Quote of the (last work-)day
From one of my co-workers, on internal IRC, after I once more exhibited my sketchy grasp of the French grammar:
curl --mirror http://www.leconjugueur.com/ | ssh pphaneuf 'cat >/dev/brain'
That was unexpected...
Well, no only did it snow yesterday afternoon (which didn't stay on the ground for long), but seems like it snowed again during the night, and there's a (very thin!) layer of snow over Toulouse this morning. It was cloudy earlier, but now the sun is trying to make an appearance, which will probably put an end to this, but still, was nice to see this morning.
But I totally picked the wrong shoes, for the second day in a row. Damn, I miss my boots. I should try to obtain a pair this weekend, maybe I'll finally go for the synthetic micro-fiber stuff that everyone seems to be swearing on these days. Pfft, progress! And then what, computers that work?
OMG! OMG!
It's snowing here.Syndicated 2007-01-23 12:44:23 (Updated 2007-01-23 12:45:51) from Pierre Phaneuf
Stupid music players...
So I updated my version of Max (an excellent CD ripping application for Mac OS X) and tackled my music collection, which has been in a bit of disarray for far too long. No wonder I've been listening to so much Einstürzende Neubauten, all their tracks were there at least twice (because of the umlaut in the band name, plus possibly more copies in the song names themselves).
After some ponderings, I decided that I'd switch to a folder per album, without an intermediate folder for the artist. I'm still not sure about that, but that's probably the easiest to mess with.
The new version of Max, among other things, added support for album cover art. I thought "hey, why not? iTunes 7's cover art browser is pretty swanky, I like swanky", which proved to be a rather frustrating train of thoughts, when all was said and done. Bloody iTunes. Bloody Ogg Vorbis. Bloody everything.
While Ogg Vorbis does support embedding cover art, Max didn't do it. Not that it would have helped with iTunes, this probably not being part of the standard QuickTime meta-data (not that iTunes was worth ass at using QuickTime meta-data properly). But iTunes has its own database to index meta-data, including a folder where it caches cover art. I figured that I could just manually set the cover art in iTunes, and that it'd go there (don't worry, I wouldn't have done that by hand for my whole collection, iTunes can be scripted very easily, thankfully).
But no. It see QuickTime content, thinks "hey, I don't support cover art for those!", and just ignores any cover art you set (even though it let you set it in the "edit meta-data" dialog!). Bastards.
But I'm not completely pissed at iTunes (yet), since it still seems to be working better than Rhythmbox (which I use at work)! I deleted my existing music from the library, meaning only to remove it from the Rhythmbox database. Surely, it would ask my opinion before doing something that cannot be undone, right? iTunes does, so, I'm good, right? Nope, everything gets thrown in the wastebin, which didn't seem to offer an obvious enough "restore" option (but I've been known to miss obvious buttons before, so maybe I'm just cranky). Yeah, sure, the files aren't lost, but they're all together in a gigantic mess. Great.
Okay, so after having given up on that anyway, I looked again in the music directory, to find that it had left some files behind? That's kind of shoddy, isn't it? There's two explanations, and neither put Rhythmbox in good light: either it "missed them" while deleting them, or, more likely, didn't import them in the library in the first place.
The latter being especially fun, as the process to import music in Rhythmbox is as follow: use the "import folder" option, look at the number of songs in the status bar, use the "import folder" again, look at the number of songs again, repeat until the number stabilizes. Wow. Just think if find (or your backup system!) was this unreliable. I'm not worrying too much, this is only my music player, but still, that's pretty craptastic.
Not to mention that the "automatically import music in a certain folder" option in the preferences doesn't seem to do anything? Or anything noticeable anyway...
On top of this, for all iTunes' pre-Mac OS X suckiness in the plugins department (you can only make visualization plugins for it, period), Rhythmbox somehow manages to do worse, by not having plugins at all, and being only barely scriptable (as opposed to iTunes, that can be 100% controlled via AppleScript). Thankfully, they have incorporated Audioscrobbler support, because I'd have would have had to stab myself (by which I mean use XMMS, which is just about equivalent).
Bloody hell, welcome to the motherfuckin' 21st century...
Syndicated 2007-01-22 16:56:48 (Updated 2007-01-22 17:01:08) from Pierre Phaneuf
Zzz...
I was planning on going out clubbing yesterday night, so I took a nap. I got up more than 12 hours later. Okay... Maybe I'll try again tonight. :-P
Now, off to get a haircut.
Once in a while...
Yeah, a meme... I know, I know...
This one has extra appeal to me, since I like movies and it reminds me of one of my favourites in its format of "top five" lists, which is nicely self-referencing. First, my top five favourite movies:
Syndicated 2007-01-20 11:23:32 (Updated 2007-01-20 11:25:39) from Pierre Phaneuf
I'm famous! Err...
Apparently, one of my photos is going to be on the print poster for a conference happening in Montreal, the 3rd Canada-America-Mexico Graduate Student Physics Conference!
Syndicated 2007-01-18 10:12:49 (Updated 2007-01-18 15:00:55) from Pierre Phaneuf
Damn!
The other day, walking to work, I saw a poster advertising Misstress Barbara. Naturally, I got interested, so I took a photo of it, to have the date, venue and other info.
I just looked it up now, turns out it's in bloody Girona (Spain), four hours away by car! Argh. This is even worse than stupid Tournefeuille!
Syndicated 2007-01-18 09:34:12 (Updated 2007-01-18 11:00:18) from Pierre Phaneuf
Hey, that's better!
I'm doing better, this last little while... I'm actually doing decent stuff at work, even though I'm finding the academic roots of the software grating at times.
In the past, I was under the impression that academics weren't as good as the engineers at getting stuff done, but I thought it was because they spent too much time getting things all just right, finding "100% solutions". It's not entirely wrong, but is somewhat mischaracterized. When they do start coding, they do get stuff done. The trick is that their "100% solutions" aren't for the system, but usually just focused on a particular problem. Also, they tend to stop when they solved that particular problem to their satisfaction, having proven their point. So they're shoddy as well, but in a different way than the engineers. Instead of having an overall shoddy, but complete product, they have one aspect quite spectacular, but the rest is all out to lunch, I wouldn't really dare call it a "product".
But that's annoying, as a general concept, it means that I don't really sit well with either engineers nor academics! Damn.
In other good news, I received my bank statement from December, and while I was a bit worried that I had overspent, it turns out that I didn't, being an overall cash-positive month? Oh well, no complaints here!
I checked out a new coffee place that had a, hmm, let's say "slightly less French" air to it, which sounded promising, as far as getting non-burnt coffee. I had moccacino, which is a first around here (and contributed to the "less French" feeling), was somewhat weird, but still tasty.
On the way back, I stopped by a used CD stored called OCD.net, finding the relationship between OCD and record collectors, ahem, telling. Picked up some Placebo must-haves ("Without You I'm Nothing" and "Sleeping With Ghosts"). Yum, Placebo...
Pleasantly surprised
There was a few times where I wanted to lend DVDs to co-workers, but since all those I have are region 1, I couldn't really do that. I figured I could rip them and lend those instead, but didn't really spend the time, expecting this to be a arduous process of figuring out DeCSS junk and what-not.
But no, I was quite pleasantly surprised by HandBrake, a GPL program that has everything worked out for you, end-to-end, with just enough control without flooding the user with countless knobs with which to screw up everything. Two thumbs up, highly recommended.
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