Kung-Tunes

I’m not nearly as much of a geek as I’d like to be. Over the past several months, I’ve attempted at least three times to install Kung-Tunes, an ingenious utility for displaying the currently-playing iTunes track, or a list of recently played tracks. For examples of how it’s been implemented correctly, see Todd’s or Neil’s sites.

All I want to be able to do is to put a list of the 5 most recently-played tracks in the sidebar with a link to the last 50 played tracks on another page. The common denominator on all the sites on which it seems to work is that they’re authored in PHP, a markup language I promised myself I’d learn, oh, about two years ago. Any instructions I’ve found have lots of mentions of <iframe>s and includes, two things I’ve learned nothing about.

Can anyone explain this to a numbskull like me?

UPDATE: Well, somehow I’ve got the currently-playing track working, and I think that’s enough for tonight. Part of the problem was that the whole thing doesn’t seem to work too well in Chimera, which is too bad since I was hoping not to have to use IE as much. Let me know what you’re seeing in your own browser/platform.

Catching Up…

Wow. Nothing posted here for a week. What have I been doing?:

Hopefully, real life won’t intrude so rudely on my weblog in the next few days… 😉

Cops and Church

Our church was swarming with police this morning. No, they weren’t there to bust the pastor or anything. Because of Remembrance Day, we had the Toronto Police War Veterans’ Association taking part in the service. The two readings were read by Norm Gardner, chair of the Police Services Board, and Julian Fantino, the Chief of Police. I found the whole thing sort of disturbing. I’m not comfortable with the church cosying up to the civil authorities too much. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Jesus would do. In addition, our church has a sort of mystifying love for the British Empire, and the service ended with a rousing rendition of “God Save the Queen,” which I refuse to sing, for a number of reasons. The irony was that today’s sermon was a quite passionate plea for peace. The power of the message was somewhat deflated by the Empire worship, I thought. There’s a lot of blood on those hands.

We spent the afternoon at a play with our friends Philip and Ian. Swollen Tongues was a completely over-the-top Restoration-style comedy of cross-dressing, poetic competition, and Sapphic love. Oh, and it’s all in rhyming couplets. It was quite hilarious, since some of the rhymes are deliberately bad, and the actors delivered them as broad farce.

As it turns out, we’re having some of the same problems with our new Mac as we had with the old one. Since we transferred so many of our old files, we’ve obviously copied something corrupt. So now, I’m busily copying everything to CD-R before I have to restore the whole machine. There’s probably no way to figure out which file(s) are bad, but if anyone has a clue, could you share it?