Jay McGavren's Journal

Yaaay! iTunes 7 has “skip count” and “last skipped”! This could render ratings obsolete.

Too bad I lost our iPod Shuffle a week or so ago. I may have to order another. (Damn loose slacks pockets… In fact, damn slacks altogether; I wanna wear jeans to work!)

N64 tunes...

I’d always loved the music from Tetrisphere for the Nintendo 64 (no interest in the game, just the music), but the only copy I had was recorded from my PC’s line-in port (noisy). Tonight I discovered that I didn’t even have that any more.

Looks like the clever folks on the emulation scene have come to the rescue with the USF file format, which records N64 music from an emulator. And some kind soul ripped Tetrisphere!

http://www.zophar.net/usf

Here’s the Winamp player plugin:

http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=146609

And though not directly related, here’s a plugin to encode to MP3 (also useful with MODs and other game audio):

http://out-lame.sourceforge.net/

JAXB is evil...

Well, or maybe the Open Travel Alliance is.

hc.getFacilityInfo().getRestaurants().getRestaurant().get(0).getCuisineCodes().getCuisineCode().get(0).getCode()

//KILL ME NOW, GOD! hc.getPolicies().getPolicy().get(0).getGuaranteePaymentPolicy().getGuaranteePayment().get(0).getDescription().get(0).getTextOrImageOrURL().get(0)

JavaBeans says that if an object has a boolean attribute Foobar, then the getter method for that attribute must be named “isFoobar()” rather than “getFoobar()”. That makes sense, I guess.

But when objects were designed without the intention of making them JavaBeans (such as XML Schema types that were converted to Java through code generators), you wind up with lovely names like “isOfferBreakfast()”.

Well, I suppose “getOfferBreakfast()” is misleading too. :P Maybe this whole notion of accessor methods is just plain wrong. What we need is a language where you can specify onGet() and onSet() events for object attributes, and only in the rare cases they’re needed.

I wanted a dead-tree version of my LiveJournal, because I want my kids to be able to read it someday, and I know a soft-copy will go poof well before then. LJ’s own export feature excludes comments, and I’m not about to download one month at a time, so I had to keep looking. Fortunately, a quick Google produced this:

SourceForge.net: ljArchive “ljArchive is a tool for downloading, browsing, and analyzing journal entries and comments from LiveJournal (or LiveJournal clones).” http://sourceforge.net/projects/ljarchive/

I was able to export the entire journal (comments included) to both XML and HTML formats. One single file for each. A couple more clicks, and the whole thing was printed (well, I also had to refill the paper tray - it was 117 pages).