Tuesday, March 25. 2008Wordpress Comment Spam, Anyone?For those of you wondering where I’ve been, it’s Malaysia and Indonesia for the past two months (stories and photos). Not that anyone wants to hear about that, though! Has anybody noticed a remarkable spike in wordpress comment spam in the last week? I’ve had to defer all comments for moderation due to the massive amounts of crap that’s coming through. More importantly, does anybody have any suggestion of a way to get around it? Update: Just noticed that all my permanent pages and comment captcha is missing. This disturbs me greatly. Saturday, March 22. 2008
Scriptable Services Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
in freespirit at
21:54
Comments (6) Trackbacks (0) Scriptable Services
Heres something new and something old all rolled into one!
I have been dropping hints about the possibility of a scriptable service for a while. I even showed off a very crude prototype in a lightning talk at aKademy last year. Since then, architectural changes to Amarok and task that were more important ( and a lot simple ) pushed this work to the bottom of my long term TODO list. It newer quite left my mind though. I think that the potential benefits of allowing people to quickly and easily integrate their own content into Amarok, without having to mess around with building the entire app are huge. It will allow people to add and distribute services for content that, while interesting, does not have a broad enough appeal to warrant inclusion in the Amarok core, and it will allow people to integrate content and services that we simply have not thought about. So, when sitting in a small cabin in the woods, with no internet and plenty of time on my hands, because my Girlfriend is busy studying for an exam, it did not really take long to decide what I really wanted to work on. And now I am back... So, without further delay, I give you the new, improved, and actually working scriptable service framework! I decided to completely rethink both the DBus API and the way Scriptable services interacted with the rest of Amarok. The entire API now consists of 3 DBus functions and 2 callback commands that the script must respond to. Also, everything is completely dynamic, meaning that the service will not use the script to populate any items before they are needed. Here is a few screenshots of a scripted service in action. First of all, the scriptable service framework now integrates in a simmilar way to all other Amarok scripts, making it possible to start, stop and manage them from the "Script Manager" dialog: When running, it ill appear in the service browser along with any other loaded services: And when activated, it will appear just like any other service, complete with optional html info for each item ( supplied by the script of course ): The "Cool Streams" script is my first attempt at a usable script. It basically just implements the list of cool streams from Amarok 1.4 as a service. The entire script is about 80 lines of ruby code, and half of this is taken up by the array of stations to add. About half of the remaining code is comments. So setting up a simple new service really does not take much code, and as there are only 3 DBus functions needed, it is really quite simple do do. So, despite what I have been telling people lately, Amarok 2.0 will ship with the possibility of adding new services using scripts. I am really exited about this feature, as the general scripting support in Amarok has yielded and incredible amount of interesting features that none of the regular developers had ever though of. In the same way, I hope that the scriptable service support will inspire people to add interesting new content to Amarok. Thursday, March 13. 2008(hug the bugs) * 2
Harald, I and a few others And since this was so much fun we will be doing the same for bugs.kde.org on Saturday. Join us on Saturday (March 15th) in #amarok.meeting on freenode. We will be there to discuss and give free hugs Wednesday, March 12. 2008impressions from CebitI am back at home and have time and internet access again so I can finally blog about Cebit \o/ (Nothing beats coming home after a week with barely any internet access to a modem with an LED indicating no connection.) We had a lot of fun at Cebit and it is always great to meet your favorite KDE people. But boy, the fairground is huge! And now you get to guess how much I saw of it during the week I have been there. I was particularly impressed by a very clever girl (maybe 13 or 14 years old) who was at the Amarok booth asking questions. Nice to meet the next generation of geek girls. It was a little sad to see how alien the concept of free software is to a lot of people at an event like this. (”And how do you make money with it?”). Well now they know what it is and why we do it. In the end I think it was a great success though since we were able to show a lot of visitors KDE 4 and Amarok 1.4 and 2, introduce new contributors to the team and got a few offerings that look very promising. Be prepared for some nifty new things in and around Amarok (assuming it all works out). And of course some photos: When we arrived and gave back our rented car my guys forced me to take a picture of another car at the car rental. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the uber geeky car: Eckhart, me and Franz at one of the booth parties: Harald and me at the Novell and Microsoft party (with free hugs *g*): btw: Having internet access at the Amarok booth next time would rock Tuesday, March 11. 2008
Amarok + French + IRC = Love Posted by Harald Sitter
in apachelogger at
21:17
Comments (3) Trackbacks (0) Amarok + French + IRC = Love
Ladies, Gentleman, Bots and others, may I introduce to you #amarok.fr on FreeNode.
Yeah, it took me over a year to get this project done, but better late than never, right? French is now as well as English, German and Spanish one of the Amarok IRC-based support languages *cheer* Everyone who speaks French, wants to speak French, or just once in his life wants to hang out with the cool guys -> join the channel. In other news:
Friday, March 7. 2008
Nearing first alpha, and lots of ... Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
in freespirit at
19:52
Comments (92) Trackbacks (0) Nearing first alpha, and lots of cool new stuff
Its been little while since I wrote a nice long update about the state of Amarok 2, and we have been getting a few complaints that there is not enough ews being posted, so I will try to remedy that here. And I have a nice pile of screenshots ready for you!
First up though, we have decided to put a feature freeze in effect starting at the end of this month. This is the first small step towards an eventual release of Amarok 2.0, and hopefully it will help us get it ready sooner rather than later. This also means that we are at the point where bug reports actually start to become useful. More on this in the coming weeks I am sure! So, whats new in the land of Amarok 2. Lots actually. First of all, I have tried my hand at some small but quite visible modifications to our svg theme, and I personally thinks the results are very prommising. I just need to figure out what do do about the volume slider... And of course, the theme still adjusts itself to the system color theme: At Magnatune.com, we have been adding free ogg streams along side the existing mp3 streams. Of course Amarok should also benefit from this, so I finally got around to implementing a stream selection GUI. This also allows people with slow or unstable internet connections to select the lofi mp3 streams: I think I can reveal, that as an added bonus, people who decide to purchase one of Magnatune.com's upcoming memberships will be able to enjoy ogg streams in a really nice quality A lot of work has gone into the last.fm service and integration. The bulk of the Amarok 2 last.fm service was originally done by Shane King, but this week there has almost been a competition about who could do the most cool things with the last.fm service. This however also led to a slight case of "interface wars" as we currently cannot decide between buttons and tree views for the different streams, but I am sure we will figure something out eventually A really nice feature that was implemented by Dan Meltzer ( aka. Hydrogen ) is the ability to right click any artist in your local collection and add a last.fm stream of simmilar artists directly to the playlist: I have spent some time adding capabilities that will allow any track or stream with special actions that only makes sense when that track or stream is playing to make these actions available throughout the interface. Most notably, when listening to a last.fm stream it adds the "love", "skip" and "ban" actions to a small sub toolbar next to the play controls: This small toolbar and the background is completely invisible when playing tracks that do not have any special "now playing" actions. The same actions are also added to the tray menu ( and when right clicking the currently playing track in the playlist ): Last.fm is becoming really well integrated, but the great thing about the way it is done is that there is almost no last.fm specific code anywhere but in the last.fm plugin, which can be completely disabled. This means that any other service can use the same interface elements to achieve simmilar results. Last.fm is simply the first one to use these capabilities. It also means that Amarok 2 is in no way dependent on last.fm being available. I think that this independence is very important. It allows us to work with many different services and companies without anyone getting control over the core of Amarok. And this is personally what I see as the main strong point of Amarok 2. We are positioning ourselves to be able to work with and integrate content and services from a multitude of sources without the fear of what happens if one of these services stops existing, turns horrendously evil, or tries to assert undue influence over the direction of Amarok. And with reports coming in from our crew at Cebit about the huge interest in Amarok, it looks to be a really interesting future. Now, if we can just get this 2.0 out the door soon.... Monday, March 3. 2008KDE's Summer of Code: Promote it!Summer of Code is back, earlier then ever. Early is good as it allows some more flexibility in the schedule (students could start on their projects as soon as mid-April, in case they aren't available later), the disadvantage is that I'm probably not the only one somewhat surprised that its starting so soon. So it's important to get the word out to prospective students. So if you're on any LUG mailing lists or any list with Computer Science students, send them a message about Summer of Code in general and about KDE in particular. Include a link to the SoC homepage, the Timeline and the list of KDE project suggestions*. Offer yourself as kind of the local contact to the open source "world". I sent out such a email to my local LUG and found a few interested people. The common response was that they had wanted to get involved with open source but weren't sure how, the issue SoC is largely trying to solve. We had a meeting yesterday and it sounds like a couple of students will maybe even develop for Amarok. This is just at a small university... there's a lot of untapped potential out there. *The suggestion list, at least for Amarok before I cleaned it up, had somewhat degenerated into people putting up feature suggestions (one not feasible, one that was more like a weekend project). Be sure to add project suggestions (for projects you actually know something about), but also double check the other suggestions. Always encourage the students to work with a particular mailing list or IRC channel to help refine the proposal. Saturday, March 1. 2008
distro mailinglist at ... Posted by Lydia Pintscher
in Nightrose at
14:07
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) distro mailinglist at freedesktop.org and CebitA few weeks back I requested a mailinglist at freedesktop.org for cross distro collaboration. (The original purpose was having a list to discuss with other distros how they handle the whole ~/.kde vs. ~/.kde4 thing.) Unfortunately I never got a response and just stumbled upon the now created list at http://lists.freedesktop.org by chance. If you are involved in a distro please ask the appropriate people to subscribe. (@ fd.o people: I am still interested in helping to take care of the list if needed as I think it is important.) Next week is Cebit time. Say hello to your favorite Amarok and KDE people at their booths or check out some of the talks |
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