April 3, 2009

If you want to upload something to rapidshare.com, quickly, and you only have command-line access, what do you do? This script was promising, but failed on line 30 because a regular expression didn’t match on something that turned out to be an empty (NoneType) object. I replaced this code:def upload(self): sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.connect((“rapidshare.com”,…

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So people wanted to know what my rational method for assessing obscure bands turned up. Here goes with the tracklisting, and brief reflections on each. 2020Soundsystem – Shiver Remember Robert Miles, “Children”? Sure ya do. Similar mood, vaguely krautrock underpinnings. But slightly average. Are we sure about this project? Bloodgroup – Chuck Ah, this is…

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Thinking about contacts, and also reading this, it struck me that if there is anything in computing that needs a manifesto it’s Polite Software. As in: it behaves helpfully towards others, by exporting and importing data in standard formats correctly (and if there is a common incorrect way of doing something, it should provide the…

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Why is contact management implemented so poorly in every software package I’ve ever encountered? It’s almost as bad as the all-time worst application, voicemail. Outlook, Gmail, KDE Kontact, MS Entourage, Mozilla Thunderbird; they’ve all been carefully pessimised to incorporate every possible pain in the arse. For a start, file formats and vendor lock-in. There is…

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