Obsessed with productivity

One thing I like about the Ruby/Rails community is the obsession with productivity. Check out this post on rubyinside and notice the first comment by zenspider:

It should be noted that 5 minutes is glacial compared to what you can do with inline (and how much easier it is). The above example was done (and ran) in less than 30 seconds!

I'm impressed and delighted.
(btw: can I get the same in Java? Gotta have a look...)

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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

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Today I went to a talk at the local Ruby on Rails group. The speaker was quite clueful. He had even implemented his own DSL to describe his business problem. Obviously, the guy was not a noobie in Ruby. However, what really turned me off was his usage of the word "RESTful". For him, it seemed to be a way to describe the inner workings of his application, like, say, "separation of concerns". RoR guys are generally not the most clueless people, but nobody in the audience challenged him about this. It seemed to be the generally accepted usage of the term in the Rails community. This made me think that DHH and Rails have done two things to REST: First, they greatly help to evangelize the term "RESTful" Second, they hijacked the meaning of the term and changed it from "architectural style" to "application architecture" As it happens I listened to a podcast from the Pragmatic Programmers on my way home. It was about the .Net Ruby implementati

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