Archive for August, 2005

The best CD ripper in the world

Tuesday, August 16th, 2005

Just discovered Grip today, and I must say I was very impressed.


The very first thing I ripped with it was One More Mile by Muddy Waters, which is a double CD album. Obviously I’d like to listen to all of these in order without having to break to change CDs (or make a playlist especially for it), so I thought of editing the Vorbis comments after encoding to reflect this.


One of the great things about Grip is that it has space in several places for hooks, i.e. commands to run after ripping and encoding. My problem was solved in a very elegant way by writing a script that (with a little help from awk) runs vorbiscomment to add 22 to the TRACKNUMBER comment after encoding (22 being the track number of the last track on the first disc).


It strikes me that customisability of this sort is, in general, one of the big wins of the Unix toolbox approach. You might write a program for a specific purpose, but if you make it customisable enough, and especially if you give the user lots of hooks to run arbitrary programs, and your program uses open data formats, people can end up using it in very different ways. And that can only make your program more appealing and powerful.

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Hampshire win by 8 runs

Thursday, August 11th, 2005

Went to my first ever cricket match yesterday – Hampshire versus Lancashire at the Rose Bowl, about half of the match under floodlights. Hampshire bowled Lancashire out for 243 with one and a half overs left (and about as many minutes). Having scored 251-5 in their innings (Lancashire having made them bat first) this was a very close match. Warne and Peterson could have made it less close but they are obviously busy with the Ashes at the moment.


The 3rd umpire had a lot of work, being called out at least six times. One very unusual wicket was Lamb’s: his partner (Watson I think) hit the ball into the bowler, which rebounded into the stumps. Lamb was out of his crease, and since the ball touched a fielder before reaching the stumps, he was technically run out. A very unusual and unlucky way to get out. Another run out had Chilton (I think) run about 3/4 the way to the other crease and turn back, obviously too late. Man of the match was probably Watson with 106 not out off 105 balls.


Watching cricket live is quite different from watching on TV. For one thing, watching the pitch side on makes it impossible to see the line of the ball, and even the length is hard to judge sometimes. It’s rather hard to see the ball at all at that distance and the speeds it travels at. You just can’t see whether a wicket was due to the batsman’s mistake, deceptive swing or spin, or whatever.


Another thing that startled me was how quickly they get on with the match. Test matches are quite sedate affairs – since they have so much time they don’t have to hurry up and bowl. One day county cricket is much more hasty as there is a time limit. You have to bowl 44.1 overs in 2 hours 50 minutes, or risk 6 penalty runs for each over you overran by. They really don’t muck about. I timed the balls at about 30-40 seconds each plus 35 seconds between overs.

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