We Saw a Chicken …

Day: 17 May 2008

  • Old Man Luedecke in Toronto

    I saw Old Man Luedecke play The Drake on Thursday night. After being snowed out of seeing him in Guelph, it was great to finally hear him play. Wasn’t disappointed; really fun show. Superb lyrics, fantastic technique (his clawhammer and Seeger up-picking are spot on) and gently self-deprecating stage banter make it a fun night. Go and see him if he’s playing near you.

  • auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels

    auplabels – extract times of tracks in an Audacity file for adding labels (download).

    Audacity 1.3’s method of track splitting has always seemed a pain, so I wrote the above to help me.

    Running auplabels file.aup will generate a somewhat sparse file of track offsets:

    0.00000000
    191.57333333
    376.08000000
    550.76000000
    …

    You’ll want to edit this to add track names (there should be a tab between the first column and the title):

    0.00000000      Battle of the Blues
    191.57333333    I Quit My Job
    376.08000000    Ain't Goin' My Way
    550.76000000    Wake Up Hill
    …

    If you use File -> Import… -> Labels… to import this into your project, the label track should exactly align with your track splits.

    (Of course, this should really be an XML application since Audacity AUP files are XML, but issues were had.)

  • how to fix the annoying Ubuntu/Debian XML::SAX install problems

    Debian and its derived distributions have a policy about packages not being able to modify the configuration of other packages. While this might generally seem like a good idea, for the TIMTOWTDI world of Perl, this causes problems.

    The problem arises if you have installed Perl XML modules from both CPAN and the Debian (or Ubuntu, or whatever) repositories. Debian’s modifications subtly break the XML::SAX module, on which most Perl XML modules (including the brilliant XML::Simple) depend. If you’ve been naughty and used a module from CPAN, Debian gets its knickers in a knot, and won’t configure or run anything remotely related to libxml-sax-perl.

    If you get the error Can’t locate object method “save_parsers_debian” via package “XML::SAX” at /usr/bin/update-perl-sax-parsers line 90, your system is affected. You might get the clue that any of your Perl XML handlers freak out and fail in weird ways.

    Here’s a method (there’s always more than one, of course)  to fix it. This was combined from a couple of sources, each of which was on the right track but didn’t entirely work. Actually, the first might’ve been right on the money, but my hiragana’s a bit ropey …

    1. make sure you’ve got your system up to date with apt-get or aptitude.
    2. sudo cpan CPANPLUS (this will ask you lots of questions, to which you should almost always answer with the default)
    3. sudo cpanp -u XML::SAX (this takes quite a while, and produces no output for most of it)
    4. LC_ALL=C sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxml-sax-perl (the LC_ALL=C might not be strictly necessary, but it worked for me)

    You must remember never to pretend to be smarter than the Debian maintainers, and suitably chastened, may now return to your normal OpenSSH patching activities …