Analog by Night

“The interactive ability to consume stories across the scales of time and generalization about human behavior.  The idea is for a technology that represents reality on scales of time and level of intimacy with the self. The lowest point might be something like “what am I(or another individual) experiencing at this moment, and the highest point might be something like what can you say about all people of across the whole of history.  Inbetween groupings being: the story of my family, my lineage, my friends, the story of Americans, the story of caucasians, what happened this week to people I know, what is the history of human communication, etc.

My next question is how do you build the scale?

I started running this script Mp3 wget about an hour and twenty minutes ago, and I have 139…140 mp3′s and counting.
If you are looking for new music this is the shotgun approach to getting it. Maybe shotgun is too small a comparison. Maybe clusterbomb is the right word.

So what it does is it parses a list of mp3blogs that you want to hit. Here’s my list

1. http://radiofreepolygon.net/
2. http://www.3hive.com/electronic/
3. http://www.materialcultures.org/gifted/
4. http://adoru.blogspot.com/

http://luna.typepad.com/weblog/mp3/index.html

It scrapes the mp3′s off that site, and then descends one level down into every link it finds on the page and grabs an mp3 there. This wouldn’t be a big deal except that some of these sites have huge link lists as part of their blogroll. So, half the time I check progress the script is scraping some site I’ve never even heard of. So I’m a little nervous about how long this is going to go on and what kind of crap I’m getting.

I think after this run I’m going to spend a little time tuning the script. I’ll keep you up on the progress. If anyone knows of an osX 10.4 utility like this that is customizable speak up. It’s the new napster.

How’s my life? Girls stink. But fall is here, which means that wonderful smell, sweaters, extra pleasure in hot coffee and staying in. It’s why I moved here.

I miss my folks and friends back home.

What I need is for a Cron driven script to hit a php/perl script that will a traverse all the subdirectories in a given filesystem/directory and not just create a simple site map, but create content sections and categories based on those folder names, and then writes meta data into a database for each object it finds ie:

- if an object is nested four folders deep, then the names of those folders and the filename of the object become metadata
- The top level folders are sections, the second level folders are categories, and the n-level folders become subcategories right down to the last folder which is an entry , an entry which simply contains thumbnails of the different files.
- recognization of a significant variety of file formats: image, document, pdf, pages, office docs, fonts, etc.
- a media player.
- thumbnail and list views.
- statistical reporting (number to files total, per category, per file type, new
-versioning (how will this work?)

I need to gather components that will make this happen

- the script that will crawl directories
- identify file types and write a database table with filename/filetype
- traverse each known filetype and associate it with either and icon or a thumbnail
- read direcotry names and assign new tables and relationships.
- write metadata to object database

ugh, this could go on. I’ve got a good idea of what I want, and I just need to start writing it, piecemeal, over time. Ruby? Perl? I have a fondness in my heart for the speed, power and efficiency of perl, but I like the easy of dev with ruby.

I think it should maybe be able to write, XML, RSS and XHTML.

more later.

One day I plan on entering the University of Washington. One day shortly thereafter I plan on applying to the iSchool. Shortly thereafter I expect to choose classes, schedule classes, and initialize my entrance into an educational experience that should prepare me for professional-level IA. More importantly I expect it to revolutionize the way I think about information, and/or have some of my existing notions confirmed, and have some others totally obliterated. I honestly expect that the ones that will be obliterated will coincide as the ideas I’m most fond of, are the most forward looking and philosophical, and appear in my papers; papers I expected to be burned in the hands of a professorial mob as they chase their idiot man-child frankenstein’s monster down the street for the kind of intellectual heresy that made Derrida so Derrided.

Alas I suspect that I can buy myself some time by learning NOW instead of later. By marching steadily up that sisyphean learning curve towards a state of blissful ignorance similar to Socrate’s when he said that bit about ‘knowing nothing’. To do that I’m going to dig up the texts that are part of the program. From working at a college I’ve learned that Prof’s are pretty fond of posting this kind of administrative material on the web for their students. Saves time, saves paper, saves 30 emails. So I suspect that I can get to a list of profs for required courses, find their web page, snatch up the corresponding syllabi and start trying to learn what the other kids are learning now.

“How dare you, attempt to usurp the time honored tradition of collegiate….,” you may say. To which I dismissively reply, “ah hush; information is free–or it should be. And don’t gimme that crap about “you can’t learn outside of a classroom,” or “don’t degrade the classroom, by stealing from it.” *Ears plugged*-lalalalala. Ok, yes, of course. You can take your desperate intellectual property-mindedness and shut up. You can hear my thoughts on that later. Maybe.

Anyway, so I’m going to use comments to add to my list of profs, pages, syllabi, and texts. Then I’m going to add those to my half.com wishlist, so you can buy it for me

here we go:

It’s an incomplete paper, but it’s so good it’s a B+. I’m working on bringing the blog closer into integration the rest of Subject Oriented. Here’s the latest: Index 2. I’m working on this from a function then form approach. I get something to work “mostly right”, then I spread that out to the places it needs to be, later I make sure things are more deeply integrated properly. It’s work in stages, but it’s better than work from Stooges. The idea is ultimately to sort of force this thing to deliver content to other pages. I’m not sure if the best approach is XML, RSS or just standard PHP Database queries. You can see that earlier I used a SSI/PHP hybrid to deliver the content. That’s a pretty server heavy thing to do I expect, so I’m going to try and create mini syndication at home in the right way.

What I want is to create content in one place–The wordpress interface, or even some other interface, maybe a client side app–and then for Other sections particularly the articles and projects sections to pull content from the database upon query. This is commonly called content management, I believe. It is properly done with any one of already well developed and existing packages. But you see this is a learning exercise. I’m LEARNING.

If you have suggestions on improving my learning experience, comment.