When worlds... well, at least they mesh

Last night I go home from world and felt like sleeping. I mean I needed mad crazy sleep. So I took a nap at 8:30 pm and woke up at 1 am. I didn't even feel like opening my eyes, so I just hit the bathroom and went back to bed. Then I woke up at 7:30. That's eleven hours of wacky, nutty sleep.

What do you do at 7:30 on a Saturday morning ever since they got rid of Saturday morning cartoons? IRC in Australia, of course! It's 9:30 pm in Melbourne (or 7:30 pm in Perth). It's good to wake up to trivia games that assume I'll never know what "The Yanks call...". Ah, fun.

I have no idea whether I'll get anything done today, but I'll have plenty of time not to do it.

-stretch and yawn, Dante

scams a-plenty

I like Pandora.com a lot. Every time I turn it on, it serves up some lovely tunes. I've found out about a bunch of bands as a result.

My only complaint had been that I wanted to snag the tunes while I was at it. A coworker of mine was playing Pandora at work. I said "are we supposed to be streaming stuff at work?" He gave me the look of "you nerd" and said "this isn't streamed. Look in the temp directory and it's all MP3s."

Now it's Saturday morning and I'm sitting in front of the Ubuntu box I've been beating up. I wanted to see whether Pandora only needed Flash to work (you can get Flash for Linux but not Shockwave). Indeed Flash was all it needed and I was listening to music while fighting with installations. Then I decided to look in /tmp. I found /tmp/plugtmp and therein a bunch of oddly-named files. When I sorted by time ('ls -alt'), I noticed the latest files were each a few megabytes and each generated at about the spacing between songs. I ran a check on the file type for a few of the files ('file filename') and indeed they were MPEG 1 Layer 3 128 kbps. I prefer higher bit rates, bu I think I'll live.

Far be it for me to explain what one could do based on such information. After all, Pandora is an application of a corporation, so one would assume said corporation have paid for licensing agreements and distribution rights. One would likely be in trouble for moving a replica of said files, so I would never suggest that it's possible to perform such an action.

It's only fun when there's a hint of scam to it. Maybe that's why all of this music copying jive is about: it's put the rush of theft and and risque back into what is essentially a pack rat's hobby.

-more Brit pop, more power pop, more Wilco fans, Ps/d

P.S.: I did a little extra digging. Sometimes the file will get written to /tmp, sometimes to /tmp/plugtmp. I have yet to figure out the alternation pattern. However, it's easy enough to figure out which file is which by time. They don't keep their ID3 tags, so I have to label manually. However, I am making progress. I've also figured out that the time the file is written is always a little ahead of what I'd expected because it downloads one song ahead. This way you can skip a track without waiting. However, this also means I can pause Pandora, go into the temp directory or the child, play the latest song and see what will be next before Pandora tells me what it is. Name that tune!