P. Oscar Boykin

This is a fun meme: Metros from the world

I only learned this morning about Ernesto (thanks Meet the Press). Fortunately, it looks like New Orleans is not likely to be hit. Unfortunately, it looks like I (or North Central Florida) will be much closer to the action:

Its a little hard to judge, but I guess the eye is predicted to cross just south of Gainesville.

Update: Hurricane predictions are quite volitile, and the above map links to the most recent prediction. The good news for Gainesville is that the prediction for the eye has moved east of us.

Update 2 (8/29): While I was so self-absorbed, I failed to mention that Ernesto appears on track to head through my beloved home of Raleigh, NC. Hopefully it will be greatly weakened and cause no problems.

Though still hot and humid, the fall semester is upon us. All summer long (or perhaps longer) many of us have dreamed of August 24th; for on that day EEL 6507 begins its semester long journey into the magical world of Queueing Theory and Data Communications.

The excitement is palpable, yet we still have days to wait. In the meanwhile, I hope this electronic world-wide-web site will satisfy you:

EEL 6507: Queueing Theory and Data Communications Website.

I recently subscribed to Emusic. I don’t buy music with any digital restrictions management (see Defective by Design). This rules out iTunes. Cory Doctorow gave an excellent talk on why DRM is a broken technology and a bad idea. At Emusic you can download high quality (~192 Kbps VBR) MP3 files with no DRM, which will play on almost every device I own (car, DVD player, computer, iPod). For 9.99 a month, I can download 40 tracks, which means when I max out, I get 25 cents a track.

Emusic probably has a lot less bands than iTunes, but it has a lot that I like including: The Pixies, Frank Black, They Might Be Giants, Spoon, Johnny Cash (at Sun Records), Interpol, Beulah, Tom Waits, Elliott Smith, The New Pornographers, Neko Case, and more. So, enough hyping Emusic. What’s the point of my post?

Since I run Debian GNU/Linux (and I don’t run non-Free Software), the Emusic download manager was not an option. This meant I had to click each song I wanted, and save it to a particular location. This being unsatisfactory, I wrote a small python program that does this for me. So, I click on the song, Firefox opens the link with my program, which downloads the song and saves it to a canonical location (based on the artist and album). It makes it very convienient to download complete albums.

Thus, I give you Dromanova (name taken from the scientific name for the emu). It is currently two parts: the python script: dromanova.py, and the shell script for launching gnome-terminal to give a progress meter: shell_edl. This code is licensed under the GPLv2 or later. I welcome any improvements. If someone wants to write a GTK progress meter instead of using the terminal, that would be really great.

Update: (8/31/2006) I have fixed a couple of bugs. If a track’s metadata has path separators, that won’t cause a problem. The current version should work on on windows as well as Unix (though, I have not tested it).

Update: (5/31/2007) I have created a Mercurial repository for Dromanova here.