my father in law was having some iTunes issues over christmas, so I wrote a quick python script that will find duplicate references to files in iTunes. you need python to run it. from the docstring:
Prints the number of duplicate songs in itunes, then prints a list of duplicated songs. A “duplicate song” means multiple references to the same sound file in iTunes.

USAGE: python duplicates.txt

the argument is your iTunes music library XML file. typically, this is where ever you have iTunes installed. for example, mine is:
/Users//Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml

so, I’ve downloaded a bunch of apps to my iphone. I got a metronome, a tuner, a flashlight, a iphone light saber, and an ear training program. the really nice part about some of these apps is it allows you to get rid of random things that just do one thing (alarm clock, tuner, metronome). maybe this isn’t as big a deal to most people as it is to me, but I love having less clutter and stuff just laying around.

tuesday: squats, work sets were 195. standing press, work sets were 95.
wednesday: deadlifts 5×5, work sets were 255, 275, 265, 265, 275.

used a switched grip for the first time with deadlifts yesterday, it was much easier on the grip and I’m guessing I’ll be able to pull a lot more than with using a matched grip.

I was thinking recently that since I stare at eclipse all day, maybe I should look into making it a little nicer to look at. unsurprisingly, there aren’t a ton of eclipse skins out there or anything, but I did find a niceexported prefs file that looks pretty nice. the only changes I made were to change the font back to courier new, since I need a monospaced font.

also, the kempelton icons for firefox are nicer than the default icons and make things a bit more pleasant as well.

this is going to sound incredibly ocd, but that’s mostly how I roll.

like most musicians with a day job, my typical after work routine involves practicing guitar, playing/writing music, etc. since I use my computer as a music player, and have a lot of cool software for composing, etc, I tend to sit in front of the computer when I practice. unfortunately this also leads to me compulsively and needlessly checking rss feeds and email every few minutes, and basically wasting time checking on random things that pop into my head: should I order new boxing gloves? what’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? how late is fairway open? not exactly pressing, need to know information.

I’ve tried a number of things to remedy this in the past: deleting browser shortcut from dock, turning off network connection, and good old fashioned resolve. unfortunately none of this has contributed to less browsing the interwebs.

so last week I just turned my computer off. I turn it on when I need it for something (like transcribing or whatever), and then turn it off when I don’t. if I need to do something on the internet, I sit down, fire up the machine and do it as opposed to interspersing it with practice time. this has really helped my focus a lot, and probably also helps reduce energy consumption. do I really need to have a computer, 2 external hard drives and a external sound card sleeping 24/7 when I use it less than an hour a day?

you can gzip javascript files, and firefox and IE know how to handle them. with all the huge .js libraries everyone uses these days, this is a great thing if page weight is a concern. note that I picked this up from steve souder’s awesome web performance tuner,yslow.

I jailbroke my iphone earlier this week, the tiff/safari exploit just made it too easy. since all you do is visit a web page, I figure nothing too bad can happen from a “steve jobs bricking my phone in the next release” perspective. it’s their security hole after all.

anyways, the infrastructure the folks at apptapp have set up for package management is amazing. it’s very high quality software, and the 3rd party programs you can dl (I have an ssh client, nes emulator, and a theme management thing) all seem to work well. the nes emulator is particularly nice, it’s pretty cool to play super mario brothers on the train.

I just found out the patent I got is no longer pending. although the idea is nothing groundbreaking, it’s pretty cool to have it on the books.

I used to use osx at my day job, but at my new job most everyone drinks the MS kool aid. I try to keep an open mind and figured it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, windows isn’t so bad and everyone uses it, etc. now, after spending a month on the dark side, a few thoughts:

1) I really miss expose. I used it constantly, it is by far the best screen switching tool I have ever used. I still hit F9 on my keyboard, and cry a little inside when nothing happens. if anyone out there can recommend a similar utility for windows I will love you forever.

2) outlook is infinitely better than mail.app. I used to think mail.app was pretty nice, and it’s fine for personal use, but oh man does outlook destroy it in terms of everything else.

3) I really miss terminal. I have a love/hate relationship with terminal due to its lack of tabs, but having a unix prompt easily accessible is great and I miss having a unix based operating system. cygwin sucks, dos is horrible and there are no symlinks.

all in all, windows has made some improvements since I last used it, but I’m still an osx fan at heart and windows just feels like a junky OS to me. it’s clunky, fonts look weird, DOS scares the hell out of me, and I have to download precompiled binaries of open source stuff.

tomorrow morning I’m trying out aurora, which is allegedly going to turn my mac into an alarm clock. I’ll report back on how it goes.

maybe I have just gotten a little unlucky in this regard, but most of the startups I’ve worked for and with have had very tight hardware budgets.This has never really made sense to me as a developer, and certainly doesn’t make sense to me from a management/budgeting perspective. I have no idea what the budget is like at my current gig, but here’s a real world, just happened to me today example of why I am perplexed by companies not spending a lot of money on hardware in their software engineering groups.

I was doing a build of our application on an older development box everyone uses, and it was taking between 3 and 5 minutes. not long enough to work on another project simultaneously, not short enough to avoid uncomfortable waits for completion. I remember that my boss told me about another, brand new with all the latest hardware server to use that might be coming online soon, so I check and it is up and no one else is on it. on the new box my build is down to 35 seconds!

if I can save 3 minutes per build, and I do 20 per day, then that’s an hour a day in saved time. for a team of 5 developers that’s 25 hours/week of people not waiting around for a build to finish. this example today is 11% of my day, and a significantly larger portion of the time I actually spend writing code.

I don’t really want this to turn into a rant, but if you are going to pay a guy as much money as most developers get paid to write code, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t include the cost of having a new machine on his desk twice a year, and all the latest hardware in the development environment. hardware just keeps getting cheaper and faster, and yet at my last job I had the same computer for 2 years, and we had to battle for hardware constantly. just yesterday I spent 2 hours with a co worker on a problem we were having because of an outdated operating system, at my previous job the number of application servers in production dropped by half once we got new machines, and saved tons of time during deployment.