Patching is a Normal Activity

Wednesday, November 23, 2011.

This morning, while adding some songs to my iPod with gnupod, I hit a bug.

The error message was descriptive enough that it took all of 5 minutes to patch and be on my way. Gnupod is not great code, but it’s Perl, and unlike Rhythmbox – which has a problem where it syncs partial audio files, and is a big fat gui program written in a compiled language – I actually have a good chance of making it do what I want.

The two things I found interesting about this:

  1. I prefer the crappier but hackable code.
  2. Patching something seems like a perfectly normal activity in the context of “I want to listen to some music.”
Posted by Alan on Wednesday, November 23, 2011. (Discuss)

blog comments powered by Disqus
maelstrom

"After a little while I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see."

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story "Descent into the Maelstrom" by Harry Clarke, published in 1919.