2016 — 3 January: Sunday

I've slept through "The Well-Tuned Piano" but, from the five minutes or so of other music I caught as the programme was winding down, I shall (obviously?) be firing up get_iplayer fairly soon. I have never heard, and only barely heard of, La Monte Young. Shocking! Meanwhile, a "Restart" immediately after the first boot cured today's "System Panel icon misplacement" without further effort. There seems to be some form of timing issue at work while my Linux Mint system rubs the sleep out of its eyes.

The UK's educational...

... problems are clearly multiplying. I was musing recently along lines that have just been confirmed by this BBC story. "When I were a lad..." we had no classroom computers1 with which "to complete multiplication challenges against the clock, which will be scored instantly".

UK education policies were (as ever) being chopped and changed for political reasons, not more rational ones.
It's a politically-explosive topic at the best of times. Perhaps psychologists aren't so silly, after all? Gotta keep those research grants coming in.

Me, in IQ and normality


My barometer is sinking, dagnabbit. And my first cuppa is already a distant memory. 21,792 seconds of well-tuned piano (and other) music has just been snaffled. Fingers crossed it's enjoyable!

Agatha Christie

I've just put get_iplayer's useful (and newly-discovered) "--pid-recursive" option to good use on these seven clips, too. Although I have never read anything by Agatha Christie I remain eternally curious about the lives of other writers.

Heading my way...

... is a growing need (following my morning chat with Brian) to wrap my head around Kodi's system of NFO files...

In particular they are helpful if the information fetched from a web site does 
not match the video file, or data for that particular file does not exist. 

... since that precisely describes one of my current set of pickles. The fact that two movies called "Emma" appeared in 1996 is not helping! Blame Jane, heh? I also need to re-examine a part of molehole's structure as, it seems, I have been a little lax with some of my <div> tagging. The horror, the horror! To my dismay, Brian's Python SHTML generation processes are both ruthlessly effective and completely unforgiving of any such laxity on my part.

I need better disambiguation!

I'm strangely reassured to learn that Brian's brand new Mint 17.3 "Rosa" and brand new Kodi installation fails at the same point for the same reason(s) when fed my data. My initial attempt to "disambiguate" my Emma (if she'll forgive me) had been to invent the years 1996a and 1996b for the two media stub files that are "stand-ins" for the actual physical DVDs. (Recall, I'm not using Kodi to play physical media, but just to populate a SQLite DB with details of all my video material.) Anyway, Kodi chews on these two stubs, producing from them a melded SQLite DB movie entry that fails to access and correctly interpret the "CaseLogic Location" data that is, erm, crucial if I'm to stand any chance of being able to lay my hands on the right Emma.

In the manner of a terrorism threat alert, the problem severity has just been raised to "Really Annoying Tribble". And the rain continues to rain, too. Precisely as forecast.

Murphy's Law strikes again

Recall the Story of Mel? When he was asked to implement a "cheat" mode to allow customers always to win, he got the test backwards and thus ensured the machine would always win instead. I know just how he felt. My choice of disambiguation was "most pessimum." It triggers a Kodi behaviour we didn't know existed.

Hence the undesired melding, which is just Kodi saying "Ah-ha! These two nearly identical file names are obviously but two parts of a single entity. I will treat them thus by stacking one atop the other. My user will be so pleased!"

Disambiguation rules!

The two 1996 film versions of "Emma" are now teased apart in my latest version of my video list. Gone, too, is the misplaced </div> tag that slammed things too far over to the left. The broken breadcrumb trail is a Thing of the Past (I fixed both these in the Python to save Brian the trouble). And a couple of mis-identified film titles have been unceremoniously stricken from the record after consultation (as it were) with the online DB that Kodi actually uses to do all its movie title data scraping.

Best of all, I now know precisely how to edit existing entries, and how to add new ones. All without directly touching Kodi's SQLite DB, too. Cool. Very cool.

  

Footnote

1  But I recall at age seven — none of today's "at the age of 11" nonsense — being called up, in turn, to stand by the teacher and recite these tables. It still strikes me as a cheaper, more effective, method of assessment :-)