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I've been using the Electoral Vote Predictor since learning of it from Tim Bray's blog to keep an eye on the current state of the electorate, at least as accurately as the polls can tell us. Today, the Votemaster has revealed his identity; he's Andrew Tanenbaum, creator of MINIX. Thanks to Dr. Tanenbaum for creating and maintaining such a useful service.
Since I launched ICYG, I've incorporated "now playing" info on this site by having ICYG's source player's HTTP writer return a small HTML file about the currently playing song when requested on a certain port. Then, I created a cron job on Cygweb's host that made that request with Lynx, saved the result locally, and rebuilt the frontpage every 5 minutes. This was OK, but obviously not dynamic or highly accurate. I'm now working on a Zope-served now playing page and am playing with an iframe in the ICYG Radio portion of the rightbar as a replacement. I need to see if MT has a cleaner way of including foreign HTML content than iframes.
Well, I've done my duty and voted. I'm looking forward to seeing the results. It'll be interesting to see what statistical model of the Electoral Vote Predictor produces the most accurate prediction of the actual vote. For a while, Dr. Tanenbaum averaged the latest polls for a given state, then went back to using the latest polls for the daily snapshot. I think a statistical model that weighs the last two to three weeks worth of polling data, perhaps with a little extra weight in the middle, might be what produces the most accurate reading. But we'll see.
I'll be participating in tonight's Harrisburg Webloggers Meetup that Ross organized. I'm planning to interview my fellow bloggers for the first Cygweb podcast. Hopefully that won't take too long, because there will be plenty of beer, conversation, and reality TV to go around, and I don't want to miss a thing.
CNN's "Breaking News" banner currently reads "Sen. John Kerry calls President Bush to concede presidential election, CNN has learned. Details soon."
Oh well. I wasn't as disappointed at the outcome of the 2000 election as I am at this one.
The Meetup at Ross's last night was a lot of fun. Much geek speak was had and I recorded some Q&A's with the guys for a podcast I hope to publish by the end of this week. We'll have to do that again sometime, perhaps after the holidays, when we can share "toy stories". ;) Thanks again to Ross for getting us together.
I'm reading the Slashdot article about the CBC starting Vorbis streams. Based on the hyperlinks and info, it looks like they're using Winamp2, Oddcast, and Icecast. It's cool to know that a large media outfit is using technology I've been cutting my teeth on for a while.
I've edited the recording I made Tuesday night for the podcast. I should have it spruced up and ready to share soon. The guys shared some good info and I think it will make a good "first glimpse" of us for those non-Harrisburg bloggers who check it out.
I chose to record at the meetup using a fairly cheap Koss desktop mic (with integrated pre-amp) connected directly to my laptop's line in. This got the audio directly onto the computer, but the recording suffers a bit from "one-mic syndrome" and has greatly varying volume levels (most of which I should be able to clean up). I'm realizing now that I'm one part away from a much better solution. I could get a small 4-channel mixer for under $100 and connect my two higher-quality mics to it, as well as a stereo music/effects source (like a CD player or the laptop), and record the output of the mixer to my portable MiniDisc recorder. The recorded audio would have to go through an A->D conversion to get back onto a computer for editing and mastering, but it would have been recorded at such higher quality that I don't think it would matter.
Go check out Scott's new design. Very interesting.
I built the ICYG website on Zope bit by bit, putting together the pages by brute force. In this context, that means I had separate page templates for the main site pages, even though they shared many similar elements. Today I applied the lessons of the excellent ZopeZoo tutorial and converted the backend objects to use Zope inheritance as much as possible. It's reduced the amount of objects powering the site and has introduced a logical hierarchy that will make it easy for me to extend the site in the future.
I also tried to clean up the site's CSS, although the scheme and elements have stayed the same. Enjoy!
I'm finally getting around to checking out the songs on the Wired CD. I like the David Byrne and My Morning Jacket songs so far, but I haven't gotten even halfway through the tracks yet. Some of them will make good bumper material for the meetup podcast.
15.1MB 48kbps MP3 44m 15s
Well, it's here - my first podcast from the November 2nd meetup of some of us Harrisburg bloggers. Please bear with the sound - I promise that future podcasts will sound better!
In it, I interview the following guys:
Credits:
If you're new to podcasting, I'd recommend checking out the following tools:
Thanks to Doug Kaye and his helpers for streaming audio from BloggerCon. I was able to catch some of the podcasting and "feed overload" discussions via the feed, and even connected into the BC IRC channels to catch the backchannel of the "overload" session.
As I mentioned here, I think that Ogg Vorbis is an excellent container/codec combo for podcasting, from a technical sense. Obviously MP3 has much broader compatibility and should be used for wide-audience podcasts. However, as a proof of concept I've made my first podcast available as Ogg Vorbis, with roughly the same bitrate and audio specs as the MP3 version. However, there is more metadata packed into the file, and the multiple tracks within the file go a step towards addressing the bookmarking issue.
If you're interested in checking it out, it's here. (14.2MB Ogg Vorbis, Q0 Mono 32000Hz.) I've intentionally kept this file from showing up as an RSS enclosure in my feed due to the fact that most people aren't expecting OGGs to be podcast at the present time.
Please let me know what you think of this format, should you decide to check it out.
I'm enjoying the Bills game right now (thank the scheduling gods) and while surfing I just found word of a new Icecast release on their site. What interests me most is the "listener authentication" feature, which I've wanted for ICYG since I launched it. Other new features include "multi-level fallback" (which I assume is server-based stream substitution, as opposed to pointing several streaming clients at the same Icecast mountpoint and letting them butt heads) and "burst-on-connect". Can't wait to check it out. Thanks to the Icecast team for their continuing development.
Via Electoral Vote Predictor: This excellent county-by-county map showing percentage of the presidental vote was put together by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University. (More info)
Mark Cuban has some words for the music industry. Get the back catalogs online!
NFL agrees to six-year extensions with Fox and CBS worth $8 billion:
A unique aspect of the extensions -- and something Tagliabue has sought for several years -- gives the NFL the option to move seven late-season games from Sunday to Monday night to feature more attractive matchups.
The NFL also can develop late-season prime-time satellite or cable packages of eight games, which would be televised on Thursdays and Saturdays. Or the league could take those eight games and show them regionally in prime-time telecasts on Sundays and Mondays.
``We got some protections,'' Fox Sports chairman David Hill said. ``The last several weeks of the season, the NFL has the right to pull a game for Monday Night Football and we're still in conversation on (details).''
As a viewer of MNF, I'm pleased about this. However, if I was a season-ticket holder of a team that could potentially host a game that moved to another time than what was originally scheduled, I'd be a little perturbed.
I put Icecast 2.1.0 in place last night and it was working great for Scotbuff and me. Besides the HTTP authentication working properly, the burst-on-connect feature seems to help the stream start playing more quickly. I'll probably play with the burst buffer size a little at home to see what works best.
The admin web interface of Icecast has been improved as well. With the required authentication, I can now see what user each active session belongs to, instead of guessing a club member by the IP address displayed in the interface.
I don't think I've refreshed my templates since installing 3.01D, so in the interest in getting TypeKey cookies to actually work, I've upgraded to the templates included in MT 3.121. It appears they are allowing the cookies to work on the site without restrictions (at least, with FireFox 1.0). Please use TypeKey logins if you can. Thanks.
I've started submitting Indiefeed music that I like in an effort to get more non-RIAA content in the stream. I may try to flag indies with a visual indicator so that they stand out.
Update: I think the RSS feed is working well now. Digging into the Atom feed specs, I don't know that Atom is meant for this type of "stateless" data. The mandatory requirement of the tag for each
The first 100 times I'd checked out Oddsock's Stream Transcoder, I don't think I fully appreciated what it did. Turns out, it's the perfect tool to solve this problem. After a quick configuration, I fired it up and it's taking a "master ICYG" Vorbis Q10 stream, transcoding it down to ICYG's normal Quality 0, and directing it to the public ICYG mountpoint. Too cool. Thanks to Oddsock for the tool.
Update (11/12 8:20a): ST wet the bed overnight and was running in a non-working state when I went to check it. It wasn't sending output to the Icecast server at all. I killed it, cranked the master ICYG stream down to Q8, and restarted ST.
Update (11/13 8:27a): ST stopped working again. I'm removing it from the mix for now. I'll have to look for some testimonials to see how others are using it. Perhaps the Unix version is better? I don't want to compromise the quality of the public Q0 stream by two recompression cycles that are too harsh.
It's alive! And it's valid!
I like learning things when scratching itches. This was truly fun to figure out how to do.
Update: Looks like I have to deal with some unicode issues. I think allowing unescaped ampersands in the description data is making the feed invalid at times.
Update (11/15): The Python recipe mentioned in the comments seems to have done the trick. I've also added GUIDs and taken out the redundant date info from the item contents. If you're using the feed and would like to see something implemented, please leave a comment.
Kordell just punted in the Ravens-Jets game. ;)
Update: Jim Nantz just said Stewart is punting for the first time since high school, but he's wrong. I remember watching a game in '98 or '99 where he punted. Check out this stat page.
By Bills-Patriots standards, this game is a rout. It's 20-0 New England at the half. Ugh. At least the Outlets will benefit.
Brad Sucks' "Dirt Bag" just debuted on ICYG; ironically, the song that came after it was Twisted Sister's "I Am (I'm Me)". Looking around Brad's site, he has an entry that points to the new TS album Still Hungry. Yep, it's a re-recording of Stay Hungry.
C'mon, Scott, you know you want it. ;)
I haven't even had a chance to listen to the rest of Brad's album I Don't Know What I'm Doing yet, but I've submitted it all to the station. Enjoy.
The amount of time into the cold season a bike-carrying rack remains mounted on your car increases your perceived outdoorsiness.
9.42MB 48kbps MP3 27m 24s (Link disabled due to bandwidth issues.)
Scott and I recorded our first Brutal Deluxe podcast, reviewing the past and upcoming NFL weekends with an emphasis on fantasy football. We played fast and loose with this session, but I think we had a good discussion. Hope you enjoy listening to it should you choose to do so. We'll be back with another edition in two weeks.
Credits:
Recommended podcatchers:
I'm off work all this week. We're on the road, visiting the in-laws for the Thanksgiving holiday. Pretty darn relaxing, although I've spent quite a bit of time removing spyware from my father-in-law's XP machine. Apparently using IE/OE on an XP SP1 machine with an occasional dial-up Internet connection and no firewall can be dangerous... :)
I definitely don't think there's anything quaint about slogging around the web on dial-up. Ugh.
I was able to take in the prime time games this week; I'm certainly happy the Bills notched another win. Expectations are high here, but I see them splitting their last 6 games at best. The Outlets came within two points of at least tying the Hellions this week. Close games are fun.
We're off to see "National Treasure" tonight and I hope to see "The Incredibles" on Friday. Weeks off are always good for that; we usually see most of our movies at home.
I had a goal of figuring out a method of directly querying MP3 and Vorbis metadata from the Python scripts that power ICYG over this vacation. I think I've met it.
I finally found mmpython, a comprehensive Python library dedicated to querying media metadata. This was the first time I've installed a library into a Python instance, as opposed to dumping a single module into the lib directory, so it was a good learning experience for me. After installing it and looking at its invocation method in the supplied script, I quickly figured out how to use it to query a particular songfile for metadata info.
Currently, I ask ICYG members to sort their music directories by artist so that my song-picking script can parse those names to make sure it's spreading picks out between available artists. With this enhancement, I'll have the script query each eligible songfile for the artist information. I'll also be free to pick using other base metadata info if I want.
I say base metadata because apparently the free-form non-default tags we use for artist and purchase links aren't available through mmpython. That's OK though, since I extract that info out from the play log, not via a direct query of the associated songfile or its path.
To anyone reading this: Happy Thanksgiving! We'll be watching the football and eating the turkey a little later today. But most of all, we'll be enjoying each other's company. It's been nice to unplug from work and recreate this week; I'm thankful I had the opportunity to do so.
We had an uneventful trip back home today. Traffic wasn't too bad, but our normal "halfway" gas stop near Mansfield was closed! I guess it's all in the name of progress - the expansion of US 15 at that exit made it harder to get off the highway there, so perhaps less people did...
Pics are out on my Flickr page for friends and family.
Doug Kaye is stimulating some good discussion about making money off of podcasting.
I think a one-size-fits-all MP3 file per interview/podcast with one or more randomly-placed ads or requests for donations is appropriate for free download. Paying subscribers could possibly have access to more detailed, ad-free content, perhaps in "enhanced packaging" like the chapterized Ogg Vorbis files that I've blogged about before. Doug's previous idea of allowing custom RSS feeds per user is also a good pay-for-play feature.
Man, I wish I had waitched the Bills-Seahawks game. They won 38-9. Will they go 10-6? Time will tell. :)
Never did I think that the Outlets' Bengals would be so potent. Cincinnati and Cleveland combined for a huge offensive game, and T.J. Houshmandzadeh & Shayne Graham combined for 36 BDFL points. They helped the Outlets to another excellent, if fruitless, performance.
Tonight is the first night ever that Melissa and I have stayed tuned into WHTM-DT for "Desperate Housewives" and "Boston Legal". BL is particularly entertaining tonight. It's nice to be able to finally enjoy ABC HD without the glitches I'd been seeing before. If MNF tomorrow is clean, I'll be a happy guy.
My favorite programming language has been updated. Thanks to the developers who continue to improve Python.
I just noticed today that Amazon has this Hi-MD recorder (which my wife is getting me for Christmas) for just under $200. An excellent deal for this package. There's also a promo code, MDCASE4PROMO, on the item that'll get you a free case for it.
I considered HD-based music recorders/players but because of issues like proprietary non-user-replaceable batteries, I went with this. Podcasting has revived my interest in mobile recording and this will fill the bill quite nicely, as well as being a high-quailty playback device. (I hope!)
9.44MB 48kbps MP3 27m 28s (Link disabled due to bandwidth issues.)
This is our second Brutal Deluxe podcast. With one week to go in the BDFL regular season, Scott reviews the playoff picture. We talk about the past and upcoming NFL weekends, and what's currently going on in between them. We also talk about doing next year's BDFL draft via Skype.
Credits:
Recommended podcatchers:
This page contains all entries posted to cygweb in November 2004. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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