...nwood...

Last night I finally achieved a goal I've been doggedly pursuing for - well let's just say "too long." I've got Band-in-a-Box (BIAB) running under Wine (MS Windows emulation) in Ubuntu 7.10. I've been dual-booting Windows and Linux on my IBM Thinkpad T40 for quite a while. One of the main reason I've needed to subject myself to the ugly and soul-less world of Microsoft has been to use BIAB.

Wow, JQuery is really coming along. Check out ui.JQuery.com - epecially this photo album

I've got to study the source to that sweetness!

Last week I jumped on an opportunity to do some Drupal crusading in my department at UC Berkeley. We are standardized on VB.NET, but I sensed an willingness to consider alternative solutions for an ailing website that offers very light CMS functionality. I don't know of any framework comparable to Drupal that exists in the .NET world. If you do, comment here and let me know! The functionality already present in Drupal 5.1 allowed me to bring up a fully functioning prototype in my free time.

Tonight I spent a little time getting reacquainted with Elliot's LastFM Drupal module. I see where he got to with the implementation of separate blocks for individual users. I'm mapping the route to fold in a few of my options. I hope to finally get this into Drupal CVS in a couple of weeks at the latest. See the next post for info on the Drupal project that took priority last week.

Tonight I was giving Rhapsody another look. I have been using Napster mainly because it was a little cheaper. Rhapsody.com launched back in Dec 05. You can stream from within a web browser and the kicker is you don't have to use Internet Explorer, and they provide an Firefox extension! Sweet! Only one problem, the XPI installer bombs with an incorrect message about insufficient disk space. (Boo! Bugs!) I did a lot of googling and didn't find anyone with an answer, so I resorted to taking a look inside the XPI to see why it's so TWEEKED.

I figured out the url to the XPI download and then used wget to save it to my disk. (Is there an easier way?)

An XPI is just a zip file, so I unzipped it and pulled up install.js in my trusty editor (Emacs). The problem is right here:

var kilobytesAvailable = parseInt(bytesAvailable / 1024);

By looking here ~/.mozilla/firefox/pjfmmgsq.default/install.log I could see that parseInt is returning a very small negative number. Maybe diskspaceavialable isn't returning an int, or maybe it's just broken? I am not a java programmer and it's late (way past bedtime AGAIN), so I took the brute force approach and commented most of this function out.

Click here to see it work.

This is my absolute first attempt at jQuery, so don't assume that I know what I'm doing...

BUG: If click Save Configuration on the admin form you will get a blank page...

Fixed. Silly... My debugging output was thwarting the header() in includes/common.inc line 311. I have implemented simple debugging output in the bottom of the block for developer convenience.

BUG: Track times: They are probably incorrect for you.

Fixed. _lastfmdev_adjust_server_time() now calculates the offset between the Last.fm server's timezone and the date_default_timezone set in the Drupal installation.

Over the last few weeks I've been working on a Last.fm module for Drupal. I started with some code by an English programmer. I'd hope to polish it up before sharing my modifications with him, but since I see that he's back at work on it I'm posting it here and sending him this message:

I abandoned the previously blogged phpWiki in favor of the much more
user friendly and elegant MediaWiki
application. MediaWiki, another Apache-MySQL-PHP application, is the
workhorse behind Wikipedia, among other great wikis. One of the most annoying problems that I quickly ran into with phpWiki was that the application began complaining about "conflicting" edits as I made subsequent edits to the same page. Leveraging my programmer impatience, I did minimal troubleshooting and began searching for a different wiki solution.