Standard Mischief

Just a little something I whipped up one night before the long drive home. Yea, after losing my 5 minute commute, I’m starting to get into pre-recorded talk shows. I’d have started this post a little differently, but 2003 called and they wanted their podcasting howto post back…

Anyway, here it is:

curl -LO $(curl "http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts.rss"|egrep -o "http://[^ ]*mp3"|uniq|head -1)

The first curl command uses the L option to allow the request to be redirected with a 3XX response code. Blogtalkradio.com does this.

The O option just assigns a filename based on the original rss feed URL (sans path). This works well unless you get someone clueless who names their files like this:

I’m not going to explain the regex and remainder except to say that the -1 can be changed to a higher number to get more shows unless everything goes foobar because Karl named his files with exactly the same name.

Oh, and the files just end up in your current working directory, and you’ll have to get out of it if you want to cleanly unmount your flash card, but you knew that already.

You’ll need to get curl though. N00buntu users could use something like

$ sudo apt-get install curl

but if they really are n00bs they’ll probably use the GUI tool to get the job done, and then never touch the command line and get their podcasts using Amarok or something. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that you are not the audience I’m writing for. The audience I am writing for will find their way here using the “search engine friendly” URL.

Oh and since I’m new to this podcasting stuff, I have to ask. With the proliferation of mp3 players like the iPod shuffle that don’t have a display, shouldn’t we be starting our broadcasts with “gun nuts #54 for May 27th” instead of “Goooood evening ladies and gentlemen…“? That would allow a user to shuffle through a bunch of shows to easily find the one he has not heard yet. Much nicer if the shows don’t all sound the same until a half a minute in.

Thanks for making my commute a bit more interesting, everyone.

At work, I double-checked that the special magic bit in the MySQL database is set at “0″ before shipping some prototypes of our embedded Linux thingy out the door. It’s the bit that tells us whether or not the customer agreed to our “click-wrap”. That’s the legal agreement that covers our ass. I follow instructions and then let ‘em go out the door.

Not good enough. The next day while the devices are in transit, the boss wants the triple-damn-dog check. Since it’s a single digit’s worth of prototypes, I go ahead. I log into the first future customer’s web GUI thingy with a username and password and get the legal notice. Everything’s fine. I get ready to go onto to the next one. Instead of declining the click-wrap, I take what I think should be a shortcut, and just hit Shift-<reload> to reload the URL in Firefox. Bam! I’m in. Whoops, that’s not suppose to happen!

Closer examination exposes some very lazy programming. Someone’s going to be busy fixing this just before the long weekend. There are also some related browser cookie problems that could be exploited with just the standard mischief. Good thing they have me around to break everything.

On top of that, I’m now getting paid to brush up on MySQL injection attacks.

.. but I wonder how many Front Sight certificates Ignatius Piazza is going to have to give away this time around in exchange for using your blog as a link farm to bury the latest round of bad press deep, deep, deep in the results from your favorite search engine.

No, no first-hand knowledge, in advance or otherwise. It’s just that my bullshit meter pegs at full scale when it gets a whiff of a “Clear Catholic”.

(not a “Cleared Christian” or a “Cleared Catholic”, BTW)

I always thought the “never shown” email address that was (required) in the comment forms of many blogs worked like a souper seekret code word that would let the blog owner know if some other person started using someone else’s pen name.

I really don’t need your name, a pen name is fine. Just please use the same name every time. Same with the (will not be published) (required) email address. Make something up if you want. Be consistent.

I’ll make a note of these issues in case I ever get around to redoing the layout of the blog.

The scene: A Friday lunch with cow orkers

Me: “So what’s all this about “stress tests”? Isn’t that “newspeak” for a financial audit by the government, except (hopefully) without all the negative connotations that auditing the books of a publicly held company normally evokes?”

Everyone else: <stunned silence>

<awkward pause>

Me: Hey, isn’t that your new GPS navigator?

Is anyone else worried that the newspeak of “stress tests” was adopted so widely with so little criticism? Does anyone else wonder why, if the government needs to audit a publicly held company to bring “transparency”, shouldn’t someone be going to jail for all those less than transparent quarterly reports?

Shouldn’t a publicly held company traded on the stock market that’s open to the public, publish data that allows anyone with a interest in the company review the reports to let them accurately assess the assets and value of the institution and then make a guess at the value of the company verses the price of the stock?