Higher Logics

Ensō is an interesting new language being developed by Alex Loh, William R. Cook, and Tijs van der Storm. The overarching goal is to significantly raise the level of abstraction, partly via declarative data models. They recently published a paper on this subject for Onwards! 2012 titled Managed Data: Modular Strategies for Data Abstraction . Instead of programmers defining concrete classes, managed data requires the programmer to define a schema describing his data model, consisting of a description of the set of fields and field types. Actual implementations of this schema are provided by "data managers", which interpret the schema and add custom behaviour. This is conceptually similar to aspect-oriented programming, but with a safer, more principled foundation. A data manager can implement any sort of field-like behaviour. The paper describes a few basic variants: BasicRecord: implements a simple record with getters and setters. LockableRecord: implements locking on...

I've been reorganizing my media library using the very cool MusicBrainz Picard , but of course all my m3u files broke. So I wrote the free M3U.NET library , and then wrote a utility called FixM3U that regenerates an M3U file by searching your music folder for the media files based on whatever extended M3U information is available: > FixM3u.exe /order:title,artist foo.m3u bar.m3u ... The M3U.NET library itself has a fairly simple interface: // Parsing M3U files. public static class M3u { // Write a media list to an extended M3U file. public static string Write(IEnumerable<MediaFile> media); // Parse an M3U file. public static IEnumerable<MediaFile> Parse( string input, DirectiveOrder order); // Parse an M3U file. public static IEnumerable<MediaFile> Parse( IEnumerable<string> lines, DirectiveOrder order); } The 3 exported types are straightforward. A MediaFile just has a full path to the file itself and ...

Having run into a scenario where I had directories with many duplicate files, I just hacked up a simple command-line solution based on crypto signatures. It's the same idea used in source control systems like Git and Mercurial, basically the SHA-1 hash of a file's contents. Sample usage: DupDel.exe [target-directory] The utility will recursively analyze any sub-directories under the target directory and build an index of all files based on their content. Once complete, duplicates are processed in an interactive manner where the user is presented with a choice of which duplicate to keep Keep which of the following duplicates: 1. \Some foo.txt 2. \bar\some other foo.doc > The types of files under the target directory are not important, so you can pass in directories to documents, music files, pictures, etc. My computer churned through 30 GB of data in about 5 minutes, so it's reasonably fast.