Coffee & Gems

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...

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

Chances are you have not heard of Colayer , a Swiss-Indian company producing a SaaS-based collaboration software. I did a small project with the guys, that is how I got to know. When I first saw their product I immediately thought the guys are onto something good, so it is worthwhile to share a bit of their application concepts. They follow an approach I have not seen anywhere else. On first look Colayer seems to be a mixture between wikis and forums: the logical data structure resembles a hierarchical web-based forum and the forum entries are editable and versioned like in a wiki. But there is more: presence and real-time. All users that are currently logged in are visible and one can have real-time chats within the context of the page one is in or see updates to the page in real-time (similar as in Google Docs). These chats are treated as atomic page elements (called sems in Colayer parlance) just like the forum entries or other texts. Through this mechanism, all communication around...

Here is a small bit about the asynchronous nature of the Flex layout mechanisms that I learned while slapping together a presales demo yesterday: When changing properties of UIComponents listen for FlexEvent.UPDATE_COMPLETE events. They get fired when the change is actually done. In my case I needed to get the textWidth of a Label after changing the label text. Right after calling the setter of text the getter of textWidth will still return the old value. [Some background reading ]

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Java User Group Switzerland (JUGS) titled "Agile RESTful Web Development". It was about the REST style in principle and hands-on RESTful development with Apache Sling. I enjoyed giving the talk and think that it was well received. Here's the slide deck: Agile RESTful Web Development View more documents from mmarth .

I just wrote a small Ruby script to generate a Google sitemap out of file directory. I thought that it might come handy as a quick start for someone, so here is the code (requires the builder gem) require 'builder' htmlfiles = Dir.glob("*.html") x = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => $stdout, :indent => 1) x.instruct! x.urlset( "xmlns" => "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" ) { for file in htmlfiles do x.url{x.loc "http://www.example.com/#{file}"; x.lastmod "2009-09-17"; x.changefreq "monthly"; x.priority "0.8"} end }

(cross-posting from here ) OK, I admit it, declaring that " the RDBMS is dead " is a meme that has been going around the software industry for a while. Remember object-oriented data bases that were supposed to replace the relational ones? Well, guess who is still here. However, despite the RDBMS's amazing survival skills I would like to propose a related prediction: I believe that the year 2009 will go down in history as the year when the " relational model default " ended. The term "relational model default" was coined by me to describe a peculiar thing that goes on in application development: start talking to your average application developer about some arbitrary business requirement and chances are that simultaneously he mentally constructs a relational model to fit those requirements. That relational approach to modeling your problem may or may not be suitable. The real problem is that all too often this default does not get challenged. As a conse...