July 9th '09 0:16

I download some... stuff, let's say, via RSS & bittorrent. For a long time I used uTorrent, which is great at this sort of thing, but I had to run windows in a VM to run it, which sucked. rTorrent is a good CLI Linux torrent client, but it didn't have support for RSS feeds or stopping & removing a torrent once it was done. What it did have was the ability to watch a directory for new torrents and a poorly documented pseudo-scripting language in its config file.

However, here is the magic incantation:

schedule = watch,10,10,"load_start=/path/to/torrentfiles/*"
schedule = stop,10,10,"remove_untied="

directory = /path/to/temporary/directory/
on_finished = move,"execute=mv,-u,$d.get_base_path=,/path/to/completed/downloads/directory/ ; d.set_directory=/path/to/completed/downloads/directory/"
on_finished = stop,"d.close="
on_finished = remove,"execute=rm,$d.get_tied_to_file="

This (in order):
- watches /path/to/torrentfiles/ for new .torrent files, and adds them when it sees them
- removes torrents that have had their corresponding .torrent file deleted.
- saves all new torrents to /path/to/temporary/directory/
- moves torrents to /path/to/completed/downloads/directory/ as they finish (these two commands must be in a single statement or rtorrent gets mad).
- stops completed torrents after moving them.
- removes the corresponding .torrent file after stopping them
- which causes the schedule=stop line to remove them from the downloading list.

This should work on any platform where you can get rtorrent to work, including MacOS.

To get the .torrent files from the RSS feed(s), you just need some sort of podcatcher (I hate all of these terms). I use bashpodder, which again should work anywhere. The only modification needed is to comment out the bit about creating .m3u playlists and set the data directory to /path/to/torrentfiles/. I don't enjoy editing bashpodder's config file, so I've used Yahoo Pipes to combine and sort the various rss feeds I'm downloading from. I also use other pipes to apply regular expressions to some of those source RSS feeds, in order to exclude crap I don't care about. I'm pretty impressed with Pipes (even if I do keep referring to it as Yahoo! Tubes!) - its like a command line in the cloud for dealing with web services.

In a completely unrelated story, there is a thing called ShowRSS that is pretty neat. COMPLETELY UNRELATED.

June 25th '09 20:17

May 29th '09 0:29

Everyone ever should go listen to The Ryan Montbleau Band right now. I saw him open (sans-band) for Martin Sexton in San Francisco many moons ago, and he is spectacular. Sadly, his tour schedule seems to basically avoid all of my friends ever, despite their home being smack in the middle of everyone I know.

Either way, go buy their music from their web site so they can buy beer so they can make more music. Go go go.

May 28th '09 20:22

I'll be in Beijing starting tomorrow and extending through the following Friday, 6/5. If you want to get in touch with me during that time, I suggest sending email or calling/texting my google voice number - (408)533-8206. I won't pick up, but I'll at least get your message and respond by text or email.

May 12th '09 4:49

• fire dancing: we're all pyromaniacs, get over yourself


• not taking care of yourself: time to grow up! your parents don't care anymore.


• twitter: jesus, was anyone ever impressed by twitter? I will light your social media on fire with my brain.


• adding version numbers to stuff: I appreciate that you like to name stuff, but you can do better than News 2.0


• getting excited about kerning: I'd say you're the only one who cares, but it seems like everyone does. Nonetheless, unless you're in the technical side of print journalism, please shut up.


• lists of things that are overrated: I am not as clever as I think.


• giant watches: your wrists aren't very big. this is because you spend all your time on the internet reading watch review web sites. go home.


• beer snobbery: I'm all for delicious, but PBR has its place too.


• cheap liquor: We're not in college, you can afford a glass bottle. If you actually can't, you're exempt from my disdain in this particular area.


• acting your age: everyone see that coming.

May 12th '09 2:14

... wherein I hurt myself, and get in trouble by relating the story.

Google has cafeterias, within which I have been known to eat. There are also pretty girls who work here, and large plants. Both of the latter are, at times, found in the aforementioned cafes.

Today, having finished a delicious lunch with my coworkers, I was egressing the tray-drop area when I was suddenly passed by a pretty girl. I turned my head to... observe & ensure her safe passage through the crowded hall. My mission completed, I returned my eyes to my path forward to my office, when I suddenly ran into the leafy part of a plant. With my eyeballs. Too quickly to close my eyelids.

And then I hurt.

May 6th '09 1:24

Dear people who syndicate twitter into livejournal,

You are all my enemy. There was a time when you wrote things in livejournal, and I found them interesting, and thus I made you my 'friend' there, and read your interesting writings in my igoogle gadget and everything was great. Then you decided that twitter was a good idea - I can't really blame you, the rest of the world seems to agree with you - and that was fine too, because I didn't have to read about how great your sandwich was and could just continue reading the increasingly-infrequent, but high quality stuff that ended up in livejournal.

But then you started using loudtwitter - or some other abomination - to copy your day's twitter output into livejournal. Let's just be clear here: your twitter output is dull. So is mine. If I was interested in your dull twittering (not tweeting. You are not a goddamn bird. Shut up.) I'd have followed you on twitter, which is where this "content" should have stayed. But no, you've violated the sanctity of the concept of blogging (and now that I've had that thought, I have to kill myself) by giving yourself an excuse to never make another attempt at being interesting.

Which is to say, I will be de-friending a bunch of you on livejournal shortly. Please do not take offense.

April 27th '09 1:55

It infuriates me when I can't purchase something I'd like. For a long time, music was the greatest offender; I couldn't buy music that didn't come with trash (eg, a CD and jewel case I'd never use again) or that I couldn't use (iTunes DRM). At long last, Amazon and cdbaby have sufficiently-good electronic music distribution systems that I can use, and now I'm back to buying music with some regularity. (For the record, cdbaby is slightly better at this than amazon, but I can't complain too much - both work in Linux).

The new problem is books. I have a Sony Reader I really like, but I've read most of the Project Gutenberg titles that interest me. The Sony book store doesn't work in Linux, Amazon's store is too DRM-encumbered for me to use (and they won't sell you a book unless you buy a Kindle, for $400). Now I'm trying SmashWords, which is a weird ebook self-publishing platform. Hopefully the quality of books isn't terrible, but I guess I'll find out. The prices are pretty reasonable, and they give you an idea of word count before you buy, so at least there's some idea of economic value.

Now I need to collaborate my word-per-minute reading rate, correcting for plane travel.

April 24th '09 0:09

This is weird: an article by Bob Tedeschi about cell phone headsets. Sure, its a boring topic, but his point of view is "these $100 headsets are so cool, your teenager will wear them while driving that car you bought him." Which is nice fodder for a dull article about headsets, but misses the point completely.

Your teenager isn't talking on the phone, they're texting. And all the headsets in the world don't make that activity more hands-free. You have to wonder if the author has seen a teenager in the past 5 years.

April 23rd '09 23:38

April 23rd '09 22:05

Timothy Egan has an article (blog post? essay? whatever, that line is gone) over at the Times about the fleeting nature of shame in the public life. I have to disagree with his premise: its not shame that's gone missing from the public's (and media's) perception of the lives of celebrities, its a concept of honor.

The Boy Scout Oath starts with "On my honor" and proceeds to list a series of virtues (although "don't be a damn hypocrite" isn't amongst them, and probably should be for any future politicians in the troop). There was a time when you didn't require shame to be bum rushed out of the public life: your fellow man's disdain for your dishonorable conduct would do that for it. This applied pretty well to politicians for the better part of a century, but not the extremely wealthy. Maybe that's the problem: all of our political leaders (save for a few congressmen) are incredibly rich. The good Mrs. Clinton was able to loan her campaign tens of millions of dollars and got back less than a penny on the dollar, and she certainly doesn't seem to be hurting for flow.

If you're wealthy, you don't need to be elected to stay in the public eye; you can afford a team of attorneys and publicists to do that for you. You don't even have to answer hard questions on your own - not that you can find a so-called television journalist to ask one (no, John Stewart doesn't count) - your attorney provides that service as well.

If you're getting rich and your title is 'public servant', either the system is corrupt or you are. In the past five years, the answer seems to be 'both'. No wonder our nation is collapsing in a grand mal seizure of dissemblance.

April 22nd '09 21:03

Them: "Tell me a story."
You: "This one time, your mom was fat."


END COMMUNICATION.

April 7th '09 5:02

If you're looking for me next week, please do it in rural Kentucky. I'll be in Hazard county (awesome!) yelling at teenagers and generally trying not to break the law. You can find me with a phone call, but maybe there'll be some sort of blagotron at the camp and you'll get to hear from me via some sort of terrible blagging. In other news, feel free to follow me on twitter, jaiku, or a half-dozen other things I find generally offensive to humanity.

April 2nd '09 3:35

Due to quite a bit whining on the part of two different people (the pair of whom are only INCREDIBLY LIKELY to have colluded), I've hacked together some simple comment posting support. This blag sure isn't a one way medium of feces anymore.

Welcome to 2001!

April 1st '09 6:08

Why do people ask you that when you go to see their show? Its not that I mind sharing, but if you've been watching this thing for thirty six hours in the past six days, you've probably had every thought about it possible; its unlikely I'll have anything useful to add.

Anyway! I saw a dress preview of Distracted at Theatreworks just now. The production qualities were really good, good acting and design... but what an ungodly bad script. This is a real play! It was produced... somewhere else before here! This is what I imagine a housewife would write while trying to decide what color crossover SUV she should buy. Or maybe a second-semester drama student at a magnet school. Seriously, how terrible. The shows I did in high school - written by high schoolers! - were a lot better. Of course, at least one of them - Dirty Windows - was pure brilliance.

Gosh, so sad. Such talent in the cast and crew, and such tripe to work with. That said, if you're in the area, go see the play... for all the things that aren't the writing.

April 1st '09 1:47

do haiku differ? would one by another name smell about as sweet?