Ian Smith imsmith

Rich Already Answered That!

A list of commonly asked questions, design decisions, reasons why Clojure is the way it is as they were answered directly by Rich (even when from many years ago, those answers are pretty much valid today!). Feel free to point friends and colleagues here next time they ask (again). Answers are pasted verbatim (I've made small adjustments for readibility, but never changed a sentence) from mailing lists, articles, chats.

How to use:

The link in the table of content jumps at the copy of the answer on this page.
The link on the answer itself points back at the original post.

Table of Content

Recently, I decided to migrate my music library from Google Play Music to a self-hosted server running Subsonic. Only problem is I have a bunch of playlists, and Google provides no way to export those into any format that Subsonic can consume (m3u, pls, xspf). I also couldn't find an unofficial tool to do this. The best I could find was a handy app in the Play store called Playlist Backup. It can't export playlists for music stored remotely at Google, but it can create lists of albums and tracks names. Good enough! Now all I needed was a utility that could employ some fuzzy logic to match these lists to my local music files, which follow a typical Artist / Albumn / Track hierarchy.

Turns out, Python 3 makes this really easy! Just copy the script below:

playlist-gen.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# Converts a list of audio tracks

My thoughts on MessagePack

Hi. My name is Sadayuki "Sada" Furuhashi. I am the author of the MessagePack serialization format as well as its implementation in C/C++/Ruby.

Recently, MessagePack made it to the front page of Hacker News with this blog entry by Olaf, the creator of the Facebook game ZeroPilot. In the comment thread, there were several criticisms for the blog post as well as MessagePack itself, and I thought this was a good opportunity for me to address the questions and share my thoughts.

My high-level response to the comments

To the best of my understanding, roughly speaking, the criticisms fell into the following two categories.

	# Generate PDFs from the Markdown source files
	#
	# In order to use this makefile, you need some tools:
	# - GNU make
	# - Pandoc
	# - LuaLaTeX
	# - DejaVu Sans fonts

	# Directory containing source (Markdown) files
	source := src

	<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName www.example.com
	# For local dev machines
	ServerAlias staging.www.example.com
	ServerAlias dev.www.example.com

	DocumentRoot /var/www/www.example.com

	<Directory /var/www/www.example.com>
	Options +FollowSymlinks +Multiviews +Indexes

	#!/bin/sh
	#original from http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/262635-linux-does-not-register-on-the-windows-ad-dns
	# reply of Phil6196 Oct 1, 2012 at 12:41 AM (EDT)
	ADDR=`/sbin/ifconfig eth0 \| grep 'inet addr' \| awk '{print $2}' \| sed -e s/.*://`
	HOST=`hostname`
	echo "update delete $HOST A" > /var/nsupdate.txt
	echo "update add $HOST 86400 A $ADDR" >> /var/nsupdate.txt
	echo "update delete $HOST PTR" > /var/nsupdate.txt
	echo "update add $HOST 86400 PTR $ADDR" >> /var/nsupdate.txt
	nsupdate /var/nsupdate.txt