Amarok Blog

Monday, July 31. 2006

Microsoft Photosynth looks impressive

Photosynth is a software aiming at detecting and combining several similar photos to create a big 3D world. Pictures (or rather a vido in that case) speak more than a thousand words: Watch Microsoft Photosynth in action.

The software seems also to be able to find similar pictures to a given photo and even promises to automatically identify known objects on images of various different sources.

Posted by in muesli at 01:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, July 30. 2006

gscanbus

I’ve discovered a neat little tool in order to monitor IEEE1394 (firewire) devices on linux. It’s called gscanbus. It allows monitoring of devices for debugging purposes, and as I’m doing some work with firewire for my thesis, it should be quite useful. Having said that, it was a little painful to setup on fedora core 4, the machine I have at uni. For anybody else struggling, now or in the future, make sure that the raw1394 module is located in the right place, else it won’t be found.

ln -s /dev/raw/raw1394 /dev/raw1394

hopefully this helps someone in the future.

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 20:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Battery died

I just had my MacBook for a few weeks and now the battery already died. It won't power up without its power-adapter at all, and once it is running OS X just tells me "No batteries available". Seems I am not the only one.

Guess I got to go to the Apple Store tomorrow and ask for a quick replacement. I just hope I don't have to wait weeks for a silly new battery. First revision Apple products... what did ya expect.

sigh,

muesli

Posted by in muesli at 04:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, July 26. 2006

Laptop (un)love

The epic story of failing computer hardware which has come into my hands is surely as depressing as ever. I’ve sent my motherboard back to the vendor, to be checked and replaced if necessary. Warranty expires in another 2 weeks, phew. If the motherboard comes back clean, I’ll have to send in the RAM.

I knew I would be without my pc for a little while, so I decided to update the laptop’s kernel, and stay fresh with all things kde related. My distro of choice is arch - a trustworthy, handrolled, bleeding edge release, which is easy to maintain, especially to update and super fast. Unfortunately, leaving such a distro stagnant without updating causes havoc when bringing it up to speed. My biggest problem, by far, was troubleshooting the madwifi drivers for my atheros based wifi card. With kernel updates, and my own custom built modules, nothing worked.

I spent three days trying to fix it, playing with modprobe and all those fun games. So much frustration caused me to boot into the kubuntu livecd and simply overwrite the partitions with it. I’ve been quite impressed with kubuntu, especially the way which it sparkles and glitters. I loved the fade in splash . It recognised my wifi card immediately, but having to use sudo for every command is irritating me. Oh well. Apt worked well too, but it still isn’t anywhere near as awesome as pacman is for arch. It was a breeze to install suse’s knetworkmanager, which is just great. Use it, if you have a wireless network. I suppose with all good and polished things come the downsides too, unfortunately. I have found kubuntu too slow to be able to use. Keep in mind that I need every bit of fast when using my 700mhz laptop, and all the functionality which is loaded comes at a price. Perhaps I haven’t found the best way to streamline the distro, but unless I can get it to a comparable speed to arch, I’ll probably have to return to my favourite type of i686 optimised packages: handrolled to perfection.

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 08:55 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, July 25. 2006

Using Ketchup to manage your kernel sources

Today I discovered Ketchup, a little command-line tool to manage your Linux kernel sources. If you're one of the weirdos, who is still compiling his kernel manually for whatever reason (like I do), I can only recommend it. Ketchup nicely eases up the entire process of checking for updates and applying them to your system.

Let's not hesitate and look at few usage examples... Want to know what's the latest version of a particular kernel-tree?

$ ketchup -s 2.6

2.6.17.7

$ ketchup -s 2.6-mm

2.6.18-rc1-mm2

Let's play with your kernel sources a bit. First of all, you surely want to check what version you currently got lying around...

$ cd /usr/src/linux

$ ketchup -m

2.6.17.6

Let's assume there is a newer kernel version available and you want to download it, bunzip it, revert the old patch and apply the new one. Nothing easier than that:

# cd /usr/src/linux

# ketchup 2.6-tip

2.6.17.6 -> 2.6.17.7

Applying patch-2.6.17.6.bz2 -R

Applying patch-2.6.17.7.bz2

That's really it. It will download the patches, revert and apply them, so all you will have to do is watch and wait

Switching to an entirely different kernel versions is just as easy:

# cd /usr/src/linux

# ketchup 2.6.16.2

Final note: If Ketchup should abort with a gpg error, then it couldn't verify the patch's or kernel's signature. Either add the 2.6 public key to your keyring (this is the proper solution) or call Ketchup with an additional -G parameter (this will override signature checking). I'd suggest the former, which is really easy to do by downloading it from a public pgp server:

# gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 0x517D0F0E

Have fun compiling,

muesli

Posted by in muesli at 23:43 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, July 24. 2006

TODO: Xbox 360 Streaming From Amarok

I haven’t written this yet. But I’ve been googling for information, and I’m stuck. So here’s an appeal to the wider community.

Xbox 360 can accept streams from Windows Media Center Edition. But I don’t have that, does anyone? So I want to stream from Amarok. Can anyone recommend something that can do this already, or a whitepaper about it? Am I going to have to reverse engineer the MS protocol? Because that may put me off unless someone can give me some pointers.

If I made it I’d make it an independent app to Amarok and then interface it. Is there some general purpose streaming solution out there that I may be able to write a plugin or something for? As reinventing the wheel is not for me.

With this feature I could play geometry wars while listening to some of my collection, which would be nice as the GW theme gets a little repetitive after about 30 seconds.

Please don’t slate me for my 360 purchase! It rocks too much for me to not have one.

Real URL: http://www.methylblue.com/blog/?p=48

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 10:24 | Comments (2)

TODO: Xbox 360 Streaming From Amarok

I haven’t written this yet. But I’ve been googling for information, and I’m stuck. So here’s an appeal to the wider community.

With this feature I could play geometry wars while listening to some of my collection, which would be nice as the GW theme gets a little repetitive after about 30 seconds.

Please don’t slate me for my 360 purchase! It rocks too much for me to not have one.

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 06:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, July 22. 2006

What happened to FidoNet?

Usenet just doesn't cut it for me. Too much spam, too little quality, too much hassle. Not just once I've been thinking about the good old FidoNet and started wondering what actually happened to it.

So I googled a bit and read up on the topic. Basically the net still exists and it's not that hard to setup your own point/node and start receiving Fido message packages via the Internet. The Nodelist flags were adapted to the new situation, of course (itn,ibn). I'm currently really pondering setting up a system myself (again).

The only thing stopping me so far is one simple question: How much is really going on there nowadays? Anyone got some stats on Echomail? The Nodelist itself doesn't seem too impressive: "just" a few thousand nodes are left. I remember the file being at least four-times as big

Hopefully there's still some active FidoNet user out there, willing to answer my questions...

Posted by in muesli at 00:58 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, July 20. 2006

Good News: eBay bows to consumer pressure

In my last blog entry I ranted about the perceived downfall of eBay. I have good news for all of you: As a reader pointed out, eBay reacted to my blog and is now changing their strategy. Quoting a Yahoo News article:

SAN FRANCISCO - It has been clear to investors for some time that eBay Inc. has been losing the luster that turned the online auctioneer into an e-commerce bellwether. Now, CEO Meg Whitman is finally acknowledging things have been off kilter and is hoping to set things right by raising fees on the online stores that had been diverting traffic from eBay's auctions.

"We are trying to get back to the essence of eBay," Whitman said Wednesday during an interview.

Who's to say bloggers have no power?

Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 15:51 | Comments (39) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, July 19. 2006

The rise and fall of eBay

About two years ago I started using eBay to satisfy my hunger for books. I love reading books, and when a friend recommended to try eBay because it's a "cheap and fun way of buying books", I became intrigued and tried it. Turned out, eBay was a paradise for book lovers indeed. Every week I would buy one book, mostly English language literature which is hard to obtain here in Germany. I bought from private auctions exclusively, and with a bit of luck and good timing rarely paid more than 1 or 2 Euros per book. Usually, after two or three days I would receive my little package in the mail. I was in heaven.

Those were the good times. Nowadays, things look drastically different on ebay.de:

"Sofort & Neu" means "Buy now & Unused", and this is the heart of the problem: There are hardly any real private auctions left on eBay. Instead, the majority of auctions are really just sales, mostly from commercial book traders. As you can see, the prices are often ridiculously high: 28,90 Euro for one book, you'd think the thing was printed on gold. At this point it's easier and cheaper to just go to Amazon and buy the book there.

Whatever happened to private auctions? Once upon a time eBay was synonymous with "The internet auction house". Nowadays, it's just a shopping marketplace.

I want my old eBay back.

Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 03:41 | Comments (12) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, July 10. 2006

iTunes Music Sharing Client Works

The title pretty much says it. You can now stream from local subnet iTunes, Banshee, mt-daapd/Firefly hosts.

Assuming you have Zeroconf set up - I will be adding a "add host" button for users with KDE 3.3 and I suspect the great majority of users who don't have Zeroconf set up at all. At least under Linux, Zeroconf is an ironic name as I actually had to edit some /etc files to get it to work. However to be frank, I'm sure most of our users know what a hostname and an ip address is; shouldn't be too painful to suggest they add hosts manually until Zeroconf configuration difficulties get ironed out. Hopefully the distros work it out, as I bet some of them already are.

Currently its kind of hidden, you have to go to Amarok Configuration and add a "DAAP" media device. And then click "connect" in the media device tab. Assuming you have Zeroconf setup, you should see any local DAAP (aka Music Sharing) servers. I hope to integrate it into the collection browser in the near-future.

In a nifty example of code re-use, the Ruby proxy written for Last.fm doubles as the proxy for DAAP. Last.fm needed a proxy to take out the "sync" commands; DAAP needs a proxy due to silly post-4.5 iTunes requiring DRM-like hashes to be part of the HTTP GET command.

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 22:36 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

Destroying a legend

How sad is that?

I don't understand what was going on in Zidane's head at that moment.

What a career-ender

I just hope people will remember him for other things than this foul.

Must say, I quite enjoyed the world-cup over the last month. Sometimes I really wish it would take place more often than just every four years. Then again, maybe it's only so exciting, because it's a once-in-four-years happening you just don't want to miss.

Congratulations to Italy, something the tifosi can surely embrace during the disturbing time of mach-fixing allegations.

See you in another four years, I reckon.

Posted by in muesli at 01:26 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, July 6. 2006

The awesome Ruby community

The Ruby community never fails to amaze me. The other day I ran into problems with socket programming (in fact it was for the Amarok last.fm support). So I asked the friendly folks on #ruby-lang for advice. Advice I was given, and much more than that: One guy (hi Michael!) actually checked out and built Amarok from SVN, refactored the complete script (I know now how truly masterful Ruby code looks), then spent several hours tracking down a complicated bug and fixed it for me. He effectively saved our release with this contribution.

#ruby-lang is just like that. Whether you have a silly newbie question or a complicated problem, you will get help. And also I go there for playful banter

By the way, in case you haven't seen it yet, here's a sneak preview of the awesome new Ruby homepage:

Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 17:07 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

KDE Everywhere - Malta

So finally I came round to blog about my Malta travel, more specific, the krusade.

After having some troubles preparing the monsterious big Kay for the journey, I was quite surprised how well it worked. Although - I of course forgot the adhesion to make the 5 pieces one big Kay, I first had to find something sticky, which wasn't as easy as I thought, anyway I got the adhesion and was able to start clogging.

So as I get very hyperactive when I have to do such a precise and important work (I had exactly one try), it took me about 3 hours to get the Kay finished (most time was probably used for shouting, crying and freaking).
Hopefully understandable that I didn't want to leave it, but it was evening and the class crew was preparing for going out - what does a nerd do? - right! - he takes the Kay with him (awful idea though). Of course the Kay was suffering from all the Heineken and smoke, so that it wasn't very good looking when we came home, that's when I got the intuition that I might should have protected it with a transparent plastic shild thing.

But it survived the night and was able to go with use to Valetta (capital city of Malta). Wasn't easy to find a good backround for the Kay as whole Malta doesn't look so good in summer (as it is so hot- everything is quite dusty). So I took some pictures which look quite good imo (athough the Kay doesn't do so on high res

KDE-Look

PicasaWeb Posted by Picasa

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 14:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thank you ATI

I just wanted to say thank you ATI. Without you and your awesome driver for Linux, my life would be just totally boring. No one would like a rock stable Kubuntu, much better it is to repair demage done by silly drivers - wooohoo I love it when I have to stop boring packaging and boring promoting to play with my wonderful looking fglrx.

Really ATI - I LOVE YOU

without you my system would be just too stable.

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 14:31 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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