Saturday, May 31. 2008What I did today
....sitting in front of my laptop, looking at launchpad because I was waiting for builds to finish.
Compile clusters are so much nicer -.- Saturday, May 31. 2008Sometimes Im really fed up with..
..those "Neinsagers" who permanently complain about KDE4. That's what I wrote today on the Kubuntu mailing list, after a recurrent complaint about KDE4:
Don't compare apples with pears, please! Well, the last sentence is a bit bold as I have no insight in the current Gnome development, and I would not be astonished if they were on the same ways for coming releases. Please correct me if my statements are false or incorrect... Thursday, May 29. 2008Late night hacking and finding a bed
I love LinuxTag!
Stephan already blogged about how I was sleeping on the table. So, here comes the background story: After hours of hard work on Project Neon, an Amarok project to create nightly binaries of the latest Amarok version (I was sorting out some underlying issues in the base components in preperation for the openSUSE build service integration) , and as I was somewhat tired and it also was quite late in the night (or rather early in the morning) I choose to go to bed, though one shouldn't call that 'go', anyway, I didn't find one within the critical 10 seconds and chose the next best option: table + chair + me in between (I better don't tell you about the bathtub  My head is telling me that I got too much beer, so please excuse any spelling/grammar errors. *looking for something to drink* Wednesday, May 28. 2008Amarok 2 Gets Music Video Support!
Heya,
over the last few days I've been working on a video applet for Amarok 2, allowing you to view music videos directly in Amarok's new context view. Here comes the screenshot:  As you can see, the video is nicely integrated in our user interface, thanks to Plasma magic. This feature is especially handy for watching Youtube videos, and we're working on integrating it directly with our SeeqPod service, allowing to find and play videos from the net in the blink of an eye. I'd like to stress though that this feature is strictly meant for watching music videos. We do not intend to turn Amarok 2 into a generic movie player! There won't be advanced features like full screen mode or DVD playback. So don't even try to convince us, I can assure you it's futile :p So, Amarok 2 is and will stay a music player (and a very good one, we hope), but the addition of playing music videos complements our feature set nicely. Last not least I should mention that this feature is completely optional; you can enable and disable each applet separately. Enjoy  Wednesday, May 28. 2008A Cool little hack! ( Free, public domain, audio books in Amarok 2 )
A little while back, Amarok's very own Lydia Pintscher, aka. Nightrose, blogged about a session on free culture at FOSSCamp. Among the comments to that blog entry was a suggestion to integrate free, public domain audio books from Librivox.org into Amarok 2. This spurred a bit of a discussion which resulted in someone coming up with a link to a nice XML api for searching their catalog.
Now, regular readers of my blog will well know what happens when I see a nice API for searching free content.... So, after about an hour and a half of hacking, I give you the brand new Librivox.org service script:  As it is implemented as a ruby script, and not as a native C++ service, it is quite limited in its functionality, but it works great for searching for and streaming audio books. The scriptable service framework is turning out to be quite useful. It allows for very rapid prototyping of new services, that are very usable, even if some of them would benefit from being ported to native services. I also think that having a few good scripted services ship with Amarok 2.0 will inspire other people to write new interesting services, and provide examples on how to do so. Wednesday, May 28. 2008Tuesday, May 27. 2008About the karaoke and the linuxtag
So...
First part of exams done! *yay* But meanwhile Stephan invited kwwii for a bit of karaoke @ LinuxTag in Berlin. Kwwii of course agreed, which made Stephan wondering what will happen with records that go straight into my hands. Well, first of all, I was practising karaoke yesterday (instead of learning for today's maths exam), so i am almost not the best karaoke singer ever  Anyway, the problem is, I have absolutely no sense of embarrassment so I will not only play eventual records on Radio Amarok, I will make them play 24/7 post them onthe 15 blogs I own and make them part of Project Neon.  That reminds me... Neon is undergoing major refacturing, mainly in order to provide KDE nightly packages for Kubuntu (thanks to Kevin for pushing me so hard ) . Currently the source fetching component is work again (at least to the low profile testing I did) and the ubuntu component is close to be finished, so maybe apt-get soon tells us about kde-nightly Just for the record, amarok-nightly will use a different package tree in order to preserve the current tree size. Also new is the Phonon KCM bundling Monday, May 26. 2008just for the record?Frederik sums up OpenExpo and mentions “Nini is as good a table soccer player as I am.” Hell yea I am! We rocked (NOT)! It was nice to meet Martin, who is doing the desktop cube for kwin as a GSoC project. Lubos, your student rocks ;-) Everyone please check if there are other GSoC students living near your place. Would be cool if at least some of them could meet some KDE folks face to face and be welcomed by the community this way. I have to prepare some last minute stuff for Linuxtag now. Hope to see some of you there at the KDE, Amarok and Kubuntu booth and thanks again to everyone who helped at OpenExpo. *hug* Monday, May 26. 2008Magnatune, everywhere!
This post has little to do with Amarok. In fact it is quite blatantly beating my own drum and that of my employer, but I thought it was worth mentioning here anyway as it is something I am quite exited about and something that might be of interest to all you bloggers out there. ( And it will give me an excuse to actually try it out myself )
Now, with that out of the way.... Over the last few days, we have implemented support for embedding every single album at Magnatune into blogs and web pages. On every album page there is now an "Embed this album" link that leads to a page where you can configure a small embedded player and then copy paste a bit of code into your own page. The player comes in two major varieties ( with and without a visible playlist ) and the ability to start playing automatically or require the user to press play ( I much prefer the latter option ). The size of the player can also be configured. Of course, the player plays full versions of each track, only interrupted by a small add nag add at the end of each track. So, to give you a taste, here is one of my long time favorite albums from Magnatune.com: ( EDIT: Ok, so it seems this blog plays a bit of havoc with the layout.... ) ( EDIT 2: The planet does not like the player, so to see it, you will have to go to the actual blog ) I hope people will find this fun and useful, and that we will see these players pop up all over the place. Friday, May 23. 2008Welcome to another SoC-BlogWell, this is just another blog from a GSoCer. As official start of this years Summer of Code is on Monday I finally installed this blog to tell other SoCers and everyone else who could be interested about my experiences, problems (eh mean achievements) and ideas over the next months. Yes I know, it is locking boring it is the WordPress default theme. I am not really a design guy. I will implement Nepomuk (Semantic Desktop) features into the upcoming version 2 of Amarok the great KDE music player . So this brings together the exciting Nepomuk project, Amarok and music. You probably know Amarok but didn’t hear about Nepomuk yet. For the moment I will just refer to the website of the Nepomuk Project and the website of it’s KDE implementation. What will it look like in Amarok?
For those of you, who are now being afraid because you don’t want to use Strigi and Nepomuk: Thanks to the new flexible collection framework in Amarok 2 this will be fully optional. Just another collection in Amarok. So you don’t have to use it at all without any loss. What have I done so far? To be honest, not very much:
That is it for know. I try to write at least once in a week a short update about it. Wednesday, May 21. 2008Review: AutopanoProWhat: Autopano (registered version @ 99 euro) Verdict: totally awesome. Pros:
Pros:
Example: Tuesday, May 20. 2008Get your free on!As I already mentioned before I did a session on free culture at FOSSCamp and I promised to write a little more about it. So here we go Nikolaj did a great talk at a few events about Amarok 2 and how it lives at the crossroad of free software and free culture. (Check out the video if you want to see his talk. It’s worth it!) Take for example Amarok 2. We have integration for Jamendo and Magnatune (and others). There is a lot of really good music at both of them but they lack the exposure to the user. By integrating them into Amarok we give many people access to both services that would have never had a look at them otherwise. Of course this is also a great thing for Amarok because we have a music store integrated that sells (and a service that lets you download for free ) DRM free music, one of our developers gets paid for work he loves and we get some money for every album that gets sold through Amarok so we can pay for team members to go to conferences and other events. The other big benefit we get from this is example data. New users of Amarok have a whole lot of music at hand without having to think about it. With the infrastructure that Nikolaj worked on (service framework and scripted services) it is as easy as never before for people to get their own or other’s services integrated into Amarok and therefor accessible by a large group of our users. We also hope that this attracts new developers and that really awesome stuff will come out of it.
But Amarok is surely not the only application that could benefit from a collaboration with free culture. And this is why we did the brainstorming session at FOSSCamp. Some of the ideas we came up with were:
I am perfectly aware that not all of these are feasible for different reasons or might already be worked on. What I want however is developers to think about ways their application could benefit from free culture. A good starting point is search.creativecommons.org. So what ideas can you come up with? Which project could benefit? And in which way? Tuesday, May 20. 2008A wolf in designer clothing
Ok, so I kinda liked the latter iterations of the Graywolf look for Amarok 2. Apparently, not many others did though. So Lee Olson ( our main artist at the moment ) and I have been thinking of alternatives for a while. And It would seem we have finally come up with something that has managed to get most of the Amarok team excited. It is still in the initial phase and a lot of work is needed still, but so far it is already a huge improvements to the overall look of Amarok 2, at leasts in my humble opinion. This new look is much more clean, and actually a lot closer to our initial idea of what Amarok 2 should look like.
But all this text really does not give an idea of what this looks like, so here goes:   Besides just updated SVGs and a new way of rendering the background, it is also worth noting that a great number of redundant borders and frames have been removed. Of course, the theme still uses the system palette to blend in, even though, it at the moments adds just a touch of color. So on other themes, it looks quite drastically different:   I personally find the black one quite striking, although the highlights in the background would likely benefit from being "tuned down" just a little bit. On the technical side of things, all the SVG graphics has been moved into a single file and a DBus command has been added to load a different SVG file without restarting Amarok. This, along with out new nightly build service NEON, makes it a lot easier for artists to contribute, as it is no longer necessary to build Amarok 2 and dependencies from source, or rebuild Amarok 2 just to try out some changes in the SVG file. Hopefully, this will allow more artists to contribute in the near future. Monday, May 19. 2008Markey @ Ubuntu Release Event (Lausanne)
Ahoy!
On Saturday Myriam and I visited the Ubuntu release party in Lausanne (some city in Switzerland), where I also had the pleasure of giving a talk about Amarok 2, and we enjoyed some fine beer and foods. Admittedly I get easily bored at such events, but this time I quite enjoyed myself, making some new friends and playing some Frisbee and table soccer. Enough boring talk, here's some pics: Me trying original "Wild Africa" liqueur, complete with safari hat Moira and Myri Some usual suspects (note the sweat stain on my shirt.) Sunday, May 18. 2008rocking hard and swimming upstreamSaturday was the second and last un-conference day at FOSSCamp. There were a lot of interesting sessions, just like the day before. I attended a few sessions:
At the end of the day we went for some sightseeing again and checked out a few local pubs and restaurants. Prague thanked us with heavy rain and excellent food.
The interesting point that came up again and again during the day is how alien the concept of upstream and downstream is to a lot of people. There are a lot of bugreports where the user is not sure if the problem is specific to a certain distro’s package or if it a general problem with the program he is using. He will have to decide at some point where to file the bug and will make the wrong decision in a fair number of cases, which is fine and human. Just as common though are wishlist reports in which the reporter assumes that his distro is developing all the features of the software he is using. A distro is not seen as a product that mainly bundles applications and tweaks them to be sutible for a certain target group and purpose. Sunday was planned to be used for sightseeing but apparently Prague didn’t want us to leave the hotel for that. Heavy rain again To make a long story short: Prague (except for the rain) and the hotel were awesome, the sessions were very productive and I hope to see a lot of the great ideas that were talked about realised and am sure the feedback everyone got was helpful. I had a great time and miss them all already. *sob* |
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But it was great fun. YAY for whomever brought the table soccer to OpenExpo. I think we need to make karaoke and table soccer regular KDE activities. And we sure will do our best at Linuxtag ;-) Karaoke is planned for Friday. Maybe videos will turn up somewhere at some point *g*
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Let’s see what we can do at Linuxtag 
The last cafe we went to was the local Hard Rock Cafe including Absinthe, Blue Lagoon, White Russian and a fancy old video recording of a concert with various famous musicians done as a circus show. Rock on! 
