Attention young people: Shut Up!

In what has to be one of the rather less well thought-out moments in history, the principal at a junior high school in Vermont has banned blogging. To be fair, he blanned it only during school time; students are free to go home and continue their blogging activities. His rationale for doing so was that "blogging is not an educational activity."

I'm sure there are other things that a student does with the school computer that are "not educational." Given that schools spend a lot of time trying to convince a student to "express himself" in one fashion or another, to "keep a record" of his life in a journal, the idea that on-line journaling is an unworthy exercise must be cover for some other conceit.

The principal does say that whenever a student puts his name and info on the 'net, he puts himself at risk for on-line predators. This may be true, but I see no evidence that this increased risk has actually materialized, and his further recommendation that parents monitor their kids' activity by going in after the fact and performing forensics on the household's browser cache, history, and cookie files doesn't seem to me to be the kind of activity that fosters trust between parent and child. Household rules about what is and is not permitted, and up-front discussion of the use of household filters, would much better serve the needs of a family.

btrnmetainfo.py

As most people here know, I'm a big fan of anime, and most of my anime comes to me via BitTorrent. One of things that I've found commonplace is that many trackers obfuscate or otherwise mangle their torrent names. BitTorrent is tolerant of these shennanigans and even has a handler to download the files "as named on the command line" or "as named in the file."

I prefer to know what I'm dealing with before I load it into the torrent handler directly, so I wrote the following little script. It takes any torrent file and renames it to match the internal file or directory name.

( The Code )

Another useful chunk of code: rn

Another piece of blindingly useful code (although in this case one that will help you cut your leg off at the knee if you're not careful), this is a program I use every freaking day, it seems like. rn is a little script that takes as its first argument a pcre regular expression, usually held between two single quotes, and then a list of files.

When it's done, the file names will all have been modified according to the expression. For example, let's say you have a bunch of files named, "Album - Artist - Song.mp3" and you want them named "Artist - Album - Song.mp3". You would type in:

rn 's/Album - Artist/Artist - Album/' *.mp3

Or, if you were feeling fancy:

rn 's/^(.*?) - (.*?) - /$2 - $1 - /' *.mp3

This makes in-place mass-revision of filenames very easy.

( The Code )