Syyyyync

Just started syncing my music collection with Mp3Tunes. I discovered the thing through the Amarok blog (which incidentally has a really nice article about it) and the service seems promising, not to mention [tag]useful[/tag], especially for the backup aspects of it. I was always scared that my HDD would unexpectedly crash before I had a chance to DVD-backup my current version of my collection and this presents me an excellent option.

I guess now that I have a website, I could just as easily upload everything there through ftp, but it always seemed more trouble than it was worth. With this service however which provides unlimited storage I get to back it up and also get some extra perks for it.

It’s not that I need an online streaming option since Last.fm is perfectly capable of providing me with a radio station that I’m certain to like, but it’s still nice to have the option to listen to a specific song I crave.

The funny thing is that as far as I can see, this is perfectly legal. I am not distributing my music but rather storing it for personal use. The fact that “someone” could share his password with a friend who could then easily download anything he wanted from the collection does not make any difference 😉

One could easily take the next step and think about creating a “group account”, with a shared password among several friends who could then listen to songs from a much larger collection. This group could easily pool their money to buy a premium account at a very low cost and get all the benefits at a fraction of the cost.

What also perplexes me is the way these people suppose to make money out of this. They provide unlimited space for millions of people who will use it to upload Gigabytes over gigabytes of music. Then they are going to use it to listen to said music which should create enormous bandwidth needs. I know that storage is quite cheaper nowadays but storage, plus backup is not and unless they’ve figured out the perfect way to compress music then I don’t see how they can make money by giving premium users only small bonuses like unrestricted album covers and large file size and I don’t think that the music store is so attractive either.
The whole thing smells of .com bubble.

For the paranoid amongst us, you could even think that this is an elaborate scam by the RIAA to, in effect, voluntarily implicate ourselves with our collections.

In any case, I have now been added to the unlimited storage. If any of my friends is interested in the service and wants to get an immediate unlimited storage, I have three promo codes left that I can give you to get priority.

Right now, after 2.5 hours of up-syncing, I am still at 2% of progress. To finish it would take 4 non-stop full 24-hour days of syncing which I plan to do 🙂

All that needs to be done after that is to have it record my music to last.fm and/or be playable through Amarok itself (which should take care of the former as well, for LXers at least)

Code? LoL!

I just discovered the best programming language eV@R!!!!

Click Hiar! !one1!

I pretty positive this started as a joke but the contributions are just amazingly funny. I mean, just check out this code snippet!!1!

HAI
CAN HAS DBASE?
I HAZ A VARIABLE1 IS NOTHING
IM IN YR DATA ; ) "test.mdb"
CAN I PLZ GET column1 column2 column3
ALL UP IN table1
OMG column1 IZ BIGGER THAN 5
ALL UR BASE R BELONG 2 VARIABLE1
IM OUTTA YR DATA
VISIBLE VARIABLE1
KTHXBYE

Amazing!1!eleven!

Css wrangling

I have finally implemented drop-down menus on the navigation bar. This should make page navigation that much easier I hope. Now I can remove the pages from the navigation bar and fill it with something more interesting (No idea what though)

It took me a few hours until I got everything done. Initially I was trying to figure it out myself but I could not find any plugin to do it nor any hint from themes that implemented something similar. Fortunately, the admin over at Back-on Online was kind enough to provide me with some code snippets when I contacted him. Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as copying and pasting them into my style sheet and header files (Although I was secretly hoping for that) 🙂

After some unsuccesful tries over the course of an hour or so, I decided to google the name of the script which fortunately pointed me in the right direction.

Three hours later and my drop down menus are complete (in their first incarnation that is). Not only that but I’ve managed to add the categories as a drop down menu which should make navigation even easier.

My Relevant stylesheet part for the navigation drop-downs is this

/* Drop Down Menu */
#suckerfish, #suckerfish ul {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
list-style: none;
line-height: 1;
}
#suckerfish a {
display: block;
color: #fff;
}
#suckerfish li {
float: left;
position: relative;
}
#suckerfish li ul {
position: absolute;
left: -999em;
height: auto;
}
#suckerfish li ul li {
background: #009;
width: 20em;
}
#suckerfish li ul li a{
color: #AAA;
}
#suckerfish li ul ul {
margin: -3em 0 0 20em;
}
#suckerfish li ul li ul li{
width: auto;
}
#suckerfish li:hover ul ul, #suckerfish li:hover ul ul ul, #suckerfish li.sfhover ul ul, #suckerfish li.sfhover ul ul ul {
left: -999em;
}
#suckerfish li:hover ul, #suckerfish li li:hover ul, #suckerfish li li li:hover ul, #suckerfish li.sfhover ul, #suckerfish li li.sfhover ul, #suckerfish li li li.sfhover ul {
left: auto;
}
/* End Drop Down Menu */

It took me quite while to have the third level menu come out at the same level. The most important part to notice is that the width and the margin of it should be the same, otherwise you either get the manus overlapping or too far apart. In the third menu I fount it better to leave the width automatic so as not to extend the background color too much. However that created a problem with small links and as a result I had to reduce the parent <ul> width to something small to force the list items to fall under each other.

In the header, after adding the new class id in the <ul> parent of the navbar, I also included this


	
  • Categories
  • Which creates a drop down menu for the categories.

    All in all, I like this way of navigating through the pages much more. Unfortunately I only tested this in Firefox and Konqueror does not seem to handle everything as it should be so I just don’t even want to think what is happening in IE (even with the javascript hacks I had to put in). So if you’re using that and things look strange, do yourself a favor and get a standards compliant browser.

    I might go back to this once I get in the mood but for now I’m happy it’s at least working in firefox.

    PS: I just now discovered that the <code> function in worpress’ wusyiwyg editor pretty much suchs as it tends to be moved around every time I save.

    Damnit, What now?

    What the hell just happened to my gallery is what I want to know. One day everything is working fine and now I check it out and the layout is completely b0rked!

    Scratch that, everything seems to be back to normal now. As a troubleshooting step, I renamed my wpg2header.php file to a _bak and copied the header.php into the same name. Format was closer to the original but still bad.

    I then restored the _bak file to it’s original name and it now works…

    WTF?!

    Oh well…

    I still need to fix the stylesheet for the gallery and add the footer in some way however.

    Need. More. Free. Time!

    ACP

    After some discussion, the Antichristian Phenomenon has gone live. I decided to just dive in and make a start and see how things go after that. Why not? After all, it won’t cost me anything other than time since I’m not using even close to my limits on my hosting plan right now.

    Right now the main site is based on WordPress (oh how I love free software) and there is room for expansion into anything else (like gallery, wiki or whatever).
    I’ve installed some few basic plugins but unfortunatey the theme I picked does not support widgets currently, which is unfortunate since they have recently been put as a base feature list in the new wordpress 2.2.

    Maybe I’ll change theme if it isn’t updated or I may just do without widgets as I’ve done until now. The group will decide anyway.

    Who knows, maybe this will turn into something interesting in the long run.

    Βοηθώντας το Blog.me

    Οργανώνεται συλλογή υπογραφών για την βοήθεια υπεράσπισης του Αντώνη Τσιπρόπουλου. Το πιο ενδιαφέρον είναι οτι το τελικό σύνολο των θα παρουσιαστεί στο δικαστήριο σαν πειστήριο οτι οι “εμπειρογνώμονες” των ιστολογίων και του internet διαφωνουν με την κλήτευση.

    Μέχρι τώρα που το γράφω αυτό έχουν υπογράψει μόνο 16 άτομα.

    Αίντε!