Well, sort of.

As Don recently mentioned, I've recently grown interested in working on some gigs of my own. So, on one end, we have things like the webhosting that he mentioned, as well as hosted groupware and other goodies (if you're reading this, I'll give you a discount on hosting, just ask :-) (note to current customers: it's the deal you're currently all getting... and no, there's no miracle 'free' plan, sorry ;-)

However, I've also been getting involved in side sysadmin and programming projects.

One such project deals with a small business who actually manages to pull in some 15 million hits a day on just one of his sites, which is more than Slashdot. It's been fun working on a setup that can handle that sort of traffic, without actually using a load balancer :-)

A new project that's come up is to create a simple-to-use program which can do all the following:

• Get information about movies/streams of any type, from static mpeg movies to proprietary Microsoft MMS based streams
• Given a url, verify said file/stream is working
• Given a time (in seconds), get a screenshot of the video at that time

Really, there's tools out there that can do most of the above... I don't actually have to write a video parser. What doesn't exist is an easy means of doing the above.... one has to take the existing tools, come up with the right options, and put it all together.

Having never really spent much time dorking around in the video world, I hadn't realized the complexity of many video tools. Have you ever looked at the mplayer manpage? It has nearly 40,000 words across 9000 lines.

It was a lot of fun putting this together... when building it, I had my sights on developing a tool that would allow someone to easily do what Google Video's has going. That is, given a set of video url's, verify each works... and if so, display the length, format, set of screenshots, and so on, all the goodies that you can see in this Movie on Google video's.

I honestly don't even know what they're going to use it for, I was simply given a list of options it needed to have available, and recognized that hey, they could implement Google Video's if they wanted :-)

I went out to see The Violet Burning last night. Kevin Max was playing as well.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover Brennan Strawn from Monarch actually opening for the other two.

The Violet Burning were their usual "alternative with a twist of punk" selves, a great show. Kevin Max was good, though they are bit more of a pop'y style of music than I usually prefer in bands... I'll probably get their stuff in time though. Brennan Straw was a surprise, and put on an accuistic guitar show (unlike his usual piano based music). He has a new album coming out in a month or so, which I look forward to.