Andrew M. Whalen » How-To

Editing Songbird Add-ons

Andrew — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:35:58 +0000

If you haven’t seen it yet, Songbird is a Mozilla-based open-source music player. I’ve been using for some time now and it’s amazing.

Just like Firefox, it has a system of add-ons. The Notify Me add-on allows you to get Growl notifications when the song changes. Unfortunately, the add-on hasn’t been updated in 4 months. Here’s how I made it work with the latest version of Songbird.

Download the add-on from the Songbird Add-ons page. The .xpi file is just a zip file, and we have to unzip it to modify the contents. In Terminal, change to the directory where the .xpi file is (mine was on my desktop). Make a temporary folder to put the add-on files into when they’re unzipped. Put the .xpi into that folder and unzip it, then move the .xpi file out of there. Here’s the process in Terminal:

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir notifyme
mv notifyme-osx-1.1.0.xpi notifyme/
cd notifyme
unzip notifyme-osx-1.1.0.xpi
mv notifyme-osx-1.1.0.xpi ../

Once unzipped you’ll find a file named install.rdf. Open that up in a plain-text editor (Not MS Word) and change the maxVersion variable to whatever version you want. I’m changing it from 1.1.0rc1 to 1.2.0a.

>1.1.0rc1>

Save install.rdf and zip the add-on back up (notice I changed the file name):

zip -r ../notifyme-osx-1.2.0a-unofficial.xpi .

You can then go to Tools -> Add-ons… in Songbird, click Install… and find the .xpi file you just zipped. It shouldn’t warn you about the version being incompatible anymore.

Although I just detailed how to do this and it worked for this add-on, I don’t recommended it. The max version is there for a reason. There may have been changes to Songbird that make an add-on incompatible with a higher version. Don’t blame me if you try this and your computer catches fire.

Here’s the finished product: notifyme-osx-120a-unofficial.xpi

Finding Frequency Counts With SQL

Andrew — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:50:01 +0000

Finding the frequency of items in a database table is something I find myself needing to do a lot. Though for some reason when I need to do this, I always forget how, so here it is. Let’s say you have a table of tag data with two columns and a bunch of rows. Let’s say the table is a simple adjacency list of tags for posts on a blog. Here’s an example of what it could look like:

id of tagged post	tag
1	sql
2	blogs
3	robots
3	llamas
4	sql
5	trees
5	blogs
6	llamas
3	blogs

Now let’s say you want to find out how many times each tag is used. This can be done with one easy SQL statement:

SELECT tag, COUNT(*) AS total FROM tags GROUP BY tag

This will give you output like this:

tag	total
robots	1
trees	1
llamas	2
sql	2
blogs	3

This is a very useful statement for tag clouds, general statistics, and lots of other things.

Changing File Extensions

Andrew — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:28:52 +0000

Today at work I needed to change a whole directory (with many sub-directories and sub-sub-directories and… etc.) of .php files to the .html file extension. Since the files were on a Unix server, I wrote a quick Bash shell script to take care of this for me.

#!/bin/bash
 
function change_extension_recursive {
 
	#change all .php to .html
	for f in $1/*.php; do
		mv $f $1/`basename $f .php`.html;
		echo $f;
	done;
 
	# recurse on any directories
	for d in $1/*; do
 
		if test -d $d; then
			change_extension_recursive $d;
		fi;
 
	done;
 
}
 
dir=`pwd`;
 
change_extension_recursive $dir;