After chatting with my buddy Dave about how awesome it is to show off using terminal to !1337 computer users I realized how often I’m sitting at command-line listening to music in iTunes and wondered how to control iTunes with a shell script.

I searched around an found this article on the topic but of course wanted many tweaks of my own so I’ve wrote the following script that should allow anyone to control iTunes in terminal or via SSH remotely.

Possible Uses

The implications are pretty neat if you think about it.

• DJ a party from a laptop, iPhone, or mobile with SSH
• Control your home or office music server remotely
• Scare the heck out of your roommates

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This article will show you an example of how to download multiple files concurrently using the curl_multi commands in PHP 5.While php itself doesn’t support multi threading and concurrency, libcurl does and php allows us to download multiple filesat the same time from php.

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Recently many people in the symfony community have been wondering if the sfThumbnailPlugin and my sfThumbnailCachePlugin should be combined and the merits of thumbnail caching have been questioned so I have posted my response.To be honest, I haven’t run tests to see what the performance gains are exactly for my plugin but I think we could both agree that the process of generating a thumbnails is CPU intense, even if only for a half second. To test, on my machine I generated a thumbnail using Imagemaick which my plugin also uses: Read More…

Joe Adu asked me how he could put photos in a folder and have php randomly choose one of the photos and display them. Then if more photos are added to the folder they would automatically enter in to the rotation.

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So Tom pointed me to some photos from the good old days working long hours in the computer science lab at Bowdoin. I guess I always thought I was a pretty chill/normal CS kid but the truth is in the photos and I’m not going to lie, we look like total dorks. Tom’s going to kill me for putting this up here but it’s a nice segue into what we’re both doing now.

This past winter Tom and I went into the web consulting biz together under the company Adventex Design which I started back in 2000. Currently we’re working on some top secret projects which we hope you’ll be hearing about soon If you or someone you know has some programming talent and experience with web applications we’d be interested in chatting with you.

I had a great week up in Maine coaching at the Dick Fosbury Track Camp. I’ve put some vault photos up in the gallery. P.S. Nice plant Merry!

Here are some good sites for vault videos:
Neo Vault
Stab Hoch