Keeping myself busy here on team Ruby.MN at the F1 Web Challenge. You can check out some photos of our group uploaded at: http://is.gd/leE3
I've been up for 20 hours and programming for the last 16. Only 8 hours left! Fear the Red Shirts! =o
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
F1 Web Challenge v2.0
Well, the F1 Web Challenge is back again this year! I'll be participating in the Team Ruby.MN. We just got word yesterday that our team t-shirts are done, we have met as a group a few times since the event to plan out the logistics and everyone is fired up to take on whatever non-profit is assigned to us. Yahoo!What is the F1 Web Challenge You Ask?
It's a yearly competition put on by a local software consulting firm that brings non-profits together with programmers in a competitive setting to see who can build the best website in 24 hours. From being in the event last year, "24 Hours" is really a misnomer. That's the amount if time you'll be working, but not the amount of time you'll actually be awake and at the event. Last year I was at the event from around 7:00 am Saturday, until 4:00 pm Sunday and then by the time I got home and unwound, I didn't actually get to sleep until 7:00 pm on Sunday. I ended up being awake for 36 hours!
All of the that being said, the event was extremely fun and rewarding. I met some really great people, made some really good friends and had a chance to work with some of the brightest programmers in town. What more could I ask for? I should have been paying to get into this event!
I'll be trying to post photos and details on the event on the blog here as time permits. We won't know our non-profit that we are assigned to until we show up that morning. One thing they have changed this year was to increase the members on the team count, so we have two more bodies to help us get the work done. I'm excited to see what we create!
Details
F1 WEb Challenge Website:
http://www.f1webchallenge.com
Our Team (Ruby.MN) Website:
http://www.f1webchallenge.com/teams/27-Ruby-mn-2-2
Follow me on Twitter during the event!
http://twitter.com/justingrammens
Sunday, February 22, 2009
OGG track numbers iTunes - and Songbird Sings!
I'm a BIG fan of Linux and open source. I try and use open source software whenever I can and try to contribute projects with either monetary donations or helping in reporting bugs, testing or documentation. I have a Linux desktop and host all of my applications on Linux. However, there unfortunately are however some programs and clients that require me to have a MacBook. Alas, sometimes you have to pay the piper. But I am looking to eventually ween myself from Steve Jobs.
I'm also an equally big fan of open standards. One standard that I support is Vorbis and more precisely the OGG container. If you have heard about OGG, the definition from Wikipedia is as follows:
Ogg is a free, open standard container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The Ogg format is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.
The fact that a company could own the format that all of my music is in, goes against my beliefs of free and open standards. I therefore have tried everything that I can to try and keep all of my music in this format. It hasn't been easy, especially since most all music purchase download sites only offer MP3 or AAC. Not even a lossless version like FLAC seems to be available for download on most sites! Very annoying, but that's the subject of another post I guess.
Why am I writing all of this you ask?
Well, I've got close to 20 GB of OGG files and had been wanting to try and use iTunes to listen to them. The people at Xiph have created a quicktime extension that allows iTunes to recognize and play the OGG format! Details on that can be found here.
However, what you'll soon find out is that while it plays the songs, iTunes doesn't know the track numbers! It plays all of the songs from an album in alphabetical order. Bummer. This while not a deal breaker, is extremely annoying and when you have some albums where the songs are in particular order for a reason, it makes listening to album useless. This issues has been submitted to the people at Xiph, but has been deemed not important.
After some searching however, I found an amazing script by Dr. Lex, which allows you to run through your entire library and update the iTunes metadata with the track numbers from your OGG files. Woohoo! Now we are in business. You can get the script directly from Dr. Lex's site here. Very easy to install and it worked out of the box with my iTunes version 8. You'll notice the script also does some reply gain adjustments as well if you have that configured, but in my case I was just interested in getting the track numbers. Thank you Dr. Lex for creating and sharing this script. This is open source at it's best.
UPDATE:
Since I have solved my iTunes in OGG problem, I have actually found a better music player that support OGG right out of the box! It's called Songbird and has some really cool features along with a pluggable architecture. This allows in the same way that Firefox has taken off by people contributing to it, my hope is that Songbird will do the same. If you want to help an Open Source song player succeed I suggest you take a look at it. My next step is going to be getting a sync program going with Songbird so it will push songs to my Android powered G1 phone, but that's a subject for another post. Lots of fun pet projects in the works.
Happy audio listening with Songbird!
I'm also an equally big fan of open standards. One standard that I support is Vorbis and more precisely the OGG container. If you have heard about OGG, the definition from Wikipedia is as follows:
Ogg is a free, open standard container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The Ogg format is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.
The fact that a company could own the format that all of my music is in, goes against my beliefs of free and open standards. I therefore have tried everything that I can to try and keep all of my music in this format. It hasn't been easy, especially since most all music purchase download sites only offer MP3 or AAC. Not even a lossless version like FLAC seems to be available for download on most sites! Very annoying, but that's the subject of another post I guess.
Why am I writing all of this you ask?
Well, I've got close to 20 GB of OGG files and had been wanting to try and use iTunes to listen to them. The people at Xiph have created a quicktime extension that allows iTunes to recognize and play the OGG format! Details on that can be found here.
However, what you'll soon find out is that while it plays the songs, iTunes doesn't know the track numbers! It plays all of the songs from an album in alphabetical order. Bummer. This while not a deal breaker, is extremely annoying and when you have some albums where the songs are in particular order for a reason, it makes listening to album useless. This issues has been submitted to the people at Xiph, but has been deemed not important.
After some searching however, I found an amazing script by Dr. Lex, which allows you to run through your entire library and update the iTunes metadata with the track numbers from your OGG files. Woohoo! Now we are in business. You can get the script directly from Dr. Lex's site here. Very easy to install and it worked out of the box with my iTunes version 8. You'll notice the script also does some reply gain adjustments as well if you have that configured, but in my case I was just interested in getting the track numbers. Thank you Dr. Lex for creating and sharing this script. This is open source at it's best.
UPDATE:
Since I have solved my iTunes in OGG problem, I have actually found a better music player that support OGG right out of the box! It's called Songbird and has some really cool features along with a pluggable architecture. This allows in the same way that Firefox has taken off by people contributing to it, my hope is that Songbird will do the same. If you want to help an Open Source song player succeed I suggest you take a look at it. My next step is going to be getting a sync program going with Songbird so it will push songs to my Android powered G1 phone, but that's a subject for another post. Lots of fun pet projects in the works.
Happy audio listening with Songbird!
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