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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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.

For those of you who use bit torrent to download various tv shows, podcasts, videocasts or any other type of periodicly updated media there is now a way to automate the process. I use azureus for my bit torrent download client and have added the RSSFeed Scanner Plugin which you can learn about how to install from zeropaid. While they certainly do a great job of telling you how to install the plugin they leave out the details of how to download from a site that requires a login. I’ll explain how this can be done with cookies.

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After building a list of items in a string (ie “x1,x2,x3,x4,”) I typically find myself needing to remove the last comma. After using this for the longest time:

$str = substr($str,0,strlen($str)-1);

I found:

$str = substr($str,'',-1);

This will actually remove the last character whatever it is so be careful, for my uses it’s perfect.

I know this is not novel but it’s elegant and these are the things that make my day.

Creating disk images on a mac is easy. If you have an older version of OS X you should see a program called Disk Copy in your Utilities folder. If you use OS X > 10.4 your Disk Utility will do the trick.

Just go to File > New and create an image of any volume on your computer. That’s the easy part.

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