Here’s one of those projects that you dream up just to avoid doing more important/useful work: FFmpeg SVN to Twitter gateway. I, too, am now contributing to the notorious fail whale.

All the kids are talking about this Twitter thing these days. I have read up on some kind of open API they offer. I’m not really that keen on these modern web-based APIs. I had a feeling that someone must have a Python API for it and sure enough: python-twitter. So that takes care of that half of the gateway.

The other half is interfacing to FFmpeg SVN. I already have this part reasonably figured out thanks to FATE— my current method is to simply execute ‘svn’ via shell and parse the stdout. It seems that there are a few cleaner Python-oriented solutions for this. But all I really need is to parse the current revision number from ‘svn info’ and then parse the output of ‘svn log -r <rev>’.

Perhaps the craziest part of my solution is that I’m using an sqlite3 database to store a single piece of data– the revision. Hey, I just find it to be the simplest solution, oddly enough.

I imagine it would be possible to engineer the Twitter update as a function triggered during a commit. However, I tend to think it’s not a good idea to have a commit trigger that is dependent on an RPC call to a web service that has a tenuous uptime reputation.

Now to sit back and see if anyone actually follows the account (besides spammers).

I came across this Typealyzer web site which purports to assess a blogger’s personality type based purely on the written word. I have 3 active blogs and I apparently manage to write using a different personality type on each blog:

• This blog — my personal technical blog — pegs me as “INTJ – The Scientists”.
• My Gaming Pathology blog — where I write about usually obscure video games — marks me as “ESTP – The Doers”.
• My corporate blog — where I speak in fairly careful terms about what I do at my day job — earns me the distinction of “ENTJ – The Executives”.

I suppose all of those make sense. Each blog is written with a slightly different tone. This is in keeping with the website’s explanation that “This is about exploring social roles (or personas) that are expected to be different in different situations.” I think it’s frustrating that I have to write my corporate blog in an executive, often vacuous tone (and I know it frustrates the readers to no end as well); I would much prefer if it could lean toward “The Scientists” end of the personality inventory. Alas, it is not to be.

I popped in a bunch of blogs I read but they all seem to learn toward certain areas of the brain chart. According to that chart, I don’t seem to read any blogs by people heavy in the sensing or feeling departments. I have a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it. On a hunch, I plugged in the blog produced by the top Google search for “angsty teenager blog” — Teen Angst Poetry. That scores as “ISFP – The Artists”. Sure enough, I don’t think I would enjoy reading that blog.

I have a habit of prepending ‘time’ to all of my ‘make’ commands in order to keep a rough estimate of how long build jobs take.

Adhering to this custom, I performed a ‘make’ command on a project that didn’t actually require any rebuilding. So how does the following happen?

$ time make -j5

[...]

real    1770m35.893s
user    0m12.408s
sys     0m11.692s

Answer: The machine (virtual machine, actually) had just been started, had a grossly out-of-sync clock, and must have synced to the time server during that narrow window that the build was occurring:

make[2]: Warning: File `...' has modification time 1.8e+04 s in the future
make[2]: warning:  Clock skew detected.  Your build may be incomplete.

In the middle of 2004 I purchased a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra portable MP3 player. “MP3 player” was not quite a commonplace concept yet but the word “iPod” was beginning to catch on. When describing this new toy to people, I usually described it as “about the same as an iPod but about 1/2 the price” which was absolutely true when I purchased it.

Here is my Nomad compared to a 1st generation Apple iPod Touch, my current MP3 player (and more):

The Nomad Zen Xtra served me well for 3 solid years until I finally got a proper iPod in summer of 2007. I have kept the unit around since then for no particular reason. I decided to disassemble and photograph it before I send the battery and electronics off to their respective recycling destinations.

The Nomad Zen Xtra was highly user-servicable and upgradeable. At the time I put it out of service, the battery could barely run for 5 hours (whereas, 10-12 hours was no problem when it was new). A replacement battery would be easy enough to order from assorted battery shops on the internet.

Have more than 40 GB of songs? Take off the back of the unit, remove the 2.5″ 40 GB IDE HD and replace with a larger one. That never proved to be necessary for me; in fact, I soon realized after I bought it that the lower-end 30 GB model would have been well more than enough.

The 40 GB HD from the unit is still perfectly good. I decided to hook it up to a Linux computer and see if there is anything I could work out about the filesystem. Before I got too far into it, a little Googling led me to a Python utility called zenrecover.py. Works famously:

$ python zenrecover.py /dev/sdc songs /home/melanson/mnt/zen
0% 3.6MB/s "Bizet_Intermezzo_from_Carmen.mp3" (6.8MB)

Just for fun, I dumped all the songs from the unit. I discovered a few things I had long forgotten and had never made the transition into my iPod. Curiously, the very first items that the utility dumped (likely because they occupied the first parts of the filesystem) were a selection of classical tunes as played by the “Beijing Central Phil Orchestra”. These songs came with the unit. It’s notable that the software transferred them off because the packaged software did not allow the user to do so (I’m pretty sure it allowed all music that was downloaded to be transferred off).

Ugh, that packaged software had to be the worst part about the Nomad Zen Xtra. I know lots of users like to chastise iTunes over a range of pet peeves. I think such people have simply never been exposed to anything worse, like this software.