bryon.rl()

Podcast Tagging

I love writing little bitty programs that do so much for me.   I use Happy Fish to manage my subscriptions to podcasts.   The problem though is that podcasts are notoriously bad at tagging their files consitantly.  This leads to a mess when I’m trying to find them on my mp3 player (creative zen).   What I want is to be able to go to the genre “podcasts” then find a list of all the ones I have there then listen to the latest one.  How come this is so hard? because no tags in a standard way.  If you look at the happy fish blog in the next version he is going to add a way to address this but for now I created a simple ruby script that run nightly to do this for me.   This script simply looks at every dowloaded podcast and assigns it a genre of podcasts then assigns the artist to the name of the podcast which happens to the be the name of the directory they reside in.  It uses the excellent id3lib library to accomplish this.  I have this in job that runs nightly so that my podcasts are always usable by my mp3 player

require 'find'
require 'fileutils'
require 'rubygems'
require 'id3lib'

basedir = 'D:\Audio\podcasts'

Find.find(basedir) do |path|
    if FileTest.directory?(path)
       next
    else
       lastdir, filename = File.split(path)
       if File.extname(filename) == '.mp3'
            tag = ID3Lib::Tag.new(path)
            tag.genre = 'podcasts'
            tag.artist = File.basename(lastdir) 
            tag.update!
        end
    end
end

results in

Craigslist Job Posting

I’ve become rather disgruntled lately with the way intelligent competant developers (mainly me) have been treated and unrespected.  Before you read let me clarify,  I have a job that pays well but I do follow job posting weekly to make sure I don’t miss any possiblity to do something more interesting and exciting that will better my life.  This morning I saw this craigslist posting.

asp/sql programmer

An up and coming Voice over Internet Protocol Company is now looking ASP/SQL programmers to add to our growing team.

We are looking for those you have experience in this field.
This is a telecommuting job, so you will need a home office that meets these requirements:

Does your home office meet the following requirements?
-Must maintain a reliably quiet and professional home work environment during working hours.
-Must have reliable high-speed internet (DSL or Cable)
-Must have reliable personal computer which meets minimum system requirements:
-Windows XP or 2000 
-512 mb RAM
-Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2.x web browser

Pay rate is starting at $15.00 an hour for two week probation period for this contract position. After probation period, salary will be determine on results.
Email your resume for immediate interview.

It made me laugh.   The title does not match description.  According to this listing the biggest requirement for this job is that you have a home office with a shitty computer.   So I emailed them

You can’t be serious? 15/hr? I have to supply my own computer and internet?  you really don’t want qualified candidates for this and it’s obvious

Ok yes I know I was being snotty but I was in a foul mood.  His response though was well worth the 3 seconds it took me to write the email.

Please don’t waste my time with stupid replies.  If this is not something for you then move on, you are clearly looking on craigslist looking for a JOB, why waste your time emailing me stupidity?  It is 2009 and most people who do not live in their mothers basements have a computer.  Hell, homeless people have computers these days.
Obviously you can not read nor comprehend that the $15/hr is for a two week trial period.  We have plently of awesome programmers that we have found on Craigslist, you of course will not be one of them.
I wish you well with your search and please do not bother to respond with anymore stupidity.