A while ago I wrote a quick tip on how to mount an ipod in linux, I did this while working on a python script that would retrieve all my music from my ipod and put it back into a file structure of my choosing with file and directory names that a human being can understand. The reason for this is simply the fact that I kept rating music over time and ended up rating everything - an information I don’t want to loose as I migrate all music onto my phone.

I’ve never been much of a python guy. Now there’s this production environment where we’ve got a few basic things like bash, ruby (since we’re using puppet) and python. Our Java based software has a nice JMX interface with a bunch of lifesavers in it and each JVM has the jolokia agent running (http/json access to jmx) so we can access this goodness fairly easily from scripts and/or the shell. So far what we’d be doing would be something like this: