A while ago I wanted to record my favorite streaming radio station, Radio Paradise, so I could listen to it in my car.

Recording was no problem with mplayer:

mplayer -playlist ~/radioparadise.m3u -dumpstream -dumpfile ~/radioparadise/rp_$(date +%m%d%H%M).mp3 -vc dummy -vo null ;

But now I’m left with one huge file, and no way to skip over songs I’d rather listen to later.
The radion station uses IceCast I believe, and sends the meta data along with the stream – but now I’m trying to figure out how to capture the meta data and flag the stream to mark the track changes.

Until I have wireless Internet everywhere I’m at – I’ll have to come up with creative ways to listen.
I hope someone out there has a suggestion.

I noticed gij-4.1 was eating all my CPU when I was running Eclipse, so I decided to switch to Sun’s JRE.

Adding Sun’s JRE was no problem… there are plenty of tutorials on how to do that at ubuntuforums.org, but the bigger issue was getting Eclipse to recognize my preferred virtual machine. Even though update-alternatives showed /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/bin/java as preferred, and even after I set it’s priority higher so I had

*+    1        /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/bin/java

Eclipse still wouldn’t recognize it!

I finally gave up and added a command line argument to Eclipse’s startup:

/usr/bin/eclipse -vm /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/bin/java -vmargs -Xmx128M

Notice I had to increase the memory size because the default is 64Mb, which is NOT enough.

Now my load average is back to about 0.2 and 90% idle instead of gij-4.1 taking 90%.

I just spent about 20 minutes struggling with a rendering issue in IE. Apparently IE 6 has an issue with justified and italicized text.

Something inside a page was causing the content to jump around below floated divs. It showed the classic signs of a block element taking more width than it’s parent container and jumping below to where there was free space, but I couldn’t figure out what element it was.

Finally I found out it was a paragraph of italicized text. Nothing struck me as unique about this paragraph, except that it was the only paragraph that was italicized on the page. Removing the <em> wrapper around the text fixed the issue, but I didn’t understand why <em> was blowing up my layout – until I put together that the paragraph was italicized AND justified. Those two in common caused my container block to explode wider than the 100% it was taking and force everything out of place.

PC IE 6 has problems rendering justified & italicized text. So be careful placing a paragraph like this inside your pages, at least if you care about IE…. you’ll notice I don’t.

Well this is what happens when you become embarrassed about your website. You re-design… you build it using valid xhtml (or try to at least), CSS, PHP… and you have fun.

The new look is wider… I went with a width of about 1000px. The underlying code is all a custom PHP blog system I built over the weekend. It wasn’t built in 10 minutes, but while I was working on it I DID say ‘whoops!’ as many times as possible. It uses some neat introspection techniques for templated output…. and I dropped Blogger like a bad habit. I was getting sick of their spotty server response etc.

So, welcome. Hope you like it. I promise I’ll write more often (yea right).