RasterWeb!

Gah! Today is October 12th, 2005 and I just found out about the nomination, and the voting closes today…

Help me out, vote for tinkernet at mkeonline. This is a limited time offer. Expires today. Thank you, and Good Day Sir!

You remember last year don’t you? My costume idea was the iPod Photo. At least one person thought it was cool…

Well, this year I feel completely justified in suggesting you take last year’s costume, rip it in half to make it much smaller, and paint it black. When I say “last year’s costume” I am of course referring to the iPod Photo costume you made, just like Mr. deusx… You will then be teh cool with your iPod nano costume. How 2005 of you! (Failing that, make it look like my Rio 500 and you can party like it’s 1999!)

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…