Joel and Ruby performance

Joel of Joel on Software fame has bashed Ruby performance on his blog. The outcry caused by this flamebait has been large as expected. Yet, out of the gut (without any benchmarks to back up my feelings) I thought he was probably right that Ruby is small.

However, I found an interesting comment on the Smallthought blog: the author points out that Ruby's performance is slowed down by a naive implementation of the interpreter and points to a Smalltalk interpreter just OSSed by Sun. Now, if we combine this and Sun hiring the JRuny guys there is cause for hope to get a better Ruby interpreter in a short while.

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Interviewed by Internet Briefing Blog

Reto Hartinger of the Internet Briefing group has interviewed me about what I work on these days. The interview is in German.

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan

Running the iTunes genre tagger script with OS X Automator

Due to public demand here's a little recipe how to run last post's mp3 tagger without using the command line on OS X: Open Automator Start a new "Application" project Drag the "Run Shell Script" action into the right workflow panel, set the "pass input" drop-down to "as arguments" and edit the script to (see screenshot below): for f in "$@" do /opt/local/bin/python /Users/michaelmarth/Development/Code/mp3tagger/tag_groupings.py -d "$f" done (you will have to adapt the paths to your local setup) Save the application and happily start dropping mp3 folders onto the application's icon.

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