Monday, June 4. 2007LinuxTag Mashmash - A mass of mixed ingredients reduced to a soft pulpy state by beating or pressure; a mass of anything in a soft pulpy state........Perfect description for my LinuxTag sum-up. It was the first time Amarok got directly visible to it's users at a fair (FOSDEM is not a user event IMO  . And I think for the first time we did quite well.Merchandise selling did go well, though we didn't have shirts on first day due to delivery problems, but after all we sold about half of our sortiment. Also I noticed that the stats @ amarok.kde.org about 50% new and 50% recurrent visitors might be true, as I met about the same amount of users as not-yet-users (on the other hand I also was a lot of time helping at the Kubuntu booth to promote KDE and Kubuntu). For next time we really have to ensure to get something visible and attractive for booth decoration, just the icon isn't enough IMHO, also business cards should be available (KDE ones would be most meaningful?) and most important .... a hot and sexy configured KDE+Amarok. We also got to create a new branding on Amarok - "Awwwwuuuuuuoooooooooo" - simply put: howling. I guess we should continue this branding as it's great fun and also really unique to Amarok. Finally I'd like to thank Sven, Lydia and Dennis for booth work, really great job you did. Greate thanks also goes to Kubuntu-de.org for caring for cute (4.3) little apachelogger  and for just being such an awesome team - folks I simply love ye!Last but not least I'd also like to thank KDE for providing the base of all my promotional work as well as my desktop, Trolltech for sponsoring Qt 4.3 and a dinner, LinuxTag e.V. for the fair and LinuxNacht and Ubuntu-Berlin for the BBQ, and in general everyone who was involved including the whole FLOSS world ... for just kicking the .com's as  See ya next year in Berlin (then I want to visit the Trolltech office there
Monday, June 4. 2007Vacuous VistaWhen I bought my new pc in March, I was ambivalent (yet hopeful, if that makes sense) about the preinstalled copy of Vista which was to be installed on it. Since my current hard disk was more than sufficient for all things productive (linux), I left the new drive with windows for my games. I like games. I had a few troubles with the onboard sound with the linux kernel, so I bought a cheap SB Live! card which was perfect - hardware mixing and 5.1 sound. The caveat? Of course, the product is now so old that it isn’t supported by Vista. Sad, because it truly is one of the most reliable products that has ever hit the pc market. I was stuck with archaic stereo sound for games which was a shame, but something I was willing to live with. So back to the topic. For the last 3 months I’ve come to totally hate that operating system. It’s flashy and fun for 3 weeks or so… Oh, hell, I’m not going to complain, there are many more complaints out there on the web. To the crux, it couldn’t even do what I wanted - play games! (aside from a few, that is). Today I wiped out the drive and reinstalled xp, which boots in fractions of the time, supports my soundcard, plays my games well! Here’s a word of warning. If you plan on doing windows installations, remove the power from the linux disk before you start and save yourself a potentially disastrous situation of formatting the incorrect disk. The partition manager for win xp setup is notoriously bad. Also, after the installation is finished, don’t forget to repower the drive. Otherwise, if your CD drive is on the same IDE cable, the slave jumper settings may confuse xp and totally mess everything up (like freezing the machine on cd access - this stumped me for an hour or so). The entire process left a poor taste in my mouth, one which I’m far to familiar with. I’ll be glad when (or if…) I can play all I like on my happy kubuntu installation. Monday, June 4. 2007Amazing Art Skills; Amarok Database Schema and suchThe Graffiti Facebook app, despite looking pretty lame initially, turns out to be a lot of fun. It's very simple. There's only one tool, a brush, and it only has three parameters: opacity, width and color. Check out Seb's Amarok icon:
I retaliated with a Tux:
So OK, Seb's Amarok is better.  This weekend I was visiting my Aunt and Grandma and so was without Internet. I had some fun with Krita and Inkscape. In (more relevant) Amarok news, I plan on spending some time tomorrow devoted to thinking about the Amarok 2 SQL schema. My Summer of Code project is supposedly about the playlist, but really its more then that since pretty much every major subsystem in Amarok 2.0 is getting a rethink. This includes a complete overhaul and much-needed normalization of Amarok's database schema. I'm thinking of saving the playlist state in the database (to ease and speed up undo/redo, make it crash-proof), so to procede much further on the Playlist::Model rethinking the playlist model is needed. Similarly all of the various Amarok systems need to be ported to our new (and absolutely fantastic) Meta:: framework from the currently MetaBundle before they can be used by the Playlist::Model. Its easy to get mired in trying to understand some piece Amarok code. I need to work on creating smaller goals as I go along. |
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