Torsten Curdt’s weblog

It’s already a while since we are back from Gent. But somehow I did not yet find a quite minute to sit back and write about it. Well, here we go…

But I won’t talk about beautiful Gent. I won’t talk about the cool hackathon with the excellent ribs afterwards. And I won’t talk about the tasty beer. What I’d like to talk about are the people – the community – and the spirit.
It was just great seeing so many people back again. What before was a “putting faces to names” -which already was great by itself- became much more. At least that’s the feeling I got. It almost felt like seeing old friends again. We talk to each other on or off the list, via instant messaging …sometimes we even talk on the phone. If we are near we try to meet. Not talking just about geek stuff but also about personal matter and life. Tell jokes. Spend time.

Feels really great to be a part of this!

Today I got the final draft for the jakarta commons book I have been working on with some other folks. I cannot believe it took so long. Should be in the stores soon.

Need an idea for a christmas present? ;-)

About 80 people in a room, wireless networking and a lot of community spirit.
First let’s kill some bugs…

Again it’s time for traveling to Gent. It’s time for the Cocoon GetTogether.
I am really looking forward meeting up with all my fellow Cocooners. Discussing new development ideas next to a beer or just catching up on what’s up in private life. Gonna be great fun!

…need to catch the train …see you there!

Still in the process of organizing my music collection I came across two amazing tools. Tagging mp3s using tools with freedb support is great but it does not help identifying single songs.
Musicbrainz and moodlogic to the rescue! Both tools use some kind of fingerprint to identify the songs. While musicbrainz is free, moodlogic is comercial and you have to pay for the amount of analyzed songs. (ripoff!) But they also have a different focus: musicbrainz is a tagger (with in some parts a horrible user interface. Please remove this browser nonsense from the GUI!) Moodlogic is more an alternative too iTunes with even smarter smart playlists. While the results from moodlogic are impressive, musicbrainz still did a good job and recognized a lot of songs. (Still room for improvements though) The good thing about musicbrainz – it’s cross platform. Not open-source (except the API) but at least not Windows only like moodlogic.

Anyway both did a very good job and I hope support for such a service will find its way into [your favorite mp3 tool here]. Great stuff!