Category Software

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.

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 […]

On the Motorola Droid

It should be no surprise that Verizon would invest in Android, given the onslaught that AT&T’s exclusivity with the iPhone has brought to everyone, despite the fact that Verizon’s network is superior to AT&T’s, the fact that it has a number of popular handsets and services etc. And while Europe remains the place where mobile […]

Μια κριτική για το AthensBook

Παρ’ότι τον τελευταίο καιρό βρίσκομαι μακριά από τα δρώμενα στον θαυμαστό κόσμο του διαδικτύου και αδράζοντας την κάθε ευκαιρία να διατηρήσω την επαφή τόσο με τα όσα συμβαίνουν στον κόσμο όσο και με τους δικούς μου ανθρώπους, διάβασα μόλις πριν από λίγο — με περισσή θλίψη — την πρώτη αρνητική και στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος της […]

Ye Olde Google Maps

Google Maps is an invariably fantastic service that has slowly become a de facto platform for easy geographic representation of data. Lots of sites use the service, APIs and tools provided to visualise, inform and project information onto maps. In Hellas (Greece), Google has — with the help of Teleatlas, the primary data provider for […]

Google Wave Developer Sandbox

I’ve been granted access to Google Wave for a bit less than a day now, and from my limited time with it I can say the following: It feels much more like an application than a web page. This is contrary to most other ‘apps’ by Google, including Google Docs, Maps, GMail, Reader etc. where […]

About the same, or even faster

John Gruber writes about hardware (i.e. physical) keyboards on mobile phones. I mostly agree with him on this one: they are, for the most part, useless and the iPhone is --- at least --- not hurt (in my view much better off) without one. There are, of course, some distinct advantages to having any form of physical controls on a device, including using the device without looking at it, but there are several drawbacks too, while at the same time the numerous advantages to having an on-screen 'virtual' keyboard more than make up for the lack of a physical one, both for design and usability reasons. In the end it's probably a personal preference thing, but I for one have been waiting for an all-screen, no-keyboard device like the iPhone for years and I'm sure happy it's here the way it is. Oh and by the way, I probably type faster (and more accurately) on my iPhone than I would ever type on a BlackBerry device or Pré with their miniature keys that seem designed for children and the relatively tacky feel; it took less than a few days after getting my iPhone to getting used to the auto-correction system and a few more days before my typing performance stabilised to an acceptable level for dealing with emailing etc. Finally, the auto-correction on the iPhone seems to work admirably well with Greek too [for those eager to remind everyone that Apple has a parochial mindset; it does, but it doesn't apply here].