RasterWeb!

We need video playlists… Ok, to be more specific, we need video players that support playlists…

I first implemented XSPF on tinkernet because it was simple, and I like what XSPF is, and can do, and I needed to test the code mentioned here. Of course without a video player that can handle XSPF, what’s the point? Well, it looks like VLC will support XSPF soon, so that’s good… (Oh, drop by the forum and leave a post asking for support if you want. )

In the meantime, I’ve been playing with SMIL just a bit, really just using Michael Sullivan’s implementation as an example. So here is what I’ve got:

Over on tinkernet, in the sidebar, is a link to the SMIL file, which should cause your browser to download the SMIL file and open it using QuickTime Player. Of course you need to have QuickTime installed, and your browser configured, blah, blah, blah… But once that’s done, you should see what we see above. QuickTime Player all set to play all the videos in the ‘playlist’ with a little menu to jump between the videos. (I guess this is QuickTime-specific SMIL, but I’m a SMIL newbie, so I’m not 100% sure what the outcome of that really is…)

Anyway, I think this is exciting, and we should thank Lucas Gonze for the XSPF stuff, and hope that others (especially software developers) see the value in playlists…

Someone asked: How would you explain RSS-Video feeds to your grandma?

People tried, and eventually someone wanted it in Haiku…

Here’s my attempt (apologies if this is not a proper haiku):

subscribe to content
get it delivered to you
without doing a thing

Ok, I think it needs work… I really have no haiku experience… Can you do better?

I don’t know why I never thought of this before…

Occasionally I need to run a script that can either dump everything to the screen for me to look at as it’s running, or I can direct to a file to check when it’s done. This is in efficient. So while I used to do this:

perl foo.pl

or this:

perl foo.pl >foo.log

I now do this:

perl foo.pl >foo.log &

which runs the script, and sends the output to a file, while running the process in the background. If you want to see what’s going on, just type:

tail -f foo.log

to continually watch the output. Of course you can do grep’s on the file, or just tail part of it, or whatever, but it’s nice to be able to keep that long process running, and check on it’s progress quite easily.

It’s the little things, you know…

Gosh, how long has it been since I (or anyone else for that matter) has mentioned a video iPod?

Apple declined to comment about a video iPod. (Or anything else for that matter.)

Stay (i)Tuned!

Yahoo! is Upcoming… I mean, Yahoo! aquired Upcoming.org!

Hooray for the Upcoming.org guys…. (And Yahoo!)

I just hope it doesn’t go the way it went with blo.gs. I assume it won’t, since it’s a people thing too, and not just a purchase of an existing service. I’m sure it’ll be all Flickry…

I know, Google is the King of Search, right? But Yahoo! just keeps adding on, and adding on, and getting and doing more cool things, and it seems like every 6 months someone else I know goes to work for Yahoo! and I’m going to be nice to them now just in case they want buy me in the future…