Ok, so I'm already pre-downloading all of the movies and the XMl that drives Front Row, so now.. I want to make it better.

As I'm keeping all the trailers, it would be nice to be able to show that I've got multiple different trailers for the same movie, and figure out what date I downloaded things. Also which I've watched.

So here's what I want to do..

* Pull all the trailer stanza's from the XML, and populate a database with each of them.
* Generate the list of titles from the database, and dynamically generate the XML
* Insert the download date into the description to give an idea of how old it is
* When clicking on a movie trailer, record the date, so I can change the 'title' to indicate whether I've watched it before or not. Use either a 'Location:' or a 301 redirection.
* Get the high-def (720p) versions for those trailers that have them, and the standard def for thos where there is no high def version. Mix & match the lists
* Multiple-list items that have multiple trailers

All in all, it shouldn't be too difficult.

I've picked up my drum sticks again, and starting to work on thigs again.

Lets ignore the fact that it feels like I've got blisters on my thumb and first finger on my right hand, and go straight to insanely beating drums.

I was mucking around, as I have a tendancy to do, and decided to try something fast, and slightly confusing.

So it ended up as this..

In 4/4 time, down to the semiquaver (so 16 strikes per bar), on the hi-hat, forcing an alternating left/right strike on the snare, with some kick thrown in for good measure.

Snare on 3, 6, 9, 12, 15.
Hi-hat on 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16.
Kick on 1 and 15.

H/K H S H H S H H S H H S H H S/K H

Due to the snare on the 3's, it means alternating between right and left strikes on the snare, with a hiccup in the timing at the last semiquaver.

It seemed so simple when my mind concocted it. My body on the other hand decided it wasn't so simple when it tried to do it.

Took about half an hour to get it 'rough', at 140bpm. Still mess it up after a few bars though :P Still, it's fun to try!

Anyway, back to my book! :)

Some time ago, I got sick of a long pause when accidentally clicking on the 'Trailer' menu option in Front Row. As such, I decided to write something to redirect the request to something more local. I set up a simple scheduled job to retrieve the 'current.xml' from Apple's site every day, and used Squid to redirect the request to the local copy.

This worked beautifully. Yay :)

So really, it's only natural that the next step should be taken: Actually download the trailers.

I sat here last night after getting home from Chris & Helene's wedding, trying to watch the trailer for Avatar (which one of Helene's cousins suggested I watch), and promptly fell asleep on the couch waiting for it.

Ugh.

So this morning, I decided to poke around with the routine I've already got to see if I can download the trailers local, and redirect them too.

Turned out to be relatively simple, with just one caveat; the user-agent string.

So now, every day, a simple script goes and gets the current day's trailer list, walks through and gets the poster pictures, and then gets all the associated .MOV files as well. Squid to redirect the images.apple.com and movies.apple.com to my local cache.

Yay! Near instantaneous trailer watching! *whee!*

I guess next on the agenda is making it care about actors and genre's to only pull those that I'm interested in, leaving the rest to pull from the apple sites upon the rare occasion..

Hrm.. Interesting thought...

Mah.. next change = full rewrite in php or perl.. ;)

.. I'm so simple minded sometimes ..

Miss Ex, I'll write whatever I bloody well like in my journal.

If you don't want to read it, THEN DON'T READ MY JOURNAL. Very simple solution.

Now go away. Leave me alone.

My Ex decided to come around tonight..

I refused to let her in.

I told her to go home. I told her I didn't want to talk to her. I told her to leave.

Then I yelled at her to go home.. To leave me alone. To go home.

Then I screamed at her to leave, or I'll call the police.

..

She still didn't leave.

Now my calm is completely gone, and I'm angry. I didn't want this on a Wednesday night. I really didn't.

She wanted an answer. It took her half an hour to ask the question. It took almost as long again for me to say in cool, soothing tones what that answer meant.

All the time, I just got angrier.

This is not how you behave. This isn't how you act when you break up. You don't keep coming back and trying to have 'conversation' more than a month later. You don't call 10 times a week. You don't SMS.

You just step away, get drunk, and move on.. give or take the drunk part..

Now i need something for a very hoarse throat.

*sigh*

EDIT: "Afta u get this I am erasing yor number. Goodbye" .. Well, maybe this will mean she will leave me alone. Of course, this means she'll not tell me when she comes to pick her stuff up.. *sigh* buggered every freaking way possible.

Anniversaries for various things come and go fairly regularly. I thought I'd just mention one that is coming up for me tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the 9th anniversary of my step father's death.

Unf.

I still find it strange that I can remember a fair few of the details of that night. mostly, it was the fact that I wasn't at his side when he died, but that's of little concern.

I went out to see his plot today. He's ashes are buried out in Lilydale.

Whilst out there, I swung past my sisters grave. She still doesn't have a plaque.

It's been 9 years for my step dad, and just over 3 months for my sister.

..

I hate tears.. ;)

Love you all.

Cute things I saw this morning:

Cupcake Cake Tin
Cupcake's with feet

She handed it back to me today.

Annoyingly, the screen on my mobile phone appears to have decided it wants to not display anything any more.

Boo.

The greater annoyance is that all of my phone numbers are on the *phone* and not the *SIM*.

*sigh*

Will attempt a backup / transfer tomorrow, and most of the contact details of everyone is somewhere else...

Just.. annoying.

EDIT: I was successfully able to back up my phone contacts using my Apple and the 'iSync' program using bluetooth blindly. Yay.. :) So when I get a new phone, I shouldn't loose any data.

Now, new phone...

It's come to an end.

My relationship of the past year is over.

Sadly, not really an unexpected development from my side of things.

Well, yesterday we went to the local bike store, and picked up some odds and ends (tyres, inner tubes, new helmet), and I fitted them today.

No Problems.

When I put my bike back together, I noticed that the rear wheel wasn't quite right. It wasn't good, but it didn't look too bad, so I let it go.

We went for a ride, and about 3 km later, the badness showed.

Dang.

I snapped the rear axle. Sheered it clean off of the holding bolt under the gear cluster.

Wow.

So annoying.

Wheel taken to the bike store for repairs.

Now it's a question of whether it's repair or replace. *Whee!*

As I was riding home last night, I was looking up at these new traffic authority advertisement billboard with the new "look again for motorcycles" sorta thing.

As I turned back to the front, a guy decided that the lane I was in was a good place to be, and changed into it, on to of me.

...

Oh dear.

As I pulled around him a few moments afterwards, he had the good graces to look abashed.

Those adds are working well I see..

;)

Yesterday, as I was pulling out of a service station, I had an accident.

( .. )

I've had quite a few issues the last month or two connecting to the Internet.

I thought at first it was just a dodgey phone port (even though it was working fine earlier, I'd moved some equipment around so..), then thought it might be Telstra screwing me around, but finally, the culprit showed it's true colors.

My ADSL modem is fried. For a while there, it would refuse to train correctly, giving either no DSL carrier, or one considerably slower than it should have.

Today it showed it's true colors and flashed bad diagnostic lights at me. *whee!*

I went and bought a new one. After a little screwing around (Yay a setup interface that requires Javascript! ), I've gotten it working.

There's still one or two minor issues I've not addressed yet, but... so far so good ;)

I'm going to leave it at this for now and deal with more tomorrow.

As if one machine dying wasn't bad enough, my other new machine decided it didn't want to use one of the 5 disks in it.

This machine has 4 1TB disks in it as a software RAID5 array. One of the disks drops out occasionally due to a bad SATA power connector, so I wasn't that concerned.

I opened it up, swapped the power connector around for one that wasn't broken, closed it up, rebooted and... still couldn't see one of the disks.

Ok, odd. After a bit of muddling around, got the array rebuilding:

mdadm /dev/md0 --re-add /dev/sdd

Cool, great. Then I went and rebooted it before it finished rebuilding. That was a bit of a duffy idea.

The machine refused to boot. It refused to see the software RAID array at all.

Eek!

Emergency mode ahoy!

Using:

mdadm -A -s --auto=yes -f

brought the array back on, still with a missing disk. Tried to use the file systems on the software RAID device, but then the LVM on it refused to start. Manually doing a:

vgscan -a yes

brought that back online thankfully, so I ran a few file system checks. Everything checked out ok.

Rebooted, it was back.

Another --re-add, and we were off to the races!

I'm gonna leave it alone for a little while now. The RAID device was rebuilt properly this morning, so.. No touchie!

Oh, all of this was precipitated by a XEN virtual machine refusing to boot. It seems that at one point when I was rebooting, the LVM device I use for the XEN VM's disk decided that it wanted to be inconsistent, and was refusing to run the FSCK. Eek. It was also out of disk space due to trying to do too many updates at the same time.. EEK..

Anyway, that VM is still down and broken. Have to remember how to use 'losetup' to do an fsck of the partition within the block device now..

Yay.. More documentation..

:-|

*death!*

It would appear as if my old P4 is finally going through the throes of death.

It locked up solid earlier this morning, and decided it didn't want to boot after that.

*sigh*

Ah well, it sucks, but I was planning on buying a new computer anyway.

Now.. What to buy.. what to buy..

*mwahaha!*

Today, I got engaged to my lovely Amanda ;)

*whee* :)

I have a lovely issue at my place.

Sometimes, when I've got the lights in the lounge room on, they flicker, then go out for a few hours.

To add to that, it seems if I turn the oven on, it happens too. Grr. I like using my oven :(

Looks like I'm calling the landlord next week.

My partner, Amanda, insists that I'm an uncultured lout who needs to be taught about such things.

As such, she took me to see Bell Shakespear's presentation of Hamlet on Friday night.

*whee*

Was fun ;)