Bekar's Headache

Apple Movie Trailers .. Thought-dump

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:16:36 GMT

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.

Drumming...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:50:39 GMT

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! :)

Front Row Geekiness

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:57:25 GMT

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 ..

Funny ;)

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:05:23 GMT

http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp08072009.shtml

Telling Off..

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 09:57:38 GMT

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.

Ex.. Trouble

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:53:48 GMT

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

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:12:03 GMT

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.

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:05:47 GMT

Cute things I saw this morning:

Cupcake Cake Tin
Cupcake's with feet

Engagement Ring

Sun, 24 May 2009 02:36:07 GMT

She handed it back to me today.

Sat, 23 May 2009 13:19:12 GMT

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...

Break Up

Sat, 23 May 2009 04:00:25 GMT

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.

Push Bike

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 05:59:25 GMT

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!*

Irony

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:27:32 GMT

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..

;)

Funny Motorbike Accident

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:09:54 GMT

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

It was serious. So serious in fact, that I.. I.. I rubbed some dirt off of the vehicle in front of me.

My goodness, it was just horrible! I rolled.. Rolled too far forward into a stationary car.. And kissed it's rear bumper with my front tyre.. :)

The driver got out, looked, shook his head, then got back into the car.

Ah well. ;)

Was not a good riding night for me. Almost fell over a but further along 'cause I wasn't paying attention when I pulled up, was off with the fairies looking at some housing department apartments in Collingwood.

Just an odd night :P

'net woes

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:04:55 GMT

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.

Computer Pain

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:31:43 GMT

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!*

Computer Death

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:35:57 GMT

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!*

Announcement

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:04:13 GMT

Today, I got engaged to my lovely Amanda ;)

*whee* :)

Oven

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 07:52:44 GMT

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.

Culture

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 10:12:12 GMT

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 ;)

MISSING!

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:01:50 GMT

ARGH! NO!!

I've lost all my Rozen Maiden Anime's!

Randomness - Motor-bike

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:01:44 GMT

Last week, I was riding to work, and was being a real prat about it as I was running late. I pull up to the traffic lights and look down at my trip meter:

66.6

How appropriate. I calm down and continue on my way. I squeeze through a few tight spots but whilst taking it easy. I pull up at the next set of traffic lights and look down at my trip meter:

69.0

Oh dear. It's an odd thing to be sitting at a set of traffic lights, astride a bike, and pissing yourself laughing, with nobody the wiser.

Tonight, I was running low on fuel so did the usual "if the reserve light comes on when there's more than 10KM left on the freeway, pull off at Nunawading and get fuel". Cool.

Got to Eastland (mail box) with the trip meter reading 222.1KM. *YAY!* This is about 20km more than usual. No fuel-up tonight :)

So much random. There was another thing, but I can't remember it any more :(

Stolen Meme

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:01:59 GMT

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The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them
5) Put a star next to those you've only partially read.

<lj-cut>

1 * Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Started it.. a few times..

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - But of course! Don't like the movies though.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - I'm just a kid in an adults body *nod*.

5 <b.To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - School..

6 * The Bible - Bits and pieces.. Didn't interest me though.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - School again..

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - *beam* YAY!

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 * War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Read the first chapter.. Once..

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Oh, the sighing doors :P

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - Oh so long ago!

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Well, reading it now really. A Horse and his boy is the faviourite so far.

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - See above.

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert - I like the original 6 books.. I sat down and re-read Dune in one day when I was younger.. :)

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - School again

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - Shawshank reference..

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Probably 'cause of Picard.. ;)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - A long time ago.. School again I think!

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 * The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - I can't remember. I know my sisters read them, but I can't recall if I did as a child.

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - School again

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - Sister's influence.. Well, one of 'em ;)

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Whilst I did enjoy the books (including Great Glass Elevator), the Henry Sugar story is my faviourite.

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Bumper-sticker of the day

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:08:46 GMT

For good people
to do evil things,
that takes religion

..

Fun.. :)

It comes from a quote:

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg, New York Times, April 20, 1999

Fun and games!

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:20:36 GMT

The money that my last job owes me finally got paid! The superannuation is still outstanding, but.. Hey, one step in the right direction!

I also got my EyeTV today, so I'm going to experiment with recording some VHS tapes onto my little Mac.

Fun.. ;)