Thursday March 31, 2005

Solaris zen...

I have a fairly old portable mp3 player the "Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen". Its a 20G device which came out about the time of the original iPod. In the last year or so I havn't been using it much. I've either listened to content on my laptop or off of CD in the car¹. Recently I've become interested in using my Zen again. Encouraged by Dan Price's blog entry about using his camera with gphoto on Solaris 10 I decided to do this on my S10 box. Initially I looked at gnomad which lead me to libnjb. Libnjb is a library which uses libusb to access a wide range of Creative devices². Other then having to cover the u_int{8,16,32,64}_t types they used with uint{8,16,32,64}_t types from the package compiled easily. If you follow the steps that Dan went through in getting his camera connected you can then use the sample command line tools to move things to/from your portable mp3 device. Libnjb is intended to be used by a program like gnomad but could be used for script interaction with a device. Like automated downloads of podcasts...

Now all I have to do is to get this into blastwave...

¹I need a reasonable portable/car/stationary audio integration story but havn't had the energy to work it out.

²The FAQ/HACKING/README files supplied with libnjb are a treasure trove of information including some nice information about how to obtain more information about the on the wire protocol and which devices support which protocols. This feels like a really well done project. ( Mar 31 2005, 11:18:30 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

All that matters is the music

Before the SCI show tonight while moaning about the silly articles in the Tahoe Tribune a friend noted nicely that "All that matters is the music". And he is right. That reminded me of a closet deadhead podcast. In podcast 6 an interviewee makes the same statement with respect to peoples assumptions (like the Tribune writer) that its more about the drugs and social structure then anything else. He makes some very cogent statements about how that assumption probably comes about.

The show tonight was very different from last night. Instead of driving intense focus it was varied with whacked out jams, drumz, slow songs, and some very hard rocking. I had a feeling the whole first set as if the band was playing at some experiment that we all were suppose to figure out. Thats one of the aspects of jam band shows that I really enjoy! ( Mar 31 2005, 01:35:33 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]