New vinyl, old program

First, I forgot to mention that I went and bought 8 new records from the local record store. It’s always kind of intimidating when I go in there, so I make sure to bring my kru. (No, they do not fit in my pants.) darkho and euphorik seemed kind of bored, though euphorik did find some CDs. Total bill: $90. I’ve got something between $110 and $200 left in my record budget I’d say. (The low end if I decide to put $100 towards a new hard disk. I need something bigger I think.)

I do have this problem of where to put my music. I’ve always been a fan of keeping it on CD. CD-R media is cheaper for dollar/size (I think!) and is more portable. My friends prefer hard drives. Hard drives are faster for reading/writing, allow you to see a huge amount of music at once, and don’t require anything to be swapped in/swapped out (can access over the network; sort of redundant). I think I’m going to be sticking with CD-R because of the price, but what worries me is backups. Reading about the longevity of CD-R media at CD Media World makes me think about my MP3 discs. Of course, if I had hard disks, what am I going to back those up to? I wish I had a big tape drive/tape changer, and/or I wish magneto-optical disks were cheaper.

I was just reading about “The State of the Scene” or something like that on some site I found called charlottemix.com. Apparently hip young professionals like House, D&B, Ambient, etc. I bought a bunch of Trance. What does that say about me? Probably that I’m boring. Well, fuck them right in their stupid asses.

At some point last night — I can’t quite figure out when — I managed to install Snort. They’ve got binary RPMs on their site and they seemed to work in RH8.0. I installed it, ran it, and nothing real dramatic happened. It keeps having false positives on people sending POP3 commands, especially their passwords; I could swear it’s looking for any occurrence of 0×0A in those packets, but I don’t precisely know how to read Snort rules. BTW, I installed the snort and snort-plain+flexresp packages, IIRC. Sometimes it’s enjoyable to tail -f /var/log/snort/alert.log or whatever it’s called. Sometimes. OK, maybe not really, but after an hour or so it can be interesting. Saw a bunch of port scans, which didn’t really surprise me.

Tried to do offset detection with EAC today on my Plextor PX-R820T (I think that’s what it is). Out of five CDs (from the 11 I think I own) that were on their known offset list, none fully matched the ID codes they had, and only one was considered “known” by EAC itself. Further, on that CD EAC calculated an offset of like +8655. The user reported features database shows a green (”large” number of people) record with +355. Say what? I gave up on that. My drive also claims to support C2 error detection, and it confirmed it was reporting them with a scratched CD, but apparently everyone is reporting that it doesn’t. Either that or they’re just reporting that they’ve left it off. I left it off too.

Worked on DarkWiki tonight. It’s got some problems still. For example, I keep getting errors like:

Too late to run CHECK block at (eval 77) line 3.

Ignore for a moment the difficulty at tracking down what is generating that error, given the content of the message. (I don’t necessarily blame Perl for that, either.) I’m almost positive the only place I’m using CHECK blocks is in my interface.pm code. So that means there’s a problem with it, and I’m going to have to go back and attack that. Don’t know exactly how it got to be too late to run the CHECK block, but I guess I’ll find out. I’m using CGI’s debug/console mode to test right now… or I would be had I gotten to the point of my $query = new CGI; yet. Still, some progress has perhaps been made.

I regret not using something like XP for this project. It might have made the development faster, and probably made for a better design. Note to self: in the future, everything except for tiny scripts (100 lines or less or something) should be done with XP — or at least something different from what I’ve done in the past.

I wonder if anyone has done a web site where you can upload a little package/script, documented or not, with a blurb and some search terms. Might go to furthering reusability. Could make it easy to set up so people can run it for themselves. I just get the feeling I write all sorts of little snippets, scripts, and hacks, and they’re forgotten before their usefulness is at an end. Maybe if it was super easy to send that code somewhere I’d do it. Then we need a brigade of people that like to write documentation for software by looking at the code to sweep through and document things. Yeah. This will never happen, I think.

I need to finish my Donnie Darko soundtrack, install some machines at work, rip all my CDs, reorganize the storage of my CDs, maybe make some more mix CDs, set up all sorts of cool software at work, and… I did start that Java streaming Ogg Vorbis server a long time ago that I’m now thinking I’ll never touch again. And this is just what I can remember right now. Sigh.