Amarok Blog

A friendly user has today created a screenshot of the latest Amarok from Git Master. I was rather surprised that it actually looks fairly decent on Windows (had expected worse things), and the user even said it also works pretty well, with the new Phonon-VLC backend.

Anyway, I wanted to share this with you, but please keep in mind: This is a preview of the next Amarok version. Some things (like the new toolbar) are not yet fully finished, so please don't complain about that.

A while ago I had written an article about the dangers of "micro-options" in software. Like many articles about usability, this one was discussed somewhat controversially (which is good in a way), but overall I did get a positive reception, even from a professional usability expert.

While this article was perhaps interesting, there was no "proof in the blog pudding". Let's be honest here, anyone can claim the wildest things in blogs, which may be true, or not. I did however stumble upon an interesting connection between psychology and usability, which appears to back up my speculations. The connection is this:

The Paradox Of Choice

Have you ever been in the following situation: You're in a supermarket. You want to buy a salad dressing, and the timing is somewhat tight. Guests are waiting, the usual...

Alright, found the "salad dressing" section (which can he hard in itself, in huge supermarkets). So, not much time, let's choose something that looks yummy, and preferably not too fatty! So, what do we have here? Vinaigrette, Blue cheese dressing, Caesar dressing, Honey Dijon, Hummus, Italian dressing, Louis dressing, Ranch dressing, Russian dressing, Tahini. Hmm. Nice choice. Let's go for some Italian Dressing, I like that one. Wait, there are three different brands of dressing, each of them offering further varieties of this product. Chef's Choice, Low Carb, Lite, Very Lite, and hey: the Special Edition!

Here is someone who can explain this problem of choice much better than I could ever do. His name is Barry Schwartz, he's a professor of psychology, and he made one of the best TED talks ever (according to the founder of TED himself):


TED Video: Barry Schwartz - Paradox of Choice


I very much recommend watching this video. Few have been disappointed by it, and I suppose you might find it enlightening too. It does explain many phenomena in our modern life in a surprisingly simple way. One of them can be translated to usability: Too many choices can reduce the user's satisfaction with a software product.

I'd be happy to read comments on this article, be it positive, or negative. Discussion is important, so I think we should do that. But please, do me one favor: Watch Barry's talk before commenting. Thanks

Dear Amarok and KDE users,

I'm sure that you have heard of the terrible earthquake disaster that has happened in Haiti. Current estimations of deaths range from 100,000 to 200,000, and this number keeps rising. What we are looking at is very likely one of the worst natural disasters of the last 10 years.

I would like to encourage our users to help Haiti in this situation, if you can. One way of doing this is by sending donations to international humanitarian groups that support helping Haiti. I'm sure there are other ways, if you know some concrete examples, please add a comment.

Please do not voice your opinion if you have any bizarre theories (be it from religious motives, political fearmongering, conspiracy theories, etc) about how this disaster happened. I've heard many of them, and there is no need to hear any more. This article is only about helping, but not discussing backgrounds.


Thanks.


Disclaimer: I do not speak for the Amarok team, nor do I speak for KDE. This article is a private matter.

Here's a little story I wanted to share with you. It's so bizarre, you might not believe it when you read it, but it really happened


Some back story:

A few months ago Amarok had migrated to Git, and then Konversation had migrated too. We had to write a special "commit hook" script for making the commits show up on IRC, via the CIA bot. This script was running on our Amarok server (called "Kollide"), and all was fine. At some point then we migrated our server to new hardware, as the old contract had expired. That also went really well.


What happened later:

At some point the CIA bot started to print everything twice. Yes, every single commit, all duplicated. I guess you can imagine how annoying that was. So we tried to debug this for weeks, looked at all scripts, at Gitorious, and whatnot. Noone was able to spot the bug, it was a mystery. Two days ago then we discussed this problem again in our #kde-git IRC channel, with Jeremy Whiting, and Eike Hein. Basically we were close to giving up on the whole thing. For fun, Jeremy said something like: "Hmm, what happened to your old server, btw?". That got us thinking. Then Eike compared the IP addresses of the server that sent out the commit message, and what did we see there: Two different IPs. What had happened:

The old server (we like to call it our "Shadow Server" now) had continued to run happily, because the hoster had forgotten to switch it off. So it was still running our web site, all sorts of other stuff, plus this little commit hook script!

When we realized what had happened there: There was just one possible reaction: Headdesk


Don't know about you, but we found that quite bizarre and funny, as noone had anticipated that (not even our admin)

This is the second part of my series of articles about "good music", which was originally planned to become a series of three. In the first article of this series I had talked about Progressive Rock. The plan was to do a follow-up on Electronic Music, and then one on Classical Music, but somehow I got inspired today to write about Rock Music instead, so I'm changing the plan a little.

As a preface I should again say that this is of course highly subjective. Tastes differ wildly, and talking about art is especially subjective. Why am I writing this? As a developer of a music player I simply get to hear a lot of music (all day, basically), and I've always been fascinated by music, although I'm personally not a musician. So, take all of this with a grain of salt. What motivated me to write this second part is that I did actually get some very nice feedback on the first article, including a fellow KDE developer talking to me at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit about this article, which I thought was really nice. Apparently there is some interest in talking about music, so let's just do that

Now I should explain why I originally didn't plan to write about Rock Music. The reason is a bit weird: I am somewhat ashamed of admitting that I do enjoy Rock, simply because there's so much crap in this genre. Again, this is highly subjective, but I just don't consider run-of-the-mill Rock very exciting. However, some bands managed to do Rock with a twist, either by adding components of other genres to it, or simply by being freaking good. Most of these "freaking good" bands also are versatile though, and they do incorporate different styles into their music.

Queen

It is pretty hard to describe Queen briefly. It's also pretty hard not to hit superlatives when talking about them, because they were very super in many regards. I personally consider Queen the best rock band of all times, that's probably the best way to sum it up. Queen also happened to be my first "love" in music, and to this day I love them just as much as I did when I was 14. What made them so special? First of all, their singer Freddie Mercury was simply as good as singers can get. Incredible vocal range, fantastic and unique voice. Freddie Mercury died in 1991 from AIDS, one of the first prominent victims of this virus. Back then this caused quite the media stir, as Freddie was more or less openly gay, and the media tried to do the best they could to explain that "the guy died because he was gay". I'm missing words to describe this stupidity, so let's switch to Brian May, their guitarist. May is in fact "Dr May" now, as he has recently completed his PhD in astrophysics, and he's currently listed at #39 of Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". It's hard to call the man anything else than a genius, if you have ever listened to his compositions and guitar work.

Freddie Mercury was able to switch effortlessly between Falsetto voice and Modal voice (what you would consider the normal voice), without really pausing or causing a hitch in the transition. As far as I know, this is pretty difficult to do, and not mastered by many. In my mind, I always had the image of him using his voice more like a musical instrument than just a voice, much like a trumpet. He was able to start deep, and then lifting it up, higher and higher. If you try that at home, chances are you'll end up with a sore throat next morning.

If you care about music at all, you should listen to some Queen songs. Some recommendations for especially good songs: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Who Wants To Live Forever", "The Show Must Go On".

U2

This band is a bit of a strange bag. I have some sort of love/hate relationship with them, caused by a moral dilemma: Their music is among the best you can get. Their believe system is comparable to a fruit cake.

U2 is an Irish band, but these days they are more like a worldwide corporation. Their singer Bono is a bit of a controversial person. On the one hand, the guy is simply a good singer. On the other hand, he tends to get a bit over his head, meddling in politics, trying to cure world hunger, and kissing the Pope's ring. One of his latest escapades even made it to Slashdot. You be the judge if this man can be liked. My opinion: It's important to separate the personal from the professional. And professionally, this band simply is damn good. Bringing us to the next important band member:

The Edge, who is the guitarist and main composer of U2. I personally find him more likable than Bono, but all this is of little relevance. What is relevant to me is that Edge is a very good guitarist, with a unique style that is different from most other guitarists. His electrical guitar soli are rarely there for showing off, but more for creating a mood, and that he does masterfully.

It is important to note that most of U2's brilliant albums (they also made some crappy ones) were co-written by Brian Eno, who is widely known as one of the most influential persons in the music industry. My suspicion is that Eno is the true mastermind behind U2, as all albums with him tend to be masterful. The rest, not so much.

Some recommendations for U2 songs: "One", "With Or Without You", "Unknown Caller".

Honorable Mentions

Here are some more "rock" artists that I enjoy (they are all not classic rock'n' roll bands, but let's keep it at that):

The Verve

Guns 'N Roses

Pink Floyd

Frank Zappa

R.E.M.

I hope you enjoyed this article a bit, thanks for reading! And as always - I'd love to hear some feedback

Nice holidays and a happy Hackmas to all of our users, developers, and basically to everyone else too




PS:
There are two easter eggs hidden in this xmas blog article. If you can spot them, you deserve one extra "Happy Hackmas" from me

Some of you might have heard about the Malware incident that recently has hit our friends from gnome-look.org. While some of you might chuckle about it because it hit the competition, there really is nothing to chuckle about, because the next target could easily be us. In fact someone might be uploading a Malware component at this very moment. Noone could tell until it's too late.

So, there have been some discussions about possible solutions for this issue. Some have proposed that we add a review process to all of this, so that anything that gets uploaded gets a security check from some KDE developers. That's a neat idea on paper. But only there. This couldn't possibly work out, for two reasons: 1) Manpower - We simply don't have enough of that. 2) Responsibility - Who wants to be responsible for letting Malware slip through your fingers? This can happen to anyone, and it would be pretty embarrassing. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for anything.

Back when we designed the scripting system for Amarok 2 (QtScript, in-process), Ian Monroe and I realized that there isn't really any way to make it secure on a technical level. Sandboxing, automatic malware detection, flying cars - all this works somehow in theory, but in reality it requires some Bruce Schneier to do it, which we don't have (there is only only one Schneier, I guess). So basically we realized that the system would be unsafe, and that we would have to live with it. Amarok is very vulnerable to Malware scripts, because scripts can access most of Amarok, and Qt, and whatnot. Any Joe Schmoe could hack up a two-liner script that deletes your $HOME. So we accepted that reality, and tried to think of some other methods for making it all safer. What we came up with is this:

Mandatory Version Control

Basically our idea was that all Amarok scripts (and the same could help with other download components) would have to be hosted in a public version control system (VCS). This system could for instance be SVN, simply because it's relatively easy to learn, and we could use a central server for it. These are the three advantages that we'd expect from the proposed system:

Malware. With a VCS, it's very easy to tell who inserted Malware, and when this person did this. This fact alone would provide some accountability, and I think it might prevent a good deal of attempts of messing around with the code. And even if it happened anyway, it would be trivial to revert the change, and we would just ban the person who did this from ever committing to this repository again. Another positive effect is the sheer number of developer eyes on this code, which could catch many issues before they become a problem. Currently we have this #kde-commits channel on IRC, and some developers are watching it (if only to kill some time). I think something similar could work with this system.

Abandonware. One of the major issues we had with Amarok 1.x scripts was the sheer amount of forks. Developer A created script A1, then developer B came along, forked the same thing (in other words, copied the code), enhanced it a bit, and released it as B1. This left us with a huge amount of varieties of the same script, and noone could really tell which version was maintained at all. With a VCS, developer B could simply take over maintainership of script A1, if for some reason developer A stopped maintaing it (which happens all the time).

Crapware. Learning the VCS means an extra hurdle for contributors. This can be seen both as a disadvantage, or as an advantage, depending on the point of view. That's because learning something like SVN is pretty simple, and yet it would prevent very unexperienced programmers (who are also missing motivation) from starting the project, in the first place. But it's easy enough that it probably wouldn't prevent someone from doing it who really is motivated, which is probably for the better. So it might just work out in reality.

As an addendum, I should say that this system could only work if we enforce it, making it mandatory for all scripts and any kind of program code that is reachable via GHNS. Making this system optional wouldn't solve anything, because then a Malware person could still merrily go ahead with his/her evil intentions.

To sum it up, I think that this approach could really help us, and all that's missing is a practical implementation. We would have to work together with the kde-apps.org people (mainly Frank Karlitschek), and the GHNS developers, and then set up an official VCS repository (maybe KDE SVN, maybe something else). I'd be interested in hearing your opinions about this proposal, so please leave a comment if you have an opinion on it

Short article about a new project we started:

ColdStorage

What is ColdStorage? Well, basically it used to be a Vaporware project, started about two weeks ago, which is now no longer Vaporware. It started out with some of us KDE folks getting fed up with existing solutions for using Git as a backup tool (for backing up $HOME, etc). There are a number of existing projects that try to do the same, but I found none of them working, either not working at all, or not fully working.

So we thought, hey, let's give it a try by doing it ourselves. What we started with was a basic idea, a cool name, a Git repository, an IRC channel (#coldstorage on Freenode), two developers, and a bunch of code stubs. Thanks to Thomas Zander, we now actually have some code. Thomas managed to create some initial code for it basically on a Sunday evening.

Now, the project is still in very early stages, but in the FOSS spirit I wanted to announce it anyway, since my feeling is that the more people know about it, the more contributors we might attract, and the faster we can get it done. After all, what we want is a tool that just works, as quickly as possible.


Here's some more info about ColdStorage:

ColdStorage is a backup tool using Git at its core.

Written in C++, with QtCore.

GPL v3 licensed.

Multi-platform (in so far as Git is multi-platform, not sure how far the Windows support is).

Still in its very early stages of development, but the core functionality is there.

If you are interested in helping out, come join us sometime on IRC