Archive for January, 2009

Linux, from server to desktop

Monday, January 5th, 2009

I remember roughly ten years ago, when a friend came by and upon attaching his hdd to my machine a nice Afterstep desktop booted up. It was in the Windows 95-98 era, where one couldn’t boot a Windows OS with a different motherboard (actually XP still sucks with this), so I really thought it was astonishing. Things “worked” – for some reason Linux was “stability”. Linux: as a server and, to be honest, as a very weak desktop – but even with the guy doing nearly everything on the command line, the lack of blue screens struck me.

Nowdays all I hear is that the desktop Linux is here (X is the year of the Linux desktop, where X is the current year) – and actually I just don’t think so. By forcing this very strong server system to behave like a desktop, it’s just loosing quality. Hard lockups, bad drivers, the stupid rants and quarrels about the binary blobs and all the brokan applications – it’s not what I saw a decade ago.

Just for fun, search for the word “segfault” on some of the Linux distributions I used and liked (number of results): Arch ~322, Ubuntu 250, Gentoo 183.

Debian community is so terrible, there’s not much point in using their forums in my opinion – what’s important is not these numbers, but the fact that others are experiencing these issues as well. I don’t care if it is an nvidia driver, a udev issue, a broken browser or whatnot, segfaults, lockups and the Magic SysRequest Bicycle Repairmen are all here to stay.

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Convert m4a to wav or flac with script

Thursday, January 1st, 2009

For some reason Winamp couldn’t play the Apple Itunes m4a files for me, so I wanted to have a quick solution to convert m4a files to lossless flacs. VLC can write into files as an output, but with that the dumping speed is 1:1, which is not very fast. Basically the solution is just a couple of shell commands, so if you know mplayer, feel free to check the code bellow.

Okay, this is going to be pretty rough: this is a php shell script, I run on Windows, because:

  • I don’t like Cygwin and I totally hate cmd.exe batch scripting (in this case FOR /R and backslashes).
  • I know about the ecmascript and vbscript interpreters and yes, I totally hate those, because they suck compared to plain old Bash and friends.
  • This is a command line php script; I’m on Windows, I registered the .cphp file extension to be handled by php cli, so I just press enter on such file. Believe me, this saved me hours of work, especially at my workplace, where I am using XP and cygwin is broken like hell (I don’t know the admin password to remove it). I know Python is all the hype, but I couldn’t care less.
<?php
$files = explode("\n", `dir /b /o:n *.m4a`);
$mplayer = 'Q:/bin/mplayer/mplayer';
$flac = 'C:/Progra~1/FLAC/flac';
foreach ($files as $file) {
  $file = trim($file);
  if (!empty($file)) {
      echo "Converting $file\n";
      shell_exec("$mplayer -vc null -vo null -af volnorm -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file=\"$file.wav\" \"$file\"");
      shell_exec($flac . ' -8 "' . $file . '.wav" ' . str_replace('.m4a.wav', '.flac', $file));
  }
}

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