Sometimes when playing a video game the gamer has a wonderful experience, but many times we forget to acknowledge the help of the music to achieve it, take for example the introductory theme (flash player on that page, lyrics and spanish translation) of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Amazing how a lot PlayStation 3 owners are requesting the option of player customized soundtracks on all games. I am not one of them, for me the soundtrack is part of the game, removing it is like removing a weapon, a car, etc.

It is very rewarding to coordinate a team of developers, that are able to migrate a third-party application to Linux, working without access to the central Host the application requires, and that when We deploy it to the testing site every module works amazingly well, no major bug found yet, only little things that are being fixed in minutes

The PlayStation 3 uses standard 3GPP tags and does not understand iTunes style tags so every song I imported do not show the correct information, so instead of fixing them on the PS3 (something that does not changes the file, only on the internal database) I wrote a script with the help of AtomicParsley:

#!/bin/sh

addTag() {
        line=`mp4info "$file" | grep "$2"`
        if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]
        then
                command="$command $1 \"`echo $line | sed -e "s/$2: //"`\""
        fi
} 

for file in *.m4a; do
	command="AtomicParsley \"$file\""
	addTag --3gp-title "Metadata Name"
	addTag --3gp-performer "Metadata Artist"
	addTag --3gp-album "Metadata Album"
	addTag --3gp-genre "Metadata Genre"

	exec 3<>"$file"
	read -n 8 <&3
	echo -n 3gp6 >&3
	exec 3>&-

	eval "$command" -W

	exec 3<>"$file"
	read -n 8 <&3
	echo -n mp42 >&3
	exec 3>&-
done

It add a few 3GPP style tags taken from the original iTunes style tags. As AtomicParsley rejects to add that kind of tags on non 3GPP files, the script changes the ftyp field on the file temporaly to 3gp6. The script process all files with the extension m4a on the current directory.

Everyone is doing this on Planet GNOME, so I wanted to see the results too:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
150 cd
135 ll
105 hg
89 vi
39 less
39 find
37 sed
35 rm
35 tail
35 cat

ll = ls -al.

While I was learning how to use Mercurial in order to contribute to the Mozilla platform, I became addicted to it, and with the migration tools now I have access to my repositories with full history on the go, without need of permanent connection to the CVS or SVN server. I can even do offline commits to my local copies.

I had not found a nice GUI for it yet, but being restricted to the command line is not a big reason to not use the powerful offline features. ummmm OpenJDK is stored on Mercurial, and Netbeans 6.1 finall will have support for it.