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I ended up with some M4B audio files; these are "MPEG v4 system, iTunes AAC-LC" files. In order to reliably manage these files along with every other audio file [all of which are MP3] the simplest solution is just to convert them to MP3. In order to accomplish that I dumped them back out to WAV using mplayer and re-encoded them to MP3 using lame.

    # service named start
    Starting name server BIND checkproc: Can not stat /var/run/named/named.pid: Too many levels of symbolic links
    - Warning: /var/run/named/named.pid exists! start_daemon: Can not stat /var/run/named/named.pid: Too many levels of symbolic links                                                          done

There is no shortage of documentation for common IRC operations like registering your nick and managing channels. But I had quite the time figuring out the syntax for changing my password; turns out it's obvious:

    /ns set password new_password

There is no password confirmation - so make sure you type it correctly.

On a related note, for anyone new to IRC, it is possible to bind multiple nicks to your FreeNode account. Just switch to the nick you want to bind and then issue the "group" command.

So far in Python I had not found a good method / module for performing compression and decompression of data as streams; most tools required files to be compressed which has some obvious limitations. But then I saw a mention of pyLZMA roll by. It supports compression and decompression of streams using the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm.

If you have a Python app, or almost any kind of app, the accepted manner for printing is to use some kind of subprocess to invoke some command-line utility to submit the print job. Of course this requires that the underlying subsystems are aware of printers [and thus run a printer subsystem]. It also assumes the name of the command-line utility, the permissions are adequate to execute it, and all manner of other things. To put it simply: this is terrible! Why does my web server, workflow server, etc... need to run a print service?

OpenGroupware Coils uses SQLAlchemy as it's ORM. One of the desired features was a Logic command that efficiently returns contacts with upcoming birthdays. In raw SQL this query would be very simple to write - but how to do it in SQLAlchemy? The answer: sql.expression.extract which will create an expression column equivalent to EXTRACT. With EXTRACT it is possible to compare to the year-of-day represented by a date. The Python code looks like:

Maybe this should be obvious, but it wasn't to me. I've got an XML document and an XSLT stylesheet. But that stylesheet just produces text, not XML; it is essentially a template for an e-mail. So I was extending OIE's transformAction for performing XSLT transforms that produce other than XML... but the documentation is a bit thin and every example is XML results. The trick is pretty simple, just

unicode(result)

and make sure [of course] that you have

In implementing the List method of the EntityAccessManager provided by the Contacts bundle in OpenGroupware Coils it seemed like it would be very efficient to allow the consumer to request what set of attributes it needed; for instance, if a WebDAV client's PROPFIND request didn't ask for a given property, why request the corresponding attribute in the query? Especially since the result set for PROPFIND queries are frequently very large [on the order of 20,000 records or so]. But how to pass a set of attributes as a parameter?

While on vacation I had to time to address some unresolved issues left over from the last revamp of the OpenGroupware .NET client assembly and Gtk# application [Consonance]. For the client searching now works again - that was a stupid bug where the callback was never set. Also fixed up numerous bugs in the Gtk# client so Contacts can be updated including company values, addresses, and telephone numbers. After five years of off-and-on hacking I think Whitemice.ZOGI.Backend is now stable and seems to perform very well.

You are provisioning a Window 2008R2 server for remote desktop service; you've configured the terminal services license manager in one mode [ device | user ]. But when you receive the license documentation you discover that the CALs purchased were for the other mode. Then the Windows terminal license server manager tells you to change the mode of the license server.... but there is no obvious way to change the mode [because Windows is user-friendly!]. One option is to go old-school - hack the registry!.