Links: Hacking, Music in Python, Rust & unitasking

Michael McCracken — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:15:00 GMT

My shared links for April 5th through April 6th:

Why I still program - "I believe that the rejection of programming as a lower activity can be explained by the Theory of the leisure class. In effect, we do not seek utility but prestige. There is no prestige in tool-making, cooking or farming. To maximize your prestige, you must rise up to the leisure class: you work must not be immediately useful."
From counting citations to measuring usage (help needed!) - Building a Better Citation Index
workhacks.com: Top 3 Gmail Management Apps for Mac - Mailplane Blog - includes a list of gmail plugins that look useful
Melopy - """ >>> from melopy import Melopy >>> m = Melopy('mysong') >>> m.add_quarter_note('A4') >>> m.add_quarter_note('C#5') >>> m.add_quarter_note('E5') >>> m.render() [==================================================] 100% Done """
Rust Language Tutorial: Expression Syntax - Starts out good, but the "leave out a semicolon to return a value" leaves a bad taste. Why overload semicolons like that? Why not just use 'ret'?
Forget Self-Improvement -
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review - A few good points on avoiding multitasking burnout. Nothing too new, but maybe if people keep repeating it in places like HBR, then it'll start to become conventional business wisdom?

Links: Haskell, Music OCD Tools, Terrorism, Probability for Ranking things

Michael McCracken — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 23:16:00 GMT

My shared links for March 30th through April 3rd:

Magic Maps: Now You See It. - Very cool app for working with maps and time series data
How Not To Sort By Average Rating - Shows the best way to sort by positive/negative rankings that is robust to small sample sizes
terrorism hardly existential threat. 2010 -
workhacks.com: Top 3 Gmail Management Apps for Mac includes a list of gmail plugins that look useful
Yesod Web Framework for Haskell -
beets: the music geek's media organizer - The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. (It also downloads cover art for albums it imports.) Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.

Because beets is designed as a library, it can do almost anything you can imagine for your music collection. Via plugins, beets becomes a panacea:

Embed and extract album art from files' tags. Listen to your library with a music player that speaks the MPD protocol and works with a staggering variety of interfaces. Fetch lyrics for all your songs from databases on the Web. Manage your MusicBrainz music collection. Analyze music files' metadata from the command line. Clean up crufty tags left behind by other, less-awesome tools. Browse your music library graphically through a Web browser and play it in any browser that supports HTML5 Audio.

michael-mccracken.net (ranking)

Links: Hacking, Music in Python, Rust & unitasking

Links: Haskell, Music OCD Tools, Terrorism, Probability for Ranking things