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.

<em:maxVersion>1.1.0rc1</em:maxVersion>

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

Here’s a video I made last January, but I’ve updated it by recreating it from the original photos, and I added an audio track “1 Ghosts I” from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV.

Way back in January I was playing around with this great software called gphoto. It allows you to attach your digital camera to your computer and take photos. This has many uses, one of which is to create time lapse movies by writing a script to take pictures every so often. So that’s what I did, one January night. I wrote a script to take a picture every 15 seconds or so, and set it to run from 6am to 6pm. Unfortunately, my battery died only an hour or two in, so I came out with an 11 second video of a partial time lapse sunrise.

MovieClip.prototype.oldHitTest = MovieClip.prototype.hitTest;
MovieClip.prototype.hitTest = function(x, y, sf){
	var obj = {x:x, y:y};
	this._parent.localToGlobal(obj);
	return this.oldHitTest(obj.x, obj.y, sf);
}

Warning: this still doesn’t work for the version of the hitTest function that takes in a MovieClip as its parameter. That’s that, and hopefully I won’t have that problem again.

When it comes to programming, I’ve found that 9 out of 10 times I tend to reinvent the wheel when writing something. This site has always been handled with a CMS I coded, but I grew tired of maintaining it. I’ve gained a lot of experience in building database-driven web applications that suit my specific purposes, but it’s time to move on and do something new.

All the old blogging content is still here, as well as some new content. I went for a much simpler styling of the page, mainly to help with cross-browser complications and whatnot. I trimmed down many (ok, all) of the useless pages that went on and on explaining details of things that I don’t even care about anymore. Expect more frequent posts about very random things.

Present day…
After some research on the good ol’ Internet, I found how to get the tv tuner to work with my machine. I have Ubuntu installed with a 2.6 version linux kernel. I had to set some driver flags to make everything happy. I recommend TVtime if you’ll be watching the TV right on your monitor. It has a nice interface, and it’s really easy to use.

Here are some of the details that finally made the tuner work:

Removing the drivers that got loaded at boot time:

rmmod tuner
rmmod bt878
rmmod bttv

Adding the drivers with correct settings:

modprobe bttv card=10 tuner=50
modprobe tuner card=10 tuner=50
modprobe bt878

You may have to fool around with the tuner number. I’ve seen that 2, 39, and some other tuner numbers may work for WinTV cards. To make sure that your tuner is using the right tuner number, try the command:

dmesg | grep bttv

You should find a line that says something like:

bttv0: using tuner=50

If you do, you should be golden. This is what my output looked like:

[4358448.355000] bttv: driver version 0.9.15 loaded
[4358448.355000] bttv: using 8 buffers with 2080k (520 pages) each for capture
[4358448.364000] bttv: Bt8xx card found (0).
[4358448.364000] bttv0: Bt878 (rev 17) at 0000:01:02.0, irq: 9, latency: 132, mmio: 0xf4000000
[4358448.365000] bttv0: detected: Hauppauge WinTV [card=10], PCI subsystem ID is 0070:13eb
[4358448.366000] bttv0: using: Hauppauge (bt878) [card=10,insmod option]
[4358448.366000] bttv0: gpio: en=00000000, out=00000000 in=00ffffdb [init]
[4358448.368000] bttv0: Hauppauge/Voodoo msp34xx: reset line init [5]
[4358448.510000] bttv0: using tuner=50
[4358448.510000] bttv0: i2c: checking for MSP34xx @ 0x80... not found
[4358448.512000] bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA9875 @ 0xb0... not found
[4358448.514000] bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA7432 @ 0x8a... not found
[4358448.541000] bttv0: i2c: checking for TDA9887 @ 0x86... not found
[4358448.846000] bttv0: registered device video0
[4358448.852000] bttv0: registered device vbi0
[4358448.859000] bttv0: registered device radio0
[4358448.859000] bttv0: PLL: 28636363 => 35468950 .. ok

Math is the only class I’m not looking forward to, and it’s not hard to figure out why. With a name like differential equations, it’s not exactly a class any normal person would enjoy taking. Physics this semester deals with electricity, which I’m looking forward to. My database class obviously deals with databases. For you to view these words, a database had to be accessed. Databases aren’t something new to me, so hopefully I’ll be able to slide through this class without much trouble.

Software Engineering seems like it may be just a fun class in general. Learning how to deal with producing a piece of software for a customer is the main focus of the class. This should be a good skill for when I someday make it to the “real world.” I’m also taking a one credit class on learning C++. I’ve bought a book before on C++, but never sat down and actually taught it to myself. This will be a good opportunity to force myself to learn a new language.

Someday soon I might get around to taking some new pictures, and updating the old photoblog. It’s been almost a month since that’s been updated. I’ve gotta get on that. Taking pictures in the snow with dark and cloudy skies isn’t much fun. Maybe with all this rain, something will spark my interest.

This is a good day for AMWhalen.com, as the new site works as I want it to. At this point it’s not completed (as I still need to add content to some places), but it will soon be unveiled to the world of the internet.

In my picture gallery, (which is run by a PHP program I made from scratch) I have a added a cool slideshow option when you view a picture. Browsing through images will be much easier now, since you don’t have to close the larger image to click on another thumbnail. You can scroll through them by clicking on the “next” or “previous” buttons, or you can click “play”, and the photos will show every 10 seconds. This is a great stride for my photos also, since I’ve made the photo-viewer “smarter”. It now resizes pictures to a predetermined height. This is because I was noticing that my pictures were too big for many monitors out there, so you couldn’t see the whole picture. There was also a problem before with not always being able to see the whole caption. Hopefully that problem ahs been resolved as well. The sizing of the pictures has been a problem for awhile, and I’m glad that I could finally think of a way to fix it.