Friday, June 30. 2006How wastefulI’m sure you’ve all heard it before - Creative is the iPod killer. Opera is the Firefox killer. Here’s a new one: the k3b killer. Seriously, who cares. Why are people so determined to kill wonderful products? They should spend more effort making crap products better (and I’m not talking about imitations), not playing down the already stunning ones. Friday, June 30. 2006Some Sort of Rule: last.fm. Firefox unintegration.As Seb points out, it is necessary to point out how awesome native last.fm support is. It is. One (as-yet unintegrated feature, it will probably be put in shortly after the string freeze ends) great feature of Last.fm is the custom radio station. Just enter some of your favorite artists and it puts together a stream of those artists and their related artists. Feel free to try a couple of mine, though of course its better if you pick your own artists.  Leo Franchi added a .protocol file to be installed with Amarok to support the lastfm:// protocol for Konqueror, like the links in the previous paragraph. Though Makefile.am isn't ever fun, it was a straightforward task: an app installing support for new protocols is obviously an issue that KDE decided to provide a solution for. I immediately got to thinking it would be cool to add such protocol support to Firefox as well. In Windows a registry edit is all that is required. After some help from irc.mozilla.org and Google, it appears to be completely impossible for a application to install a protocol into vanilla Linux Firefox. The user has to go in and add an entry to about:config manually. One suggestion I got was to write an extension, I asked if an extension could be installed from outside Firefox - no. Obviously not useful (though perhaps something last.fm should look into). If you have a Firefox built with Gnome support (eg, not a Firefox binary downloaded from mozilla.org), you can use gconftool-2 to add the necessary settings. Gconftool-2 is hardly ideal for what should probably be an install-time operation, it doesn't appear to do settings for all users (though I could be wrong). Thursday, June 29. 2006last.fmThis is my obligatory blog saying that native last.fm support in Amarok is bloody awesome. Wednesday, June 28. 2006Hooray, last.fm stream support in Amarok!
I'm very happy to break this news to you, as I think it's an incredibly cool feature: Amarok now has full support for last.fm streams. This includes advanced features known from the last.fm player, like skip/love/ban, cover images and metadata. Have a look:
 In true Amarok fashion, we have developed this feature with intense teamwork. The planning and first code was started at our K3M multimedia meeting. Seb Ruiz did the initial port of Muesli's original last.fm player code (Qt4) to Amarok. Then Ian Monroe improved the framework and added a proxy server, which was needed to make our engines understand the lastfm:// protocol. Soon we realized that an in-process server would not work; here my previous experience with server programming and Ruby kicked in: I ported the proxy to a tiny external Ruby script, with very low overhead. Now we were able to listen to a last.fm stream with Amarok for the first time, which rocked. Soon we noticed that the server script was bit too simplistic; it would not work with the Helix engine. To the rescue came our Helix expert Paul Cifarelli, who had never before programmed in Ruby. In a matter of hours he managed to improve the script, so that it now works with all engines. Then we added support for cover images from last.fm - they are shown automatically for each track the stream is playing. And our graphics artist Vadim Petrunin made some funky icons for the skip/love/ban buttons. Sounds complicated? It was  But it was a damn good hack, and we've enjoyed it immensely. You guys can lean back and enjoy your favourite music from last.fm in Amarok 1.4.1.Have fun  Tuesday, June 27. 2006Defeating Wordpress Trackback SpamUntil yesterday I was getting 200 trackback spams a day. Firstly I installed Trackback Validator, which works a treat at preventing trackback spam from going directly to your blog comments listing. But you still get an email about the trackback, even though it is already classified as spam. So I was looking through my referral logs and I noticed that I get a lot of visitors searching with the suspicious string “l3av3 a r3ply pr0udly p0w3r3d by w0rdpr3ss”. I used leet-speak so that google doesn’t flag up this site anew! So I edited the wordpress code to change that string. You can find it in footer.php, and this is editable in the theme editor in wordpress admin. Hope this helps some people out there! (But not too many as then the spammers will catch on…) I still wanted to attribute the blog to Wordpress, as it’s awesome, so the string now reads:
Update [30-Jun-2006]Actually, it turns out the www-redirect plugin I coincidentally activated on the same day as the above hack, had a bug that made it impossible to submit trackbacks and comments to this blog.. Although I still expect my measures to have some affect, I doubt it’ll be that much. Too good to be true eh? Update [25-Jul-2006]I changed the address for the site from http://methylblue.com/blog/ to http://www.methylblue.com/blog/, because I use the www-redirect plugin for Wordpress attacks by trackback spammers to the old address fail, as the POST is lost. Very little new trackback spam comes my way now and I’m hoping this is because I changed the string above. Tuesday, June 27. 2006Defeating Wordpress Trackback SpamUntil yesterday I was getting 200 trackback spams a day. Firstly I installed Trackback Validator, which works a treat at preventing trackback spam from going directly to your blog comments listing. But you still get an email about the trackback, even though it is already classified as spam. So I was looking through my referral logs and I noticed that I get a lot of visitors searching with the suspicious string “l3av3 a r3ply pr0udly p0w3r3d by w0rdpr3ss”. I used leet-speak so that google doesn’t flag up this site anew! So I edited the wordpress code to change that string. You can find it in footer.php, and this is editable in the theme editor in wordpress admin. Hope this helps some people out there! (But not too many as then the spammers will catch on…) I still wanted to attribute the blog to Wordpress, as it’s awesome, so the string now reads:
Update [30-Jun-2006]Actually, it turns out the www-redirect plugin I coincidentally activated on the same day as the above hack, had a bug that made it impossible to submit trackbacks and comments to this blog.. Although I still expect my measures to have some affect, I doubt it’ll be that much. Too good to be true eh? Update [25-Jul-2006]I changed the address for the site from http://methylblue.com/blog/ to http://www.methylblue.com/blog/, because I use the www-redirect plugin for Wordpress attacks by trackback spammers to the old address fail, as the POST is lost. Very little new trackback spam comes my way now and I’m hoping this is because I changed the string above. Monday, June 26. 2006Sunday, June 25. 2006Saturday, June 24. 2006Thursday, June 22. 2006Wednesday, June 21. 2006Thursday, June 15. 2006SimpleDaapClient finished
SimpleDaapClient is a Ruby script that connects to a non-Apple DAAP server (though old iTunes probably works), gets a listing and produces an XSPF playlist of the hosts entire database. The XSPF file contains much of the metadata so that Amarok can display it all. It turned out that Amarok didn't support XSPF files that specified their location. The alternative - to look up the song based on album and artist - was the only thing supported. So I had some fun debugging both the Ruby script that made the XSPF file and the decoder in Amarok at the same time.
I just put what I think are probably the finishing touches to SimpleDaapClient. Yesterday, Mark pointed out that if the recursive solution was too big for the stack, why not just make the stack bigger. Which I did, so I haven't made an iterative solution like I said I would last time. It is just a prototype after all. Though... I probably should find an iterative solution for Amarok itself. There's something satisfying about writing a Ruby script that uses 3x the memory of kdevelop. To use SimpleDaapClient.rb, first download it, make it executable, and find & replace "localhost" with the DAAP server of your choice. Then bump your stack size and run: ian@wasabi ~/soc/DAAP/trunk $ su wasabi trunk # ulimit -s 65536 wasabi trunk # su ian ian@wasabi ~/soc/DAAP/trunk $ ./SimpleDaapClient.rb This will create a /tmp/daap.xspf. So, just do something like `amarok /tmp/daap.xspf`. You need Amarok from revision 551863 (the newest at the time of this blog). And now... back to coding in C++ full time probably. I'll miss you Ruby! Thursday, June 15. 2006HypocritesJust started to read an article about the annoyances of websites over at some crappy news site. I’ve taken a second to apply their rules to their own website.
 A classic example of “do as I say, not as I do”… Wednesday, June 14. 2006DAAP with LISPy Ruby Code; Interproject Mingling
Now that I'm settled back in beautiful Kirksville, I've started working full steam on my Google Summer of Code project, which is to add iTunes music sharing to Amarok (also known as "DAAP support"). Currently the only maintained DAAP library is part of the Banshee project, so its in C#. Libopendaap and kio_daap (which has a fork/branch of libopendaap) hasn't been touched in a year and doesn't work for me, I think due to 64-bit issues (which I tried to diagnose, but it was entirely mysterious to me). Rhythmbox has its own implementation of DAAP, written as a SOC project last year and uses glib, so it quickly scared me a way.
So at the risk of being accused of "not written here", I've decided to write my own DAAP implementation, at least for the client-side (I'm still holding out hope for mt-daapd integration). I could make it a separate library for use by other KDE applications (Juk?); I will at least not couple it with Amarok to leave that option open (though I might go ahead and use metabundle...). To become familiar with the protocol, I've written a Ruby script (it doesn't do anything yet, but its on SVN). I think it will be possible to actually turn it into an Amarok script to provide bare-bones basic DAAP client support - basically the user would type in the IP address and all the tracks would be loaded into the playlist. Currently it gets a 'stack level too deep' error when trying to get a database listing, which I blame on learning LISP last semester. It uses the same sort of recursive algorithm we used in class all the time. It shouldn't be too difficult to rewrite it iteratively. One "interesting" feature of the iTunes implementation of DAAP is that it requires an almost DRM-like messed up MD5 hash, meant to reduce interoperability of iTunes with others. Luckily David Hammerton of libopendaap has already figured it out. If you have a spare minute you might check out that code, its pretty hilarious. I've never liked Apple, now I have a reason not to. (This means my Ruby prototype won't ever work with iTunes). A thanks also goes to James Willcox (snorp) of the Banshee project for pointing this out and providing other useful pointers. I consider Banshee to be Amarok's most significant competitor in the open source world, but I think we all recognize that our real competition isn't open source. On a similar note, I contacted Cole, a fellow SOCer who is implementing DAAP for XMMS2. He also determined that none of the current DAAP implementations are satisfactory and is implementing his own library as well. Though our conflicting library requirements mean we can't directly colloborate, I think we will be comparing notes as the summer continues. Wednesday, June 14. 2006 |
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