2015 — 17 November: Tuesday
An early task today1 will find me installing a bunch of Python support modules to mimic Brian's local development environment. That way, he won't need to package it all afresh each time when sending over refreshes of the code drops for the "Kodi data" work he's doing.
"Boston Legal"...
... has been my initial data test case. Invoking his GUI "stubs generator" allows me to type in just the title (of the entire show), the CaseLogic location of the first episode of Season #1, the date I bought it, the price I paid for it, hit "Enter", and we're off to the Data Races. Next thing I see is a data subfolder structure pre-filled with all the 'stuff' Kodi snacks on in order to go off scraping data from its TV Shows DB in search of plot summaries and cast details for each episode, appropriate subsets of fan art, the whole enchilada.
There's then nothing I need to do beyond fire up Kodi, go into its "Add videos" function, and tell it where to find the Boston Legal subfolder. Within a minute or so I can be reminding myself of James Spader's headgear and William Shatner in 'mad cow' mode. Poor taste, perhaps, but enormously entertaining:
There's going to be a relatively small-scale data cleanup effort needed that can probably only be done manually. For example, Season #2 of "Boston Legal" is stored in a different CaseLogic folder location, was bought at a different time, and for a different price. So the generated data stubs for Season #2 can either be entered in a separate data run, or just edited, whichever turns out to be easier.
I'm still only intending...
... my use of Kodi to be a visual interface into my disk library, rather than as a full-blown actual physical media player. (That's what my Oppo is for.) Yet to come will be a set of simple video lists for display on 'molehole'. These will be generated directly by Python scripts interrogating Kodi's SQLite DB once it's been fully-populated. I agree this is an insanely-convoluted way of skinning this particular feline, but although I dread to think quite how busy it is, that's the beauty of having a very fast PC. As with my library of books, generating web lists of the videos is a sub-second process.
And it surely is better than manually typing in all the details of every episode of every TV Show in my little stash of the things.
The next data hill...
... to be climbed is the mountain, in fact, of MP3 files. Won't that be fun?
Given my distaste...
... for much that is called "art" these days, I found this essay surprisingly interesting. (Link.)
I'm reasonably sure...
... it wasn't raining when I set off this morning, but it certainly was by the time I returned. It's enough to get you questioning the nature of reality. I did a spot of that, last night, courtesy of an odd little 7-minute video...
... YouTube was kind enough to recommend to me. It takes its title from Edgar Allan Poe (as did the Alan Parsons Project for the instrumental track on their outstandingly-good début album "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" in 1976).
If I didn't...
... know better, I might think that this trio of video entertainment possibilities, found earlier today in Asda...
... had all had their cover artwork cooked up in the same, green-tinted, graphics studio. Or the scanning gubbins of my trusty HP LaserJet Pro M125a is on the blink. (And that doesn't bear thinking about.) My lunchtime reading — a copy of Linux Voice with a very fine 'Opinion' piece by Simon Phipps — restores my red/green colour balance:
It's a long time...
... since I played Adam Cohen's first album. It got what the 'yoof' call a 'shout out' from Stephen Holden in a New York Times piece. (17 years ago!) Just don't ask me why it's in the "Movies" section.
In preparation...
... for Brian's latest code drop I have just successfully executed the following sequence:
sudo apt-get install python-pyside sudo apt-get install python-pip sudo pip install tmdb3
I gather a visit to the Cheese Shop occurred!