Month: April 2009

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Spotify Mixer DJ Software

This is not a new idea. A Swedish forum has a discussion thread Dj:a med Spotify that suggested the same thing months ago.

With both despotify and libspotify available, someone with time and interest could make something like UltraMixer but with Spotify as the main source of music. A DJ with this application would have the world’s biggest record crate!

Some possible obstacles:

  • Playing more than one song at a time. Could be solved with multiple Spotify accounts.
  • How does streaming affect BPM and changing pitch? Use a big cache?
  • Maybe the libspotify Terms of Use has some restriction affecting this

I will also suggest Spotify integration to the UltraMixer developers. Maybe that could earn me a “Professional” license? 🙂

By the way, has anyone made a uniform interface to despotify and libspotify so that they can be used interchangeably?

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SSL certificate anguish revisted

About one year and one month ago I wrote about SSL certificate anguish. Recently the certificate has expired so I wanted to create a new one. Unfortunately the apache2-ssl-certificate tool went missing and as my server runs Ubuntu 8.04.2 (Hardy) it’s simply not there!

I did this to create the new self-signed certificate:

  1. Download the apache2-common package for Dapper
  2. Extract it with dpkg-deb
  3. Install /usr/share/apache2/ssleay.cnf and /usr/sbin/apache2-ssl-certificate manually
  4. Run apache2-ssl-certificate --force -date 365
    (There should be two dashes before “force” and one dash before “date”. Very logical, and WordPress might not show it properly.)

Maybe I should have increased the time the certificate is valid to more than that, but then I won’t get the chance to revisit this blog post in about a year… 🙂

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Make Developers’ Lives Better

The Pragmatic Programmers has a spin-off called Pragmatic Life. It made me think about the books I have acquired that are more about life than about programming:

  • The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. W. Covey
  • Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, by Andy Hunt
  • Getting Things Done, by David Allen

I’m also thinking of ordering the The Passionate Programmer, by Chad Fowler, when it becomes available…

Some personal reflections on the above books:

The Seven Habits Highly Effective People

I’ve read the  whole book once and begun studying the chapter about the first principle (Be Proactive) in more detail. These principles seem really hard to turn into habits, but it sounds good!

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

A smörgĂ„sbord of things to do to make better use of your brains! I’ve read it but I cheated by not stopping to do the exercises when told to, so I’m about to read it more “deliberately” and do the exercises.

Getting Things Done

My wife bought us this book in Swedish (called FĂ„ det gjort! : svart bĂ€lte i vardagseffektivitet) but neither of us has started reading it yet. I expect it to be a great book, and I’m very pleased that my wife bought it without any hints from me. (I readily accept that it can be seen as a hint to me to get more things done!)

The Passionate Programmer

The previous incarnation of this book was called My Job Went to India: 52 Ways To Save Your Job and that didn’t appeal at all to me. Now it sounds really interesting but I will probably not have finished the books above when it is released, so I have no idea when I can get some quality time with this one.

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Tired of Lighttpd

The initial VPS package I ordered did not have very much RAM so I decided to run Lighttpd. Since then I have upgraded the VPS to a pretty luxurious package so the RAM limitation hardly applies anymore.

I still haven’t moved all my websites from the old server to the VPS and I just realized that a big threshold is moving the web server configuration from Apache to Lighttpd. Now I plan to revert to Apache on the VPS before migrating more websites.

Lighttpd is not bad, but I’ll save it for simpler setups than my 20+ virtual hosts  including multiple forums, blogs, wikis…

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libspotify – the official Spotify library!

Spotify opens its doors to developers and releases libspotify. Nice!

The C API and examples look very clean. It’s even possible to play songs through the API and I guess that’s much more than anyone expected. Some might complain that the library is binary-only for Linux on IA-32 but I won’t…

If I had a premium account I would probably spend a lot of time toying with their API the next few days!

It would be perfect for the never-gonna-happen project with a car computer connecting to AUX or CD changer input on the car stereo. The car computer could be based on an ALIX board, run Linux from Compact Flash and use an USB-based mobile broadband to download songs.