After some thinking (which hurts) reworked my batch file to save the legislature’s audio streams. I made it more generic and should be self explanatory.
For testing purposes I use the ten minute long stream from NHK radio of top news stories.
Batch follows
While vlc is a very slick piece of work, I generally prefer to use mplayer and a gui front end for playing streams and media files, it behaves the same way under XP and linux, will play whatever I throw it, ignores embedded script commands and unless told does not go talking to strange people on stranger networks.
From limited observation, it appears the Alabama Legislature starts providing its stream a few minutes or so before the start of the session (generally at 10AM for the House and Senate). The stream continues while they go into recess (are the swings divvied up by party and seniority?) and for a while after they convene for the day.
Since I needed sox for another project, and the only win32 binaries don’t have mp3 support, off we go to make it.
I followed the directions at the ffmpeg for windows wiki. The wiki gives directions that any one who can read this can follow. Then added updates for both msys and mingw.
Also downloaded the source for nasm, sox, lame and libsndfile
did the ./configure –prefix=/mingw && make && make install && make install ~/export dance and had my binaries. Copied the ~/export/bin folder to my xp path and was done with that.
So now can trim silence from sound files and also have a mp3 encoder too. Yoozaa.
The Alabama Legislature provides mms:// streams of the House and Senate while in session but does not keep an archive of past sessions, so it falls to us citizens to do it.
So first lets discuss the needed, a connection to the internet faster than dialup speed, a box running some OS that supports tools to save/convert/edit the streams, hard drive space (about 100 megs per day) and time.
Since most folks are using windows 2000 or higher (XP, Vista) will focus on that OS. The command line (but not the batch file) shown will work under linux and BSDish things like OS X, too.
State Sen. Lowell Barron’s plan to take $100 million per year for ten years from the state’s seed corn appears tottering with a long count commencing. His plan to start a state mortgage financing agency appears close to passing which uses funds apparently sitting idle in yet another state account.
Of course, he does not stand to benefit from either act, he is selfless servant of the people.
According to a panel of the US Court of Appeals. Though after reading the decision, I suspect after this round of appeals is over, a new round based on ineffective counsel will start up.
Kind of interesting that Artur Davis (an announced candidate for governor) has a response out but neither of the other leading candidates (Sparks, Folsom) do. Davis’s response does sound like what you’d expect of some one who needs to win votes from party stalwarts.
According to this UPI article.
Prodded by this article Samizdata, a link to The Debts We Never Paid, summary of state level bond issues that have been repudiated at American Heritage.
Bailouts only hinder Darwin’s work.
