2015 — 1 December: Tuesday — rabbits!
November is no more! Furthermore, two of my overnight emails have each contributed significant boosts to my good cheer and general bonhomie.1 One offers me a preview of the following (unpublished) scientific paper:
"On the Undesirability of Removable Rotating Media as a Proximal Source of Audio and Video Entertainment"
Although, as it happens, I was finally able to remove last night's reluctant minidisc by rotating the player by about 110 degrees and allowing gravity to assist the "Eject" mechanism. An act of desperation, perhaps, but better than trying to break into the mechanism inside the case.
"Late Junction" etc
The other email demonstrates the benefits (to me) of knowing a Python whizz with insomnia. My habit of downloading BBC Radio 3 programmes from their weekly "Late Junction" and (various) "Jazz" strands has enabled me to amass a sizeable pile of delightful music, but with no easy way of knowing exactly what each downloaded music file contains.2 Take, for random example, the edition of "Jazz Record Requests" that was transmitted two years ago on 7th December 2013.
I have the downloaded .m4a file, and its file name already contains all that's necessary. Namely, the "pid" (programme identifier) that ties it to the BBC process that builds a web page of associated information. (Notice I don't say "web page", but "process that builds" a web page. A crucial difference when it comes to turning that pid into a human-readable list of music tracks, because simply eye-balling the source code of the web page gets you precisely nowhere.) Which is where Brian's magic Python slithers on to the scene.
It swallows the "pid" and sets about a series of processes that reconstruct the bits of the web page that enable it to data scrape precisely the music tracks information that appears on the BBC's page even though it is quite beautifully obfuscated from the casual human reader of the source code of that page. It's probably not even deliberately obfuscated. The Beeb just wants to assemble and display the information to the reader of their web page in an automated way and not have to worry about manual maintenance.
So, feeding Brian's Python the "pid" — in this case, b03kny0b — eventually regurgitates the following:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03kny0b BBC - Jazz Record Requests, 07/12/2013 - Music Played 00:00: Tubby Hayes - The Surry with the Fringe on Top 00:07: Duke Ellington - Prelude to a Kiss 00:10: Stan Kenton - Dragonwyck 00:15: Frankie Newton - There's No Two Ways About it 00:19: Lew Stone - Etude 00:23: Sidney Bechet - Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me 00:30: Django Reinhardt with Rex Stewart's Feetwarmers - Montmartre 00:32: Dizzy Gillespie - Good Bait 00:36: Stan Tracey - Rocky Mount 00:44: Jo Fooks - Dr No Blues 00:48: Peter Nero - It's All Right With Me 00:52: Cécile McLorin Salvant - Woman Child 00:36: Horace Silver - Rocky Mount
Come on! Just how Arctic is that? And if only the BBC's track timings were to the second it might even be possible to carve up the .m4a file into individual music tracks. That, I readily concede, is several steps too far!
On my return...
... from a delicious Thai lunch at the newly-opened "sister" establishment — the Greyhound Inn, Broughton — of the Fox Inn I've enjoyed eating at several times now in more far-flung northern parts of Hampshire, I've made myself a cuppa and snuggled up to my (non-existent) open fire with the latest issue of "Full Circle" (PDF file). Did you know there are even (shock! horror!) static (web) site generators? Jekyll, for example:
I was greatly amused to read of the many apparent advantages of having web sites with static pages... Who would ever have guessed?
Tonight's film...
... may yet be this new arrival (from New Jersey). Its premise is quite intriguing:
Amused by...
... this little item from David Langford's latest, ever-reliable, "Ansible" newsletter:
Less amused...
... to learn (in a mention of the death of one of its editors) that a second volume of John W Campbell's letters had somehow crept by me, unnoticed, in 1993. Mind you, this first volume3 was assessed...
... by my more arrogant younger self as "Surprisingly heavy going, but fascinating/annoying" and will, I suspect, now remain an elegant sufficiency of Campbell for one lifetime.