eean

Entries from May 2006

Wednesday, May 31. 2006

Just for the log... Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 01:07

...the first piece of opensource, I've ever written. Back at the age of 15, pretty much exactly 10 years ago. Funnily back then nobody really seemed to care or know what opensource is. Neither did anyone really realize the power behind. Except a few developers, of course. Nice to see how things have changed in retrospect. Let's just imagine what could be done in another decade. I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks to google for caching it. I wouldn't have a backup otherwise, I reckon.

COMUnit at Google Groups.

Tuesday, May 23. 2006

gearing up Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 05:07

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gearing up

We've been getting into some of the nitty gritty details of the multimedia meeting in the Netherlands this weekend. Like with the help of the Wikipedia picture of Amsterdam's Centraal Station, we decided that I would meet Leinir on the west side of the main entrance on that blank wall. Hoo-ray for the Internet.

First order of business: How do you pronounce Leinir?

Since I dislike walking, and its the "when in Rome" thing to do besides, I'll probably be renting a bicycle for Thursday. If I'm not too jetlagged, and after looking at the other touristy things to do during the day in Amsterdam, I decided to see the Van Gogh museum again. The things I didn't do in Amsterdam the last time, like the Anne Frank house or the Heinkein Experience (Come on Heinkein, 10 Euros? Budweiser makes watery beer, but at least Grant's farm is free and has a zoo!) still don't sound as appealing.

Thursday, May 11. 2006

Backends, Phonon, GStreamer Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 13:43

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Backends, Phonon, GStreamer

Chris Schaller's (a gstreamer dev) blog, as pointed out by Aaron Seigo, does pretty much miss the point. KDE has already been down the road of hitching up to the one true media framework. GStreamer simply does not offer "a believable API/ABI stability guarantee that covers kde4's lifespan." And one can't really blame it, we can't even be sure how long KDE4 will last. And portablity as well - why wouldn't KDE use the available "advanced media frameworks on other platforms" (as Schaller puts it)?

So an abstract multimedia layer is just a technical necessity for a project like KDE. However some of the issues Schaller identified are in fact real issues, ones we've experienced developing amaroK. We have an abstract multimedia backend system. One thing we've discovered is that it is very important to make sure all engines are fully functional. A user can only use one engine at a time. So an engine that is less then functional is actually quite damaging to the application - Murphy's law dictates that distros will pick the least functional backend as the default. We've considered options such as notifying the user of features that their engine lacked. But ultimately whats the point of an incomplete or instable engine when a better one exists? So a few days ago, amaroK's gstreamer engine was turned off - the Xine and Helix backends are fine, there are several open bugs on it and it does not support streaming yet. Phonon should have a similar policy of not tolerating incomplete engines.

So Schaller's points regarding the problems of having 5 different engines is one to be concerned about - however there is really no reason why Phonon has to have 5 engines and I hope it doesn't. Any additional released engine should have some justifaction (like the advanced features of NMM).

Thursday, May 11. 2006

Concluding the Delete Controversy? Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 01:57

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Concluding the Delete Controversy?

I borrowed the delete dialog from JuK at the suggestion of a bugzilla comment.

It also cleaned up the code a bit; previously it was respecting the setting from Konqueror which for some reason resulted in a lot of redundant Trash/Delete code.

We're in a string freeze so it won't be in until 1.4.1.

Wednesday, May 10. 2006

To Europe Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 11:30

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To Europe

Got my e-ticket in the mail this morning: I'm going to Europe! First, flying into Amsterdam, where I will probably sleep all day and party all night. Not because I'm some sort of nocturnal party animal, but Europe is 7 hours ahead of Missouri so I don't have much choice. Last time I went to Europe (flew into Amsterdam that time as well) I got over my jet lag fairly quickly through the judicious use of naps; hopefully this time will be the same.

I just loved Amsterdam last time I was there, a big city with lots bike traffic instead of car or vespa.

From there we go on south to the Multimedia Meeting. It will be great to finally see all these people I've known over IRC for >1 year in the flesh. I'm still in the midst of finals this week, next week I plan on preparing some ideas to bring to the meeting. This semester I had a Software Engineering class, some of it was academic silliness, but I think some of it might be useful to think about. Especially in light of how the latter stages of this 1.4 release has been marked by many regressions. I think some "system decomposition" is in-order (read: reorganize the source tree). Automatic regression testing would also be a useful tool. Sometimes I think a more formal decision making process would make sense, though this would be contrary to how amaroK has ever done things.

We do certainly need to gain some consensus on when would be the best time to start amaroK 2.0 development. Personally I'm in the "as soon as 1.4 is doing well" camp.

From there Seb and I are going to tour around a bit. Seb wants to go to Belgium for some reason, but it is only like 10 minutes away from the MM meeting, so why not. Then I'm going to London; I've never been to England before so that should be fun.

I will join Seb in thanking the folks at KDE.nl like Martijn Klingens and Adriaan de Groot for organizing the event, and of course, paying for my ticket.