Gary Robinson's Rants

Sony's snub of MP3's

...But Sony doesn't play MP3. It seems it "supports" MP3 through conversion, and we all love trans-coded music, right? But nope, no playback of MP3.

Yes, seriously. Really, stop laughing. Transcoding is an abomination. Running your music through two lossy encoding steps is plain bad for the music if your standards are anywhere above 1950's AM radio technology. [From a most entertaining rant in cat /dev/DiBona/brain via Linux Journal]

500 Nigerian scammers arrested by Nigeria

My posting has been very light lately due to having so much going on in my business and personal lives. (In particular look out for a product update announcement here sometime real soon now). But this I thought was worth noting:

NIGERIAN AUTHORITIES have arrested more than 500 email scammers, including some high profile people, and seized more than $500 million worth of their assets.
...
According to AFP, amongst those court in the net were 419 previously "untouchable kingpins” including legislators, lawyers, politicians, bankers and public functionaries. [The Inquirer]

More cleaning up Python __init__() methods

A while ago I posted a suggestion for how to eliminate some mindless code in python __init__() methods when you want to assign instance attributes from __init__() args.

Henry Crutcher postedhis own solution on Thursday in the Python Cookbook.

I've combined the two approaches in a comment to that post (on the same page). I think it's getting to be a good solution.