Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

As you might know, podcasts are like radio shows recorded and distributed digitally (read: mp3 and RSS). Since pretty much anyone can record a show and distribute it over the Internet - everyone and their brother do that.

The file sizes of some podcasts are huge. There are shows that last for more than an hour and include pieces of music and stereo special effects. I’ve seen this eat up more than 50 MBytes each.

Since I only have a 128 MByte memory card (and about 20 of those MBytes are eaten by software intallations and other data), I was looking at ways to minimize the file sizes of the podcasts that I wanted to listen to.

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For a while now I have been using ICQ both at home and at work. Instead of having two different copies of data or running ICQ remotely, I was simply copying all data files over between these two locations. rsync with scp were doing the job just fine. The problem emerged when I started to use ICQ on more than two machines (two machines in the office and one at home). I had to always figure out where is the latest copy of my data and distribute it from there to all the other locations. After doing it manually for just a couple of time bored me to death and I decided to write a script.

I started off with a very specific script that was only meant to copy my ICQ back and forth, but quickly realized that it can be generalized to copy any set of directories. So, here it is - sync_dirs.pl.

This script accepts and requires only one parameter - directory to synchronize. You can define a few shortcuts for frequently used directories inside the script. Locations are also defined inside the script. Since this piece of code uses Net::SSH and Net::SCP, the current limitation is that you must have ssh configured to authorize with keys, not passwords. The good news, is that you need only one location to be able to access all the others. The most recent copy of data will be copied over to this central location and from there distributed to all the other machines.

One of the things that will go into history with the year 2005 is the number of bad movies produced by Hollywood. IMDB says:

Hollywood is mired in its biggest box-office slump in over 20 years.

With all those bad movies around, finding something worth the time and effort becomes increasing difficult. Luckily, there are these two things that can make our lives easier - IMDB and Perl.

Combining the two all sorts of interesting things can be achieved. Particularly, an ultimate movie wishlist can be generated.

If you are here just for the script, than here is the movie_wishlist.pl. If you want just the result, than here is wishlist.html. Otherwise read on for the explanations on how it works and how you can make it better.

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I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.

I am satisfied with the process of my migration to Gallery2. Most of the things work already. Here is a brief round-up:

• All images and albums are imported, sorted, and thumbnailed.
• Few albums are tagged for easier searching.
• Old style of URLs is configured and working. All old links should be fine now.
• I have familiarized myself with Gallery2 internals a bit. Maybe even more than I intended to.

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