handyfloss

Recently my friend L. drew my attention to a blog that had a nifty flash animation on a sidebar. That flash animation presented the visitor with a playlist of some songs, which she could play by clicking on them. Well the thing is called radio.blog, and can be downloaded from its homepage. BTW, it’s a Creative Commons software piece.

So, yes, I went ahead and implemented it in my blog… and the result is in the right hand side of this page.

Installation

You need to download the zip file you can find at the radio.blog site (direct link).

Unzipping that file will create a radio.blog.2.5/ directory, which contains a Instructions.txt file. Read it, because it is very simple and, of course, useful.

Basically, you will find two directories inside the main one: creat.sound/ and radio.blog/. The former can be used to place MP3 files into it, and then create RBS files making use of one of the BAT files therein (for MS Windows), and the latter is the directory that you have to place in your web server, because it contains the program itself (SWF and PHP files), along with the MP3 files you will upload.

Okay, so the first step is to convert the music into the RBS format. They include a (very simple) BAT file that can do the job if you’re on Windows (don’t sue me if it doesn’t work: I haven’t tried it), but whatever OS you are running, a RBS file is nothing more than a MP3 file renamed to .rbs. Yes, just that. However, the BAT files the makers give not only do that renaming: they also downsample the songs to 32 or 64 kbps. You can do it by hand using lame (toolame won’t work, because Layer II is not supported, only Layer III). The downsampling is desirable because, even though the quality goes down, so does the size, and it is crucial to make small files if we want a half-decent listening experience for our visitors. Myself, I use a 48 kbps bitrate. Important note: make sure the resulting MP3 has a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz (I think the default is to resample to 24 kHz, which will make the song sound like The Chipmunks singing it, because the player assumes it’s 44.1 kHz).

Once we have a bunch of RBS files, we will have to put them into the radio.blog/sounds/ directory and upload the whole radio.blog/ dir to our site. Next, you have to copy the code below into the source of the web page you want to put the radio into (e.g. the template of the blog):

<iframe src="http://YOUR_URL/radio.blog/index.php" name="radio" scrolling="no" frameborder=0 width=220 height=320></iframe>

In the code above, substitute YOUR_URL with the URL of the site you downloaded the radio.blog/ dir to.

Creating the RBS files

From WAV:

lame --abr 48 --resample 44.1 infile.wav -o outfile.rbs

where “48” is the desired bitrate. You can tune it up (better quality) or down (smaller size).

From OGG:

Convert to WAV,

oggdec infile.ogg -o infile.wav

and then, like above for WAV.

Or, in one step:

oggdec infile.ogg -o - | lame --abr 48 --resample 44.1 - -o outfile.rbs

From MP3:

lame --mp3input --abr 48 --resample 44.1 infile.mp3 -o outfile.rbs

Music I have uploaded

Due to the restrictive copyrights most mainstream songs bear, it is legally tricky to broadcast them at a place like this. Not only that, but I also refuse to give free publicity to a bunch of sobs who assume I am a criminal, and treat me like one, limiting my rights to access, share and spread their music.

However, there is little to fear. There are places like Jamedo, where all sorts of musicians publish their work under Creative Commons licenses, so that anyone can freely download, listen, copy, share and spread it any way they feel like, with the only price of acknowledging the author. This is the way to go, and this is the kind of artists I want to support. All the music you’ll find at my site, is, therefore, Creative Commons music.

Last night I went to see the movie Chaos (Caos).

It is a decent movie, with some thriller ingredients, following the “misterious” bank robbery theme I also saw in Inside man (Plan oculto). Here the plot is, maybe, more developed, but less perfect. It is not evident why some things happen, and the inclusion of chaos theory into the plot is irrelevant, but it has the makings of a good thriller, in which details fit together as the movie goes on. Not perfectly, but they do fit.

As a little warning, do not expect incredible amounts of action, just because Statham and Snipes are starring. It has some action, but the main dish is the plot itself.

Barring some holes in the script, and the usual unbelievable bits (some explosions, some bad guys escaping miraculously… you know, those things), I’d say it is well worth watching.

Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Crash, and I have to say that I liked it a lot. The plot is very good, and the events flow naturally.

What I liked most was that the characters were, albeit sketchy (because there are many, and there’s no time for more development), quite more complex than your average black-or-white hero/villain type nowadays. There aren’t really good guys and bad guys. There’s racist idiots, but also people with prejudices learning to overcome them, apparently racist people acting as heroes, ethnic minorities clashing among them, appart from with white people, and “gangsta bros” becoming samaritans.

A great movie, really.

Viernes 5 de mayo, carretera N1 dirección Donostia, cercanías de Vitoria. Una inocente joven, a quien identificaremos como L., conduce su flamante coche nuevo con destino a Donosti, huyendo de la asfixiante y deprimente macrourbe conocida como “Madrid”.

No sabe si lo ha alcanzado o le acaba de adelantar, pero tiene delante un coche de siniestro aspecto, y con matrícula francesa. Hay algo en su manera de circular, lento pero con suaves acelerones ocasionales, que parecen indicar a L. “adelántame”. No, indicar no es la palabra adecuada. Retar.

“Lo que me faltaba, un pirado”. L. acelera y rebasa al amenazador automóvil, dejándolo fácilmente atrás. Respira aliviada, y prosigue su viaje.

Pero no todo queda ahí. Segundos más tarde un destello en el retrovisor la sorprende. “Si todavía hay luz, ¿qué hace ese tío?” Un rápido vistazo al retrovisor confirma su sospecha: es el coche francés de antes. “Bien, si quiere adelantarme, que lo haga”. Efectivamente el coche rebasa a L., pero en vez de alejarse reduce su velocidad hasta quedarse justo delante, como en la anterior ocasión.

L. decide no adelantarlo, reduciendo la marcha con la intención de dejarlo ir. Pero no será tan fácil… el coche también frena. Van tan lento que L. se extraña de que otros coches no los alcancen, pero el hecho es que van sólos por la carretera.

Al final, L. decide adelantar y acelerar hasta dejar el coche atrás. Pero este parece que no cede tan pronto, y acelera hasta alcanzarla. L. inicia una carrera desenfrenada por dejar al franchute loco atrás.

[…] Me salto 187 páginas de descripciones de acción a raudales, más que nada porque tengo más cosas que hacer […]

Cuando está llegando a Donosti, L. reduce la velocidad y se prepara para tomar la salida necesaria. El francés loco se posiciona a la par del coche de L. y por primera vez circulan en paralelo cierto tiempo.

L. mira horrorizada cómo dos pares de ojos rojos que parecen refulgir la observan desde los asientros traseros del coche francés. Fijándose más puede ver el contorno de unas cabezas enormes y ligeramente deformes, como la descendencia siniestra de una familia infernal. Lentamente, con exasperante deliberación, la ventanilla del copiloto se va abriendo, dejando ver tras ella la melena rubia de una mujer que bien podría ser una diablesa, con su rostro pálido pero hermoso entre la cabellera revuelta por el viento. Unos complicados gestos, posiblemente satánicos, de la mujer, empujan a L. a bajar su ventanilla, y prestar atención, contra todo lo que su ya torturada razón le avisa. Temiendo oir palabras terribles que perviertan su mente y la subyuguen al Señor de las Tinieblas, L. oye (en francés):

– “¡Gilipollas, llevas el intermitente derecho todo el tiempo encendido!”

Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Failure to launch (Novia por contrato).

I went to Antiguo Berri, a cinema that is a 5 minutes walk away from where I live. That’s why I always get out 4 minutes before the movie starts…

Yesterday I got out 6 minutes before, congratulating myself because I had 1 extra minute. All was fun and rejoice until I arrived at the cinema ticket desk… and noticed I had forgotten my wallet at home (and had no time to go back for it). Wait, there’s hope! I had with me my coin wallet, in which I had enough money. The regular ticket is 5 euros, but a card issued to under-30s by my bank entitles me to a discount of one euro. Fine, I had 4.70 eur in my coin wallet! Now, the bad part: the discount card was in my other wallet, at home :^(

Now, I go to that cinema every week, so the clerk knows me. I thougth that she’d accept to make the discount even without the card, you know, my charming smile and all that… Tough luck, yesterday they had a new guy at the desk. My moral sank.

However, I thought “what the hell?”, and told him what the matter was. To my (mild) surprise, he accepted promptly, and issued me a discount ticket, making me pay only 4 eur. Bad part is he didn’t give me a “young discount” ticket, but one of “discount to the elderly” :^)

As for the movie itself, it is a romantic comedy, which says it all. It’s only moderately funny, but I had a good time watching it. It pokes fun at guys living with their parents, which is technically my situation… so I sometimes thought it was a drama, instead of a comedy!

I don’t think I spoil any big surprise if I disclose that the main line of the plot is that the parents of Matthew McConaughey hire Sarah Jessica Parker to make him fall in love with her, so that he quits living with them. Yeah, right, I thought the same thing: them bastards! My self-confidence was already low, I didn’t need the suspicion that next time a girl is “receptive” with me it’s because my parents hired her to make me move out of home, thanks!

I know, I know: it’s a movie. But… did they really think it would work? SJ Parker’s aim was to give MM self confidence, so that he’d shift to the next step in life, living alone. Now, if (or “when”) he did find out about the farce… wouldn’t his self confidence actually sink? Wouldn’t it be even more difficult to make him move away in the future (if it didn’t work out at the first try, as it was evident that it wouldn’t)? What kind of shit were those parents smoking when they came out with the idea, and were can I get some?

Heracles is the name of my computer at home. I have been “tuning” it this weekend, and I think the result is reasonably attractive. I am publishing a screenshot (see below) of the resulting desktop, partly to show off, and partly to keep a history of the evolution of the looks of my desktop.

The screenshot shows three different adesklets, namely Calendar 0.5.3, modubar 0.0.1 and SystemMonitor 0.1.3. The modubar is currently docking the icons for Konsole, Firefox (currently highlighted by the cursor), amaroK, OpenOffice, TVTime, Quake IV, and the Xfce settings. As I write these lines, I am considering getting new icons :^)

The icons of the bottom-right corner correspond to the Xfce Icon Box, a nifty program to show the icons of the currently open windows (in this case, amaroK, Konsole and Firefox).

The black texts correspond to two Conky instances. The top-left one gives general info, and the bottom-right one tells me how much Internet traffic I have had the last days and months. This is not trivial, since my ISP (Euskaltel) overcharges me if I download+upload more than 4GB/month.

The desktop environment is Xfce, and the Linux distro it is running on is Debian.

Many newcomers to Linux are appalled by the apparent need of using the feared CLI (Command Line Interface) in this OS.

This is partly FUD, because most everything can be done in modern Linux desktops that come with major distros (e.g. Xfce under Debian), through a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

However, this post does not try to deny the need of the CLI, but rather stress that an experienced user (if I may call myself so) finds himself doing 99% of his tasks from the command line, just because it is more comfortable and efficient in the long run.

As an example, the data that prompted me to write this: my computer (called Bart) has been up for 63 days so far. I also work on four other computers, called Casandra, Amphiaraus, Orpheus and Arina (through OpenSSH, of course). Part of these 63 days, I have had terminals open in all of the other machines (except Arina, the connection to which is automatically closed after 48h of inactivity, a.k.a. weekends).

All right, so the number of command lines typed in by me during the “lifetime” of these terminals (less than 63 days) are as follows:

Bart: 5047+934+782 (3 simultaneous terminals)
Casandra: 159
Amphiaraus: 114
Orpheus: 6289+4067
Arina: 313+242 (last 3 days only).

This data is not taking into account other terminal windows I have opened and closed in the meantime, and the fact that Amphiaraus has been up only 3 days, and Casandra just 18 (Orpheus 136 days, Arina 194).

Counting only 45 of the 63 days as laborable (5/7), it means I type 400 lines of commands per day, on average! It also means that my computer is keeping track of the last 18000 commands I introduced (not really, because I have set each window to “remember” just the last 1000 commands entered).

A screenshot of an Orpheus terminal below.

Yesterday I went to the cinema and watched Spike Lee’s Inside man (Plan oculto is the Spanish title). I have to say that I wholeheartedly recommend this movie. It’s very well directed (although I don’t like Lee’s other movies all that much), and the photography is superb.

The plot is very nicely written and tied up together. There are, as always are, some weak points and things more or less difficult to believe. However, many real situations that actually happen every day are more difficult to believe, so…

For me that movie is what a movie should be. It tells a story the way the cinema should tell it. A book is a book. A song is a song. A picture is a picture. And a movie should be a movie. Each one has its tools and procedures, and this movie puts the ones of the cinema to good use, IMHO.

Today I changed the name of this blog from an unappealing Iñaki Silanes’ Blog to an intendedly witty handyfloss. I was going to name it Mental floss, but the name is taken :^(

The new name fuses the british expression candyfloss (meaning “something attractive but insubstantial”, according to the Merrian-Webster OnLine dictionary) and the acronym FLOSS (which stands for “Free (Libre) Open-Source Software”).

*some minutes patting myself on the back, for being so witty and humorous*

I *ehem* humbly *ehem* think that the word neatly sums up the message I want to transmit with the blog: that the free software is useful!

I just edited the template of my blog, so that the style is now different. I hope you like it better than the previous one (a default one). I think I’ll keep changing details here and there, however.

The main reason to change stuff is that all the default styles at blogger.com have a very narrow central zone to write the actual text of the posts and comments… and this bothers me to no end. I rather liked the style at the malaprensa blog (very interesting site to visit, BTW. In Spanish), so I tried to mimic some of its characteristics.