REverberations - Software

iPhoto Libraries in mythgallery (mythtv)

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:19:46 -0500

Here's some information about a personal coding itch I scratched recently, on the off chance that it helps someone else out there. Certainly my Google skills didn't turn up anyone else who had solved the same problem.

Problem Description
You have a Mac somewhere where you use Apple's excellent iPhoto to manage your huge digital photography collection.
However, you don't have (and most likely don't want) a spiffy but locked-down and feature-light Apple TV to display them on your TV, instead preferring the excellent and far more versatile open-source mythtv.
Mythtv has mythgallery which displays pictures from a normal filesystem reasonably well, but the poor thing has little to no understanding of the complexities of Apple's "iPhoto Library" on-disk layout. I'm talking Albums basically, plus an understanding of "Originals" versus "Modified". I just want it to be how it looks in iPhoto, but on my big LCD screen in front of the couch, controlled with my myth remote. Is that too much to ask??!

Research/Analysis
Can't find anyone else with this issue so figure "how hard can it be?". Not very, it turned out, at least to get something working, if ugly.
The perl Mac::iPhoto looks like a good place to start, but since it hasn't been touched since 2003 it certainly doesn't do anything much useful on my current (7.1.3) iPhoto Library.
It uses Mac::PropertyList to do the parsing of the xml file, which doesn't seem to work either. After much fiddling it looks like the AlbumData.xml file in the iPhoto Library actually is invalid - it doesn't have the proper header. First hack Mac::PropertyList to accept the dodgy header, but later decide to keep that standard and put the hack into my script instead.

Design
Decide to make a directory next to the iPhoto Library which is full of symlinks pointing into the actual library. Directories in this tree will correspond to Albums in iPhoto, and the links will be named such that the alphabetical order used by mythgallery corresponds to the order in iPhoto.
Try and get this working on the linux box and also via Samba but in the end it's simplest to run the code and create the symlink tree on my mac and then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree across to the linux box.
Don't use samba, it stuffs up the annoying ":" that iPhoto uses in paths, at least for me. rsync handles it fine, it's not even that Mac-specific one to my knowledge, just whatever is on my Ubuntu box.

Code
You'll need Mac::iPhoto 0.1-timg, which is the modification of 0.1 available on cpan to work with iPhoto 7.1.3, and Mac::PropertyList 1.31 from cpan. I guess I should put my code on CPAN, but just wanted to get it all up here for now.
Once that's available, you will of course need the actual iPhotoToDirectories script. It's all hard-coded - but you wouldn't have made it this far if you couldn't edit it to work in your situation :)

Operation
You'll need the same directory structure on both the mac and the linux box as the symlinks get created on the mac but are de-referenced on the linux box.
Once it's all in place, run iPhotoToDirectories on your mac whenever you want. It takes a long time, so I wouldn't script it. Maybe an overnight cronjob if you keep your Mac on all night. I don't so I just run it when I remember.
Then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree to the linux box.
Finally, chmod -R a+rx the linux directories if the uid on your mac is different from your myth user.
And then, assuming mythgallery can navigate to that symlink directory, it should work and the browsing should be significantly more useful than it was before browsing the raw directory.

Known issues

Mac::iPhoto's parsing is amazingly slow, ie. ~30mins for me
hard-coded paths
ampersands (&) in album names break things
empty albums should be not put into output
sorting could be much improved
would be nice to understand Events too, hmmm...
lots more UNknown issues, for sure. Let me know!

But hey it works! And with a full-time life that's enough for me right now.

Catchup Blogging

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 17:46:44 -0600

OK, News time. It's been a while.
I've uploaded some photos to my Flickr account which have titles showing a pictorial version of what we've been doing recently.
There's some from Adelaide (1 2 3 4), some from our recent weekend back up to the Hunter Valley to celebrate our wedding anniversary (yep, it's been over a year now...) (1 2), and even an ugly product of our veggie patch.

Margaret's house has been on the market for a while and is now sold, she's looking for a place to buy and has a few in mind. She may be moving in with us during the change-over period.

So we've re-organised the house a bit. We've now got a separate (small) room devoted to music. It's good to have everything out and in the one place, and I've been inspired to do some recording, helped out with a computer audio interface I found cheap on eBay. Still trying to decide what software I want to use with it though.

The junk that used to be in that room has now sort-of migrated to the spare room, but it could be consolidated to make room for Margaret should the need arise.

Around the house, I've been cleaning out gutters and getting things organised in preparation for the arrival of our water tanks. The fact that it's been raining a lot recently has been annoying us, thinking of the wastage. It looks like we'd have to vote capital-L Liberal to get the government to do something about water recycling, so becoming as detached as possible from it all is appealing.

Put some of the wine from our Hunter trip (came back with three cases!) under the house in a sort-of cellar arrangement. The conditions are good but it's hard to get to. Should be good for medium-long-term storage though.

We headed off to the Whiskey Experience again a few days ago - a great fun evening which we figure is just to raise brand awareness. Not that many people around us were aware of things around themselves by the end of proceedings!

One of Liz's birthday celebrations this year was a trip to the Löwenbräu Keller, something I haven't done for years and an evening we thoroughly enjoyed. The band there seems to do the same show every night, but it's very entertaining. Plus we get to drink great beer and practice our German.

... Which is good, because Sebastian Schnelle (whom we stayed with at least three times in Europe 2002-3 and caught up with again early last year) is back in the country to do his PhD in Brisbane. He and his girlfriend Jana flew into Sydney last week and we caught up a few times. She's still in learn-English mode, so we had a few conversations with me speaking German and her English, and my lack of skill there seemed to give her more confidence.

Oh, and I buggered my knee badly about a month ago, which is the worst it's ever been. I've had plenty of days working from home and far less cycling. I have a specialist appointment next week, so hopefully I can get something done about it.

Another Jersey Kerb gig happened last Friday - the first with Jono playing keyboards and me back on bass after Ed left for England. We played pretty well I thought, but the crowd was both thin and lacking energy. I think we have a job for our manager to get us sorted in a new venue or with some more aggressive advertising. Still great fun though.

Surely that's enough topic-hopping for now. Congratulations if you made it this far!

Broken FIFA

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 02:58:24 -0500

Any good suggestions as to why FIFA's live match thingy only works on a Mac if you use Safari, not Firefox? That's pretty ugly.
Oh well, watching the game anyway - bring on the next month!
Have a nasty cold so haven't slept and feel horrible. Not sure how late I will last.

Flickr

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 21:55:18 -0500

I'm playing around with Flickr, an online photo-sharing site.
All of my photos are stored in iPhoto, and there's a great plugin you can load into it to give it the ability to upload photos to Flickr from right within iPhoto itself.
So, it happens that about an hour after I had finished a gig with The Honeymakers today, I uploaded a couple of pictures and within five minutes other people somewhere had viewed them. You can find photos based on "tags", so for example I tagged these photos as "jazz", "music", "saxophone", etc. Anyone who searches for these keywords will find my photos, along with those of anyone else who has used the same tags.
Also, if you scroll down this page and look on the left you'll see the latest three photos I have put up on Flickr, without having to leave this page.
If you already track my RSS feed, you may also like to add this one, which will give you an entry every time I upload a photo.

Bands + Apple iLife = Bliss

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 22:44:06 -0600

Purely by coincidence and perhaps the fact that I lug my powerbook with me everywhere I go, I've ended up doing lots of digital media production with Apple's most excellent iLife suite of applications.
Firstly, the big band that I play sax in, the Honeymakers, is in the process of recording a demo CD to send to prospective clients. The brief was to get something on CD, of whatever quality, and to send it out with a disclaimer of sorts about our non-professional status, the small amount of time spent rehearsing and the tiny budget available for recording.
I turned up to rehersal one week and the band director asked me if I could record the band on the powerbook. "Sure", I answered, "what sort of gear do we have?" Very little, the answer came, and we were starting right then. In fact the first cut of some tracks has been recorded using the internal mic on the laptop as that's all we had to start with. Solos have been over-dubbed with better mics on individual tracks, but the vast majority of the band has been recorded purely with one mic.
And the software magic that made all this possible? Garageband. It totally rocks and is oh so cheap. The effects and things available with a mere click of the trackpad are brilliant, and overdubbing solos is so simple - just whack some headphones into the headphone jack, hit record and play along. One of the other guys in the band actually recorded his tracks at his place and gave me a CD full of the results which I can just drag and drop back into the projects. Sweet.
We've done solos and the vocals with better mics, but being able to pack up the "recording studio" by unplugging a couple of cables and closing the lid just blew everyone away.
I'll post a link to the resulting mp3s as soon as I've finished mixing them down - possibly tomorrow.

Garageband also rocks my world with the other band I'm playing in at the moment - a RTA-affiliated rock band where I'm playing mainly bass guitar. I just couldn't resist making myself a little cable which runs out from my bass amp's effects send to the laptop input, then back from the output to the amp's receive line.
Using this setup, I can now run what for years has been the holy grail of guitarists every where - real-time effects processing in software. I just click on setting for each song, which sets the reverb, compression, distortion, amp simulation, etc. to be however I want it, and there's my tone, running out the amp with no delay.
The guitarists in the band who turn up with ten or so effects boxes and associated batteries and cabling each are very jealous.
I remember reading somewhere that Mac OS X's audio stack has latency low enough to be able to do this, but the equivalent part of Windows would never be able to achieve the same feat without some serious re-writing on Microsoft's part.

At rehersals for this band the other day, someone had the bright idea of filming the entire thing for archive/humiliation/burning. At the end of the process, I noticed it had all been done on a DV (digital) camera. One firewire cable between that camera and the trusty powerbook later, I had a pile of clips sitting in iMovie. A bit of drag and drop later, and I have a DVD ready to burn with titles, credits and all the really bad stuff relegated to the digital trash can.

This really is a lifestyle computer. Apple should be paying me to say this stuff :)

New Blogging Software

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 13:35:00 -0600

I have been toying around with the idea of doing some internal blogging at work for a while now, and yesterday I finally got a small patch of time and sufficient links that I wanted to post to become inspired.
My previous blogging software, Blosxom has been working fine for me for years now - that's what I used while travelling around Europe, I've hacked the code to bits and know it inside out.
However, it wasn't going to work for me here. Mainly because the software I use to post to it, Blapp is quite limited and doesn't support multiple blogs.
Plus, there's plenty of new features around in other software, and Blosxom hasn't seen a release in quite some time.
So, I went shopping. Eventually I turned up the brilliant Open-Source Serendipity system. It has two main features I've always wanted in Blosxom - written in PHP and with a MySQL backend.
Up and running in minutes at work, I quickly got to posting through the web interface. Since it supports XML-RPC I could concievably use a client on the Mac, but I haven't explored it much yet.
As you have probably guessed by now, I liked it so much that I moved this site over to it also. All post-Europe2002-3 posts have been imported, along with comments (comment dates are all wrong though). Since it supports RSS importing, this process was relatively pain free.
Sure, there's quite a bit to learn, but it seems to be working nicely thus far. I've hacked the Idea style a bit to get a look I'm happy with for now.
Sorry to everyone though, you're going to have to do the update bookmarks thing. The URL you have bookmarked should be http://www.reverb.com.au/tgould/.
Also, if you are a user of RSS, you'll have to get a new feed into you aggregator, although I put an entry into the old one to point this out.
Post any comments if you find any problems, I'd like to get this working smoothly.

Safari Link Spoofing

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 20:31:00 -0600

Watch out for this if you happen to be using Apple's Safari web browser. Nasty.

Life Update - Melbourne Cup, House Hunting

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 13:44:00 -0600

Haven't been great at updating this recently, but I'm currently home sick so thought now would be a good time to do so.
iCal just reminded me that I'm supposed to be at a Melbourne Cup afternoon tea at work shortly, but my TPH (tissues per hour) rate is a bit high to be at work right now. I don't care about the race myself, but I bought a ticket in a raffle for a TV, which would be nice to win - our current TV has substantially less screen real estate than my Powerbook.
Liz and I have been doing some house hunting over the last couple of weekends. It's interesting to see just how much the prices are diving. Just Listed, our primary source of info, sends me emails whenever something which matches our criteria either changes or is newly added. This is far superior to the Old Media method where each agent puts out an ad with all their properties, which are aggregated in a local paper such as ours The Leader, sorted by agent. I don't care who is selling the property, I care about things like location and price, and want to be able to search by these criteria regardless of agent. This is where Just Listed works so well.
Just Listed recently sent me three updates on one such place over the course of a week or so - first dropping the price to $500k or so, then to $455, then to $425. That's what I call a buyers market, and once again I'm glad that something is finally swinging in our favour.
We are looking mainly in the South-Sydney suburbs of Mortdale and Penshurst. We like the small village atmosphere that the centre of these places have (and the other key factor - a train station), and a short walk from the centre there are plenty of places currently for sale within our budget. Still, we aren't blind to other suburbs such as Peakhurst, Riverwood, and in the other direction Kogarah, Carlton and Allawah. It's a bit scary to realise that the prices we need to pay to get a free-standing house in these suburbs would buy us two or even three such properties way out in western Sydney somewhere. Still, we are viewing it partly as an investment in our futures and partly as somewhere to live for a while.
According to the computer of the Mortgage Choice rep who came over a couple of weeks ago, some banks are willing to lend us up to $800k!! No thanks! Would like to be out of debt sometime before we die.
Those sort of figures were on one hand nice to hear, but on another they reminded us just how serious the financial commitment we are moving towards is.

Father's Day

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 17:58:00 -0500

OK, so it's fathers day today, the weather is great. By that I mean lots of rain, storms, and I got a call from Liz before on the way to her Dad's place saying that she got caught in a hail storm. No great problem, our car isn't worth crap anyway. We got some cabling fixed on the boost relay on the starter motor the other day which address the issue of me having to clutch start it the other day, and things are much better now. The silly old thing only has to last us until some time early next year when we intend to whack a bit extra on our home loan and buy something better.
The rain is great, soaking up our brown parched lawns and gardens, and meaning that the seven months and counting since we washed the car can wait longer yet again. In fact, right now I'm typing this sitting outside watching the rain fall around me, just enjoying the sounds of rain and storms. And iTunes. Of course, the poor powerbook and I are under a cover, but it's still quite a bit of a break from my computer desk. Especially since I was there all day yesterday making up for other people's poor planning at work which left me with about -3 days to get 10 days of work done. Packs of fun.
Normally when I work from home I'm not all that productive (at work I have three desktop machines and piles of papers), but I found the combination of Desktop Manager and and external 17" monitor for extra desktop real-estate gave me plenty of working space for my Tarantella connection into work. I might even convince the boss that I need to do it a bit more often...
Whilst on the topic, he mentioned the other day that he should be able to keep me on past January next year (my current contract end date), making our long-term planning just that bit easier.
Last but not least, congrats to Kung for finally paying off his loan. Don't crash any more cars dude!

iPodder

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 17:39:00 -0500

After noting yet another great hint over at Mac OS X Hints, I stumbled upon the great little tool called iPodder.
To save you following too far through the links, let me summarise what it is all about. With a view to pushing the boundaries of traditional media, some people around the world, including Adam Curry the author of iPodder and one-time MTV Video Jockey, are posting to their blogs in mp3 format. As a radio DJ by trade, he is interesting to listen to, and as usual I'm keen to listen to anything not pushed out by large media companies, in any new format I can discover.
What his software (and other, improved versions I'm yet to try) does is parse RSS feeds of various websites, find any mp3s contained within, download said mp3s, put them in a playlist in iTunes, which is then automatically copied to my iPod. Very neat. So, all I have to do in the mornings is disconnect my iPod and there is some interesting radio by himself, and some new IT Conversations (I've listened to Tim O'Reilly thus far).
If you aren't sure what blog and blogging is all about, It's probably time you found out. What you are reading right now is a blog. Not a very good or actively maintained one, but a blog none the less. The idea is that the little guys around the world just tap out what is of interest to them, and if someone else happens to be interested also, that's great.
iPodder and friends are taking this to a new level, where the content is automatically available on the output device of your choice, and in a format you can listen to in the background while you are doing something else.
I think I have a hard enough time putting text on here to consider audio at this point in time, but it is interesting to see where stuff like this is going to end up.

Two Weeks with an iPod

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 29 Aug 2004 13:48:00 -0500

I sat by and watch three generations of iPods come past me. As a stereo-typical early adopter of most technologies, this has been a little strange for me. My last portable audio device was an early-model Sharp mini-disc recorder which saw a lot of use during Uni. Perhaps a little too much, as its proprietary battery eventually all but fell of the perch, meaning that the hacked together charger I had for it (was an imported Japanese model) was eventually a life-line. I left it with a friend when I went overseas and upon return it was an expensive paperweight.
Less than two weeks before the iPod came into my life, I decided that some form of portable audio was necessary for my 35 or so minute walk to the station. It's so much more bearable that way. However, since we are saving for a house even the cheapest iPod was out of the question. I still beleive the price must dive before more people get their hands on these little beauties. So, I grabbed a $80 mp3-compatable CD player from Aldi. The interface was clunky, the software buggy, but the cheap cheap cheap factor worked great, and I had 150 or so songs per CD, burnt in about 10 minutes with two clicks from iTunes.
But the iPod is in a different league. I've invested plenty of hours in my mp3 collection, getting ratings, playlists and id3 tags all just right, and all that time payed off as soon as I connected the iPod for the first time. Sure, to find out that my entire collection wouldn't fit on in one go with the first message was a bit dis-heartening, but iTunes made some selections (no idea how), and then, after only a matter of minutes, there was most of my music, sorted by name, artist, genre, or whatever I wanted. Smart Playlists were in place, everything Just Worked, in that great Apple way.
Physically, the thing is gorgeous to hold and play with, so much so that the only fault I can place is that my grubby fingers constantly leave marks all over it, especially on the shiny back bit. I'm not interested in the iPod mini - this is a great size, and 4GB would be even harder to work with for me.
I think my problem is that I have too diverse musical tastes. My collection includes Elton John, 1920s Blues, Justin Timberlake, Megadeth, Pantera, DJ Tisto, Jamiroquai, The Monkees, Vivaldi and 5GB of jazz. The randomiser is life. Whatever comes up, I can click to rate it out of five, either down to 1 to delete later (quite rare, this is mostly done by now), 2 to mark as not-for-iPod, or 3-5 depending on how much I like it.
This "2 means not for iPod" thing is how I've come to deal with the "Size of music library is greater than capacity of iPod" problem. Plenty of my own CDs I've ripped (whoops, that's illegal in Australia...) contain say 3 songs I love, 3 which I don't like for one reason or another, and a few others which lie somewhere in the middle. I don't want to delete the ones I don't like, because, especially in the Jazz genre, I will often listen to an album from end to end the way the artist originally intended. Some times it just works better that way. So these "filler" songs stay on the 80GB Powerbook drive, but don't make it to the iPod.
Oh, by the way, if you own a 4G iPod and have worked out that the way they made the prices cheaper was by taking the accessories away, you can partially get this back by partaking of the current promo where if you buy Applecare for iPod you qualify for a free remote. Can't find a link but I have a PDF of it and have confirmed it direct with Apple.

Cool Mac OSX Apps

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 19:59:00 -0500

Just a quick heads up on some of the incredibly cool software that exists for the Apple OSX platform which I have stumbled across recently and changed the way I work:

OK, so I've been using this for ages, but Salling Software's Clicker is still totally awesome. Impresses people day after day with the way that I walk away from my Mac, it locks the screen (and hence blocks access to two other computers - see below), and when I come back, it knows it's me and unlocks the screen. Even pauses iTunes, advises me of incoming calls, ...
I actually caught up with the author, Jonas, in Stockholm last year, and bought him several beers. The man has done something I haven't seen in any other software for a long time - actually created something new. True innovation, not just using that word as a marketing ploy.
If you have to work with more than one computer on a day to day basis (I have my iBook, an iMac and my Dell Gentoo box at work), you need to use osx2x. Billed as an "Excess keyboard remover", that's what it does. I use one USB keyboard and mouse connected to my iBook, and push the mouse off the left side onto my iMac's screen, or to the right onto the Linux box. Keyboard follows. Cut and Paste between machines works. Total magic. Oh yes, and Open Source, so we have actually been able to modify the code and change some of the functionality. Great stuff!
Open Source virtual desktops done right with Desktop Manager. Supports the skins made to work with the expensive Codetek Virtual Desktop too - how's that for sticking your tounge out?
Kiwi-made visual traceroute with WhatRoute. Pretty graphics!
Annoyed that your nice shiny new Powerbook (or in my case tattered world-travelled broken-keyed dull-coloured iBook) only has one mouse button? Stop whinging and get yourself Sidetrack. Assign the button to left click and pad tap to right click, put vertical and horizontal scrollbars on the sides, put tap actions in the corners and you're better off than any Wintel laptop owner will ever be.