music

Although I was born in 1985 and I'm not even American, I've started to appreciate some of the American culture that dates back before the 60's. Besides having seen most of the Tom and Jerry episodes, I first noticed some Edward Hopper paintings and I now find myself regularly listening to music by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Louis Jordan. This type of jazz and swing music reoccurs in the Marilyn Monroe movies I managed to get my hands on. So far I've seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop and Some Like It Hot. Even though its characters smoke and drink like there's no tomorrow, The Seven Year Itch remains my favourite. In this comedy Monroe is the girl, visiting a man whose family is away for the summer. For some reason the guy manages to stay loyal to his wife and leave the girl alone. It almost seems unique compared to contemporary movies. Although the subject of infidelity is taken lightly and the movies are cliché galore, it's quite interesting to see this legend I've heard so much about at work. To quote Marilyn: “Just elegant!”

Scenario: Several hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk space occupied, even after "consolidating" to regain some of it.
Solution: Be a good little consumer and get a high capacity network storage drive.

Database

I had already set up a simple database using OpenOffice.org Base to keep track of the movies that I had. My plan was to use a MySQL database and a simple webpage to maintain and access basic information about my movies. Converting it to a MySQL database wasn't too easy. Eventually I figured out that Base allows to export each table to a comma seperated value file. These can then be easily imported using phpMyAdmin.

I had already organised my files to have decent filenames that only have underscores, periods and alphanumeric characters. This meant I was able to easily generate a path to the movies in the browser window. I found out that it was possible to create animated GIF images in a very useful post by Richard Goodwin. I created a simple shellscript which quickly generates a thumbnail sized image for each movie:

for film in *.avi *.mpg *.mpeg *.ogm *.mp4
do
B=`basename $film`
mplayer $film -vo gif89a:output=/home/mrutten/desktop/mdb/voorbeelden/$B.gif:fps=3 -vf scale=200:133 -frames 300 -saturation +10 -nosound -ss 00:15:00
sleep 1
done

This script creates a short animated image which skips several frames to not make the gif animation too big (even though the preview image directory now amounts to several hundreds of megabytes).

Besides the movies that I have, I also wrote a similar page to show the contents of my Amarok MySQL database. This allows me to browse through my music collection using a webpage.

Storage

Even though I had purchased an extra 200 gigabyte hard disk in the past, it wasn't enough to store all of my blatently pirated movies. I could have deleted half of them, but I hadn't the heart to do that. In stead I got a Western Digital MyBook World II. That's a long name for a tiny Linux server containing two 500 gigabyte hard disks that I left configured in its 1 terabyte raid 0 state. It also has a flashy Mac-like appearance. I'm well aware that I'm going to run out of space again eventually, but procrastination is my second nature, so I'll rethink my strategy when that day comes. Considering I now have an extra 1000 gigabytes on my hands, that day shouldn't come anywhere in the next year or two.

To activate SSH on this box I used the instructions on Martin Hinner's page on hacking the Western Digital MyBook World Edition. Although I'm able to mount the Samba shares that I create on the MyBook fine, SSH seems to be more stable (although slower) and it enables me to access it from any place outside my network in a reasonably secure way. I can use SSH by mounting the SSH location to a static directory on the local hard drive, or I can just browse the machine using the fish kioslave in KDE.