Now the SHOUTcast server (running out on the Internet somewhere with a big fat pipe) will be able to make a single connection to the stream created by the Amarok Shouter script. To use the SHOUTcast server as a relay, simply set the "RelayServer" and "RelayPort" to the appropriate values (e.g. the WAN IP address at home and the port the Amarok Shouter script is using). If applicable, be sure to configure the home firewall/nat router to forward port 8000 traffic to the appropriate LAN IP address. Easy cheesy.

After all that, a stream of the music playing on my home computer is available to anyone who would like to listen in.

Listening to my desktop computer stream on iTunes. Go to the "Advanced" menu. Click on "Open Stream..." and type the following URL into the text entry box.

http://shoutcast.berrett.org:8000/listen.pls

Listening to my desktop computer stream on Winamp. Go to the "File" menu. Click on "Play URL..." and type the following URL into the text entry box.

http://shoutcast.berrett.org:8000/listen.pls

Listening to my desktop computer stream on Windows Media Player. Go to the "File" menu. Click on "Play URL..." and type the following URL into the text entry box.

http://rus.berrett.org/blogmedia/audio/desktop_stream.asx

Have a look at what is currently playing before tuning in... I typically play a lot of classical music, Dead Can Dance, Sigur Rós, and albums I've purchased from Magnatune. My latest purchase is the Once Motion Picture Soundtrack, so that should be in the queue somewhere. E-mail me your request. Heh.

(Update Fri Jan 4 22:51:11 PST 2008 // added Windows Media Player instructions)

Learning Ajax
A couple of days ago, I inserted "Now Playing" information on my blog. As I noted, it's not extremely useful (you cannot "listen in") - it's just geeky. I added a bit of pizazz to the feature by adding a pop-up "tooltip" that displays a list of detailed information about the track currently playing. The information includes the track title, the artist, the album, track number, track length, and a jpeg image of the cover art as well. Again... not extremely useful, just geeky. Go ahead and move your mouse over the "Now Playing" graphic in the upper right corner of this blog - then wait for half a second for the information to display.

The information in the pop-up window is populated via an asynchronous javascript call to a CGI script that just dumps the contents of a text file. There is nothing really novel about the system (it was extremely easy to accomplish), but this is my first experience using Ajax programming. Learning Ajax is one of those items on my long "To Do" list of stuff I should learn to keep my technical skills "fresh" (just in case I never need to start "fresh" at a new company). So I'm very pleased I got off to a successful start after only a couple of hours reading some on-line tutorials.

If interested in the code that accomplishes the effect, then you can view source... here are the relevant parts of the HTML:

<div id="nowplayingtooltip"></div>
<div class="nowplaying">What I'm listening to:<br/>
<a onMouseOver="getNewContent(); ddrivetip('loading... please wait')"
  onMouseOut="hideddrivetip()" onClick="openWindow(this.href, 420, 180); return false"
  href="http://rus.berrett.org/now_playing/"><img id="nowplayingimg" border="0"
  src="http://rus.berrett.org/now_playing/nowplaying.png"></a>
</div>


My blog's javascript code is here. The relevant section is labeled "ajax stuff".

Note: the pop-up includes a jpeg image of the cover art. But for whatever reason the image is not displayed in MS Internet Explorer (5, 6, or 7). Not sure why. It works great in Firefox though. *shrug*

(Update Fri Dec 28 10:05:32 PST 2007 // my -> by)

Now Playing on Amarok
I have been having a lot of fun playing around with amarok these past few days, specifically the custom script support (open source software kicks arse!). I found a handy little amarok script called "amarokNowPlaying" that will build a PNG image of the currently playing song. Furthermore, it will scp (of ftp) the image to any valid network destination, e.g. a remote web server. At the top right of my blog you can now review the currently playing track I'm listening to on my desktop computer. Is that useful information? Probably not.

I'll work on streaming a podcast sometime in the future. That would be cool.

Building Polaroid Thumbnails with ImageMagick
My brother Brent recently (re-)started publishing to his blog. He made a comment to me a few days ago about how much time it was taking him to create a blosxom entry that includes images; building the thumbnails, creating the html for the entry, etc. He uses blosxom - the same blog engine that I use. I told him about a perl script I wrote and have been using ("thumbs") that will take a set of images and create small 100 pixel high thumbnails and build a blosxom-ready text file with the html all nicely built automagically.

Well, that was all well and good, but Brent had something better in mind. He thought that it would be cool to have "polaroid-like" looking thumbnails... like the ones shown in ImageMagick documentation (see here). So over the past few evenings I set to the task of reading the ImageMagick documentation and then converting my plain 'old thumbnail generating script, "thumbs", into one that would build cool polaroid-like thumbnails... complete with a caption, the slight rotation, and the drop shadow. I'm happy to report it is done... and I have rebuilt all of the previously published entries in December (that included family pictures) to use the new polaroid-like thumbnails. See here, here, here, here, and here. (Pretty cool eh?)

The script does little more than issue a handful of ImageMagick commands in series. But hat tip to my brother Brent for bringing this capability of ImageMagick to my attention. The script is yours to download if you like, it is simply called: "polaroids". There should be enough documentation in the script itself, but feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions.

Oh... the caption for each polaroid... what text is used for the caption itself? The caption text is globbed from the "Comment" field embedded within the jpeg image. There are probably several programs on Microsoft Windows or Mac OSX that you can use to set the Comment field. I don't know what those programs might be because I use Linux on my desktop and FreeBSD on my web server... so I use a command line tool called "jhead".

To install jhead on the Ubuntu desktop, type this:

sudo apt-get install jhead

To install jhead on a FreeBSD server, then do this:

cd /usr/ports/graphics/jhead
sudo make install

To use jhead to set a Comment for a jpeg image, then type something like this:

jhead -ce image.jpg

or for multiple images:

jhead -ce *.jpg

jhead will even preserve the file modification date when writing the comment to an image. This is a nice bonus since I use a script, "touchjpgs", to set the image file modification date to match that of when the photo was taken. The file modification date is used by my "polaroids" script to build a file name for the blosxom text file.

Happy photo blogging!

Embedding Video in HTML Pages
One of the tasks that I have now that the Skyline High School Class of 1987 Reunion is over is to showcase the Reunion DVD on-line and allow people to order it. To showcase the DVD, I wanted to include a little snippet of video embedded in the page. To do this I figured that I needed to created a flash video snippet from the DVD.

To rip and encode the section of the DVD I was interested in, I used AcidRip (and the Xvid codec). Then I converted the avi file to a flash video file (flv) using the very handy ffmpeg tool. For example:

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 44100 -f flv video.flv


where,

-i input file name
-ar audio sampling rate in Hz
-f output format


After I created the flash video file, I needed a flash player in order to embed the flash video in a web page. Fortunately, I found a free one called FlowPlayer (that includes plenty of well-written documentation).

It works great... check it out:

<http://www.skyline87.org/dvd/>

Viva free software!

HDR Imaging
Inspired by a photo posted in a blog entry by Khan (that he took while vacationing in France), I read up about the methodology he used to produce the photo - High Dynamic Range Imaging or HDR. If you like the very striking picture that Khan took, then you will probably also enjoy these two HDR photo sites:

HDR Photo Group, Flickr
HDR Okinawa, Japan

This is my own first (poor quality) effort at HDR (click to enlarge):

You can see a bit of ghosting is present because I didn't keep the camera completely still between the three exposures. This is because I have not yet figured out how to set up the exposure bracketing on my camera to take three exposures with just one click of the button. (Note: I have since figured out the bracketing feature of my camera... reading the manual works wonders!)

Now compare the HDR image to the "normal" image taken at just the one exposure:

Non-HDR and HDR Image of Kristy in Her Home Office

To create the HDR image from the three RAW exposures, I used Qtpfsgui on my home office box running Ubuntu Linux. Qtpfsgui installed cleanly (props to davromaniak.eu) and seems to work well. There are also Windows and Mac builds of Qtpfsgui that can be downloaded.

(Update Wed Jun 27 16:03:29 PDT 2007 // updated for clarity)

New Ubuntu User
After trying in vain much of last night and tonight trying to get the FreeBSD drivers to recognize the audio and network device on my motherboard, I decided (with a heavy heart) to drop FreeBSD as my primary desktop OS. My new box is dual-booting XP... and Ubuntu v7.04 ("Feisty Fawn"). I'm now primarily a Linux user. (I haven't abandoned BSD for Linux completely. I'm still running FreeBSD on my file server and my backup server.)

I'm very impressed with the Ubuntu "live disk" install process. Everything seems to work great right out of the box: the audio device, the network card, the dual-head display, DVD playback, network printer discovery, ACPI sensor monitoring, etc. After I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO image and burned myself the install CD, I was up and running in less than an hour. Wow.

I mentioned to Stacey that I have switched from Linux to BSD and am now using Ubuntu and he said: "Get a real man's OS... like Gentoo!" lol. I've heard that the Gentoo install process is much like that of FreeBSD, e.g. lots and lots of user input in a command-line type of interface. Conversely, the Ubuntu GUI-based install experience is quite minimal. I input my name, my preferred username, and about 7 or 8 other minor tidbits, and that was it. Everything else was either pre-configured or was dynamically assigned based on my network environment. I have since tweaked a few things, but not much.

Just a bit of trivia... with Ubuntu on my desktop, my home network composition is now much more diverse: WinXP on my laptop (provided by work), Win2K on Kristy's laptop (and my second laptop), Mac OSX on the kids laptop, FreeBSD on the file server and the backup server, and Ubuntu Linux on my desktop. Quite a motley array of machines.

(Update Wed May 30 01:11:37 PDT 2007 // removed some artifacts)
(Update Wed May 30 01:11:37 PDT 2007 // added ACPI)

Second Life: First Impressions
A friend of mine has been sending me several articles over the past few weeks about Second Life, a virtual world that has received a fair amount of media attention lately, including the announcement of the first person to make 1 million dollars (US) from transactions made in the virtual world. The entire concept of a virtual world with virtual property that can be bought and sold (or rented out) in a virtual currency (pegged in value to the US dollar) is nothing short of fascinating.

Tonight I signed on to Second Life (it's free for non-land owners) to check things out. I teleported to IBM's HQ inside of SL as well as a NASA museum thingy. Interesting stuff. But by and large, I must admit that SL is rather boring. The virtual world is vast, open, and strangely... seems largely abandoned. People do congregate in certain areas, yet the vibe I get is that of an on-line singles bar... and everyone (except me it seems) has a custom set of clothes, hair styles, and animations. From a personal standpoint, I'm not sure exactly where people find the time for their second life. However, from a business standpoint, I can see the opportunity for creative entrepreneurs that sell virtual items to the persons controlling these on-line SL avatars. Supposedly there are millions of SL users, each with his or her own stash of Linden dollars.

Create PDF Documents On-The-Fly
One of the things that we are doing for the Skyline High School Class of 1987 Reunion is compiling a journal that includes the answers to a small questionnaire. This was done for the 10-year, but it was all with pencil/paper and postal mail. The person who put it together for the 10-year flat out refuses to do it again manually; and I can't say I blame her. So, I suggested we offer the questionnaire on-line and build the journal pages from the answers on-the-fly (as PDFs or as HTML documents). We could even have the classmate include a picture I promised.

At the time, I didn't really know how I was going to accomplish the task, but I figured it wouldn't be that hard. Thankfully, it wasn't. Using the PDF::API2 perl library and a very handy PDF::API2 tutorial as a crutch, I authored a web app that administers the questionnaire, collects the answers, allows the user to upload a picture, and then builds a PDF file that includes both the answers and the picture. Picture placement is determined based on the aspect ratio of the photo, and the font is resized incrementally from 13-pt down to as low as 8-pt (if necessary) to fit everything on one page. After the document is produced, the classmate can then choose to make the document public or private... in either case, a copy is e-mailed to the person compiling the journal. It's pretty slick. Here is a sample of the questionnaire results (in PDF form) for review.

Source code is available upon your polite request.

Creating a Simple PayPal-Based Storefront
One of the things I've been doing in my spare time lately is working on the Skyline High School Class of 1987 Reunion web site. One of the apps that I have written (from the ground up) allows alumni to send their confirmations (or regrets) on-line. If it is a confirmation being sent, then I display a "Buy It Now" PayPal button to allow the person to pay with PayPal if he/she so desires.

So, in order to do this, I created a set of products that include all the combinations of confirmation possibilities (with their respective price points) - five products in all. This is pretty easy for anyone to do, and you don't need a shopping cart... I just used the "Buy It Now" buttons. What I wasn't aware of is the elaborate "sandbox" system, called the PayPal Development Center, that PayPal has set up to allow any user to test out the payment processing system with any set of pre-configured products. It is very handy and allows a developer to get all the kinks of of the system while using quasi-cash, instead of the real stuff.

PayPal also allows you to redirect the buyer back to a specified URL after the transaction has been completed. It is pretty easy to set up. Furthermore, there is a handy Payment Data Transfer mechanism that PayPal has put into place. With just a little help from the LWP::UserAgent and Crypt::SSLeay perl modules, I am able to retrieve a whole bunch of information about the buyer's transaction such as the payment type, payment status, payment date, payment gross, and payment fee after the buyer has been redirected back to my script.

Contact me for source code if interested.

Embedding Audio in HTML Pages
I continue to work on content for the Skyline High School Class of 1987 Reunion web site. It's a fun little thing to do and gives me an excuse to reach out and contact some of my old dear friends (for example, I spoke with Tony Coombs yesterday... something I had not done since our 10-year reunion).

One of the pages on the site that I have put together (and referenced previously in my blog) is an "In Memoriam" page dedicated to classmates that have passed. I decided today to dress it up a bit more by putting a bit of music on the page... something that would cause a visitor to perhaps stop, look over the names, and contemplate briefly on the fragility of life. However, embedding audio can be tricky business, especially in the cross-browser cross-platform arena that is the World Wide Web.

Fortunately, I stumbled on a great tutorial about embedding music in html content, authored by Thomas Boutell (of GD fame) that includes a link to download a snappy little flash widget that will stream mp3 audio files. If you visit the "In Memoriam" page, you can see the little flash widget embedded in the lower left of the page.

(Update Mon Mar 26 14:26:53 PDT 2007 // changed link text for the benefit of Google)

Restoring Files on Windows XP/2000
My brother-in-law Scott wiped his "My Pictures" directory on his wife's laptop accidentally. Um... oops. The data wasn't listed in the Recycle Bin so it seemed lost to the ether. He called me up last night in a fairly frantic state. I told him not to do anything else on the computer (not even shut it down) and bring it over. Years ago I had found this clever little freeware utility to accomplish the task of "undeleting" files from disk, but I couldn't remember the name. Fortunately, google is my friend. I found the utility after a few searches; it is simply called restoration.

restoration is small enough to fit on a floppy and will easily fit on a portable USB drive. It installs without any need for a reboot. This is important because every action that requires a disk write (such as a reboot/shutdown event) could possibly access and overwrite free area of the disk that used to hold crucial data that needs to be restored.

After Scott came over, we loaded up and ran the utility on his laptop. The utility found a ton of stuff... and most, if not all, of his deleted pictures (and video). I mounted my laptop drive as a network drive on his laptop and then he, for the next 6 hours (from 9pm last night until 3am this morning), poured over his disk using the restoration utility and restored about 5 GB of pictures and video. After he was satisfied that he had grabbed everything he could, only then did he copy the pictures he restored (and had saved to my laptop) back to his own laptop. It is crucial when using the restoration utility to copy the files to a separate file system... either a different partition on the same drive, a mapped network drive, or an external local drive. If the file is restored to the same drive where it was once located, then the disk write could be made on the file system where other files are stored waiting to be recovered. That would be self-defeating.

Note: restoration will only work on FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file systems.

Creating Shortcut Icons in Mac OS X
I created a few shortcuts on the desktop for the kids account on their new computer (running Mac OS X 10.4). The shortcuts are for various internet web sites that include some flash games for the kids to play... sites such as Kids CBC, PBS Kids, Thomas the Tank Engine, Disney Playhouse, and Nick Jr. In order to differentiate one shortcut (and thus one website) from another, I wanted to create custom icons for each shortcut. For future reference, this is how I accomplished the task:

1. Create a 128x128 pixel image for use as the shortcut. The image should use a transparent background. I recommend the PNG format.
2. Open "Icon Composer" (part of Apple's Development Tools) and drag the PNG image to the Icon Composer screen and drop it on the "Thumbnail" row. Then drag the Thumbnail icon to the "Huge", "Large", and "Small" rows... click on "Use Scaled Version" and "Extract Mask" when prompted. Save and exit Icon Composer.
3. Drag the .icns file and drop it onto the icns2icon application.
4. Open up the file information (Command-i) for the new icon file and select the icon in the upper left of the dialog. When selected the icon will have a blue shadow. Copy the icon (Command-c).
5. Open up the file information (Command-i) for the shortcut and select the icon in the upper left of the dialog. When selected the icon will have a blue shadow. Paste the new icon (Command-v).

Works like a charm. To view an example of the final product, see here for the set of custom icons I created for my kids desktop.

vi Tip: Find Character in Current Line
I'm a vi addict. I know the majority of my colleagues prefer the sexier Emacs, but for me... only vi will do. Today I was trying to remember how to easily delete a section of code from my current cursor position to another position on the same line. I used to know how to do this, but I'm old now... so such trivial knowledge is sometimes hard to recollect. So I did a bit of searching for the complete vi key binding list and soon found the key bindings I was looking for:

   f   find character after cursor in current line (followed by character to find
   t   same as "f" but cursor moves to just before found character


So the full key sequence needed to delete from the current cursor position to another position on the same line is 'd', 'f' (or 't'), followed by the character to find. Very handy.

Mailman on FreeBSD
I am in the midst of migrating my personal web hosting content from an old iServer FreeBSD-based virtual server platform to the next generation hosting platform that the web hosting company I work for (Verio) has developed. The new platform is also "virtual" and is FreeBSD-based, but it is identical in look and feel to a dedicated server... a virtual dedicated server if you will. The marketing term coined for the new platform is Virtual Private Server or VPS.

Everything you are viewing on this blog is hosted (and has always been hosted) on one of the new next-generation Verio Virtual Private Servers. I haven't moved the other stuff (mail, family web content) yet because of 1) inertia, 2) it ain't broke, and 3) lack of time. Recently however, the old iServer Virtual Server has become somewhat cluttered (having served our family well for almost 10 years now) and is low on free disk space (the new VPS platform has over 10x the storage capacity). Over the past few days I have been moving content over, one domain at a time. The last ones (berrett.org and sorenson.org) I'll move probably sometime late at night when no one will mind a delayed e-mail message or two).

I maintain a few mailing lists on several of the domain names I host for family and friends. I use mailman - which I highly recommend. While migrating over the mailing lists to the new platform (which basically acts and feels as if it were my FreeBSD-based desktop system), I learned a few things and thought I would share.

Setting up mailman mailing lists on a FreeBSD server:

1. Set up a 'mailman' CNAME (canonical name) in each of the domain names that will be hosting a mailing list.

2. Install mailman. This is easy... just cd to /usr/ports/mail/mailman and type:
   make install

3. Set up Apache to handle all domain requests for the mailman.* virtual host names. To do this add the following VirtualHost blocks to your Apache config file:

   <VirtualHost YOUR.IP.ADDR.ESS:80>
     SSLDisable
     User           www
     Group          www
     ServerAlias    mailman.*
     DocumentRoot   /usr/local/apache/htdocs
     TransferLog    /dev/null
     ErrorLog       /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log
     ScriptAlias    /mailman     "/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin"
     Alias          /pipermail   "/usr/local/mailman/archives/public"
     Alias          /icons       "/usr/local/apache/icons"
     RewriteEngine  On
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/icons/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/mailman/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/pipermail/
     RewriteRule    .*     http://%{HTTP_HOST}/mailman/listinfo [R=301]
   </VirtualHost>
   <VirtualHost YOUR.IP.ADDR.ESS:443>
     SSLEnable
     User           www
     Group          www
     ServerAlias    mailman.*
     DocumentRoot   /usr/local/apache/htdocs
     TransferLog    /dev/null
     ErrorLog       /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log
     ScriptAlias    /mailman     "/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin"
     Alias          /pipermail   "/usr/local/mailman/archives/public"
     Alias          /icons       "/usr/local/apache/icons"
     RewriteEngine  On
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/icons/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/mailman/
     RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_URI}       !^/pipermail/
     RewriteRule    .*     http://%{HTTP_HOST}/mailman/listinfo [R=301]
   </VirtualHost>

4. Set up the new mailing lists. cd to /usr/local/mailman and for each mailing list type:
   bin/newlist --urlhost=mailman.domain.name \
      --emailhost=domain.name listname

   where "domain.name" is the domain name that is hosting the mailing list name "listname". Note: I broke up the newlist command into two lines... type it as one line on the command prompt.

Works like a champ.

Layering with CSS
Ok, so I don't do much web design any more. Hardly any really. If you don't include what little design I did for this blog, I haven't designed anything from scratch since the old iServer days. Since that time, support for Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS) has become much more robust. While working on my current project (redesigning my wife's website... Berrett Psychological Services), I decided to dabble a bit more with CSS-based design.

I'm by no means an expert at CSS, but I did have some fun and learned a few new things during my project. The most useful of which was learning how to do layering with CSS using the "z-index" property. If you look at any web page on Kristy's new site (other than the home page... for example, see here, here, here, here, and here), you'll see a little logo in the upper left corner of the page. This logo is actually sitting in it's own layer, neatly isolated from everything else on the page. The underlying content is presented in a simple table with some left-justified padding so that it isn't obscured by the logo. Sweet.

PNGs with Alpha Channel Transparency and MSIE
I've been hacking on the BPS web site for the last few days (er, uh, technically, the last few years). As part of the new design effort, I created several PNG images that have alpha channel transparency. Alpha channel transparency allows an image to sit on top of any background (single-color or multi-colored) and look like it fits in the place perfectly. It is an extremely useful and versatile feature... and a necessity for what I'm doing with Dr. Kristy's new web site.

During my web design phase I did all of my testing using FireFox (of course!). Everything was looking great until I popped up Kristy's new website in an MSIE browser I keep around just for compatibility testing. You guessed it (*smacks head*) MSIE doesn't appear to properly support the alpha-channel transparency (at least the version of IE I'm using on Windows XP, which appears to be up-to-date). MSIE will show the image, but all of the pixels that have opacity values are rendered with a light cyan hue. To see what I mean and if you are using a version of MSIE that is flawed, nav here... you'll see the light cyan in the lower right of the image. Yuck.

So, I fished around on google and found a workaround for MSIE that uses a style filter that only MSIE recognizes. Using a nice JavaScript browser sniffer I found, I was then able to author some code so that the PNG images with alpha channel transparency are displayed on MSIE through the style filter, and simply displayed directly as the image source for all other browsers. Here is an example of what I did:

  <html>
  <head>
  <title>MSIE Workaround for PNGs with Alpha Channel Transparency</title>
  <script language="Javascript" src="/browser_detect.js"></script>
  <script language="Javascript">
  <!--
    function loadAlphaTransparencies() {
        var logoImage = document.getElementById("logo");
        logoImage.src = "/media/home_left.png";
    }
  -->
  </script>
  </head>
  <body>
  <img id="logo" border="0" 
       style="width: 250px; height: 450px; 
              filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='/media/home_left.png',
									sizingMethod='scale')"
       width="250" height="450" src="/media/sp.gif">
  <p>
  <script language="JavaScript">
  <!--
    if (!is_ie) {
      loadAlphaTransparencies();
    }
  -->
  </script>
  </body>
  </html>

Works great.

(Update Sun Mar 26 15:55:44 PST 2006 // updated the code to wrap better)

JavaScript Browser Detection
While I have been working on redesigning my wife's company web site, Berrett Psychological Services, I encountered a problem with browser support for PNG images that include alpha channel transparency... specifically, older (but still widely used) versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer do not correctly render such images. Because too many people have not yet switched to Firefox (which renders the PNG images just fine), I was forced to modify my perfectly valid design to accommodate for the implementation flaw in MSIE. Blech.

The first step in making such an accommodation was to detect whether or not the browser viewing the pages is MSIE. Fortunately, many people have walked this path before I have and authored some very robust browser detection code in JavaScript. Here is one such example:

JavaScript Browser Sniffer - WebReference.com
<http://www.webreference.com/tools/browser/javascript.html>

If you view source on any page found on the BPS site, you'll note that I am importing my local copy of WebReference's browser sniffer from here. It works great! I'm glad I didn't have to re-invent the wheel.

Downloading Media from MMS Servers
A good friend of mine, Dave, and his brother recently attempted to swim across the English Channel. The ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City travelled with them to England, documented their attempt, and broadcast a couple of vignettes per day about their endeavor.

The video broadcasts were also made available on-line, albeit in a way that isn't very friendly to my operating system of choice (FreeBSD); specifically, the electronic broadcasts are windows media video (WMV) streamed using an MMS server. Furthermore, it doesn't seem possible (with Windows Media Player at least) to save a local copy of MMS streams after you watch them (so I could archive the broadcasts for my own personal and private use). Argh.

Fortunately, I found a handy little program, mmsclient, that will download video streams using Microsoft's MMS protocol. It will probably compile on any platform (there are even ifdef's in the code for cygwin) as it doesn't use anything but standard libraries. If you are running FreeBSD, you can easily install mmsclient from ports; just nav to "multimedia/mmsclient" and make install.

(Update Thu Aug 18 00:14:39 PDT 2005 // fixed some grammatical errors)

Network printing from MS-DOS-based programs in Windows 2000
My wife uses several old psyhcological testing battery software packages that were written in the 1950s (or thereabouts)... they are MS-DOS based and print directly to the LPT1 port. This was fine until about a year ago, when we ditched our old parallel-port-based 3-color HP DeskJet for a fancy new 6-color HP OfficeJet All-in-One network printer. Without the printer connected directly to the parallel port (LPT1), these old (but essential) programs became essentially useless.

So, Kristy asked me if I couldn't get these programs to print to her new network printer (this was about a year ago). After some googling, I finally found a Microsoft-authored knowledge base article that provided the simple solution. Just run this on a command prompt:

net use lptx: \\printserver\sharename /persistent:yes

Or on Kristy's computer, use:

net use lpt1 \\kmsb\hp7310 /persistent:yes

This wouldn't merit a blog entry were it not that every 3 or 4 months Kristy finds that the "persistent" connection isn't quite so persistent. And so I have to repeat the google search to find the solution... now I should have it right at my fingertips.

Thanks blog... you're the greatest!

(Update Sat Dec 17 08:08:16 PST 2005 // fixed a formatting problem)