Published on Friday 31st March 2006 .
OK, I lied about going to bed. I just saw that CNET.com has the easy tutorial on retrieving music from a Windows iPod that I have always been meaning to write since discovering my music in the hidden iPod_Control\Music folder. Someone finally beat me to it. Oh well. And yes, it’s just as easy as the tutorial shows.
What the tutorial fails to mention is that the music files have truncated filenames. That is, it only shows the first ten or so characters IIRC of the filename, then it mangles it with a ‘~’ or something. The trick to getting it back with a proper filename is to use a file renamer that can look into the ID3 tags or let iTunes (or any other music library software) organize/rename your music files. The advantage of iTunes organizing your library is that it also quickly separates the files into folders by artist and album title.
Also, the music files on a Windows iPod are marked as hidden files. This isn’t normally a problem, but if it is, you can just unhide the files. If you use the file properties dialog box, there is a checkbox on the General tab to mark the file(s) as hidden. If you feel like venturing into the command line, you can always run attrib -H «path to music folder» /S /D. This will unhide all the files and folders contained in the music folder you enter.
Published on Friday 31st March 2006 .
My insomnia went crazy again tonight. In addition to burning both my posts feed and comments feed, I have also updated Scott’s blog. On his site, I uploaded and activated the Connections theme he said he wanted (IIRC anyways). And I also went ahead and edited his blogroll to have all of the ask-mark.com blogs. I think I’ll read more The Sum of All Fears and then go to bed.
Published on Thursday 30th March 2006 .
I have now changed my RSS feed so that it uses FeedBurner. If you happen to subscribe to the feed, there is nothing you have to do. If you don’t subscribe, you can use either ask-mark.com/feed or feeds.feedburner.com/ask-mark. I used the WordPress FeedBurner Plugin by Steve Smith. The plugin automatically forwards and redirects things using .htaccess. It’s probably the easiest way to burn your feed with FeedBurner. The plugin works with both v.1.5 and v.2.0 of WordPress.
I decided to try out FeedBurner just because. I had no really good reason. Hell, Jacqui’s use of it didn’t even move me to use it long ago. I did want a nicer looking feed than just the XML, and FeedBurner does just that. I know that I could have done it with some XSL, but for now the FeedBurner XSL is fine.
Published on Thursday 23rd March 2006 .
I meant to post this the other day, but I’m still ironing out the kinks after finally getting .htaccess to protect my reFeed install.
The Supreme Court will be hearing a case about a patent. A company called Metabolite holds the patent on a test for homocysteine levels, but that same patent correlates elevated homocysteine levels with vitamin deficiency. Metabolite is suing LabCorp because the latter company published an article that mentiones the correlation, although a different test was used.
Michael Crichton has an essay at NYTimes.com with more details about the sad state of the US Patent System. Nate Anderson has a further examination of the news at Ars.
Published on Thursday 23rd March 2006 .
This has been a crazy seven days! There was CATS on Friday; an 80th birthday party on Sunday; HIMYM on Monday; an NT meeting and steaks for dinner on Tuesday; a big ham, two Prices, a Mike and a Weise for dinner on Wednesday; and a wireless security meeting and two big setups on Thursday. And throughout all of this, I’ve been working on a side project doing PHP programming, CSS design and graphical mock ups!
Here’s to hoping tomorrow isn’t quite as crazy as any other the previous days!
Published on Tuesday 21st March 2006 .
For those of you paying attention, I have added a web-based feed aggregator to my site called reFeed, which is part of the reBlog feed blogging web application. With this web app, I now have a single aggregator that isn’t Google Reader (sometimes Google is too good for its own good). I no longer have to mark items as read in three or four aggregators spread out over various computers.
But I had a problem with my new web toy: it wasn’t lending itself well to being password protected. Without adding protection, my reFeed installation would be wide open to anyone who knew the address. If you’re even slightly web-inclined, you’d have tried /refeed. Version 2.0 beta 1 of reFeed was supposed to be able to piggyback on the WordPress authentication cookie. That didn’t work out as planned.
My next step was to try .htaccess to add basic HTML authentication. Every time I added a .htaccess file to my reFeed installation, WordPress would give me a 404 error. If I removed the .htaccess file, reFeed worked fine. So, I started searching various forums for a reason why I couldn’t password protect my reFeed installation. I couldn’t find an answer.
Until today: in the WordPress forums someone pointed to a Dreamhost wiki article about accessing a stats page. I used the information there to add some lines to my site’s .htaccess so that WordPress didn’t entirely hijack the URLs for my site. So, before the WordPress section of my .htaccess file I have the following:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/stats/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/refeed/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L]
</IfModule>
And just like that, I now have a password-protected reFeed installation. And I can see stats that I had been wondering about for a while, but too lazy to find out how to get to them. Hopefully my experience helps you out when trying to install reFeed with WordPress (on a Dreamhost site).
Published on Friday 17th March 2006 .
This is a perfect example of why I can’t devote 100% of my attention to any one task, while also not devoting 1% of my attention to 100 tasks:
Remember the story of Archimedes lolling in his bathtub? To an observer, he’d have seemed to be wasting time. While ostensibly doing nothing, however, he discovered the principle of displacement, a cornerstone of physics. Would he have reached the same insight in a quick shower?
…
But it’s really, really hard, if not impossible, for the human brain to come up with fresh new ideas when its owner is overworked, overtired, and stressed out. And in today’s wonderful world of nonstop work, 40% of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights.
Latest Comments
RSSRudradev, ReinoutS, Scott, Joe, Scott, Bob, Brad, Rich, Mark, Scott
Giancola, jessi, Joe, Brad
Scott, Brad
Scott, Giancola, Scott, jessi
charles binns, Scott
Zed451 is a feast at ask-mark.com