Daily Archives: 10/14/2004

Quote of the Day

Theodore Roosevelt

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

“Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star”, 149 May 7, 1918

What R.A.D.I.O. Can Teach Podcasting

There has been an explosion of podcasting stories around, and one of the absolute best that I’ve found so far can be found here. There is lots of good stuff to absorb here, including equipment reviews of radios, tips for producing radio programs, and reviews of public radio programs. I haven’t listened to his podcast yet, but if it is anywhere close to the quality of the rest of his site, we are in for a treat.

Volcano Movie

Volcano Cam!A while ago, I wrote a simple script to fetch pictures from one of the Mount St. Helens volcano cams. I only ran it for a short time, but I collected an afternoon’s worth of images and just now got arround to assembling them into a short MPEG movie.

The script was remarkably easy to write, using code from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python book. He has some code (downloadable from the website, as is the book itself) which is called openAnything which was incredibly useful, as is the discussion in the book. I urge anyone who is making programs which interface with HTTP servers to read the chapter on Web services. Great stuff.

Smarter Playlists for iTunes

Ipod TipsHere is a little tip that I just figured out. I was trying to use a smart playlist to create a special playlist which contained all of my most favorite daily podcast shows that have arrived in the last three days. The normal smart playlist interface allows you to specify a list of conditions, but they are all connected with either an AND or an OR. For instance, what I wanted to do is create a playlist for all shows added in the last three days, AND is one of ‘Evil Genius Chronicles’ OR ‘Linux Link Tech Show’ OR ‘IT Conversations’.

The trick is to used nested playlists. Create one smart playlist which contains all the shows that you find interesting. Then create a second playlist which specifies that ALL the conditions must be met, and add a rule which is “Playlist is My-Favorites” and another rule which is “DateAdded is in the last three days”. Voila!

I didn’t invent this idea, but I did find it useful, and hope you do too.