wonkablog

Okay, this is great. This morning at work we were talking about YouTube videos, and then cell phone ringtones, and we got the awesome idea — let’s make some ringtones from YouTube videos! Sweet!

So I downloaded the incomparable video Charlie the Unicorn, used audacity to cut out the Candy Mountain song, and then uploaded it to my cell phone with Bluetooth using my co-worker’s Mac. Freaking right on.

It’s a mecca of love, the candy cave!

Okay, so if you wanna know the technical details, here’s specifically what I did:

Download the youtube video using youtube-dl:

$ youtube-dl -b -t “http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q5im0Ssyyus”

Extract the audio to WAV format using MPlayer:

$ mplayer charlie_the_unicorn-Q5im0Ssyyus.mp4 -ao pcm:file=candy_mountain.wav

Edit the WAV file with Audacity, select the song portion, and export it to MP3 with a64 kbps bitrate. The start point was 2:26 and it’s 42 seconds in length

$ audacity candy_mountain.wav

And that was it! Instant ringtone goodness. Here’s the MP3.

I just got back from watching Kung Fu Panda. It was awesome. I thought the trailer made it look pretty funny, but it did it no justice.

The animation was absolutely incredible, both in style and design. The fight scenes were pretty intense, too — for a kid’s movie that is — meaning, they actually *fight* and kick butt. Also, it was incredibly hilarious. I was laughing out loud about every 30 seconds.

I’m no good at reviews. I’d recommend going and seeing it though.

Actually, now that I think about it, one thing does come to mind.  The movie was filmed in scope instead of flat, and it added a real cinematic presence.  That is actually really rare for animated films, and A Bug’s Life is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that also has done that recently.

Something else I’ve been meaning to do for a while, is get the main site up for the larrythecow.org domain since I started hosting stuff there other than planet. Today I got the idea that it might be fun to just have a page of resources of community pages that people are working on. So, that’s what I did.

If I missed anything, just let me know.

Edit: If you are getting redirected to Planet, then clear out your browser’s cache.  I originally had a permanent redirect going there, which should have been temporary to start with.  Whoops.  The old RSS feed links still work though, for everyone who never updated their entries.

I’m still working on getting ebuild dependencies into the database so I can query them with GPNL.  Getting the actual deps was easy, and that part I just barely wrapped up tonight.  The hard part is getting a fine-grained look at which dependencies are which.

Right now, I’m not too sure what the SQLite database generated by portage is doing, as far as setting DEPEND and RDEPEND.  It *looks* like it’s dumping all of RDEPEND into DEPEND, which makes sense as far as pulling in which packages to install, but that makes it hard on me to determine what the actual run time deps are — assuming that’s what it’s doing.  The fact is, there’s a number of possibilities (no DEPEND, no RDEPEND, empty DEPEND, empty RDEPEND, packages in both, etc.) that really the best way to determine which is which is to do something I should have done a long time ago, which was to write something that will parse the ebuild files directly for the variables.  Then I could easily see which ones are set, and which ones are included.

The fact is, though, that I wouldn’t have been able to do that until recently anyway, and the first time I tried it was when I first started on the package.  At that time, it was a such a disastrous mess trying to parse them as text files because you have random comments and straying lines and unquoted variables that it was just too much of a hassle to deal with.  Now that I’ve got regular expressions setup to figure out the difficult stuff like breaking down atoms into every version component and finding the package name from any atom, it should be much simpler to handle.

Until then, though, at least I’ve got dependencies, so I can add support to GPNL real soon now so we can dynamically query which packages at least depend on others.

In setting up the system, I’ve run into some interesting scenarios as well, as is usually the case.  I’m always thrown a few curve balls that I never would have expected and they either turn out to be QA issues or gentoo culture that I never could have accounted for.  One of them I hit this time was that I kept having ebuilds with dependencies for packages that were no longer in the tree.  At first I was confused, as it seemed like an obvious QA bug, but then looking at it closer, (almost) all of them are blockers — that is, don’t include this package in RDEPEND or DEPEND.  It leads to an interesting question like, how long should that be in there once the package is removed from the tree?  Who knows.  It’s fine to leave them in, I guess, but still, it’s interesting to run into stuff like that.

There’s still a lot more work to do, besides breaking down the actual RDEPEND and DEPEND variables more closely.  One thing I didn’t realize until tonight is that included in the variable is all the dependencies of the eclasses.  So if you have an ebuild using the kde eclass, then the ebuild will also have a dep for system packages like make and libtool.  I need to find a way to clean those out as well, obviously.

Fun stuff.  I hope to have an additional section soon for GPNL on the ebuild page that will display the dependencies, and in turn a possibility to display them in reverse.

I’m still getting overdue stuff taking care of, this time in Planet Larry. I’ve finally cleaned up the scripts and the configs to make it much, much simpler to debug and run the update process. Not only that, now it runs about 15 times faster (under one minute, actually).

Something interesting I realized the other day is that Universe gets about 5% of the traffic that Planet does. As a result, I changed it from updating twice an hour to once every 2 hours. Planet, on the other hand, I changed it from twice an hour to every fifteen minutes, and I might make it update even more frequently than that.

Anyway, all that’s changed is a bunch of boring backend stuff, which was some much needed cleanup that I’ve been putting off for a very, very long time. The fact that planet has been a maintenance nightmare is what has mostly kept me from dragging my feet on getting anything done, but now that that headache is gone, I feel hugely relieved.

There’s still more stuff to do, but I think I’m over the worst of it. What I’d like most is to work on next is getting the actual frontend cleaned up, and get a new design. That’s not really my thing, so if someone can help out, that’d be much appreciated.

Continuing in the vein of finishing up long started projects instead of jumping into new ones, I’ve cleaned up the website for the LDS Scriptures exports site.

The design itself hasn’t changed, I just reorganized everything, and it seems much simpler to navigate now.

I should hopefully have that new release ready real soon now.  The problem I run into is that I’m so particular about details, that it never gets done.  It is, of course, much more important to get it out there, even with all my human flaws, then to keep it all to myself, but I just can’t stand doing version bumps.  I like to have things done the first time.

Anyway, I’m glad this is finally cleaned up.  I like the layout much better.

I took this last night with my cell phone while I was at Liberty Park skating. I was getting tired so decided to walk for a bit, and the shadow was just really cool looking. My crappy camera phone doesn’t do it much justice.

I ended up going out today as well for about four hours, two in the morning when I got up, and just got back home right now from another jaunt. Fun times. I’m slowly getting better, but not nearly as fast as I’d like. My body just isn’t used to doing any kind of sports, so it’s really slow progress. I need to find someone to get some lessons from.

Just another update on what I’ve been poking at lately.

I’ve mostly been cleaning up really small stuff, small bugfixes that have been annoying me for a while.

GPNL / Packages

For the packages website, I finally fixed it so that you can search by just package name again. It’s still messed up where it searches way too much stuff by default, but that’ll be fixed soon. It was originally searching by atom and description, so stuff like package$ would break.

I did, however, put the basic search I want to add to the packages website into GPNL: search by atom, package, category, description or all. I need to add changelog to that list. It’s not much, I know, but it’s a start on the long road to getting an advanced search going. I also cleaned up the front page a bit, and added a link to the nightly database dumps.

I also cleaned up the bash script to import the data. It actually has the beginnings of some error checking now, so you shouldn’t be seeing blank pages anymore. And the database is vacuumed correctly, and on a regularly basis, so things should be slightly snappier. I’m also importing the entire portage tree 3x daily now instead of twice. The import script is actually a nice cleanup for me, because if something breaks, I can run parts of it partially, instead of having to manually fix it. It’s much nicer.

My next big thing is getting RDEPEND searchable.  In the database, it’s combined with the DEPEND variable, so I have to separate the two out.  Once that’s done, we can finally dynamically query the tree to see where ebuilds need to be fixed for binary packages.

MPlayer / Transcode

Looking better, closed like eight bugs the other day for mplayer. Finally fixed some asinine bugs of mine for transcode, have one more to go.

Took out the masked libdvdnav because it will conflict and break libdvdread. I already wrote about how I put it in my overlay so if someone wants to use it, they can.

Sword ebuilds

I finally got pretty much all the main ones in the tree that I wanted to get in. There’s still two LDS ones that I have to make myself. Shouldn’t be too hard. I hope. In all, there are 150 sword ebuilds in the tree. Freak. That reminds me of something else I fixed on the packages website: it lists the number of results. That’s something else that’s been annoying me for a while.

I still need to remove the old sword-modules ebuild and add a new virtual-type one that will pull in all of the ones based on which language they are written in. Not hard to do, just slightly tedious. Should be done soon.

lds-scriptures 3.0

Believe it or not, I’m actually planning on getting this finished this week. The actual data has been finished for a very, very long time… it’s writing the documentation that I am extremely particular about because I plan on this being the final release.

That’s about it for now, that I can remember.

This week has been insane.

I bought a Playstation 3 on Saturday.  I mostly got it because I wanted to cave into getting a Blu-Ray player, but holy cow, this thing is a freaking world of fun.

I’m going to see Indy tomorrow.  I don’t think it’s gonna be that great.

Haven’t slept well the past few days.  I’m pooped.

That’s all.

Ever since my third bout in the hospital about a month ago for stomach problems, I’ve been even more strictly watching what I’ve been eating.  In that time, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend.   The cost to buy better food is marginally small compared to the healthy benefits that come with it.

I’m no economics master (nor do I have any interest in becoming one), but one thing seems pretty obvious to me.  If you’re going to pay $3 for a piece of crap lunch, chances are if you spend a little bit more, you can get something on a magnitude of 2 or 3 times better for you.

Here’s one specific example I’ll use.  At work, there’s a grocery store in the same area.  There’s a Subway a little bit down towards the end of the strip mall.  If I went there, I could get a crappy sandwich with nasty cheese and disgusting bread for about $5 after tax.  It’s not glamorous or great, but it’s cheap, right?  Well, if I go to the grocery store and order a custom made deli sandwich with really fresh meat and really good cheese, it cost’s me an extra $1.50.  Sure, it’s more money, but I’m not going to have to worry about having stomach problems.  And $1.50 extra is nothing in comparison to a $500 trip to the emergency room.

My take on the whole economics of it is, you’re already going to spend X amount of dollars for food.  Why not increase your budget by about 25% and get something *really* good for you.  Ever since I’ve started doing that, I have been feeling so much better.  Lots more energy, less tired, and just healthier in general.

A few other quick examples.  My sister who is a food guru, convinced me to switch from margarine and instead just buy real butter.  I was always, of course, put off by the higher food prices.  But then one day I looked at the ingredients of the margarine I was buying, which was basically nothing more than whipped plastic.  Looking at the one for the butter, it had one ingredient: whipped milk / cream.  That was pretty surprising, so I checked it out, and I loved it, and of course it’s nice to know that I’m eating less garbage.

Another thing little sis has warned me against is checking the ingredients for food where the first item listed is high fructose corn syrup.  Well, I’m a big fan of juice and everytime I go to the store I buy some weird combination of juice to try out, like Apple Cranberry (which is always my favorite).  I just barely looked at the ingredient list the other day and sure enough, the syrup of death was the first item on the list.  Ick.  So, I switched to buying 100% pure grape juice and apple cider instead of my regular stuff.  Again, it costs about 30% more than the old stuff, but I feel a lot better overall.  It’s been great.

Anyway, nothing major so far, but I’m making progress.  It’s pretty interesting how just quickly checking the ingredient list will turn you off of buying something.  I’m getting in the habit of spending slightly more for food, but I’m feeling better all the time.  And I’ve had a lot less stomach problems, too.  I tell you what.