Fun challenge vs. trivial hard work

I realise, that I might not be the typical visotor to this site. I have been using PHP profesionally for around four years. Still there are many aspects I've never got around to, since work is mostly repetition.

I did not participate in last contenst and will not participate in this one for the following two reasons:

:::1:::

If I enter a contest, I want to win or lose to a superior opponent. Losing to an inferior opponent because the judge has a thing for pink makes me quite agitated.

Presentation is an important part of web and PHP is a web language. However, judging on presentation makes is a designer contest -- not a coding contest.

Speed is also an important part of web. But a 300% performance boost is irrelevant if the page takes under one second to load. A 10% performance boost is however very relevant if the entire operation takes hours.

Which brings be down to the most important factor: Code design and readability. If the code nothing but command after command in a murky pool or is it well laid out, well commented, well organised in objects and will it be possible to further develop the code in 6 months.


::::2::::

If I enter a contest, I want to learn from the experience. I don't want to reaffirm my skills by coding something I know will succeed. That would be nothing more than har trivial work. I want a real challenge that requires research, thinking and finally coding.

A few suggestions:

- MP3 statistics: Find all MP3 files on the harddrive and display statistics such as total playing time and average bit rate. This is somewhat easy with tagless constant bitrate files, but requires a lot more work when tags are present and variable bitrate.

- Simple 3D render: One source of light, any number of primitive 3D objects (box, pyramid and sphere).

---continued---

sorry for posting annoynously.
My name is Allan Hansen and I work as a software developer in Copenhagen, Denmark.

few weeks ago when I learned about file and directory handling, I told my self to experiment with my own harddisk. And it was just exactly like you said, I was searching all my music files using php script, and then automatically convert them to MySQL database. But I had no idea how to obtain the mp3 information such as playing time, bit rate, etc. So I just had the file size. Any idea? (ups, sorry Matt, I guess my reply already goes beyond PHP Coding Contest).

Technical information about MP3 files:
http://www.id3.org/mp3frame.html

PHP example that calculates playing time, bitrate and more. Works only with MP3 files without tags and constant bit rate. If variable bitrate is used, you'll have to read through the entire file...

/Allan Hansen

Forgot the last link:
http://www.phazer.dk/php/?dn=mpeg.php

Thanks for the links, though I don't really understand the article. Bad learner

The exact reason I probably wont enter this one.. Writing the parser was fun, although my *cough* display abilities aren't exactly up to the challenge.

-r