Recent experimenting with launchd led us to today’s (failed) experiment in the on-going “SyncTunes” project. (See previous references here and here.)
Short version: have tunesync-in.sh activate via launchd when a user logged
in, copying a master $ituneslib file over to $userlib. Then, while the user was logged in and playing songs through iTunes, tunesync-out.sh would run in the background (again, via launchd) copying each updated version of $userlib to the master $ituneslib.
So why/how did it fail?
- For one thing, I could not verify the …-in script was running at all. It did not appear to be running because each time we logged in, iTunes seemed to reflect the same $userlib as the previous login without any updates. (No, I didn’t try logging but…)
- Running launchctl list indicated that …-out was getting loaded into the list of active launchd jobs but there was no evidence that it was actually copying the updated file(s) (see previous above).
- Considering that $ituneslib was approx 8Mb, we can make the whiney excuse that this would have been a little more memory and disk i/o intensive of an operation than we really want to perform with that kind of frequency.
Then again, maybe I’ve done something wrong here… See for yourself: tunesync-via-launchd-1.zip
currently playing: David Holmes “Gritty Shaker”
Maybe I’d never heard of Firefly before because its short stint on TV happened to coincide with when A & I didn’t have one and watched even less of it. Maybe it’s Serenity’s upcoming release that brought it on to our radar screen. Or maybe it was just chance.
In short, it’s a Steampunk/Western & Space Opera mash-up that seems to gel pretty well and isn’t totally insufferable. If you can make it through the pilot episode. It’s hard to do quality sci-fi. Especially for screen. Especially for TV. More so for network TV. It’s pulled off fairly well and in the five episodes that A and I have screened on DVD, it seems to be very well done. The story has gotten pretty interesting and the actors have brought some life to characters that on the surface could easily be cliched. Granted, we haven’t finished up the complete series … so maybe it all falls apart? Or maybe (just maybe) like so many other sci-fi programs from TV-land, it just fell victim to the curse that follows genre shows. Or maybe it’s the curse that follows every good show ever premiered on Fox. (See also: Profit; counter example: X-Files)
“Super Mario Brothers” meets Another Roadside Attraction meets Dawn of the Dead. Late afternoon mushroom picking. They only grow on dead bodies. But they instill one with supernatural strengths. It’s also all there is to eat except perhaps the dead bodies. But the fact that there are mushrooms growing on them is enough to suggest that we shouldn’t. We’re being hunted. But no one knows for sure by what.
