Archive for August, 2005

So I’ve purchased a 4gb iPod Mini and started using EphPod 2.75 to manage the music on it. Recently I found that EphPod will export the iPod’s playlist as a Comma Seperated Values file, which is easily imported into, say, a MySQL database. So, a little Regular Expression love on the file (to remove all the extra crap fields) and importing the CSV file via SQLYog (a nice, free graphical front end for MySQL) and I have a nice database of information sitting on my server.

At this point I whipped up a fairly simple PHP script that would take all the entries in my iPod Playlist Database and format it nicely for a browser. I then decided that the table should be sortable by either Genre, Artist or Album. So that gets implimented. After I add the sorting, I decide that the Artist Name on the default sort should link to a music site with information about the artist. After doing a little digging, I decided that WikiPedia would be the easiest to link to. A couple of the artists (say, Tool for example) are a little too vague, so it links to the non-musical WikiPedia entry, but for the most part it works quite well. A day or so later, I decided to add the same functionality to the Genre sort. That was surprisingly easy, since (for the most part) I could just add “_music” to the end of the genre, and it linked to the proper page at WikiPedia. The only exception was for “Psychobilly”… The entry wasn’t suffixed with _music… it was just Psychobilly. So I had to write a little exception to ignore that specific Genre.

But now I can unveil a fairly-functional ScummPod On-Line Playlist site! I’m going to continue tweaking this, and adding more features over time. But as of right now, it works great

I’ve been doing some PHP programming for work, and I’ve rediscovered my complete love for the language. I spent all day today just tweaking a script, making functions and optimizing code. I could do PHP/SQL all day and never get tired of it. I hope work keeps throwing scripts my way

So yesterday at around noon I lose connectivity to Scummbox. My internet connection stayed up (the benifet of working for an ISP… I can check my RADIUS status) but no connecitivy to Scummbox.

When I got home, I found the server was “on” (making fan noises) but nothing was happening. Upon reboot I found that the PS2 ports seemed to be gone… I was unable to make it recognize any keyboard that I plugged in. I tried to make do with my USB wireless keyboar, and it did work for a while, but the server still froze during the night.

Soooo… This morning I turned off the system, took out all the RAM and the hard drive and moved them into a Dell workstation I had sitting around. This worked… It booted great… but for some reason the network card in the Dell wasn’t getting an IP address, so I had to pull the NIC out of the old chassis. Perfecto.

I suspect the motherboard in the old system. It wasn’t the best to begin with, and the failure of the PS2 ports might indicate a larger problem. We’ll see how the Dell does now.