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E-mail: geistlinger AT gmail.com

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Tracking Tunes

WATCHING: Beerfest Jay Chandrasekhar, director Well, this is not one for the Oscars. It's Animal House meets Fight Club, mixing in drinking games we all did in college. Not bad, but - for an over-the-top comedy - it just didn't have that many laughs. Stereotypes, tits and ass, implausible situations and so on. Not a waste of time, but not a productive use of same. But it's Saint Patrick's day, so a movie celebrating beer is appropriate All movies

I've added a new feature to the blog - a "Listening To..." list in the side rail.

Basically, this is a list of my most recent listens on iTunes.

Doesn't sound like much, but there's more to it than meets the eye.

I've seen such lists on other sites; the one I recall right now is the "Now Playing in my iTunes" on kottke.org.

I've often wondered how it was done; if there is a 3rd party app for such and so on.

I really didn't look around much; I just used this excuse to learn some AJAX.

Here's how my listing works:

• My iTunes runs on my main Windoze box. I run a script (shell script calls perl script) on one of my Linux boxes to pull the iTunes XML file to the Linux box.


• The perl script then runs over the XML file, parsing out the date played (integer, not scalar time), album, track and artist. This is all done with simple perl; no XML modules are involved.


• Elements extracted are dropped, pipe-delimited, to a flat file. (This will be all songs in iTunes.)


• Unix file sort so most recent tracks are at the top.


• Unix command to retain only top 10 (currently; configurable) items.


• File FTP'd to this site.


• When the page is loaded, an AJAX call fetches, parses and presents the data in the flat file.

A cron job runs every hour to re-create the flat file.

At the end, very elegant, but a lot of work went into this. However, it was fun and something - both for songs and re:AJAX - that I've wanted to do for some time.

Done! And the damn code works...