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badcomputer.org

Monday, December 3, 2007.

sneetchalizer and read-only filesystems

Woke up to a nice email today from a gent named Sam who said: "I literally looked at 10 different programs to convert flac to mp3 today, and all of them sucked except for yours". Very kind words, but all was not well. It seems Sam was trying to convert files from a read-only filesystem and it failed on him because sneetch was writing the temporary wav files to the 'in' directory, which of course is read-only.

So, the easy solution was to write the temp files to the same directory as specified by the '-D' or '--out-directory' argument. Some may say 'write the files to /tmp as you should' but I am unwilling to do that until I can investigate some cross-platform temp solutions for Ruby. It also occurs to me that this will require some non-trivial rewriting of the script, whilst the solution I used required a few quick edits to a few lines.

Anyways, the whole point of even mentioning any of this is that I personally never tried to convert files from a ro filesystem, so I had no idea there was an issue. So: if ever your favorite software has a glaring omission of some feature that is 'obvious' to you, simply write the developer and ask about it. Perhaps (like me) the developer didn't consider it because it did not affect him/her personally. Remember that most developers are "scratching an itch", and writing the code to solve a problem which affects them personally. They may not be aware of issues surounding alternative use cases.

Winter has arrived

Here in Edmonton we usually have snow on the ground for Halloween. This year, however, the snow has been late arriving. We had a couple of minor falls (that melted the same day), but today the snow finally arrived. Woke up to about five cm, and it should continue throughout today and tomorrow. Time to start thinking about snowboarding ;)

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