Python

Today I finally finished digitizing all of my techno and house cassette tapes. It took me a little bit over two months. Here are some statistics: 290 “a” sides 278 “b” sides (sometimes the tapes broke after the first side) 12 tapes which unusable 41 tapes which turned out to be copies of CDs which are available to buy 5 tapes were copies of stuff I have also on CDs which are not available to buy 8 tapes had unreadable labels 249 GB in 16 bit 48khz WAVE files the whole list I probably still have some tapes flying around somewhere and my girlfriend also has some, but the vast majority of my music is digitized now. The music is mainly mixed techno and house DJ sets, from my friends like DJ Gomez, Motik and Nitin. A lot of sets are recorded from radio like HR3/HRXXL and Hithouse Stuttgart and in clubs around Stuttgart and Cologne. The most popular DJs are Sven Vaeth, Roland Casper, Richie Hawtin, DJ Hello, Dag, and Laurent Garnier. ...

api.bicingwatch.com has now been up for two weeks. It is a small site with just a handful of html views and some JSON views. I also use python now to scrape the bicing.com website and store the results in a mysql database. This does not include the data I had already collected over the last year, which I will import soon. Today I also enabled disqus commenting on the station pages. I originally planned to write this myself, but this is way quicker and I can always change to the django commenting system later. ...

Even though my good tape decks are broken at the moment I have started on the software to transfer my techno and house mix tapes to the computer. I have written the software before in C++. It basically waits for a sound on the input and then writes the music to a file until it notices a long quiet section at the end of the tape and stops writing. The software was using threads and used the lame lib to do on the fly mp3 encoding, to make it even quicker to digitize tape. It also notified the user of any buffer underflows and clipped samples. ...

As I recently started learning Python one of the things I noticed which I didn’t like is the class syntax. So I wrote some minimal hello world programs in the languages I recently used to show the difference: C++ hello.cc #include <iostream> class Hello { private: char *value; public: Hello(char *newvalue) { value = newvalue; } void hello() { std::cout << this->value; } }; int main() { Hello hello("hello\n"); hello.hello(); } I like the C++ syntax, it is the language which introduced me to OOP and it clearly states what bits are what without too wordy syntax. ...

I decided that it is about time to learn something new. For some reason I decided on python and django. It might have something to do with the google app engine and because fedora uses a lot of python. I made up a small project, which is easy to start, but can grow into something bigger later. At my day job I use mainly php, including the cakephp framework. One thing which I am always missing is a proper ORM. I used to do a lot of perl coding and we developed our own ORM, which was very similar to Class::DBI. ...