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Oh dear. Whoever decided it was a good idea to go after Wikipedia on what is essentially a free use matter had better have their seatbelts fastened.
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Having worked inside the beast, I can’t say I’m surprised that the end user lost out to the ad industry in that decision.
Day: August 3, 2010
Finishing a messy filesystem merge with DeltaWalker
Almost six months ago, I managed to create a big mess 0n my outboard media drive with iTunes, when, while trying to consolidate all my music onto a new 1TB drive, I managed only a partial move and ended up with files strewn across the old drive and two different directory trees on the new drive. I’ve spent the time since in a lot of manual moving of files, since the Mac does not support merging two different directories with the same name.
I was able to clear up the top level confusion easily enough by doing a diff on directory listings from the top level directories, but that still left issues with subdirectories that had the same names but different contents. I thought I’d be doing the project forever. I tried a couple different tools to help. Path Finder was the nicest UI that I worked with, but it still only supported manual comparison and synchronization of the two directory trees.
I finally broke down and looked harder, and found an amazing tool, DeltaWalker, that seems as though it were designed for exactly the nightmare I faced. Point it at a pair of directories and it will highlight all the differences between them–missing subdirectories on one side or the other, or subdirectories whose contents are different in the two different locations. You can filter the output, too, so that you only have to see the differences that you care about (I didn’t need to know how many folders were in my target directory and not my source). And when you find files that have to come over, it’s a button click to make the move.
Once I found DeltaWalker, it took only about an hour to finish cleaning up the mess that I had started over six months before. It’s an awesome tool, and one I can’t believe I had never seen before.
Marking the calendar for 140
I got my official “save the date” mailer for the Virginia Glee Club’s 140th Anniversary celebration last night. I haven’t been to a reunion weekend since the 125th back in 1995, so am eagerly looking forward to attending.
Not least on the reasons that I want to return: the opportunity to sing under four great Club conductors. I haven’t seen John Liepold since 1996 or so, so am looking forward to renewing acquaintances. I only met Bruce Tammen once, at a Clubhouse party in the late 90s. I had a blast singing with Frank Albinder’s Glee Club this spring when the group came through on their Northeastern tour.
And I’m especially interested to sing with Donald Loach. While I came into the group at a time when there were still a lot of hurt feelings over the separation in 1989, the more I learn about his tenure as Club director (still the longest serving at 25 years), the more respect I have for him and what he was able to accomplish. It should be interesting to see what happens.