Lackhead.org

Recently I ran into a bug in cdrdao where certain disc that contain CD-TEXT data were causing TOC file generation to fail. The symptom was that cdrdao would run through each track, but when it got to actually generating the TOC file it would throw the following error:


Found CD-TEXT data.
cdrdao: Track.cc:1415: void Track::addCdTextItem(CdTextItem*): Assertion
`CdTextItem::isTrackPack(item->packType())' failed.
Aborted


It turns out that the isTrackPack method was only testing for a number of types, and missing several (including genre and discid, which one would think is pretty common).

In any case, I wrote a patch for cdrdao 1.2.2 that adds in the missing types, which seems to have fixed the problems. Caveat emptor and have fun.

-c

Since I have soooo free time on my hands, I decided tonight to take a break from watching the first season of Scrubs and instead get ZenPress, a Wordpress plugin that integrates ZenPhoto into my blogging software. And you know what, it took me all of 5 minutes. Who knew this computer stuff could be easy?

And so here is a link to my Stinky Summits album, to test integrating one of my photo albums into a posting. I’m sure you are all so super-uber-duper excited about seeing these photos again. I hope to get a new one to add in this weekend, but in the meantime, this is just to show off my mad new blogging skills.

At some point, I will doink around with the style/layout of the blog a bit more. The color scheme and layout that I have now is alright, but I would like to spruce it up a bit (metaphorically; I don’t mean it needs more forest green).

Enough for now. Boring post. Continue on with your life. I’m going back to watching Scrubs.

-c

Today the Securities and Exchange Commission suspended the stock of 35 companies engaged in spam, notably those penny stock companies that try to boost the value of their stock by generating interest through spam messages.

As a systems administrator, I loathe spam and spammers. We reject about 65% of all incoming email before it even is accepted by our email server, and then mark another 5-8% as spam using SpamAssassin, a heuristic-based spam identification software package. So approximately 70% of our email infrastructure is wasted on spam, and that’s based on just what we identify; some make it through our filters and make it into people’s inboxes (granted, not all of what we reject is spam, some are email-based viruses, misconfigured mail servers, etc, but the vast majority of those numbers are indeed spam). To me, spam is like driving a van through neighborhoods 24/7 blaring commercials; the lack of scruples in advertising is really amazing.

I have to applaud the people behind this video; I can’t imagine the brain damange I would occur living in a big city like New York City where advertisements are everywhere, especially now that they are video based. So, amen to the Graffiti Research Lab and the Anti Advertising Agency for coming up with a very affective and non-destructive way of getting their point across that advertising is graffiti.

-c