Rex Roof dot Com

moving!

2010-01-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

The posts that are on this blog are moving to my main site!
http://www.rexroof.com/

see you there!
-Rex

movie time

2009-03-24T00:39:00.000-04:00

creating an mpeg from a series of jpg images:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i '%03d.jpg' -sameq -f mpeg2video file.mpg

missing eject button

2006-05-02T11:30:00.000-04:00

I was missing my eject button in the menu bar for my mac. This was causing me problems because I don't have a mac keyboard on it and so, if theres no cd in the drive, I had limited options for getting the drive open. Then I found out how to return the eject icon to my finder toolbar:


open /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/Eject.menu

or, if you want to use the finder, open a finder window, click cmd-shift-g and type


/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/

hit enter, and then double-click the Eject icon.

sweet!

flickr and unix is awesome

2006-04-25T15:26:00.000-04:00

I've been toying around with flickr and downloading random images based on tags. I just wrote a one-liner that grabs a random popular flickr tag, it looks like this:


GET http://flickr.com/photos/tags/ | grep '/photos/tags/[a-z]' | cut -f4 -d/ | random -f - | head -1

note: the random command is something I've only found in FreeBSD. it could easily be replaced with a perl one-liner to shuffle.

this prints out a single, random, popular tag from flickr. used in combination with my perl script that picks a random picture based on tag, I can get some randomly awesome pictures:


slather -t `randomtag`

perhaps soon I'll post slather.

Unix Domain Sockets in Perl

2005-09-19T16:18:00.000-04:00

I know this has been done dozens of times before, but it's been a real headache for me lately. A full example of how to use IO::Socket::UNIX is not really available anywhere on the web. All of the socket info for perl seems to assume you've been doing socket programming in C for years, and theres very limited info on doing Unix Domain Sockets. it all seems to be about inet sockets. which, of course, relates a lot to Unix Sockets, but there are some differences.

okay, here is my working example. Its meant to be run twice, the first time it's the server, the second time it's the client.


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; $|++;
use IO::Socket;

my $socketfile = $ENV{HOME} . "/.sockettest";

if ( -S $socketfile ) {
 # client!
 my $client = IO::Socket::UNIX->new(Peer  => $socketfile,
                                    Type      => SOCK_STREAM ) or die $!;
 my $string = "this is some sent garbage.\n";
 print $client $string;
 $client->flush;
 $client->close;
 exit;

} else {
 # server!
 unlink $socketfile;
 my $data;
 my $server = IO::Socket::UNIX->new(Local => $socketfile,
                                    Type      => SOCK_STREAM,
                                    Listen    => 32 ) or die $!;
 $server->autoflush(1);
 while ( my $connection = $server->accept() ) {
   my $data= <$connection>;
   print $data, $/;

   sleep 5;
 }
}

iTunes share on FreeBSD

2005-03-16T14:23:00.000-05:00

With over 33,000 songs in my library, my iTunes share here at work is very popular. iTunes has a built in connection limit that people often complain to me about hitting. So this is why I started looking into running a duplicate share on my FreeBSD server.

first thing I did was set up nfs on my Mac OS X box to share to my mac, handily if you just write an /etc/exports file and reboot, the NFS server just starts. here's my /etc/exports file:


/Volumes/Music -mapall=rex shaolin

/Volumes/Music is where my music is, rex is my user's shortname, and shaolin is the machine hostname for my FreeBSD server that will want to mount the share.

then, on my FreeBSD box I put this in my /etc/fstab:


mogu:/Volumes/Music     /music          nfs     ro,intr,noauto  0       0

intr is nice so that when nfs goes down my df commands don't hang. I'll probably take out the noauto once I figure out if this setup is working right.
after that I just did: mkdir /music ; mount /music , as root, of course.

all of this I did after I found this handy site:

Setting up an iTunes server in FreeBSD

This page was very helpful, but I found some of the info out of date and some dependancies broken. so here's my rundown (read that page before continuing)

First, install daapd. it's in /usr/ports/audio/daapd.

In the above instructions the info on daapd is correct, but I had many issues getting the port to build. The dependancies didn't seem to work out of the box, the error it gave me lead me to build multimedia/mpeg4ip manually. do this:


# cd /usr/ports/multimedia/mpeg4ip-libmp4v2
# make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/multimedia/mpeg4ip
# make install

then, it gets tedious. to get the mpeg4ip port to build, I had to edit some makefiles. I kept running that last command over and over, editing files as I went. The first errors were about mp4.h not found. this happened about 3 times; when it did, I noted from the error what directory it was in, then edited the Makefile in that directory and added

-I$(src_topdir)/lib/mp4v2

to the INCLUDES= line. for some reason this was omitted someplace. I'll e-mail the maintainer, hopefully it'll be fixed when you go to build the port.

After that I got some errors that were warnings treated as errors because -Wall was in the Makefile. The errors looked rather harmless, so I went into the directories in question and edited the Makefile to remove every instance of

-Wall

I think this only happened once.

The next batch of errors I had was some errors that said something along the lines of "undefined reference to `MP4IsIsmaCrypMediaTrack'", those were solved by manually rebuilding mpeg4ip-libmp4v2, which you already did, because I mentioned it above.

After mpeg4ip was installed, I went and built daapd, which rebuilt a bunch of stuff on my machine in my xlibraries. most of these things were upgrades, so I had to rebuild them by hand using cd /usr/port/dir ; make deinstall ; make reinstall. I had to do this for at least 3 ports; including pango, gtk and glib. I also got an error from /usr/ports/x11-fonts/XFree86-4-fontScalable that required me to build the port manually, that is, after manually installing a new version of make and imake. I did both of these with

portupgrade imake make

. Hopefully anyone reading this won't have ports as old as mine and won't have issues with these.

once daapd is installed you'll want to put daapd_enable="YES" in your /etc/rc.conf. and don't forget to edit your /usr/local/etc/daapd.conf, a sample is provided, and an example is shown on the page I linked above.

setting up mdnsresponder/rendezvous

the information on this in that above page is outdated. I found that I already had a mDNSResponder port, so I installed that. in fact, it's part of the dependancies of howl, which is part of the daapd dependancies. but I installed /usr/ports/net/mDNSResponder, and /usr/ports/net/howl by hand; I believe they went fairly painless. Finally I created /usr/local/etc/howl and created an mDNSResponder.conf there with these contents:


FREEBSD SERVERNAME
_daap._tcp.

3689

(note that blank line in there).

also, don't forget to add mdnsresponder_enable="YES" to your /etc/rc.conf

after that I ran


# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mdnsresponder.sh start
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/daapd.sh start

if you haven't changed your rc.conf these commands won't start the servers, so make sure you do that first.

this took over 10 minutes to start up the first time, I'm guessing because it had to parse my almost 160GB of music. but after that it started up rather quickly. you can watch /var/log/daapd.log to see what the server is doing.

one note, the first time I ran this, it crashed after I played with it a bit. hopefully this doesn't continue to happen.

pladd

2005-02-10T16:48:00.000-05:00

I've written this script a half-dozen times at least, but this is the first one that doesn't use Mac::iTunes to create the playlist. I needed something that would add a directory of mp3s to a playlist in itunes with the same name as the directory, so I wrote this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; $|++;
use warnings;
use Mac::Glue qw(:all);
my $itunes = Mac::Glue->new("iTunes");

my $dir = shift;
die "specify directory on command line\n" unless ( $dir and -d $dir );
my $playlist = $dir;
$playlist =~ s/\///g;
$playlist =~ s/\s+/_/g;

die "no playlist found\n" unless ($playlist =~ m/[a-zA-Z]/);

# check the playlist total time to see if the playlist exists already.
# $pl_time will be null if playlist doesn't exist, "0:00" for empty playlist
my $pl_time = $itunes->obj(playlist=>$playlist)->prop('time')->get;
if ($pl_time) {
print "playlist exists!\n";
} else {
$itunes->make(new => 'playlist', with_properties => { name => $playlist });
}

opendir DIR, $dir or die $!;
# only adding songs m4a, m4b, and mp3s.
my @file_list = grep { /(mp3|m4[ab])$/i } readdir (DIR);

foreach my $file (@file_list) {
print $file, $/;
# add files to playlist.
$itunes->add("$dir/$file", to => $itunes->obj(playlist=>$playlist));
# remove original
unlink "$dir/$file" or warn $!;
}

you can also find it on the code section of my webpage here.

imunge roxorz!

2005-02-03T13:18:00.000-05:00

I love imunge!
I had some songs with annoying song names in all caps, with the help of ernie I wrote this imunge command:

imunge -s -r '.+' -P '\L$&'

beautiful!

Rip and Burn DVDs

2005-02-01T18:44:00.000-05:00

How to copy a dvd and burn it to DVD on my mac powerbook:

Rip the DVD using MacTheRipper. this copies it to the hard drive and removes DSS.

Open VirtualPC

mount home directory as samba share drive (for some reason the virtual PC built in file sharing won't work with most XP progams I've tried. it makes things crash.)

use DVDShrink to reencode files to fit on one burned DVD

click Open Files, pick where you saved with MacTheRipper, turn off video preview.

Set save to folder and choose the Desktop on the share.

Make sure you're saving Region Free and turn on Deep Analysis and Smooth high quality error correction.

Click OK and make sure video preview is off again. wait 2 hours. I suggest sleeping.

Close Virtual PC

Burn the resulting directories with Toast 6 to a DVD. Just drag the folder on the desktop into Toast with the DVD Data Disc option chosen.

Delete the files that MacTheRipper and DVDShrink made. should be about 5-6 gigs total.

expanding FreeBSD ptys

2004-11-11T13:44:00.000-05:00

I always forget what to do.

> # cd /dev
> # sh MAKEDEV pty{1,2,3,4,5,6,7}
>
> to make 256 device nodes for the new terminals.

iMunge

2004-10-19T17:22:00.000-04:00

Currently my iTunes houses 27,798 songs, and while that's not the most I've ever had, it is a considerable amount. Sometimes I can spend hours just renaming songs and fixing the info in iTunes. It's easy if you just need to highlight some songs and set the artist and album info. But if the track numbers or the artists on a compilation are stored in the song's name and you want to get it in the right fields so you can sort on it, then it becomes tedious.

Using Mac::Glue I've written some Perl scripts that let me easily highlight some songs and run a script in the terminal and it changes the info. Problem is I kept having to edit the script for every job I needed done. I decided to generalize this script into a single program that I just pass command line arguments to and it will modify the songs you have either selected or you can specify a playlist to modify.

The result is iMunge. (colorized source) (download) (examples)

here's a quick example of it working:


69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 01 - Roses

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 02 - Love is Like Jazz

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 03 - When My Boy Walks Down the Street

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 04 - Time Enough for Rocking When We're Old

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 05 - Very Funny

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 06 - Grand Canyon

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 07 - No One Will Ever Love You

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 08 - If You Don't Cry

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 09 - You're My Only Home

69 Love Songs, Vol. 2 - Magnetic Fields - 10 - (Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy

the command:


imunge -s -d- -N 3 -A 1 -T 2 -L 0

sorts all of this info out and puts it in it's proper ID3 tags via itunes. pretty nifty.

gmail kaputz

2004-07-15T00:13:00.000-04:00

I don't have anymore gmail invites! stop asking for them! blogger is a virus!

I'm home, resting. no more traveling.
maybe a road trip in september. I'm debating.

NYC

2004-06-16T15:37:00.000-04:00

I'm leaving town on Saturday morning (06/19/04) and going to new york city to stay until thursday (06/24/04). I'm going to see the Daily Show on wednesday and I'm going to chill out with my boy blake.

oh, and for future reference, the members of the wu-tang clan are:
GZA/Genius, RZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, U-God

gmail.com

2004-06-09T18:34:00.000-04:00

I have a couple gmail.com invites with no one's name on them.

if anyone wants one, e-mail me. my username there is rexroof

This is the first test

2004-06-07T15:14:00.000-04:00

I wanted to test blogger because I'm a google junkie.

I'm curious to see how dope it'll be.