Due to these existing partitions, and a USB media card reader, the Windows XP installer would decide label it’s system partition “H:”, instead of the usual “C:”. I’m not sure how much this would have broken, but it annoyed me to the point that I found a hack to fix it.

I found that grub (the linux boot-loader) on my Linux partition allows you to edit the partition table and set the Vista NTFS partition to ‘hidden’. The XP installer could still see there was a partition there, but it didn’t understand it, and thus labelled it’s new partition “C:”. XP will of course then proceed to clobber your existing bootloader, but that’s a common occurrence, and fixable from a LiveCD, google is your friend here.

You should also be able to use a copy of grub on a LiveCD to mark the partition as (un)hidden if you don’t have Linux on your system normally.

Apologies for any vagueness and lack of technical details, this post has been on the back burner for a few months now, and I’ve actually forgotten most of the details.

The controls on Mac OS X are less restrictive, but still restrict you to pause, fast forward or stop, however some simple javascript manipulation of the page can enable the regular RealPlayer controls, complete with a seek-bar.

Bookmark either download the source file or view the bookmarklet source. Unfortunately blogger won’t let me create an actual bookmarklet link, so you will manually have to save the bookmarklet into a bookmark in your browser.

Back when
I was writing my Google Maps property finder I was using Google’s Geocoding API to get a set of co-ordinates based on a search string.

Specifically I was using the getLocations method of the GClientGeocoder object.
This would return a number of Placemark objects with a bunch of information about the potential matches.
They don’t really document this object, but to be honest they don’t really need to, below is an example Placemark expressed in JSON-ish notation.

{   "id": "p1",
    "address": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA",
    "AddressDetails": {
        "Country": {
            "CountryNameCode": "US",
            "AdministrativeArea": {
                "AdministrativeAreaName": "CA",
                "SubAdministrativeArea": {
                    "SubAdministrativeAreaName": "Santa Clara",
                    "Locality": {
                        "LocalityName": "Mountain View",
                        "Thoroughfare": {
                            "ThoroughfareName": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy"},
                            "PostalCode": {
                                "PostalCodeNumber": "94043"
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            },
        "Accuracy": 8
        },
    "Point": {
        "coordinates": [-122.081783,37.423111,0]
    }
}

The only thing is, if you want to get a specific element, the tree will not necessarily be the same each time, so traversal is a pain.
The code below will condense all this into the root level of an object, so you can pick out the key/value pairs you want, and easily tell if some aren’t there.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

var Placemark = new Class({
    initialize: function(placemark){
        this.traverse(placemark);
    },
    traverse: function(item, key) {
        for (var key in item) {
 
            if (key == 'prototype')
                continue;
 
            if(typeof(item[key]) != 'object')
                this[key] = item[key];
            else
                this.traverse(item[key]);
        }
    }
});

One thing to note is that this was written for to use the Mootools class system, though it shouldn’t be very hard to remove this dependancy.

Supposedly they’ve begun to use IP filtering to limit the audience to the US. Either this is no longer in place or they’ve made a mistake in a regex somewhere, as this is definitely not the US.

I’d forgotten about the limit to the unpaid service, which stops playback after so many songs, but it was quite a while before I actually encountered it.
This may be a Mac OS X bug in the flash implementation, but it seems that if you keep the Firefox window containing the player minimised in the Dock, the music doesn’t stop playing!
Of course this does get in the way of the whole feedback system slightly, but I’m sure there are those who won’t mind too much.

Once I did encounter the limit I couldn’t just refresh the page and go back to listening again as they’re smart enough to stop you doing that.

But not that smart.

To completely stop this you would require either some heinous DRM-spawn system describable as cookies which you can’t delete, or some kind of unique client ID, effectively voiding all browser privacy. So to be fair, from the technologies they had to work with, they’ve done the best they could. ;)

So once you’ve been shut out of the Pandora player try the following:

1. Delete your cookies from their domains.
2. Delete any data stored within Adobe Flash for their domain.

The latter can be achieved by opening the Adobe Flash client settings and changing the data limit for the domain to 0KB, which will take effect upon refreshing the page, upon which the flash applet will request to store data in your browser again, and you’re back listening, but without any of your stations.

Update:

It appears that the region filtering will go live on January 15th, not quite yet.