I’m writing a program. It’s quite exciting in a way, because it’s a very long time since I coded anything more than a few lines just for the fun of it. I’m coding something that I’ve needed for a while. First I’ll state the problem:

When downloading music files from the net, you are often going to have duplicates and bad files. All the music players I have at the moment do a good job of divorcing the music from the file system; this is a Good Thing when I am listening to music I’ve happily categorised. However, there is the time between downloading a file and importing it into your music library when you are deciding whether the downloaded file is good enough. Here, the connection to the file system is essential: you want to be able to delete bad files and move good files to reasonably named folders within your music library, ready for importing to your favourite music player.

I’ve been doing some optimising of my Gentoo build process. I added a Blueyonder mirror to my list of places to download software from. This is good because I am a Blueyonder customer and so already on their network. I tend to get around 80 kilobytes/second from their mirror, which is about 30k/s faster than before.

I also had a look into my make.conf settings and discovered that I wasn’t turning on any optimisations for the software build, to allow gcc to take advantage of my AthlonXP’s shiny features. A little silly of me, for if you are building all of your software yourself, you should really be trying to optimise the hell out of it, otherwise what’s the point? so “march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe” it is now. We shall see if that all works fine.

One thing that is overtaking the world recently is a vast quantity of sales in shops. It would almost seem like shops may as well make sale prices permanent, they are so often in the throes of a sale! Coming home on the bus yesterday I saw a sale advertisement in a window so crazy, so completely out there that it’s questionable you’ll believe it’s really in a shop window near my house. Ladies and gentlemen, Carphone Warehouse present to you their:

Windows is gone…

Why? Well, lets just say that /mnt/xp has been renamed /mnt/music =)

It seems that I’ve had less to write about recently than usual. In part this is because of working at HP. Firstly, I’m generally pretty tired and not in the mood for writing when I get home in the evening. Secondly, much of the interesting stuff is happening at work; I’m not sure how much I can say about it so I’m taking the safe route and saying nothing!

There are some really cool looking things on the horizon that I’ve seen, however. One is the Mono/Java debate that is happening in the Open Source, and in particular Gnome, world. I’ve coded a lot in both languages, and they are both nice to program in. They are also both good for high-level desktop application writing, better suited to this domain than C/C++ in my opinion because of the simple syntax and extensive built-in libraries. I am running a C# (i.e. Mono-based) music player called Muine, which I really like and seems very stable — far more so, in fact, than Rhythmbox which is coded in C.