Amarok Blog - Entries from June 2007

Saturday, June 30. 2007

Thoughts of Day 1

Its been a fun time at aKademy today. Here are some thoughts going through my head now about it...

QtScript

At Amarok we are big fans of Ruby, since its, well, the best language. However I watched a couple of presentations about QtScript and KJSEmbed today and I have to say JavaScript does make sense for scripting embedded in the application process. It would allow the creation of new GUIs - like say a new sidebar, possibily QGraphicsView stuff - with low overhead. Ruby, python require loading a bunch of new libraries. I'm not sure this is embedding scripts (as opposed to the scripts running in a different process and calling DBus methods) is something we to do, as its somewhat risky, since a screwy script could cause the rest of Amarok to be laggy. Apparently you can have QtScript process other events thing so that it doesn't hang your app entirely, and in Qt 4.4 you will be able to kill scripts. So its worth thinking about.

Shuttleworth's Presentation

This ended up being pretty controversial, which I wasn't expecting. Among a bunch of uncontested good points, about the need for better upstream/downstream integration, getting Linux on the new form-factors (gadgets) and such he suggested that KDE should (excluding big releases like KDE 4) start releasing every 6 months, like Gnome and the Linux Kernel. This would make it easier for distros like Ubuntu to sync with KDE's release cycle supposedly (though [K]Ubuntu is pretty unique in being released so often - other commercial developers aren't so fast and then of course Gentoo only has releases for new install media, though I'd suppose Fedora and OpenSUSE are similar). The advantage would be a million users using your code faster. I think Shuttleworth relied too much on this idea, and not perhaps enough on the software engineering principals that would argue for quick releases. The idea is that features could be developed in branches and dropped in when ready, essentially that trunk would always be in a state to be almost-released.

This was met with a lot of skepticism, at the time I found somewhat amusing - because Amarok itself is on a very quick release cycle. I remember the 1.3.0, 1.3.1, 1.3.2 releases (or about then) we had a new minor feature enhancing release - with some nifty features - every two weeks. In fact Amarok 1.4.5 was released explictly to be in time for Fiesty's release. We do try to release often to get feedback, we even refer to our model as "like the Linux Kernel". I don't think Amarok is unique in extragear in working in this way.

Though maybe I missing Shuttleworth's point some. Release frequently makes sense, thats how you get work done for an app like Amarok. However for kdelibs it is a different story, releasing feature releases for it every six months seems a bit much. I'm also not totally convinced that releasing on a strict 6 month schedule to be in line with Ubuntu releases (and the theoretical distros that would start syncing their releases if KDE were as well) is such a great benefit.

I don't think its totally immodest to suggest that in KDE 3 much of innovation in apps has been coming from extragear. And in my opinion this has really been due to the quick and flexible release cycles that we have. KDE 4 will probably have new systems of tagging the latest stable apps in extragear to make it more explicit that we're part of the KDE desktop - this well help. Really if anything the release cycle of the core of KDE (especially appilcations) is perhaps too regimented, kind of the opposite of what Shuttleworth apparently thought it was. In Shuttleworth's defense it was just one point of 13 that he made.

Strigi

Strigi is a part of KDE 4's long-hoped-for desktop search feature. Strigi itself appears to not be reliant on a daemon and such and allows searching of archives. Perhaps it would make sense for amarokcollectionscanner to use it?

WebKit

WebKit is entering Qt 4.4. It makes sense certainly.

Decibel

Decibel is KDE 4's new framework for contacts, especially as it relates to VoIP and instant messaging. It would be neat to somehow integrate this into Amarok... not sure how.

Etc

In between sessions its been fun discussing Amarok with the other Amarok devs. This was one of the main reasons to come after all. PlaylistBrowser is something we still need to get hashed out more... in depth planning is on hold until Monday really.

The party tonight was a lot of fun, it was supposed to be pizza I think which I wasn't looking forward to greatly (I'm pretty patriotic when it comes to US pizza) but it turned out to yummy hummus, salad and other such vegetarian stuff instead. We spent like 30 minutes trying to find the bar though... it was its opening night and no one had heard of it.

Thanks to this blog goes to my roommate George Wright for generously sharing his Internet.

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 18:28 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, June 27. 2007

A GMail Annoyance

I love gmail. Really, I think it is the best web based email software I have ever used. The keyboard shortcuts make browsing through emails and conversations a breeze. Everyone has their pet peeves, so here is mine.

The UI for navigating between links is quite standard - click on newer or older in the email header to navigate:

Google’s help center for keyboard shortcuts lists the j key to move an older conversation and the k key to browse newer.

Have you looked at your keyboard lately? If you haven’t, take a peek:

Notice that the j key is to the left of the k key. So according to those keyboard shortcuts, newer conversations are on the right of the keyboard, but unfortunately this is switched relative to the user interface, where a newer conversation link is on the left.

Run up the wall

I’ve run into a dead end in a process of debugging a website. Here’s the low-down.

A particular university website is needed for my (and my sister’s) study.

I have a 2 desktops and 1 laptop, all running kubuntu fiesty, on the same network, same dmz etc

Only the laptop loads the website

The website will load under windows on both of the desktops

Turns out, that the desktops will load the website, but very, very slowly (about 5 minute delay)

I have absolutely, no clue about how to continue debugging and hopefully fixing the problem. Does anybody have any suggestions that I could use to try and get this up and running again?

nb: it doesn’t seem to be ipv6 causing the problems.

Tuesday, June 26. 2007

hello, may i have contextview please?

hey everyone, my name is leo franchi. quick intro: i'm 19 (as of today!), to go Tufts University, and am working on Amarok for my SoC 2007 project.

my project involves web service integration to Amarok 2.0: that means new contextual info from the web, think concerts, last.fm friend stuff, etc. as most of you know, amarok 2.0 will feature a new context browser, now called the contextview and based on QGraphicsView. as we leave KHTML as our technology of choice, we are left with a dilemma: customization. with KHTML it was very easy for the end-user (or modder) to customize the contextbrowser. using CSS, everything could be controlled.

but KHTML was one of the main reasons we left the old CB for the new QGV, and so the question of styling returns. the text inside the items on the context view is potentially styleable (but with much messyness) but the style of the physical QGraphicsItem (QGraphicsRectItem) not so much in this case. so i ask you, the users, for input: how much customization do you need? comments are appreciated as we decide how to implement what could be one of the centrally visible parts of the new amarok 2.0 interface.

leo

Posted by Leo Franchi in lfranchi at 17:22 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

KDE will travel with you

Tonight Sydney had a very special guest - all the way from Frankfurt, Germany. I was joined by the one and only David Solbach - a KDE lover and giver. You might not realise who he is or what he has done, but every time you visit one of the KDE4 technology sites (plama, solid, phonon etc), you touch his hardware and his love.

David and I caught up tonight for a few of fine aussie beers and a walk around Sydney harbour. We chatted about KDE, Amarok 2 and the general direction of the world.

Since last week I was plagued by exams, to find an email saying that a fellow kde enthusiast would be coming to Sydney made my week. The next time you are away in an unfamiliar city, why don’t you take KDE with you and try find the local contributor and meet up! Share a beer and make the world better. Make the world connect over KDE!

Monday, June 25. 2007

The real first KHTML browser on Windows

There's been a lot of hubbub lately about Safari being released on Windows, which is based on WebKit, which is based on KHTML, and how it'll beat Konqueror as the first KHTML-based browser on Windows.

Then you hear this other camp firing back about Swift, whose homepage proudly declares "The First KHTML Browser for Windows."

However, I'm here to set the record straight. To the best of my knowledge the first KHTML-based browser on Windows is ThunderHawk, which appears to have been using KHTML under-the-hood since at least 2004 and probably at least 2002.

Yes, it's a WinCE/Windows Mobile browser. But it's still Windows.

Continue reading "The *real* first KHTML browser on Windows"

Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 17:35 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday, June 22. 2007

Amarok 2 on windows - A rant

Ever since it was first announced that Amarok 2.0 would be available for windows, there have been mixed reactions. Most responses have been quite enthusiastic, but some seem to think that releasing Amarok for windows will give people one less reason to switch to GNU/Linux or other FOSS operating systems.

When the announcement of the new Amarok 1.4.6 release was posted to digg.com this argument reared its head again and I decided I would write a post about why I think that releasing Amarok (or any other free software program) for Windows is actually a good idea, if your goal is to attract people to alternatives. (disclaimer: I am reusing a comment I wrote on digg last night)

While it might be true that a few people would be willing to switch operation system based on a single killer app, I find it far more plausible that people switch if they can have the same tried and true programs as they are used to available on the new platform. What most non technical people are actually using is not an operating system, but rather a collection of applications. This makes it difficult to even explain why they should care about switching, just to have to relearn a heap of new applications. By getting as much free software as possible running on top of Windows, we are in effect making Windows less and less important, to the point where, from the non technical users point of view, the only difference is if you want the expensive Dell with windows, or the cheaper, but otherwise identical one with Linux.

Take my girlfriend for instance, she is (still) running windows, but the main apps she uses are firefox, openoffice, gaim and inkscape. As these are all available on GNU/Linux and other free platforms as well, her migration can be relatively painless once the last few games she plays run on Wine.

Also, for the argument of the "killer app only available on linux" to have any effect, the Windows user would still have to somehow be exposed to Amarok, and for most, this will never happen. (They are not all lucky enough to have a friendly Gearhead to show them the way)

Finally, I would not call what we are doing at the moment porting to windows, it more a case of getting it for (almost) free since QT4 and kdelibs4 have all been ported to windows already. It would most likely take a lot of effort to keep someone else from porting it to windows if we do not, and this kind of artificial scarcity is not what free software is about.

Cheers

- Nikolaj

Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen in freespirit at 12:52 | Comments (29) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, June 20. 2007

KDiff3

Just a short note: KDiff3 is awesome. Its GUI is decent, but where it really shines is that you hardly need the GUI at all. I did a `svk pull`, had a conflict, decided to try KDiff3 to do the 3-way merge, and it automatically did the merge itself. All I had to do was review what it had done.

This is also the sort of situation where the advantage of using SVK over straight SVN really shows itself.

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 12:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, June 18. 2007

Amarok Release Party Trial #1

So, Amarok 1.4.6 is considerable near to it's final release. Reason enough to plan a release party (need some XP for 2.0 anyway).

Problem is: I'm living in Austria and I know exactly 3 (?!) other FLOSS supporters round here, which is why I don't expect a lot of people to come ^_^

Anyway, partE day is Thursday, sometime in the evening (not yet defined), somewhere nere Lambach, Upper Austria (not yet defined either). So should the unlikely case apply that anyone wanna come (and actually is able to

send me a mail to sitter DOOOT harald AAATTT gmail DOOOT com (not that the address wouldn't be available in google searches

Be prepared for my revu... so long fellows

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 16:47 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Amarok Release Party Trial #1 (Update)

send me a mail to sitter DOOOT harald AAATTT gmail DOOOT com (not that the address wouldn't be available via google search

Be prepared for my revu... so long fellows

[[Update]]
Cafè Stadlmayr, Marktplatz, Lambach, Upper Austria, Austria.
20:00 CEST

BTW, the release party became a release party weekend sort of thing, so if anyone wanna get drunken this weekend, get back to me

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 16:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Interview

I gave an email interview for the Amarok Weekly News about my Summer of Code project. AWN's are a pretty neat way to keep people in-the-know. Check it out.

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 10:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday, June 15. 2007

VoIP - Screw it!

Now, the Amarok Wolf Brigade(tm) actually just wanted to do some VoIPing. It ended up in a big fucking mess, which lead to the awful cognition that Skype is the only usable VoIP software on Linux.

Wengo: crashing a lot, not logging in properly, not working properly -> I did 52 tries to package it!!!
Ekiga: pretty sound, shitty GUI, robot voices in conference rooms
Gizmo: crappy sound, crappy GUI, crappy dmix support, funky conference mode
Jabbin: broken website
KCall: crappy GUI, didn't work with wengo SIP

Skype on the other hand got conference call, good quality and a nice GUI. this is probably the reason for stories like this:

[markey] this morning I woke up
[markey] slightly disoriented
[markey] then I realized I'm lying flat on the floor
[eean] o.O
[markey] computer keyboard and mouse are on the ground too
[markey] some keys fallen off
[eean] wtf
[markey] must have fallen asleep
[markey] and then slipped from the chair
[eean] dude
[markey] didn't hurt though
[eean] you need to sleep more

So let me tell you: VoIP on Linux sux, except for Skype, which is closed source though.... but hey, we just wanna talk, not save the world from evil Ebay :S

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 11:29 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, June 13. 2007

Mary Jo Foley embarrasses herself once more...

Wow... Mary Jo Foley must be the world's dumbest techwriter. Or she was just really really drunk. For fuck's sake, I hope someone just hacked her account and wrote that article for her. Otherwise I hope ZDnet has some balls and finally shows this grandma the door. What happened? Well, if you enjoy a laugh, just go ahead, waste 5 minutes of your life and read her "Leopard looks like ... Vista" story.

Let me address and dismiss all of her points very quickly:

"1. New Leopard Desktop: Not a whole lot different from Vista’s Aero and Sidebar."

Well here's the first and biggest problem with you: You should be a designer, not a techwriter. You don't judge features by its looks. Admit it, you just saw the desktop wallpaper, right? But you obviously missed the stacks for example. Besides that: Vista must be just like Windows 98 then. Still looks the same to me, after all.

"2. New Finder: Many of the same capabilities as the integrated “Instant Search” in Vista (the subsystem that Google is trying to get the Department of Justice to rule as being anti-competitive). The new Leopard Coverflow viewing capability looked almost identical to Vista’s Flip 3D to me."

Smart searches in Windows Explorer? Yeah right. You don't even know what a Smart Search is, admit it. And Flip 3D? The one which looks almost identical to something Apple introduced in iTunes before Vista came out, right? Wait a second, what was the name again? Ah yeah right, Coverflow it was called. Oh wait, but that would mean Vista just copied that from iTunes and not vice versa.

"3. QuickLook: Live file previews — just like the thumbnail preview capability available in Vista."

Sweetie, you didn't really attend the Keynote, just admit it now. Show me just one of the QuickLook features that Apple showcased in your beloved Thumbnail. Good luck finding them.

"4. 64-bitness: Leopard is the first 64-bit only version of a desktop client. Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit varieties. And most expect Windows Seven will still be available in 32-bit flavors. Until 32-bit machines go away, it seems like a good idea to offer 32-bit operating systems."

Again, I just don't understand how you ever got your job? Didn't people at ZDnet notice that you've actually just ran into the wrong interview and were supposed to become a gossip reporter? Almost all new computers you can get nowadays come with a 64bit CPU. (Intel Core2Duo e.g.). All Apple machines you can buy today are 64bit machines. And contrary to Windows you just boot up a 64 bit Leopard / Darwin kernel and are able to mix 32bit and 64bit applications in userspace.

"5. Core animation: Not sure what the Vista comparison is here. The demo reminded me of Microsoft Max photo-sharing application. The WWDC developers attending the Jobs keynote didn’t seem wowed with this functionality."

Oh my god. CoreAnimation is an API not an application. What they showed was just a demo, so developers get a clue what they can do with this Framework. This demo had nothing, not the slightest thing, to do with Microsoft Max photo-sharing. I bet this demo application won't even be shipped with Leopard, because anyone could write it in a couple of days with CoreAnimation. That was their entire point.

"6. Boot Camp. You can run Vista on your Mac. Apple showed Vista running Solitaire in its WWDC demo. But I bet those downloading the 2.5 million copies of Boot Camp available since last year are running a lot of other Windows business apps and games."

Well of course they are. What's your point, though? They just showed Solitaire to prove that Windows actually runs fine on the machine. Would you have wanted them to showcase all new Vista features at the Apple Keynote, too?

"7. Spaces: A feature allowing users to group applications into separate spaces. I haven’t seen anything like in in Vista, but the audience didn’t seem overly impressed by it."

Because the audience (developers, remember?) knew that since January already. Whereas your knowledge, once more, seems absent. Besides that it existed on Unix/Linux desktops since a decade... and I can tell you it's a damn good feature to keep your desktop clean and speed up your workflow.

"8. Dashboard with widgets. Isn’t this like the Vista Sidebar with gadgets?"

SIGH... I'm really getting fed up with you now. Where have you been the last ten years, god damn. Vista's Gadgets are a copy of Dashboard, which already existed since Tiger and came out long before Vista. They just improved it big time for Leopard... or where are the widget scissors in Internet Explorer?

"9. iChat gets a bunch of fun add-ons (photo-booth effects, backrops, etc.) to make it a more fully-featured videoconferencing product. The “iChat Theater” capability Jobs showed off reminded me of Vista’s Meeting Space and/or the new Microsoft “Shared View” (code-named “Tahiti”) document-sharing/conferencing subsystems."

I must admit, this time it's me lacking the knowledge - I never tried / seen Vista's Meeting Space. So let's give you a point here and just assume you're right (even though I bet you even cocked up this point and some commenter will be able to prove it).

10. Time Machine automatic backup. Vista has built-in automatic backup (Volume Shadow Copy). It doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as Time Machine. But it seems to provide a lot of the same functionality.

Backup applications like Vista's exist since the very first computer I ran (an ITT 3030 CP/M system) obviously and didn't improve much over the last 20 years or so. Again, I just can't believe you've seriously been watching the entire keynote. Otherwise you would have noticed Time Machine's seamless integration with the Finder and the way it logs 'states' and changes for every folder on the disk.

Mary Jo Foley, do us all a favour please and quit your job tomorrow. You seem to be resistant to technical knowledge, logic and truth, so just go ahead resign and stop this awkward embarrassment. Also your grand-children might not have to ask you why everyone's pointing and laughing at you in the future. It'd be a win-win really.

Kind regards,

Chris

Posted by in muesli at 03:05 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, June 11. 2007

Jamendo Lyrics Script for Amarok

Today I finished my work for Amarok's brand new Jamendo Lyrics Script.

Now, why is it good?

it's using super efficient code (at leat I hope so
unlike about 90% (?!) of scripts out there it doesn't do HTML parsing and therefore is a lot faster
it's accesing a CC music website to get lyrics for CC music - and we all love CC music, don't we

Now, all this wouldn't be possible without Jamendo.com - the most lovely CC music site on the internets - big thanks to the Jamendo crew.

Last but not least also thanks to Amarok's very own adoptive wolf, C7, because without him, telling me 300 times how awesome Jamendo is, I wouldn't have checked it out until Amarok2 ....

[C7] apachelogger: hab übrigens gestern noch mit whisky (meinem hund) heulen geübt aufnahmen kommen noch..

which means something like: he and his dog were practising howling yesterday

So... Check it out, ye will luv it
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=60223

.

Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 12:07 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Microsoft's Patents -> THE Solution

In today's total tiredness I noticed:
Linux violates 42 Microsoft patents
now the notice:
42 = the answer to life, the universe and everything

Meaning: the violation of Microsoft patents by Linux is the answer to life, the universe und everything... I say hooray!