Martin Morgen is an animation series for children, airing on TV in Europe.

In “Martin Morgen – Das Spiel” the player controls the adventures of Martin and his friends.

Interestingly enough, it’s the first project based on licensed IP that I’m involved in.

Now I stumbled across freedrumlessons.com, a site with dozens of (you guessed it) free drum lessons on video.

In order to avoid downloading all video files manually, I wrote a little Groovy script. It greps the overview page for all links to sub-pages, and then scrapes all the sub-pages for MP4-files (so I can put them on my iPod later).

I can’t imagine what it would have been like using plain Java…

Here’s the code:

[sourcecode language='java']
println (‘————————’)
def filesToDownload = []
def url = ‘http://www.freedrumlessons.com/drum-lessons’

def slurper = new XmlSlurper(new org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser())

def html = slurper.parse(url)
def lists = html.’**’.findAll { it.name() == ‘li’}

def links = lists.a*.’@href’
links.removeAll([''])

def i = 0

links.each {
def scrapeurl = “http://www.freedrumlessons.com${it}”
println “Scraping ${scrapeurl}…”
def innerSlurper = new XmlSlurper(new org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser())
def innerHtml = innerSlurper.parse(scrapeurl)

def files = innerHtml.depthFirst().grep{ it.name() == ‘a’ && it.@href.toString().endsWith(‘.mp4′) }.’@href’

files.each {
filesToDownload += it.toString()
println (“Added ${it}”)
}
}

println (‘ ** ‘)

filesToDownload.each {
println (“Downloading ${it}”)
def filename = it.tokenize(‘/’)[-1]
def infile = new FileOutputStream(filename)
def outfile = new BufferedOutputStream(infile)
outfile << new URL(it).openStream()
outfile.close()
}

println “Finished”
[/sourcecode]

Also, nicht mehr von mir – bis vor kurzem war dieser Shop der letzte verbliebene aus meiner Internetz-Web-Development-Superchecker Zeit um 2000…

Die Technologie, das Konzept, das Design (von Markus Mayer – mit einem kleinen Relaunch um 2003 herum) hat ganze 8 Jahre lang gehalten, alle online Kundenbestellungen darüber abzuwickeln. Hach, wer oder was kann das in der heutigen Zeit noch von sich behaupten?

[The bill] would restrict or outright ban the sale of violent videogames to anyone under the age of 18. Which means, by the way, that a 17-year-old who can get in to see Hostel: Part II would be forbidden by law from buying (or renting, one supposes) the violent but less graphic Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

According to the proposed bill, violent videogames are pornographic and have no redeeming social merit. The vid-critics claim they exist for one reason and one reason only, so kids can experience the vicarious thrill of killing. Now, what does and doesn’t have social merit is always an interesting question, one I can discuss for hours. But what makes me crazy is when politicians take it upon themselves to play surrogate parents. The results of that are usually disastrous. Not to mention undemocratic.

[...]

What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It’s easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America’s almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. Cho used it in a rampage that resulted in the murder of 32 people. If he’d been stuck with nothing but a plastic videogame gun, he wouldn’t even have been able to kill himself.

Case closed.

Now, I know from personal experience that it makes little sense to discuss this “pathological love of guns” with Americans – been there, done that, got no t-shirt. It’s disturbing at least, to see liberal minded folks suddenly taking that “I have the right and the need to defend myself and my family”-road in a discussion.

On the other hand, Charlton “”From my cold, dead hands!” Heston died recently, so there’s always hope.

Kundin: „Guten Tag, haben Sie Literatur zu diesem Web 2.0, von dem man so viel liest?“

Verkäufer: „?!“

Kundin: „Wissen Sie, ich bin Personalistin, komme gerade von der Firmenmesse an der TU, und da reden alle über Web 2.0, jetzt wollte ich wissen, was das ist, um in den Job Interviews mit Kandidaten entsprechend gerüstet zu sein… Jeder redet darüber, es gibt einen ziemlichen Hype…“

Verkäufer: „Tut mir leid, da kann ich ihnen nicht helfen.“

Ich war hin- und hergerissen zwischem verächtlichen Mitleid und amüsierten Soll-ich-sie-aufklären-Gefühlen…

I just read this Commencement Address – I don’t know whether he has somebody writing his rather personal speeches; I doubt he does.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Reading about such personal things as him being adopted, being diagnosed with an uncurable form of cancer – such honesty from the CEO of a multi billion dollar company talking to a couple of students… It may be an American thing, but still I’m impressed.

i still don’t like the fonts this thing uses – even if you turn on it’s “ClearType”-equivalent option to smoothen the characters, it still looks ugly IMHO. i wonder how former colleagues could use it with a 6pt (!) font size…

i found an almost flame-war of (probably seasoned) blackberry users against the iPhone hype and how inferior this thing is. ah, i read that t-mobile has made it to offer the iPhone exclusively in Germany (and probably Austria, though this is not confirmed yet). even more annoying that it will not have an UMTS option, so one better waits for the next hardware generation (a wise decision for any type of electronic hardware, as many disgruntled Xbox360 owners can assure you)…