Category: Uncategorized

Amarok ate your stats?

I have a reasonably large music collection. In a desire to trim this collection down to stuff that I really like, over the years I have painstakingly rated my songs in Amarok. But twice, now, I have had Amarok eat up all my ratings and scores and play counts and other stats. This post will show you how to recover from such a loss.

Amarok

The first solution is for a situation where an Amarok upgrade caused the stats to be lost. I was using the default Amarok setup — that is, all the stats are stored in a file on disk using sqlite. During my Amarok upgrade, Amarok decided to create a new database. Fortunately, it left the old sqlite database file lying around. If you have an old version of your database, you can restore the stats using the following script:

The next scenario arose when I switched to using Amrok2 recently. Now, granted that Amarok2 is still under heavy development and hence the requisite migration paths might not be in place. But I still hate to lose all my stats. Amarok2 uses embedded MySQL instead of sqlite to store all its data. The following script uses your old database to restore all the stats in the new database.

Note that for this to work, you need to first start a MySQL server using the embedded MySQL directory as the data backend, as pointed out here.

Hope that helps!

My first “book” is published!


The [[http://floatingsun.net/articles/apping-for-dummies|Apping for Dummies]] article that I wrote several years ago has remained one of the most visited articles on my website and over the years many people have told me that they found the article useful. I’m happy to announce that a much updated and enhanced version of the article is now [[http://pothi.com/pothi/book/diwaker-gupta-applying-american-graduate-schools-engineering-and-fine-arts|available as a small handbook]] over at [[http://pothi.com|Pothi.com]].

[[http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/front.jpg|{{http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/front-212x300.jpg}}]]

I’ve always thought about writing a book, so this is definitely very exciting for me. Even though it is not really a full-fledged “book”, it is a start nonetheless. The handbook is priced at **Rs. 99** (excluding shipping). So if you or any one you know is applying for graduate school in the US, specially in engineering and fine arts, do check it out. You can [[http://pothi.com/pothi/preview?pFile=132|preview the first ten pages]].

Note that the article is (and will always be) still available. Of course the book has a lot of extra (and more up to date) information that is not there in the article. The article is also fairly narrow in its scope — it was basically written for Computer Science students at the IITs. The book, however, is much broader — it should be useful to applicants in engineering //and// **fine arts**. As far as I know there is hardly any published information out there for graduate applicants in fine arts, so I really hope that this handbook will be of some use to the budding artists in India.

This whole thing is very much an experiment for me. At some point I might even make the handbook available online as a (paid or unpaid) eBook, but for now you have to order your copy from Pothi.com.

Big Brother Apple


Do you remember the [[http://youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8|1984 ad from Apple]]? I’ve embedded it at the bottom if you haven’t. Anyways, the point is that I was trying to download the “free” Apple iPhone SDK today and apparently they require me to sign up first. I thought alright, that doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Now I have the sign up form in front of me, and I just don’t understand why the following fields are marked as “required”:

* company: what if I’m NOT in a company? what if I’m NOT using the SDK for work related purposes? what if I just don’t want to tell you where I work? Of course I realize I can always make this up, but why does Apple feel the need to pry on my professional/personal life so badly?
* address: are you going to send me a check in the mail? As long as I’m not involved in a monetary transaction with Apple, they shouldn’t be need my address. If they want to geo-localize interest in their SDK, I’m sure they are already doing that by logging my IP address. Again, I can make up an address but that’s not the point (besides, I’m sure somewhere in the fine print they will have me click some check box that is a proof of my consent that the information I have submitted is accurate)
* phone number: tele marketing?


Well guess what, the iPhone SDK is only available for Mac. So much for cross platform development and openness and what not.

httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

Inspiration or Imitation?


Compare these two sites:

[[http://alistapart.com|{{http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ala-300x240.png}}]]

[[http://www.cra.org/ccc|{{http://floatingsun.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ccc-300x240.png}}]]

I’m assuming that appropriate permission were taken and attributions were given, otherwise this is just a blatant rip-off.