Wednesday, January 30. 2008
Danimo on Chaosradio
A bootable livecd XDMCP client Linux Distro?
At work there's a computer with a bad hard drive. There's also a blazing fast Linux server. The easy solution should be to just boot up a livecd that gives the list of local XDMCP servers. Despite this easy demand, I haven't yet found one. I tried Thinstation, it seems to be a bit more powerful then I want. I really don't want to find out and pick which hardware to put on the ISO, that seems so Linux-from-the-90s (though maybe is needed for some really thin clients, I don't know). One of the prebuilt ISO's hangs on loading X.
I was able to use a Ubuntu disc that was laying around, that however loads the desktop before GDM (where the menu option to the XDMCP list is). Too much of a hassle for something that has to be done every time the computer boots. Every LiveCD distro I've every used loads a desktop on boot, instead of KDM or GDM. Someone in #knoppix actually pointed out that Knoppix has a "press a button" easy setup for running a network-boot server. Which is neat, but not at all what I need.
Does anyone know of a livecd that perhaps has a boot time option to load a XDMCP broadcast client? Preferably one of the "just works" livecd's like Kubuntu or Kanotix or something of that sort.
Tuesday, January 29. 2008
An explosion of color, or on the fly svg tinting
In my last entry, I introduced the new svg theme "Graywolf" which was, as the name implies, quite gray. I also stated that one of the ideas behind this theme was to allow the application to automatically tint the svgs to match the system color scheme and that to achieve this, we needed a base them that did not have any single dominant colors. As some people were expressing doubts about the feasibility of this approach, I did what I always do in those situations: I came up with a quick and dirty prof of concept.
So, before I overwhelm your sense with an explosion of color, please remember that this is the result of one night of prototyping and some of the svgs are not tinted yet as I am waiting for an updated version ( the sidebar buttons, play controls, ... ). Also, work needs to be done to ensure adequate contrast in very light color schemes. The only thing different between the following screenshots is that I have changed the users color settings. No configuration at all has changed in Amarok itself. Of course I also choose some of the more, uhm... colorful, color themes to really illustrate the concept:
I actually think the black one is pretty sweet, even if the other ones are a bit "over the top" for my taste! .-)
It is still a work in progress and needs a lot of tweaking, but i hope this will put to rest some of the fears people have expressed that it is impossible to make svg graphics match the system color scheme.
So, before I overwhelm your sense with an explosion of color, please remember that this is the result of one night of prototyping and some of the svgs are not tinted yet as I am waiting for an updated version ( the sidebar buttons, play controls, ... ). Also, work needs to be done to ensure adequate contrast in very light color schemes. The only thing different between the following screenshots is that I have changed the users color settings. No configuration at all has changed in Amarok itself. Of course I also choose some of the more, uhm... colorful, color themes to really illustrate the concept:
I actually think the black one is pretty sweet, even if the other ones are a bit "over the top" for my taste! .-)
It is still a work in progress and needs a lot of tweaking, but i hope this will put to rest some of the fears people have expressed that it is impossible to make svg graphics match the system color scheme.
Monday, January 28. 2008
Solid Magic and the Dragon Player Release Candidate
Release Candidate
I just released the Dragon Player release candidate. It really is the release candidate, it works just fine as far as I know. But I'm not foolish, it probably has some problems that only a wider release will discover. The only identified problems so far is that I forgot to bump the version and the README still calls it "Video Player."
I used Harald Sitter's Amarok (but very generic) release script, I was able to include i18n in this release for the first time. There's about 20 translations, which surprised me. Thanks to all the translators! I plan on the 2.0 final version to being out soon, certainly before Hardy feature freezes in mid-February. Solid Magic
One of the nifty additions in this release is that the "Play Disc" button is now smarter then just playing the DVD at /dev/dvd. Using the KDE pillar Solid, it gets a list of all optical media. If there's more then one, it gives the user a little select menu. The main issue this addresses is that some users have more then one DVD drive. Now they can put the DVD in either and Dragon Player will play it. Also there is no longer a need for separate "Play VCD" and "Play DVD" buttons like Codeine had, since Solid identifies the type of disc.
The Solid API takes a little bit to get used to, but it actually makes a lot of sense. You ask Solid for a list of Solid::Device's. Device has a template as() method, that actually returns pretty much any of the other relevant Solid classes. So in my case, I use Solid::OpticalDisc to identify whether its a DVD, audio CD or VCD or just data and then Solid::Block to get the device path (eg /dev/hdc) to give to Phonon.
Sunday, January 27. 2008
"Graywolf", a proposed new look
In collaboration with Lee Olson, I have been trying to come up with a new svg theme for Amarok 2 with the working title of "Graywolf".
The main issue we are facing is that Amarok 2, being cross platform, will run on a multitude of different setups each with their own look and color scheme. Unfortunately, this makes it very hard to do svg files that will look good on all platforms, as the colors might be way off.
This new theme attempts to address this by not using very much color at all in the basic svgs. The current idea is to attempt to programatically tint these svgs with the dominant color scheme color, if it is very pronounced ( and non gray ).
The really great thing about this new theme is, that for the first time, we actually have a set of svgs that all look like they belong together. And even though the theme itself does not have much color, Amarok 2 will most likely not be dull as there will be context applets and album covers shown all over the place.
Anyway, I just finished the very initial integration of Lee's new svgs and added some supporting code, and thought I would show it off, even though it still needs quite a bit of work.
And yes, I know some of you will notice right away, but I am having issues with anti aliasing under KDE4 at the moment, so a lot of the text looks like crap!
So without further ado, I give you, "Graywolf"
The main issue we are facing is that Amarok 2, being cross platform, will run on a multitude of different setups each with their own look and color scheme. Unfortunately, this makes it very hard to do svg files that will look good on all platforms, as the colors might be way off.
This new theme attempts to address this by not using very much color at all in the basic svgs. The current idea is to attempt to programatically tint these svgs with the dominant color scheme color, if it is very pronounced ( and non gray ).
The really great thing about this new theme is, that for the first time, we actually have a set of svgs that all look like they belong together. And even though the theme itself does not have much color, Amarok 2 will most likely not be dull as there will be context applets and album covers shown all over the place.
Anyway, I just finished the very initial integration of Lee's new svgs and added some supporting code, and thought I would show it off, even though it still needs quite a bit of work.
And yes, I know some of you will notice right away, but I am having issues with anti aliasing under KDE4 at the moment, so a lot of the text looks like crap!
So without further ado, I give you, "Graywolf"
Sunday, January 20. 2008
Last.fm support in Amarok 2
A bit of a change from me today ... I'm not going to mention Windows. Well, unless you want to get really meta and count the last line ... 
I think last.fm support has always been one of the cool features of Amarok, and as has been mentioned here before, with the services framework of Amarok 2 I'm taking the opportunity to revamp it a bit.
So far I don't have anything really graphically impressive to show for it, but under the covers the old code has been completely ripped out, and replaced with a new codebase, which uses code from the official client to do the heavy lifting. Kudos of course to the last.fm guys for making their client available under the GPL!
What this means for users is that since the scrobbling of tracks and playing of the radio are now using the same protocol (and even largely the same implementation of the protocol) as the official client, breakage should be a much less common thing.
I hope to get working on the interface to last.fm in the services panel in the near future, but until then you can just paste last.fm URLs in the "Add Stream" dialog like any other streaming source.
I think last.fm support has always been one of the cool features of Amarok, and as has been mentioned here before, with the services framework of Amarok 2 I'm taking the opportunity to revamp it a bit.
So far I don't have anything really graphically impressive to show for it, but under the covers the old code has been completely ripped out, and replaced with a new codebase, which uses code from the official client to do the heavy lifting. Kudos of course to the last.fm guys for making their client available under the GPL!
What this means for users is that since the scrobbling of tracks and playing of the radio are now using the same protocol (and even largely the same implementation of the protocol) as the official client, breakage should be a much less common thing.
I hope to get working on the interface to last.fm in the services panel in the near future, but until then you can just paste last.fm URLs in the "Add Stream" dialog like any other streaming source.
Saturday, January 19. 2008
slides for the talks in Stuttgart
Sven, Sput, Valerie, Jörg and I had a really nice day yesterday with lots of interesting talks at the Linuxday yesterday. It was nice to meet Frederik (I hereby promise to check out Parley ) and others.
The slides for my talk are available now:
1000 thanks to Inge for providing his slides about KDE 4. (Unfortunately I had to shorten them due to the time I had available for the talk.)
After the talks we had a nice little party and watched Aaronīs keynote in Mountain View. All I have to say: You rocked 
Back at home it was time to watch the talk by my fellow Roker Jeff. Again: You rocked and thanks for making Harald, Ian and me internet-famous 
As a little sidenote:
Not just since but especially after yesterday I really appreciate a community that does not give me a major headache for being a woman. Big thank you to the KDE community for being the way you are.
@ the guy in the IRC channel (you know who you are): For gods sake check if the person you are talking about is in the channel. Your comments were way off.
Thursday, January 17. 2008
SNAFU .*[k\w\W].*[24]
-(~:$)-> wtf snafuTomorrow it's one week of KDE 4. Well, just yet another week, with no more than 5 hours sleep per day, heavy thinking and a couple of new stress balls.
SNAFU: situation normal, all fucked up
Probably none notice that I didn't blog about KDE 4, I can't even blame you, everyone else did, so I don't matter (even less then usual
)
But I have the best excuse ever: "It's all Kubuntu's fault!"After I installed the Kubuntu packages of KDE 4.0.0, I was considerable surprised, that the icons were totally screwed, new applications like dolphin and systemsettings didn't have one at all and some others (like) Konqueror, were using the old version. Everyone who knows me, pretty much gets were that led -> me trying to fix it, but breaking even more instead. I dugg in and didn't precisely get out since Friday, icon fixes are still not finished, but instead I have introduced new build rules and backported fixes and styling improvements, created some concepts on how to improve the status of KDE 3 + KDE 4 coexisting ...
May I say: I hate when this happens! :-@
Anyway, I think 4.0.1 is going to be one useable desktop (at least when you got a KDE3Pim
.The direction is right, KDE 4 just needs more love.
As for Amarok: something really cool is coming up, although my new wrapper script for releases is br0ken
Wednesday, January 16. 2008
KDE 4 Release Event in Stuttgart
Planet KDE is filled with announcements for KDE Release Events all around the world already so I will add my little announcement as well 
Sven, Ingo (Radio Tux) and I will be giving talks at the event at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart on Friday. Check the program and join us for nice talks and a great party.
Our talks:
14:45 Linux Spirit: Open Source Community (Lydia)
15:15 Linux Multimedia: Amarok ? Rediscover your Music (Sven)
16:15 Linux Desktop: KDE4 - Konquering your Desktop (talk by Lydia and demo by Ingo)
Hope to see you there.
Donīt forget: This is the start of something amazing! Be part of something amazing! Be free!
(As always I will make the slides available later for those who cannot attend.)
Saturday, January 12. 2008
Where Has All the Memory Gone
Gentoo and Xine dev (and part-time "Amarok Helper") Diego wrote an interesting blog about memory usage. Or, at least interesting to folks like me who somewhat regret never having had a operating systems class. He discovered that any Xine client (which includes Dragon Player or any KDE4 app that makes a sound) wastes 1.7mb of RAM thanks to libvorbisenc.
Using his cowstats script, I profiled Dragon Player:
File name | .data size | .bss size | .data.rel.* size
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/playDialog.o 0 1 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/videoWindow.o 0 17 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/mainWindow.o 0 17 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/actions.o 0 1 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/playlistFile.o 0 1 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/fullScreenToolBarHandler.o 0 1 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/stateChange.o 0 1 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/theStream.o 8 9 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/fullScreenAction.o 0 1 0
src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/main.o 0 8 0
Not too shabby.
Also not so important, Dragon Player isn't a library. I just profiled libamarok which is loaded by all the various Amarok plugins so potentially could be an issue. It had 46k copy-on-write sections total, but out of the dozens of files 40k is a variable in the crashhandler, which is a kind of scary piece of code since it has to work while the rest of Amarok is crashing. So I'll let someone else work on that. 
Friday, January 11. 2008
Dragon Player available in Kubuntu Backports
Awesome release everyone!
Having KDE4 officially released is making my life easier. Thanks to everyone's favorite MOTU Harald Sitter, Dragon Player is now in gutsy-backports. I've just pointed this out on the Dragon Player website. And Long-time Rokymotioner Enr1x has created an AUR for Dragon Player. So all this makes Dragon Player easy to install, I can't wait for Amarok 2 to reach this point! Dragon Player 2.0 final will then be released in a couple of weeks probably
.
I do plan on working a bit more on subtitle/audio channel issues to make sure it works cleanly. I do feel that I'm spending probably a lot of time on this feature, but I suppose it isn't a surprise given that its one of the few features where I can't just hook up to a Phonon signal and rely on Kretz's code to do all the work for me.
And once KDE 4.1 is out, I'll be able to tear most of even this code out. So as my Dragon Player TODO list has mostly been reduced to testing a couple of things, its time to get back into Amarok 2 code. Hydrogen will be proud of me. I've identified podcasts as really the remaining "why I still have Amarok 1.4 open" issue. Bart has worked a lot with it already, I'll have to see what he has done so far.
Thursday, January 10. 2008
OpenExpo 2008 in Bern, Switzerland
Its official. I am going to be giving a talk at OpenExpo in March about the work I have been doing on integrating Free Culture and Open Music services into Amarok2 and how this collaboration benefits both the Free Software and Free Culture communities. I am super exited about this as this will be my first major conference appearance and I am really looking forwards to that. ( well, I might make an appearance in the KDE dev-room at FOSSDEM, which will most likely be the same talk, so you can get a sneak peak there if you are so inclined... )
I will be speaking on the technology track, the full program of which can be found here.
So now I actually have to start thinking about writing the talk...
I will be speaking on the technology track, the full program of which can be found here.
So now I actually have to start thinking about writing the talk...
Wednesday, January 9. 2008
Dragon Player 2.0 beta1 released
Tuesday, January 8. 2008
Dynamic Playlist niftiness
One of my most loved Amarok features are dynamic playlists. For those who donīt know how they work a little guide is availible.
I use a tweaked random for my dynamic playlist. Amarok is told to play music from a smart playlist which contains all the songs I rated with more than 3 stars or did not rate at all. I donīt want to listen to music I have listened to within the last month. So I exclude that as well. This makes my smart playlist. In Amarok it looks like this:
And now I use that as a seed for a dynamic playlist to make Amarok add and remove songs from my actual playlist and by doing this keeping it tidy, small and going on playing music for weeks if I want it to without me ever having to add or remove songs from the playlist (great for parties btw). If I feel like playing a certain song I can of course always just drag it into the playlist and play it. In Amarok my dynamic playlist looks like this:
And this is the result
I am pretty sure others out there use even cooler and more useful dynamic playlists. Please share. What do you tell Amarok to play for you?
Monday, January 7. 2008
Dragon Player moved into kdereview
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