Geeky Stuff

All your base are belong to us.

 

It’s Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S., and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to start homebrewing again. The temperature’s right for fermenting and there’s no better weather for hanging out in the backyard, drinking a beer, and watching 6 gallons of amber liquid boil for an hour or so. Of course, that leaves plenty of time to whip up some Python scripts for homebrewers (well, homebrewers that dig on Python, anyway). Armed with a netbook and 3 Victory Storm King stouts: ccbrew.py And all good boys write unit tests, right? (OK, OK … this is more like a glorified main() intermingled with some unittest assertions.) test_ccbrew.py TODO Pretty much everything relevant to water chemistry, mash schedules, gravity, color, and much, much more. I only had an [...]

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Evolution

Some chicken, some beer, 13 years, and some kids who are now clearly smarter than you were at the same age: Don’t ask me why I have a bag of ballpark peanuts in my kitchen …

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HOW-TO: Convert FLAC files to OGG/Vorbis files with a bash script

So you have a bunch of FLAC files for whatever reason, but if you’re like me, it’s because you are an audiophile and prefer a lossless codec for files you play on your high-end stereo equipment. However, FLAC files are huge, which can make them impractical for small personal music players with limited storage. This is especially true if you’re just going to plug the player into a cheap-ass stereo (like the one in my base model Toyota RAV4, for example.) That’s a bit like hunting squirrels with hand-grenades: overkill. Your best bet is to convert your FLAC files to something smaller and more manageable (and sounds better than MP3!): OGG/Vorbis. Let’s get started. We’ll assume your FLAC files are tagged with the artist name, song title, etc. [...]

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Continuous Integration with Subversion, CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild, and NuGet

I really dig the idea of NuGet packages being produced and published by an automated CI build system. While we’ve all been doing CI for years, standardized packaging and distribution options in .NET for large and complex project trees are still fairly few in number. For the most part, build systems spit out .DLLs and .EXEs, perhaps a .ZIP, and occasionally an .MSI file capable of bootstrapping a production server or a developer workstation in more sophisticated examples. It’s that last bit where NuGet rocks — the framework provides an easy peasy way to publish and distribute your libraries to developer workstations, and eventually into the builds of projects that use them. Note: Scott Hanselman recently wrote a blog post describing a very similar CI build system — [...]

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