Timur Izhbulatov's place

Last.fm tag renaming utility update

I've updated my Last.fm tag renaming utility.

Release of watchdogdev

One of my projects is a Linux-based embedded device for playing commercials. The software part is a Python application controlling an MPlayer process in slave mode.

To make the whole system more fault-tolerant I wanted to use watchdog timer which would reboot the machine in case of software failure. Thus I needed to talk to Linux watchdog driver from my Python application. The Linux watchdog API defines a number of ioctl commands which can be sent to the driver. So, I wrote an extension module which enables Python programms to use Linux watchdog API.

TurboGears behind Apache with Virtualmin

Recently Matvey (thanks dude!) has set up a new Virtualmin hosting platform on Debian GNU/Linux. When I was migrating timka.org to this new platform I found out that Virtualmin is actually very powerful and nicely integrated with Apache in Debian. Looking at all these new features and capabilities I thought that I could try to use them for running home-based TurboGears applications on Virutalmin's virtual hosts.

Home-based installation of Python libraries

Many popular Python libraries are available in various Linux distributions. However, it is not always possible and/or desirable to install them from packages. For instance, sometimes you don't have root access to the target machine or just want to have other vesrion of some library isolated under your home directory.

I've been successfully using this approach on my laptop and several development and production sites for about two years so far.

Blog engine for timka.org

I've been looking for some simple static blog engine and stumbled upon WadcomBlog by Vlad Skvortsov.

GNU Autotools tutorial

Have you ever installed any software from source? If you have I bet you've also noticed all that stuff like configure.in and Makefile.in. Want to know what's it for, how it works and how it can be used? I've written a brief tutorial.

Editing ID3 tags with Python and Mutagen

Recently I've stumbled upon some MP3 files containing no tags. I tried to tag these files using Quodlibet but it appeared to be impossible. After a breif investigation of the problem I found out that it's just raw MPEG Layer III streams with no proper ID3 headers. In order to fix this I decided to write a Python script.

Fixing Last.fm tags using Python standard library

Updated 2008-08-15. Works with new Last.fm.

I've written a Python program for renaming tags on Last.fm.