Progress was made today on the road to understanding how to deal with “struct” in order to extract the track numbers and genre numbers from ID31.0 and ID31.1 tags. My feeling is we are nearly there, just have to learn a little more about types of variable that struct can deal with (aka contacting a C programmer I know!) and the snowball effect to success should start.

The db schema needs a little tweaking, but isn’t far off. I picked up some handy tips in todays DB11 lecture which I hope to apply in some small way to make our database that little bit more refined.

GUI wise, despite recent success with the basics, it has become apparent that the going only gets tougher from here with wxPython due to the distinct lack of documentation. Although slightly more limiting for our desire to acheieve true cross-platform compatability, we have decided to run with GTK the 2.0 version of which is reasonably well supported on Windows, and for which there is a vast amount of useful documentation and example files.

Was browsing around some blogs I read regularly, and noticed a link to this posting concerning DRM and the new HD technology for high quality video storage. If it’s all to be believed its worrying stuff, and I for one would be agreeing with the post.

While content authors have a right to protect their content, their revenue is based on payments made by consumers for acceptable access to it. If the access is not acceptable, people don’t buy. Its that simple. I think the movie and music industry need to wise up to this fact. I love my music, and spend far too much on it, but I would never buy a DRM’d CD, even if it was music I really wanted. I want my music on CD that will play in my wide variety of players, I want to rip it to my PC so I can play it in amaroK with my other music, I want to carry it around on my MP3 player and copy it to tapes for the few times I end up driving around in a car with no CD player. DRM sucks as it prevents you doing all or most of this, and bringing in a new technology that has even more support for it and even less for non-DRM’d content? No thanks, I’ll pass.

Read the original blog posting here

Arghhhh!! Is my response as my browser crashes yet again because I clicked on a link to a website using flash. Ok, I know I need to fix my browser, but thats not the point. When I finally came back to the site that used the offending flash, I find they could have quite easily made the thing without going within 100 miles of flash!

Flash, I will admit, has its uses, but only in animation and such puposes. A navigation bar, images or textual content does not, under any circumstances need to be in flash, in fact it would be much better if it were not. What about people who don’t have the plugin? Worse, what if they are blind and need the screen read to them, but the readers don’t understand flash? It’s the bane of the web it really is.

I admit my rant is purely initiated by my browser crashing when viewing flash, but it is also fueled by the increasing number of sites I am seeing online using unecesary flash, and the usuability issues I am acutely aware of as a result. Web designers should stop and think. Don’t just take the easy way out. Learn your code; HTML and CSS can do a lot more than most people give them credit for, and they are readable by most anyone or anything.

Matt & Phred’s jazz club in Manchester was a new one for me, so as ever with a new place I always look forward top checking it out. As an aside, when I got home one of my flatmates (who I don’t know all that well) said he lives not far from the centre of Manchester and has been wanting to go to the club for ages and has just never got round to it! Small world.

Anyhow, onto the night in question. Venue wise, it’s what you would expect from a real jazz club. Full of jazz lovers of all ages, a reasonably priced bar, great atmosphere and great gigs almost every night. Although you have to queue on the door to get in if you arrive a little later in the evening, it’s well worth it and you won’t be disappointed.

I had never heard of Neil Yate’s Quintet before, but they wowed me with a superb performance, especially some of their covers of other artists work, inlcuding one of my favorite artists, Mile Davis. Their musical style was modern and fresh, but keeping the spirit of the older jazz tracks that they themesleves and their audience were clearly familiar with.

Audience interaction was permantly on a high, and the way they got everyone to join in with typical Manchester phrases instead of the one songs original spanish vocals was great fun! The way they carried themseleves on stage was very laid back, which I love in a live performance. All of the band sported pints of beer on the sidelines, and the bass player had to be called back to the stage from the bar after a break in the set.

Overall this live performance was impressive, and although the quintet are obviously a small-time group, they are welll worth the entrance fee to any club in which they might be playing

Recent dablings in Python have yeilded some rather nice looking results in the form of GUI’s. WxPython seems to be quite easily manipulated, and it was only a matter of time before I was able to get methods to be called upon activating a particular part of the interface. “Tool Tips” telling the user what an option does when the mouse moves over it is almost included by default in the syntax structure and so it was working from the word go.

Currently we have a simpl window, with tool-tips, an about option, ability to close the program from the menu, and an option calling a method that loads a diaolgue to load a group of files from a directory. This we should be able to combine with our tag reading code (when it is finished) and database access code, to enable our first test of indexing a group of files and storing their contents in the database all from a GUI. Fun fun fun!

Here are some screenies for those who like the eye candy….

In other python project news, the progression for reading the tags is quite slow, even for ID3v1.0. Although we can read in the Strings ok, the numbers stored as binary are causing us some issues. We are getting these slowly though, and with other parts of the project seemingly going ok, we’re not overly concerned about it. When you spend an hour on a few lines though and get few results, it can be a little frustrating!