Ala’a Ibrahim

For some time, I needed to convert a big number of files from mp3 to ogg format, as I didn’t see any loss of quality with the ogg format, also it need less space.

The problem was that I want to keep my id3 tags, rewriting them would be a pain in the a**. I searched the web for free tools to do that, but I couldn’t find any, maybe I didn’t look enough. So I had to implement it myself.

Also, as I’m learning ruby, I thought it would be a good idea to use it for the script.

The tools I needed to do this, were mplayer, id3tool, and oggenc (vorbis-tools). Also in order to utilize my quad-core processor, I built it in a multi-threaded way (not so much, but it works ).

Now, I noticed that oggenc takes a lot of time, more than mplayer, so it was loading my tmp directory, so I made the mplayer thread wait when oggenc has 20 or more in it’s queue to process. Also, for more utilization, I put 3 threads for the oggenc to process.

I think that the script can use some improvements, feel free to post your feedback.

The script is available at git-hub at http://github.com/alaaibrahim/mp3toogg

Enjoy

Every now and then I recieve some emails from Zend about training (I have an account there for the certifications I got), usualy they go directly into the trash. Continue reading

Economy is going Bad

I got this picture from a friend, it’s so cute, I know the economy is going bad, but I think that the cat exaggerated

“In the year 3000, YouTube,Twitter & FB will merge to form 1 super time wasting website called “YouTwitFace”
Conan O’Brian”

The cute thing is that Youtwitface.com already exists.
Lucky guys.

I’ve been expermenting with ruby for sometime now, and I’m really enjoying it, and I’m now coping with ‘#’ comments

Now one of the points that’s about functions, is how do they pass, by value, or by reference. So to try out Ruby. Continue reading