonna stop me.
I’ve released renko, which is similar to Adam’s iPodder script, and Dave’s get_enclosures.pl script. I’ve been using similar scripts and cron jobs for almost a year to download some web-radio shows, and doing the RSS enclosure thing when it started happening. This is code that is slightly cleaned up and made fit for human consumption. (Or so I hope!) grab renko if you wish. You’ll need Perl, and if all goes right, you won’t have to install any modules. It’s a proof-of-concept rather than a finished application. It’s got many missing features, but it’s a start. Hopefully it’ll help kickstart this revolution.
(Honestly, I think NetNewsWire could kick butt in this area, it’s a Mac OS X application that could tie directly into iTunes quite easily, and Brent could do it all with a great interface… Brent, you listening?)
Oh, both Adam and Dave wondered about enclosures in Atom and assumed Atom must have something similar, but every time I ask, no one seems to have a good answer. Maybe this will help poke the Atom folks a bit.
I started doing some audio experiments, and if you wanna keep up to date, just subscribe to the feed at http://rasterweb.net/raster/feeds/rwaudio.rss with renko, or one of the other enclosure aware aggregators and see what happens. I used Audacity for the most recent version, and it’s improved a bit since I last used it. (Noise reduction helps quite a bit!) Audacity is open-source, so that helps lower the barrier to creating the audio, though I know it’s still not the software Adam is looking for…
Anyway, that’s it for now, must run!
Update: renko is here.
Ok, I’ve gone with the title “Brad joins Six Apart” instead of “Proprietary Software Company hires Open-Source Developer” but that won’t stop me from worrying… (I know, it’s a bit sensational, but so am I sometimes.)
What, me worry? Sure! Why not… Brad has written some nice code in the past. I’ve especially gotten good use out of his port of Textile to perl. The code had a liberal license, I’d call it an open-source license. (Though the OSI would have to check on that to be sure.)
My worry comes from the fact that while working for Six Apart, we won’t see any innovation from Brad that won’t be a part of Six Apart’s non-open-source code. Maybe I’m just being selfish, but I’d hate to see some of the best open-source developers go to work for non-open-source companies and have their contributions to the community disappear. I’m not saying this will happen in this case, or that it happens very often, maybe it does, and maybe the community deals with it well enough. I suppose since I’m unlikely to be in such a position, it’s easy for me to comment on it. (Job openings for “Hacker-type who hates Windows” are sparse right now…)
Anyway, good luck to Brad in his new endeavor! I know it would take the right offer (and then some) for me to uproot the family and move across the country. I hope it all works out.
Some web sites use a ‘captcha’ which is a dynamically generated image with some code that must be input for you to post a comment. It’s a great idea, but oh, the accessibility of it all! What of people who can’t read that image? I mean, come on, haven’t we all dove into accessibility by now?
I have a solution, in the form of Text::Banner, and it goes something like this:
####### ##### ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # ##### # #### ##### # # # # # # ####### # # # # # # # ##### ##### #
There! An accessible captcha ‘image’ as it were… it should even work in Lynx!
But wait, don’t like horizontal, try vertical! That’ll trip up those pesky spambots!
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Urm… maybe not… I’ll work on it a bit more…
Inspired by the likes of Adam Curry, Dave Winer and others, I’ve started to experiment with the thingy known as “audio blogging” and you can now experience RasterWeb! in a whole new way…
First, you’ll want to add this feed to your enclosure capable aggregator: http://rasterweb.net/raster/feeds/rwaudio.rss
All set? Good… Then you will recieve the first transmission, aptly titled “RasterWeb! Audio 2004-08-18” – and let me tell you, if you want aimless rambling, with poor production values, and crappy sound quality – in audio format – you’ve got it!
I used a handheld cassette recorder, and later transferred that to my Mac, and eventually converted it to an MP3. I used to do this stuff years ago, but for some reason I had all sorts of problems with this. It’s definitely something that’s not easy enough to do on a regular basis, unless I get a good process in place.
Oh, as long as we’re talking about audio experiments, Adam has been cooking up something called iPodder, which is an enclosure aware aggregator for Mac OS X. I’ve been using my own tools, which consist of some bits of Perl, and cron, and AppleScript to do much the same thing. As I mentioned there, the only thing I’m missing is the iPod. But you can help with that…
I know, I’m a bit late on this, but if anyone wants to help me get an iPod, just use this freeiPods referer link. (See this Engadget story for background on freeiPods.) You’ll need to sign up for an offer, which you can always cancel later on.
Come on, when’s the last time I asked you for something, hmmm? An iPod is something I definitely can’t fit into the budget anytime soon, but don’t worry, I’ll keep working on the whole audio thing, since I’ve still got the old Rio 500 to work with…