Marc Fearby’s Home Page

For the past ten years I have converted most of my CDs to MP3 format and, gradually, a sense of order has evolved. Now I have my collection sub-divided into the following folder structure: d:\mp3\artist\album. This is all good and well but the ID3 tag information in these files isn’t as pretty as my nicely-ordered folder structure, which became apparent when friends, family, and colleagues wouldn’t shut up about the virtues of iTunes and I tried to import my collection.

What I once regarded as a lovingly-ordered collection of music was reduced to rubble when iTunes tried to make sense of it all. It seems that I never before cared enough about ID3 fields in Winamp which resulted in iTunes separating “JS Bach” from “Bach” and “Bach, JS”. Needless to say, I was not impressed, and quickly discarded iTunes. However, I have grown tired of navigating through my folder structure in Winamp’s standard Windows common dialogue, so I have finally done something about it and have written a program to tidy-up my entire collection. Introducting: iTunes Preparation…

Yesterday, I searched the internet far and wide for a plugin for the Eclipse IDE that would provide functionality similar to the “code snippets” feature in Dreamweaver. Having found the CFEclipse plugin, and discovering that I may use the Snip Tree View only when using the CFEclipse perspective, I decided to search a little more to see if I couldn’t squeeze out some reference to the snippets feature of CFEclipse being used in the Java perspective.

I’ve always wanted a cuckoo clock and, although I didn’t buy it in Germany, my new timepiece is German made. On the main road in New Zealand between Hamilton and Rotorua is the small town of Tirau (meaning “place of many cabbage trees” in Maori; I don’t know what a cabbage tree looks like but I don’t remember seeing any of the vegetables) which is where I popped in to see The Clock Peddler.

Finally I have registered my own domain name so that I can have complete control over my web site, and for the princely sum of $9.95 Canadian a month, I get 1GB of space, 30GB monthly traffic, and a host of other goodies. Backing up and restoring the database was quite easy but getting my year-old stylesheet to work with the new WordPress was pretty time consuming (now I understand what Monkey was talking about).

Being a new year, I should measure my success, or lack thereof, as the case may be, with my new year’s resolutions for 2005:

This morning I read an article on ZDNet Australia titled “Andreessen: PHP succeeding where Java isn’t”, which is about a speech given by Internet browser pioneer, Marc Andreessen, wherein he predicts that PHP will inevitably become more popular than Java because of its simplicity. PHP might appear simple at first glance, but if you actually spend some time working with it, you begin to feel as though the language was built by a thousand monkeys at a thousand computers - the dumb kind employed by C. Montgomery Burns…

Yesterday, I finished reading the first work of fiction in a very long time. It was a book by Clive Cussler titled “White Death”. This particular author came very highly recommended by a good friend, and, not knowing which one would make a good introduction (and having to make a choice on the spot, at Narnia Bookshop in Tamworth), I chose “White Death”, only to find out later that my friend didn’t regard this particular story too highly. Oh well, what can you do?

I’ve often thought about this particular question, and usually give up because it’s not a very easy one to answer! Well, lately I’ve given it some more thought, and if I don’t at least get it written down, then I’ll have no way of seeing how my interests change over time.