Archive for April, 2008

iTunes Library Sync Tools

nerkles April 11th, 2008

Here is my “comprehensive” review. (and by “comprehensive,” I mean “cursory”, conducted in less than an hour.)

  • SuperSync: Ugly, but it’ll get the job done. The interface design wreaks of Windows and Java, by which I mean: it’s tastelessly done, but tolerable. I’m reluctantly throwing my lot in with this one, because I couldn’t find anything better, and need our libraries synced this week, and without too much fuss.
  • TuneRanger: AWFUL. Ugly, slow, poorly designed. Run away! I can only hope that more thought was put into the underlying sync process than what went into the “design” of this steaming turd. I stopped it before it had a chance to ugly up our computers. It was so miserable that I did not trust it enough to allow it to even attempt to sync any songs.
  • Syncopation: Might work OK for casual users, but it totally choked under the enormity of my music library. The interface needs a radical re-design. It really makes you jump through too many hoops if you want to be selective about what you sync.

That is all. Good day.

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Shell History

nerkles April 11th, 2008

Ok, I’ll bite on the shell history meme.

This command will tell you the top 10 things you’ve been typing in the shell.

isaac$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
  101   nosetests
   68   paster
   45   cd
   38   ls
   34   hg
   25   rake
   21   script/server
   21   script/generate
   16   sync
   16   rm

Yes, despite being a total Python freak, I’m using Rails a bit lately. I kinda like 2.0… it’s much more polished than 1.x… but so far I still like Pylons + Elixir better… subjectively. It’s too soon to say whether that’s just my relative amount of experience in each framework. I’ve been using Python for years, and Pylons for enough time to know it very well. But I’ve only been dabbling in Rails and Ruby.

I have this sort of tic where I type sync all the time. I picked it up from a sysadmin I knew back in the day (late nineties, remember Mosaic?). I didn’t know so much Unix back then (or was that Solaris flavor?) and I saw him type it all the time and I figured it’s just what you do right after you do something else. It’s useless now, but I still type it all the time anyway without even thinking about it. It just flushes buffers to disk. Back then, on that particular web server (probably a pre-1.0 Apache), my changes to sites would not show up if I didn’t run sync, so it became this ingrained habit to type it after changing anything, and I still do it 10+ years later.

And I’m sure typing hg a lot lately. I’ve switched every project I’m in control of (at home and at work) from subversion to mercurial. Yep, it’s that awesome, and I doubt I’ll be looking back. Not to say something better won’t come along one day, but for now it’s the bees knees in version control.