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Music back on my hard disk

After my desktop computer died over a year ago I have had no space for mp3s on my hard disk, so I only used the music on my mp3 reader.

A week ago I was able to free some gigabytes of disk space and finally I put my music back on my computer. The first problem I faced was choosing a music player, after some testing the only two competitors were Banshee and Rhythmbox. In the end I chose Banshee, but I have to say that this was a completely subjective choice as both programs are nice and have almost all the features I wanted.

Then I decided to cleanup a bit my mp3s removing duplicates. This is a “once in your life” task, so I didn’t want to spend hours finding a suitable program, understanding how it works and tweaking it: I just needed something that worked without too much hassle.
The first program I found was DupeMusicMatch, you just have to run it passing on the command line the directories where your mp3 or ogg files are and "-r" for a recursive search. DupeMusicMatch just works, it seems to finds some false positives but it seems also able to find duplicates if the file names differ a lot. Thanks Todd Korody for your easy to use program!

Icecream

Why I love icecream:

$ (time make) 2>&1 | grep real
real    21m52.649s
$ make clean > /dev/null
$ PATH=/usr/lib/icecc/bin:$PATH
$ (time make) 2>&1 | grep real
real    8m15.954s

Note that about 4 minutes are spent linking the program, not compiling.

And then, while waiting, you can watch the hypnotic icemon showing where your source files are being compiled:

icemon showing icecc in action

History meme

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
368 cd
355 l
274 git
231 vi
131 u
130 q
101 find
94 time
86 grep
79 svn

Some clarifications:

  • “l” is an alias for “ls -lhA --color”
  • “u” is an alias for “cd ..”
  • “q” is an alias for “exit” (I also use CTRL-D for that)
  • “time” is there because I use “time make” to see how much time I need to compile things

This blog post was brought to you by the huge time required to link WebKit (I want gold as the default linker!)

Blogs, politicians and stupidity

“People who open a blog should be identifiable and they should ask people writing comments to be identifiable too.”
— Maurizio Gasparri, from punto-informatico.it

Do I have to use my passport every time I write a comment on a blog? And what do I have to do if the server is hosted in another country?

The sad thing about this is that Gasparri is not just a random ignorant politician: he is the former Italian Minister of Communications, and maybe also the next one as his party is probably going to win the elections on Sunday.

Speaking of which, yesterday I watched a report on BBC about Italian elections and now I’m very sad :'(.

Notify channels plugin for xchat(-gnome)

The LazyWeb was not that useful but I was able to find a plugin that does what I need. It is listed in the plugins page on xchat.org but for some reasons I didn’t find it the first time I searched.

The notify channels plugin has every basic feature I need, and it’s also simple enough to be modified adding some other useful features I would like to have.

Thanks Vlad!

Update: the plugin doesn’t work anymore, xchat-gnome doesn’t load it even if it’s listed in the gconf key /apps/xchat/plugins/loaded. The plugin is not even listed in the “Scripts and Plugins” tab in the preferences dialog. Suggestions on how to fix this?