LateNightHacking Louis Journal

Auth

Well, I spent some time working on my music collection today. I've got the laptop hooked up to the living room stereo, with VNC running on it so you can control Winamp remotely. I wrote a slick little web GUI a couple years ago which allowed you to scroll through a list of the available CDs. The problem with it is that the window is fixed at a very small size, and with almost 300 playlists, even a alphabetical list isn't the most convenient. Plus I've got a bunch of ideas about different ways to present the list. So what I've been doing is creating separate web pages for each view. That way I can try as many weird things as I want and I don't have to figure out how to squish them into one GUI. So far I have a tree view by category (and a CD can belong to more than one category) and an incremental search (which narrows the displayed list as you type). I also created a page for editing the categories. It's pretty slick: it maintains the list of uncategorized CDs, and has independently savable multi-line text boxes for each category so it's easy to move CDs from one category to another. I think I want to add some views that allow you to manipulate the list of all tracks and build custom playlists. The trick will be dealing with the track list. I'm thinking it will be too slow to generate on the fly, so I'll have to figure out some caching mechanism. But it's fun to think about! :)

As I said on Thursday, I was looking forward to three toys and had received two of them. Well, the third one arrived on Saturday. Hee hee! Neko no Ongaeshi or, The Cat Returns. It's a movie from Studio Ghibli with characters from Whisper Of The Heart (which is one of my favorites). Michelle and I ate a pear, walnut, and brie pizza from Eatzi's for dinner and watched the movie this evening. The pizza was good and the movie was fun. It was definitely a kids movie, more lightweight and random than the stuff Miyazaki makes. Still, it was cute and had some pretty funny parts. :)

Ah well. That's all the toys for now. Time to get back to work.