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June 30, 2007
Recruiters calling...
Recruiters have started calling me. The wild part is that they are calling on my work line while I am at work, want to talk to me about "Great opportunity in Atlanta Area" and ask for me by name. So, I wanted to know how they get my name, started asking some of them, and the answer was "anonymously referred". Well, in actuality it turns out that they simply go to my LinkedIn account, look at who my current employer is and call the main switchboard. Not the smartest way to get business, but still pretty clever.
Posted by Alex at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2007
The BlackBook
Last weekend we saw the Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, pretty decent movie which keeps you guessing and on the edge of your seat for very fast 2 1/2 hours. History, suspense, action, sex, the story of war that makes for a pretty good thriller.
And a wonderful thing happened, my wife and I really talked in depth about this movie afterwards, re-thinking its details and nuances, and we rarely discuss Hollywood junk.
Zwartboek
Posted by Alex at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)
How to recover songs from iPod part Deux
So, the impossible happened: my computer crashed, hard drive died and all my "important" data lost. And by important data, I mainly mean songs that I download and don't have stored on the cd's and not things like irreplaceable family pictures, past projects, any financial data, or something really important (you back up all the really important stuff somewhere else, right?). And then I remembered that songs that were on my computer are also for the most part stored on my iPod. When examining closer, I noticed that iPod actually renames mp3 files when stores them to some weird 4-letter word, like QWER.mp3 in folder F03. Strange, but probably some sort of copyright deterrent or fast search help or maybe its for the Shuffle Songs feature. So, iPod has some sort of mapping file where they store the actual name of the file and the file on disk. Clearly, the iPod folks did not care about the filename as it's stored on my computer and only worried about what? the ID3 infos? Hmmm...
Well, what's a programmer to do? I surely was not going to sit in front of my computer and manually rename each file and place them in the corresponding folders sorted by Artist and Album. Who do you think I am? Data entry person? No way! Well, i did find a shareware utility ID3 - TagIt which had some sort of batch rename mode, but the UI and directions seemed way to complicated. So, scrap that idea.
If you can't rip it off the internet, write it yourself and even more so, just make it do exactly the thing that you want it to do. I don't really need any of the advanced features right now like connecting to the FreeDB database and so on, I just wanted to read the ID3 info and then rename the file based on the combination of Song title, track number and place it in the <Artist Name>/<Album Name> folder. Organized, clean, simple. Very well, what I got is a tiny app that has a browse to... button, OK and Cancel button and that’s it. Find the top-most folder of your music, it will recursively walk all folders inside it, pull out all mp3 files and place them somewhere within the specified destination directory. If the ID3 info is not found, it will place it at the root and you will have to manually play with it.
Next version should theoretically check for folder validity, warn that the destination folder is not empty, show the progress bar and actually interrupt the process when the cancel button is pressed, but for about 25+ minutes of coding, this ain't bad.
Just in case anyone is interested, I am attaching the source written in C# without any warranty here as a .zip file. The attached project is a 2005 version, you may want to download the Express Edition from Microsoft.
Also, I zipped the .exe using .NETZ library, a C# solution for distributing .net executables, the big advantage is that you can zip your .dll’s, .exe’s, and resources as one small executable and distribute it to clients as one file, very useful.
Posted by Alex at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)