For awhile now I’ve been meaning to learn how source code management works (specifically, how Subversion works), but I never got the chance to do it. Finally the other day I set out to buy a book on SCM, luckily I was able to find a good free book on the subject. If you are interested in wrapping your mind around source code management I recommend you check out Version Control with Subversion.
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
Streaming Windows Media Player support on the Mac is really bad. Its slow, buggy; simply horrible. However, I really wanted to listen to a show which I could only listen to via streaming WMA format. I started searching the net for a solution and found Mplayer. It worked fairly well, but I really like the ability to skip parts of the show which isn’t possible with a streaming WMA.
I kept searching for a way to download the streaming WMA and put it into a WMA file on my hard drive. Mplayer came though again, using the Mplayer command line utility you can easily download the streaming audio to your hard-drive. The Mplayer command line utility is actually included in the Mplayer OS X GUI application, but, its hidden deep inside the .app package. You can find it here:
/Applications/MPlayer OS X 2.app/Contents/Resources/mplayer.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer
Just for convenience’s sake I made a symlink to the command line application in my /usr/bin/ with the following command:
sudo ln -s "/Applications/MPlayer OS X 2.app/Contents/Resources/mplayer.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer" /usr/bin/mplayer
To download the stream you use the -dumpstream & -dumpfile options with the mplayer command line app, so the final command to download the stream to your HD is:
mplayer -dumpstream "mms://domain.com/stream" -dumpfile ~/Desktop/stream.wma
The above command will download the stream located at “mms://domain.com/stream” onto a file named “stream.wma” located on your desktop. Althougn I haven’t tested it this method should work with other types of streams besides WMA. The only downside I’ve found is that it will download the stream in real-time, so if the stream is 10min long, it will take 10min to download onto your computer. Besides that, this method seems to work great.
I also figured I post links to some resources that I found while searching for a solution:
- List of Stream Recorders
- mssclient & its OS X GUI wrapper ASFRecorder X (Although these apps look good, I coudn’t get either of them to work)
- MMS Protocol Specification
I’d really like Free iPod, but I dont have enough referrals.
I’m willing to pay $10 (USD) to the first 5 people who sign up for a free iPod using my refferal link and complete one of the available offers. If you sign up under my name and complete an offer, please email me letting me know what email you signed up under and your paypal account address. When I get notification that you’ve completed a offer I’ll paypal $10 dollars to your paypal account. If your the first person to sign up and complete an offer I’ll send you $15.
Once I have enough referrals I’ll post an update to this post.
App Stop 1.1 has just been released. This release includes the following enhancements:
- Rewrote the cpu usage code, its now much cleaner
- Force quitting background applications will remove them from the list immediatly
- iTunes-like live searching ability added
- App Stop is now a universal binary
- Updated to Xcode 2.2, compiling with the latest GCC release
This will most likely be the last release of App Stop unless some bugs crop up that I didn’t catch.
Enjoy!
This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. MacDevCentral is running a story about Tunaric a music analyzer that will, after a few seconds of listening to a song through your computers microphone, tell you what the song name is. I tried it out on a few popular songs, and it actually worked! I was really surprised, I really didn’t expect it to work that well.