Category Computing

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.

Nexus One. A Message to the World from Mountain View.

It must have been sometime near mid-December when I first actually saw and used — albeit briefly — a Nexus One. A Googler, the owner, graciously let me use it for a bit after receiving it as part of the Google corporate gift that the device got — more a publicity stunt rather than an […]

Mag+. The Digital Magazine

Just a few weeks (?) before the rumoured availability of the Apple tablet (whatever its name is), here’s a recent demonstration of what the display, miniature electronics and battery technology may lead to in the near future in the context of magazines. If everything that we’ve heard about the impending release of the Apple tablet […]

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 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.

Ο Δρόμος του Τσαγιού στα Ιντερτιούμπζ!

Πάει ένας περίπου χρόνος από τη πρώτη μου παραγγελία — και το σχετικό άρθρο για το δικτυακό κατάστημα τσαγιού tsai.gr. Οι εντυπώσεις ήταν ως επι το πλείστον θετικές, με μεγάλη ποικιλία τσαγιών και βοτάνων, άμεση εξυπηρέτηση και εξαιρετικό πακετάρισμα των προϊόντων. Μεγάλη (και σημαντική) εξαίρεση οι τιμές του καταστήματος οι οποίες ήταν περίπου 20% ακριβότερες […]

Οπτικοακουστικό Αρχείο ΕΡΤ — Μέρος Δεύτερο

Τον Δεκέμβριο του 2007, έγραψα ένα άρθρο με τίτλο ‘Οπτικοακουστικό Αρχείο ΕΡΤ’. Ο λόγος ήταν η τεράστια σημασία του εγχειρήματος, τόσο για εμένα, όσο και για εκατομμύρια συμπολίτες μου αλλά και για την ευρύτερη σημασία της διάθεσης του αρχείου, μιας μοναδικής κληρονομιάς και μέρος της ιστορίας αυτού του τόπου. Παρά τη θετική άποψή μου για […]

Commodity Infiniband

In 2004 I was asked to design a HPC cluster by my supervisor at Imperial; for a long time this process resembled choosing components for an enthousiast microcomputer in the 1970s and 1980s; choosing the right components that, together, would provide the best platform (processor, storage, memory bandwidth, interconnects) for your cluster. Even in 2004, […]

Upstart in Ubuntu 9.10

Upstart is the ‘new’ event-based sysvinit replacement by Canonical, that has been widely adopted in the linux world ever since it first appeared in late 2006. The idea is centred around causality, that is, defining relationships that are not loosely defined by some measure of time, but by the presence (at runtime that is) of […]