Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

I needed to write a program to automatically cleanup some of ID3 information in my mp3 files. I also wanted to do it in Python, since of all languages that I know well, I’m most productive in python.

After some research I concluded that the best but little known option is mutagen library.

It’s written in pure pyth0n, can both read and write ID3 tags as well as FLAC and Vorbis tags and has a nice API. It’s largely undocumented but you can figure things out by looking at its code and a sample program.

I also looked at eyed3 but it has much worse API and id3reader, but it can only read and has just been abandoned.

According to Google mutagen isn’t a popular way to process id3 information in mp3 files, but it seems to be the best.

I’m probably the last person on earth to upgrade from my very old ~1.5 WordPress version that powers this blog to the latest 2.0.2.

I was delaying the upgrade dreading the possible difficulties but I have to say I’m very impressed by how easy WP upgrade is.

It took me maybe 10 minutes by sloppily following upgrade tutorial and that includes fighting with file permissions on the server (my fault not WP’s).

My custom design was untouched (I feared the most that I’ll have to repeat my all-nighter stylesheet hacking session to redo the style changes but fears were unfounded).

New admin interface is much better than the old one.

If only they had live spell-checking in the editor!

OnFolio is a tool for saving web pages or their excerpts for later. They have a very good integration with IE.

I tried it in the past but gave up because it was too slow. I tried it again because it became free, ships as part of Live Toolbar Beta (another IE toolbar coming from Microsoft; soon my screen will fill with toolbar and leave to place for web pages) and has an RSS reader.

It’s sad when a promising tool is completely unusable because of a simple, easy to fix problem.

In case of OnFolio’s RSS reader the show stopper is lack of an option to only show feeds with unread items in the list of feeds. My list of feeds spans few screens. Usually only a handful of them have unread items yet I have to scroll the list. Super annoying.

And it’s not like it’s a feature no-one ever thought about before. Bloglines had it for ages.

Another problem is heavy cpu usage when importing the feeds, probably due to background formatting of feeds. A tip to programmers out there: you can lower the priority of a thread with one API call.

Anyway, desktop RSS reader without synchronization with a web-based reader is a no-go. Microsoft should buy Bloglines, add decent synchronization API and make OnFolio work with that. Or built their own web-based RSS reader.

As to other OnFolio features - I’m still exploring how useful they are.

Summary: Bloglines is better.

I’m a long time Bloglines user but I always look for a greener grass so I decided to try Newsgator on-line. I imported my feed list from Bloglines and went on a reading spree.

I’m not switching for two reasons.

Newsgator is way too slow to be usable for reading lots of feeds. Switching to another feed takes few seconds and during that time CPU utilization shoots to 100%, both in IE and in Firefox (I’m guessing some monster JavaScript).

In Bloglines feed list is in a separate frame than the content of the feed. That means that I can scroll the content of the feed but feed list stays at the same position. In Newsgator, after I scroll down the content I have to scroll up to switch to another feed. Not cool.

Bloglines has its problems and Newsgator, overall, looks nice, but the slow speed of switching to another feed is a deal-breaker.