I’ve been playing around with a program called Jinzora. You can check out a demo at their web site, but it’s basically a way to stream out your music collection over the internet or your home network or a CMS, or all of the above. I was looking for a different way to do this than by using MusicMatch, which is a cool program but it doesn’t run on Linux and I have to worry about licensing stuff that I don’t have time for. It installed fairly easily and I had it up and running on my debian server in no time.
Just goofing around at work I tried to see if I could hit the site from here and I could. So, I’ve been listening to my music today. Not sure how the bandwidth police would feel about that but I did increase the compression so hopefully it hasn’t been too bad.
There are a few things I’m not too crazy about – I don’t know how to edit artist’s names, nor do I see an easy way to categorize things, but all in all, it’s a neat program. I’m still in the early stages of playing around with this but so far I think it will work. My biggest problem, as mentioned earlier, is dealing with all of my wma files. Linux doesn’t seem to like them so I can only listen to tunes on a Windows PC at the moment.
I did check out a few other programs, most notably slimserver, but I didn’t fool around with it too much. I think there were a few dependencies I didn’t set up or something. Basically, if I have to compile anything, I’m hosed because I haven’t mastered that yet.
If you have any suggestions for good alternatives to Jinzora or slimserver, let me know.
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posted 08/02/2005 05:07 PM
I have a ton (around 50GB) of wma files on my pc and I want to convert them to mp3. Does anyone out there know of an easy to use tool that can do a big ol’ batch conversion?
I’ve found a lot of tools that will convert the files, and a few that do batch conversions, but I don’t like how they do the batch conversions.
What I want, and this is probably a pipe dream, is to just click on my “music” folder and have it go to work. Most of the batch programs I found had you open up each folder, select all of the files, and add them to a cue. If I only had a few folders to deal with, this wouldn’t be a problem. But I’ve got something like 350 artists, who all have one or more sub-folders per album, so all of that clicking is a big pain.
Just curious if there is a solution out there.
Update
I ended up using something called Advanced WMA Workshop to do the conversion. I could not find an easy to use program in linux so I had to run it through Win XP. I had a couple pc’s running non-stop for 3 days and it finally finished this morning. Now I have to re-build the Jinzora database and I should be good to go. Phew.
| posted 08/02/2005 12:41 PM
I just wanted to give a quick shout out to the mental giants at MDOT. This morning as I headed to work on I-75 I noticed that over the weekend they tore out the old blacktop to prepare for a new surface. Fine. This stretch of I-75 from 8 Mile to 696 is pretty bad and could use it. What ticked me off and ruined my morning, however, was that they also tore out big chunks of concrete and did not bother to fill them in with anything. So, when my 93 fell into one of these newly formed craters, pop went my driver’s side tire.
Have you ever tried to replace a flat tire on the side of a busy highway? It’s not fun. In fact, it’s really dangerous. I stupidly changed the tire myself, but I should have called AAA. Thankfully a nice guy pulled over to see if I needed any help. I didn’t, but I appreciated the offer.
Once the spare was in place, I was off to Discount Tire where I ended up replacing 3 of the tires. The fourth was replaced a couple months back. Great way to start off the week. Thanks MDOT. Your bill is in the mail. And I’m sure I’ll never see a cent.
[1] | posted 08/01/2005 03:36 PM
Ummm…Dean and company must be hooked up to a caffeine iv or something because rc5 was released today. There are a lot of new features, which I find pretty amazing since rc4 was released just a few days ago. I’ve installed it here, but haven’t had time to check out the new features. Actually, I didn’t have time to check out the new rc4 features. Does this mean rc6 will be released on Friday?
| posted 08/01/2005 03:24 PM
Well, Dean and the gang have released the latest update to textPattern, rc4. I installed the new version in about 5 minutes. The only problem I encountered was an extra <br /> tag being inserted after each of my links in the sidebar. I fixed the problem and that was it. No problems with the plug-ins I’m currently using or anything else. All in all it was a painless procedure.
[2] | posted 07/29/2005 02:54 PM
I’ve been so busy moving all of the sites to a new host, learning linux/Fedora/Debian, mySql, php, mambo and a million shell commands that I haven’t had time to write about the 2005 MLB All-Star game at Comerica Park this year.
I lucked out in a huge way when my friend Glen told me he had an extra ticket to the Futures game/FanFest on Sunday, as well as the main event Tuesday night. $165, 2 hats and a blog shout out later, I was there. 
It was awesome. A dream come true for me. The whole time I was at the game I kept thinking, “Damn! It’s the all-star game…and it’s here in Detroit…and I’m here!” My wife thinks I’m nuts but deep down I think she understands.
Al Kaline and Willie Horton threw out the first pitch, some guy I’ve never heard of sang the national anthem and we received a flyover by a Stealth bomber. The game itself was ok. The AL jumped out to a 7-0 lead, which was fine with me. We got to boo Kenny Rogers as he warmed up in the bullpen (our seats were in the first row of the upper deck, near the scoreboard…very cool), and we were fairly close to Tejada’s home run early in the game. I took a few pictures and I might try to get those posted on here one way or another.
All in all, it was a fantastic night, despite the brief rain shower at the end of the game. The city looked great, and everything went smoothly. A lot of people that hadn’t been to Detroit in a long time (including many from the suburbs) were impressed, I guess, which bodes well for the Super Bowl this January.
| posted 07/27/2005 10:47 AM
It’s a brand new era at JayDreyer.com. The days of Blogger are over, replaced by Textpattern. So far, so good. I was able to import all of my posts from Blogger using these instructions without any trouble. After that, I found a template, made some tweaks and now I’m on my way.
Comments are enabled now, so chip in if you want. I’ll be curious to see if I’ll be a victim of comment spam or not. I still have some work to do here but it already looks better than the old site.
Along with ditching Blogger, I also ditched my home-brewed hosting system in favor of signing up with a real host provider. After a lot of research, I decided to go with site5.com. Last night was the first time I was able to log in so I’m still getting a feel for how everything works. Now I don’t have to worry about the power going out, my son pressing the glowing blue power button, or my lack of skills as a server admin as reasons for my various sites not being available.
Also new, along the lines of changing hosting providers, is my choice of operating system. I’ve made the switch from Windows 2000/2003 servers for my web stuff to Linux. I set up a test server at home and was amazed at the things I could do, although most of it is pretty basic to seasoned Linux pros. I’m now on the LAMP stack and so far it has been painless. The big plus is the amazing assortment of open source software that is available.
That’s it for now…I’ve got more sites to migrate.
| posted 07/22/2005 03:06 PM
As you may know, the MLB All-Star game is being held in Detroit this year, and next year brings the Super Bowl. While just about everyone here is thrilled with the prospect of hosting these big-time events, there exists a slight undercurrent of fear. Why? Well, we’re all a little sensitive when it comes to folks describing our city. People that don’t live here or haven’t visited in a while all have the same tired, old impression of the place – high crime, burning buildings, dreary, etc. As a recent example, I’d point you to Dan LeBatard’s column in the Miami Herald, but they want you to pay for it. Another example is Jimmy Kimmel’s off-handed remark about buildings being burned down if the Pistons were to win last year’s NBA championship. They won, but nothing burned, as usual. Kimmel caught so much heat for his joke (his show was yanked from channel 7 here for a night or two) he ended up apologizing on the air.
To my surprise today, I found an article about the city that wasn’t negative and couldn’t believe it. It’s on espn.com and was written by Jason Whitlock. He sums it up pretty well for us. The little fella has a decent column today, as well. I think this time he wrote about things that actually happened instead of using his ability to see the future. It’s nice to see something positive in print about the city for a change, instead of the tired, old cliches. Don’t get me wrong, Detroit has a lot of issues and it is far from perfect. If you’re going to rip on the city, at least use something a little more up to date than bringing up images from 20 years ago.
| posted 07/11/2005 03:11 PM
I went to hop on my PC the other day and my monitor was severely messed up. Extreme horizontal ghosting made the screen close to unviewable. I haven’t had my Dell 19” flat screen for very long so I didn’t think that could be the problem. I played around with my KVM switch, swapped some cables, tried it on another pc, etc. The monitor was fine, the KVM cables weren’t causing the problem. It had to be my nVidia GForce2 Pro card that I’ve had since 2 computers ago.
So, it was off to the store to find a new one. Problem is, I haven’t thought about video cards for years. I basically stopped playing games when I went back to school. Then, with the addition of Jack, there just wasn’t any time. My knowledge of video cards, therefore, is extremely limited. My requirements were pretty simple – something decent but not on the cutting edge. As I said, I don’t play games so framerates at insane resolutions won’t help me much. About the biggest things I get into are playing around with SketchUp (which is an amazing program, by the way) or using Macromedia Fireworks. I was pretty sure I wanted the nVidia Geforce 6600 GT (I think that’s it) but that ended up being a little too much. The guy at the store ended up talking me into an ATI Radeon x700 something or other. So far, it’s working great. I fired up SketchUp and was amazed at how smoothly things worked and how adding back layers had no effect on speed.
I have no idea if this is a great card of not. I looked around on Cnet a little bit last week but don’t remember anything about the one I ended up getting. Most of the reviews seemed to be written for serious gamers, anyway. Whatever. So far, so good.
| posted 07/09/2005 11:01 PM
This is an example of an automated content update system.
| posted 07/04/2005 02:23 PM
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