East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Here’s the problem.

The problem turns out to be that java.io.File’s exists() function returns false if the file lives on a currently inactive automounted (NFS, or other?) filesystem. If I trigger the automount by accessing the filesystem in some way, for instance by playing a track in iTunes, the iTSM will function correctly as well.

I have indeed dropped him an email and he responded almost immediately. This was encouraging, so I also brought to his attention that the applet ignores the browser’s proxy settings and attempts to make a direct connection to his website. He said he’ll look into that (as well as the NFS/exists() issue) and at the very least make it fail gracefully.

So… here’s iTSM’s impression of my music collection (mp3 format), a musical rollercoaster.

Now that Google has released this library to extend Jabber with voice, how long will it be until Gaim, Adium and others will include that support in their applications?

This appears to be the latest hype, creating a signature (summary) of the tracks you listen to most frequently, listened to most recently, etc.

I heard one, thought it was interesting, so I decided to give it a try.

No dice! Six attempts or so later I realize that what appears to be the problem is that it only finds (and analyzes and includes) tracks that are truly local and doesn’t know what to do with the ones located on the NFS mounted filesystem!

What I have locally is usually 99% podcasts and a few recently acquired tracks. Since it kindly provides an option to exclude podcasts and videos and it cannot deal with the protected tracks from the iTunes store, that leaves very few material to work with.

I think I’ll drop the guy an email, see if he’s willing to look into fixing that. *crosses fingers*

This would be why I have the blog set up to hold comments for moderation from email addresses that haven’t been approved before:

I apologize for the inconvenience, but I assume you’ll understand I don’t want to be someone else’s spam-advertizing site.

(And to clarify, that was a burst of comment-spam that came in overnight. Some weeks there’s just one or two, then other times this is what happens. Ouch.)

In the car with the kids on the way to dropping them off to school, listening to CD music…

A: Is that Dutch?
Me: No, that’s Bruce Springsteen, he’s singing in English.

I’ve got one CD by a Dutch artist (who also happens to sing in Dutch) in the car and A seems to insist on asking with every other song on the other CDs (5 of them) if they’re Dutch too. I might be willing to cut him some slack when he asks this for, say, Midnight Oil, with their Australian accent, but not Bruce.

You’d think he would recognize his native tongue!

It’s a pity, but Overheard In New York is actually too noisy. If for some reason I don’t get around to catching up on it for a few days, it’s like instantly there are 100 new entries and that becomes a bit overwhelming to wade through, unlike some of the other noisy news/topic feeds where I have absolutely no qualms to just hit command-K and move on, as a lot of what is said there will show up elsewhere or already has, by then.

I wish I had more time to read all of the entries in all of the feeds that interest me, but then I’d have to either sacrifice the time I want to dedicate to work (yeah, right) or need to dedicate to keeping this house and the people that live in it sane and a few other hobbies, like this blog, a few other websites, IgorMUD, and easily a dozen other projects.

It’s starting to look more and more like I’m a homemaker of sorts, but at the same time I have a full job and a guilty conscience everytime I walk away from the computer to do something around the house. I don’t want to quit either one of these things, though.

What to do, what to do?