Category Pointers

The fad stage [of blogging] is over

That seems to be generally true; while the number of posts has most definitely gone down in most of the blogs I'm following, what remains is a relatively new and open medium that gives a podium to so many capable, willing and knowledgeable people. Not in a 140 character haiku, but in an unrestricted form. At the same time, I'm saddened by how many good, even great, writers have remained silent for so long (or write hundreds of quasi-sensical 'tweets'); while it shouldn't be the case, it turns out that being a fad had its advantages, in that it helped a large number of people discover and participate in it. If anything, I'm hopeful that the adulthood of blogs will increase, even marginally, the signal to noise ratio.

Fast ID3 tagging

This is solely for my friend saper who was recently telling me how much he loves it when people post snippets of code that they come up with during their everyday lives, even if they are relatively pointless in the grander scheme of things. Well, today I was listening to a few old mp3 files while coding more important stuff and realised that some had no id3 tags, which was a good excuse to put good ol' PERL and some shell magic to some use to tag them all, fast. Here's the two-minute script for tagging files based on the filename (note the '[trackno] - [title].mp3' regex). I ran the script twice, once for the trackname and once for the track number (not shown below, is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader). Hope this is useful to someone, although I guess it mostly serves as proof as to how much you can do with one line of PERL/shell scripting magic. Enjoy =)
ls *.mp3 | while read f; do TRACKNAME=`echo "$f" | perl -e '$a = ; $a =~ /(\d\d) - (.*).mp3/; print $2;'`; id3 -t "$TRACKNAME" "$f"; done

The real choice is liberty versus control

Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.

From Paul Graham's excellent article on the iPhone AppStore:
The dictator in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally; it's IBM. IBM seemed a lot more frightening in those days, but they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now.
But the most worrying part, in my view, is that people (and especially developers) are keener on accepting the ludicrous terms that Apple is imposing on them than they were even a few years ago.

The Desertec Industrial Initiative

It may sound 'funny' and it may seem like an important 'green' energy project for Europe. What springs to mind, however, is not Europe's energy or the environmental importance of the project, but how and to what extent it is going to help Sahara, the place and the people that will host it.

Here comes the Cavalry!

Welcome Google! About a year since we first came up, designed and implemented Geo|Ads, Google just launched their own Location Based Advertising in the States. We always knew we were tiny. Some thought we had interesting ideas. At least now we know that they are not exactly bad from a business point of view either =) <div style="width: 480px; margin: auto; margin-top: 10px; "

So long.

The quintessential photo from this summer's trip to Kythira (clickety click on the image for a 'moderately' higher resolution image) and a pretty good time to take a break.
Kythira Panorama (from Agia Moni)