In case anyone cares, I still exist. I haven't been reading Slashdot hardly at all for a year or two. No telling about the future. But there you go.

The tagging feature is new to Slashdot, but I've heard of it before and have been thinking about checking it out. Today I tried a few Google and Freshmeat searches, but variations of "tag" have so many meanings I can't find much among MP3 ID3 editors, retail merchandise tagging supplies and various other IT meanings of "tag".

Does anyone have links to some open sources CMS'es that have tagging support, or perhaps links to some papers and discussions about keyword tagging for blogs or knowledgebases?

Ultimately I'd like to create a sort of user-rated knowledgebase based on some of the sites I visit. The knowledgebase might accept queries, return some summary information and link to the source sites for detailed info.

UPDATE: Ah-ha. While composing the above I came up with "keyword tagging" differentiate between the other tags. It occurred to me I should plug that into Google. Folksonomy is apparently what I'm talking about, and that search and the Wikipedia page I think will send me to the info I need. Not sure yet about open source CMS or knowledgebase software supporting it.

Fry's in Fishers, IN has Mario Kart DS at $24 (through the 28th I think). I don't know if the other stores do it, too, but this is $11 off the normal price. Woot!

My other DS game is Super Mario 64 DS which is a revamped Super Mario 64 (for N64). That's still fun.

Film at 11.

Just a JE saying I'm still around. I lurk mostly these days. I seem to have used up my insightfulness and funniness and useful tidbits.

I just wish TL would start dating underage girls again so I had something decent to read here.

Car wrecks and job changes? Booooooriiiing. You still have the hot tub, right? Take it with you to Cincy. ;-)

Actually, I have a woman coming to visit for a week or so, but we've known each other for years and from experience I'm not expecting anything exciting to happen. At least she's not trying to make me pay for meals anymore.

Okay, here's what I want to do: when FTP-installing a linux distro (Suse, Debian or Slackware usually) or Cygwin, I want to download only the files I use but have them available locally for reinstallation or setting up another PC. I have multiple PCs available. Here's a sketch:

[Public linux/Cygwin Mirror]
        |
[My proxy/mirror/FTP server]
        |
  [PC getting linux/Cygwin]

From the installing PC I'll specify My proxy/mirror server as the FTP source. The proxy/mirror will mirror the directory listings of the public mirror and download requested files keeping a local copy. Of course if an up-to-date local copy exists it will simply serve it to the installing PC.

The effect will be that I'll have a partial local mirror of the install files, but these are the very files I'm very likely to use again soon. So if I install from another local PC it will be uber-fast. Also my local partial mirror should be easier to fit on a CDROM or two for carrying to/from work.

I expect there's software out there that already does this, but I haven't found it yet.

Does anyone know of a free software package that does this?

I wrote this in response to this post and decided to move the bulk of it here to not be quite so obnoxiously off topic.

Oh, what the heck, might as well quote the parent here:
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(This from a guy who is migrating his address book to OpenLDAP because he doesn't want to sync between two PCs.)

Hey, how's that working out for you? I've been thinking of doing exactly that for a couple years now, but people have told me OpenLDAP is kind of a pain to set up for such a simple task and I really know nothing about it. Mac OS X's Address Book LDAP preferences include options like "Search Base" (for example, ou=people, o=company) and "Scope" (base, one level, or subtree); is this more complicated than I want to mess with?

-----

Reading through OpenLDAP manuals can make it sound confusing, but Debian actually did most of the setup via Q & A. I'm not sure if Fink will make it as easy or not. Probably will, though.

The point of confusion is that LDAP can be used for so doggone many things. If you're using it for an address book just think of it as a hash-style database (which it really is on the backend) organized in a tree.

The traditional layout of the tree has the root level of your LDAP server as "o=company" or "o=company,c=country". (o is organization, c is country, ou is orgazational unit, dc is domain component, cn is common name, dn is distinguished name; dn's are the unique keys.) The vogue now is apparently to follow your domain name structure and have your root as "dc=slashdot,dc=org" for example. (I think in theory all LDAPs everywhere should be mergeable and have unique bases, but I'm not sure.) It's common to put the contact info under ou=people, so your LDAP settings in the client will look like "ou=people,dc=slashdot,dc=org" maybe or the old style "ou=people,ou=slashdot,o=osdn,c=us".

If you export your local address book to LDIF and look at it in a text editor you'll see all sorts of cn's, dn's, objectclasses and such. Look them up for fun, but basically each entry needs a dn which can be the cn followed by the ou's and base or it can be uid (user id) or probably many other things depending on what you want to key on. dn's need to be unique.

Here's where I'm hung up because I've been to lazy to fix it: My exported addresses from Mozilla have dn's like "dn: cn=Name,mail=email@domain.tld", and I have to change all those dn's to fit into my LDAP base like "dn: uid=(uniquenumber), ou=people, dc=mysubdomain, dc=gotdns, dc=com". (Like I said you can key on things other than uid if you want. Also I'm not required to put them in ou=people, but what the hey, why not.) I didn't see a utility anywhere that would fix that for me automatically, so I'll have to either hand-edit or script the changes before I can use slapadd to bulk load them into my directory.

I did hand-load a couple of address entries and it works great!

Oh, and scope is the type of query. Set your search base to match your LDAP setup and either base or subtree would work fine I think. If you get really curious there are a couple of RFC's on LDAP queries that are neat reads. Then if you get really crazy like I might then you might integrate Kerberos and get your MS boxen to authenticate to your Unix box ;-).

P.S. Phroggy, I just noticed your user number and web page. Heck, you ought to do it just for the tinkering fun. I'll add a couple of technical things: the backend db can be Berkeley DB or ldbm or a couple of other things; they are library/file-based db's. slapd is the server daemon; slapadd will load the db while slapd is offline, or you can use ldapadd or other ldap clients to update while it's online. But the Debian package installed the db libraries and configured slapd.conf for me based on curses-based config screens. It was amusingly simple after I spent all that time reading up on OpenLDAP. But as usual the "simple thing" threw me: export to LDIF, import to LDAP, right? Uh-oh, gotta edit the dn's first.

Link.

Just a link for me to come back to later and possibly play with the RAQ software or alternatives. I like SSH administration so far, but if any of these tools help users maintain web pages then I have a couple of ideas....

Update: I started this project but still can't strip the ID3 tags temporarily. I'll put the details and code snippets in a post.

Update 2: I more or less gave up on stripping the MD5 tags for now since it will take too much work. However, all ID3v1 tags are at the end of the file. ID3v2 tags can be and usually are at the beginning of the file, but ID3v2 tags are far less used in my collection, so I used the following command to get the MD5 sum of the first 500KiB of the file. It will miss identical songs that have had ID3v2 tags at the beggining of the file added or altered, but I was able to delete another 1.2 gigs of duplicate mp3s with this test:

head -c 512k <mp3 file> | md5sum -b

md5sum in this command returns a filename of "-", but I used some shell trickery to figure out which sum went with which file.

***************

Foreward: Really my only question here is "how do I calculate the MD5 sum of MP3 song data only--that is, not including ID3v1 or ID3v2 tags?" The rest is just chatting about what I'm doing.

I'm a network admin who thinks he knows enough about programming to pull this off. (I had several programming courses in college and occaionally play around with one language or another but never had a developer job or a serious project.)

I have disorganized, reorganized and relabled MP3 files. I want to find duplicates. Here's my idea to accomplish this:

I'm going to copy information from each MP3 into a database, either directly or through an intermediate delimited text file. The major info will be the path & file name, MD5 sum of the file, and the MD5 sum of the data only (minus the metadata/ID3 tags). I'll probably also try to get the MD5 sum of the first X seconds or X Kbytes of song data to detect duplicate beginings (in case of a truncated duplicate). Secondary info will include all the other stuff like file size, song length and ID3 tag data; this info will just be for me to locate duplicates that aren't byte-exact and to help me decide which of the duplicates to delete.

I could probably do this with a shell script and a couple of utility programs, but it may be simpler to grab a couple of modules from CPAN and use Perl. I don't anticipate having trouble with the metadata or MD5 sums of the entire file, but I don't yet see an easy way to calculate the MD5 sum of only the song portion of the MP3. I'm browsing through CPAN, and there are tons of modules which read and edit ID3 tags but nothing quite like what I have in mind. I did find one that strips the ID3 tags, but it seems to alter the file directly, and I only want to have the tags stripped just long enough to get the MD5 sum.

Sure I could read the data structure of the MP3 file and parse it myself, but I intuit that somebody made a perl module or command line utility that can nondestructively present me the tag-stripped MP3 so I can MD5 it and leave the original file unchanged. Anybody know of such a module or utility?

My app won't be pretty or user friendly. It will probably take a path as input and output either a delimited file or update a mysql or pgsql database directly. Then I will query the database to find what I need. I'm not only finding duplicates; I'll also be looking for files that are unique per storage device, because I have most of my MP3s on my main PC and my MP3 player (w/20G HDD), but there are some MP3s on one device but not on the other and vice versa, not to mention some on my linux box and some on my work PC. I can import from all sources into different tables and play with queries and eventually consolidate and catalog my mp3 collection.

I know there are some various apps that try to do some of these things, but I like working at the command line and having my hands on the raw data; every time I try to deal with an MP3 manager application I hate it.

EDIT: Yeah, I could just delete all my MP3's and re-rip them, but what fun would that be? Mucking about with Perl and SQL sounds so much more fun.

Found it! Rekall. Slashdot article here, sites here and here. Also I now remember I wanted to try out OOo as a db client, too.

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Sometime recently, Slashdot ran an article about a generic database front end that went from proprietary to open source. Kinda like Access but without a database engine--just the user interface. I meant to come back to it later and try it out, but I can't find the article or remember the name of the product! I've searched Slashdot, Freshmeat, Google, Google Groups and Google Directory with all sorts of combinations of keywords like database, front end, mysql, postgresql, report, designer, query but had no luck in finding the article or the software.

I think there was an R in the name of the software.

Does anybody remember that software or article? I think it was in the past couple of weeks.

Thanks!

P.S. To avoid smartass responses like the one I would leave ("Yes, I remember it" with no more info), I also request that you name the software and/or link to the article and/or the software site. :-) Thanks!