Happy Earth Day!
It’s the 35th anniversary of Earth Day.
But every day is Earth Day. Do your part.
I especially liked Google’s logo today:
2005
Flickr continues to amaze
Flickr continues to amaze me. What did they do this time? If you had previously bought a Pro account, they have announced Pro users have been given a another year for free, and 2 Pro accounts to give away to friends. In addition, normal Flickr users have had their bandwidth and photo’s doubled, and Pro users have had their bandwidth doubled, and the price of a Pro account is now almost half of what it was last year.
I guess being bought by Yahoo was a good thing. God knows I’ve been very, very happy with Flickr, and this made my day.
Home Sweet Home
It’s nice to be home. Even if the weather is cold, rainy and windy.
Jinzora & Netjuke to merge
So I leave for a business trip for a week, and halfway through I finally check the ‘net for news, and what do I see?
Jinzora and Netjuke are merging efforts to create an even better music management web tool.
While kind of cool, I’m glad to see the Jinzora team in firm control – their release cycle and active development is why so many Netjuke users have jumped ship from Netjuke to Jinzora. Blake Waters, the lead developer of Netjuke, has been busy for the last 2 years on other projects, leading to Netjuke development stalling.
I’m glad Jinzora 2 has been released, and under the GPL. I have concerns about Netjuke’s future, as they wanted to get away from the GPL, and possibly even charge for the software. I’m hoping Jinzora stays on the path they have so far, and away from where Netjuke had thought about going. And Netjuke’s requirement for 2.0 for PHP5 was disconcerting – I understand wanting to use latest and greatest versions of software, but even Ubuntu doesn’t support PHP5 yet.
I look forward to the teams working together.
Thanks to Jamie for the heads up on my forums.
Welcome to Sunny Florida
I’m in sunny Florida this week. 80 and sunny every day, upper 50s, low 60s at night.
I could get use to this. Except for the hurricanes.
Time to go ride the Hulk a dozen times.
Well, der
After continuing to play with Jinzora, I discovered something: Displayed number behind Genre’s is not the number of songs – it’s the number of artists.
For whatever reason, I thought it was the number of songs, leading me to believe the import process was missing tracks, though it would show the correct number of tracks imported.
Well, der. Jinzora was right.
I now return you to your scheduled programming while I rip my CD collection for the 4th time.
What have I been up to? Jinzora!
I’ve been playing with Jinzora this week, as you could see in the screenshot in my previous post.
I’m very impressed. I still have some glitches to work out – my ID3 tags don’t seem to be importing correctly, and I downloaded Easytag to check, and they looked right. A light bulb just went on, and I’ll have to check to see if it’s using id3v1, instead of version 2. I’m 99% positive all my tags are v2.
I really like the layout, it’s one of the best install routines I’ve ever seen, the album art it automatically grabs and puts up random is cool, and it does everything else. My only complaint, is that it doesn’t seem (and I’m new to this, could be wrong) a recursive file scan after the initial import to check for changes. One of the cooler things about Netjuke was I could update my ID3 tags, scan for changes, and it would fix it in the database. That, and the web pages seem to load slow, even on my local lan.
I’m slowly re-encoding all my CDs after the great hard drive crash of ’04, and doing it in MP3 this time, instead of Ogg. My new MP3 player cheats, and won’t do Ogg (though it does Napster2Go, but I’m not signing up for that).
Could it be?
Could that be silwenae.net making a return? With the music server?
I have proof:
And it’s streaming music as we speak.
There’s some kinks to work out, so if you had access to the old music server, I have some things to fix first. But progress is being made!
iPod One
What’s on President Bush’s iPod, you might be wondering?
The playlist does reveal a rather narrow range of babyboomer tunes. Writing in the London Times, Caitlin Moran noted: “No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles.”
Why am I not surprised?
Ubuntu migration (almost) complete
I’ve upgraded 3 of my main machines to Ubuntu 5.04, aka the Hoary Hedgehog release. The laptop went flawlessly, as did my gaming machine, which is installed on a second hard drive. Most impressively, the ATI binary drivers, with the change to X.org, stayed and worked on my gaming box automagically. OpenGL is beautiful, the fonts are beautiful, and I’ve switched to the Clearlooks theme from Industrial.
My two major complaints are the Industrial theme disappearing and they’ve changed Nautilus’ spatial nature. Clearlooks is acceptable as a replacement, but I don’t understand why they’ve had to go and screw with Nautilus. Gnome’s default behavior for Nautilus is to open every window in a new window. I like it that way. Ubuntu, being a Gnome-centric distribution, and dedicated to releasing after every major Gnome release, should follow that direction. I can understand why some people don’t like it, but it strikes me as odd they’ve made this change.
Only the server is left to upgrade, and based on the 3 upgrades I’ve done from Warty to Hoary, should go flawless. Then it’s a matter of getting the server up on the network, which is a different story after my network rebuild last weekend.