October 2007 archive

Amazon MP3 Download: Jeff Beck, ‘Heart Full of Soul’

I’ve been trying out some new music download options lately. I was happy to see that Amazon started selling non-DRM MP3 files for about a dollar each. I think a dollar is too much for individual song downloads, but I wanted to try it out and help show that people are willing to pay for unrestricted music even when it can be had for free.

Not totally unrestricted, of course. MP3 is still patent encumbered. I’d much prefer Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is free as in freedom and supposedly it is technically better, although my tin ears wouldn’t know the difference. And the name “Ogg” sounds cool. I’m reluctantly willing to go along with MP3 since I already have a huge library of MP3 …

Subversion (SVN) helper bash script to list repo dirs

Finding my way around SVN. So far I’ve created a repository to hold my WordPress theme files and miscellaneous scripts. The working directories are scattered around my home dir, and I found that I wanted a way to view the structure of the repo itself. You can do this with the svn list command:

svn list –recursive file:///path/to/your/svn/repo/dir

And you’ll get a list of all your directories and files. I thought it might be nice to only see the dirs, and then furthernice to specify the depth of dirs to browse, so I cobbled together the bash script below to accomplish this. It takes the output from svn list -R and prints only items that end with a forward slash, e.g.:

svn list -R file:///home/scarpent/src/svn | svn-dirs.sh -d 2

To …

Hodgepodge of Miscellany, part 2 of 2: Google Code, Subversion, Meld

(Continued from part one.)

Google Code Project Hosting

I mentioned this in my YARQ post and have since explored it further (although not much further). It’s a pretty cool free (as in beer) service. I like that they offer a Subversion (SVN) respository and it is easy to start up new projects. I had briefly looked at how to start a SourceForge project and it seemed more involved. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and maybe it helps ensure people are more serious about their project, but there are a lot of little projects you might want to host and not spend so much effort up front.

To experiment, I created the bash cpafter project for my bash cpafter.sh and copy_it.sh scripts. An …

Hodgepodge of Miscellany, part 1 of 2: FSM, OO.o, Tomboy

I’ve been busy with this and that and wishing I had something more substantial prepared to post. I’ve been doing free software stuff, although nothing lately has generated a longer article. Here’s some scrips and scraps on what I’ve been up to:

(Wait! One of the tidbits grew in to its own post! Stay tuned…)

Free Software Magazine, Issue 20

My first article for Free Software Magazine has been published, in Issue 20: Extending Nautilus (the GNOME file manager): rotating JPG images. I’m actually going to be paid for this one, in cash and a book, so it must be good. See, free can pay. :-)

Thanks, FSM!

OpenOffice.org

Working on miscellaneous details in the overall “moving to freedom” process. I spent some time figuring out how to do envelopes and …

Cascade River, again

From the same beautiful day as the last picture: Cascade River State Park, Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

1600 x 1200

Self service free wallpaper: 1280×1024 1280×960 1152×864 1024×768 800×600 640×480

Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Shot with: 2 mega-pixel Olympus D-520 camera

Related: Cascade River State Park, Minnesota