Entries by Mark Kretschmann

I felt I need to share this article with you; here at Amarok HQ we are very happy about the news.

Another race won, and we are looking forward to the next challenge. Go Go Amarok!

Then you're lucky: The Amarok project is giving away 20 tickets for LinuxTag 2007! All you have to do is head over to our site and participate in our little contest.

After reading this article on the dot I decided to give the new KDE-Games for KDE4 a spin. I have to say they've done fantastic work. The SVG graphics look just as good as on the screenshots, and scale beautifully to any resolution. Of course the best graphics technology is useless without actual artwork, so the kudos must also go to the artists. It's all very pretty. Likewise I was impressed by the relative maturity; many of the games seem already perfectly playable and in good shape.

The only small downside of the SVG rendering seems to be that it's quite CPU intensive. Resizing e.g. KAtomic to full screen takes a few seconds on my box (5000+ X2), and I can imagine that the application might appear to freeze on slower machines. However, in-game the performance is just fine, so I don't think that's a big issue.


I'd say gaming on KDE4 is going to be shiny. Check it out if you haven't already

We sometimes get asked by users how one can achieve to install Amarok in a different prefix. This can be handy if you'd like to check out a SVN version, but you don't want this to interfere with your packaging system. On our wiki there is already a guide for obtaining Amarok from SVN, so I won't detail this here (I am referring to the stable 1.4 branch here; Amarok 2.0 requires a lot more work to build). Once you have the sources, give the configure script your desired installation path ("prefix"):

./configure --prefix=$HOME/amarok_install

Then compile and install as usual. After that edit your ~/.bashrc and add the following lines:

export KDEDIRS=$HOME/amarok_install/:$KDEDIRS
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/amarok_install/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=$HOME/amarok_install/bin:$PATH

Now log out from KDE, and log in again. Voila, that's it

Hooray,

today's a big day in Amarok's history: For the first time Amarok2 (the current development version) compiled natively on Windows. Everyone likes screenshots, so here goes:



Credits go to my fellow Amarok developer Dan Meltzer, who spent the last two days tweaking the source to get this running. The amazing part here is that it only took two days. Basically most of Amarok was already so portable that it compiled without changes. I really expected it to be much more work. Shows that it pays off to use an excellent cross-platform toolkit like Qt in the first place.

Today I've made Amarok2 use the new Oxygen icons from SVN trunk. Have a look:



I'm rather fond of Oxygen; I think it's an improvement over Crystal, and definitely feels refreshing. Unfortunately even Oxygen can't solve some of our fundamental problems with icons:

• 
  Amarok needs many very specific icons, like "Update Collection", "Cover Manager", or "Visualizations". We would need someone to create these icons for us.
  



• 
  Our release cycle is independent from KDE's. Sometimes we introduce a new feature that needs an icon. Relying purely on Oxygen, we would need to wait for the next KDE release to get a suitable icon.
  



• 
  The biggest problem: KDE allows users to switch to alternative icon themes. Most likely they're incomplete as far as Amarok is concerned.
  

Here's a really nice review of Amarok 1.4.4. The reviewer goes into great detail and presents many of Amarok's features, including the recently added Magnatune store.

Check it out over at Sourcetrunk.

Good news, everyone!

Thanks to the generous donations from our last fundraiser, the Amarok project will soon move to a much better web server. As some of you have probably noticed, our current hosting (AMD Duron, 512MB RAM) is hopelessly underpowered for the growing traffic on amarok.kde.org. We've had a lot of downtime over the last months, especially when the site was hammered by digg.com, heise.de, etc.

The new server will be a dedicated AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2 gigs of RAM, 2 x 300 GB SATA HDD, from Hetzner.de. This should provide us with enough power to survive the slashdot/digg-effect. Paleo (Olivier Bédard) will continue to be the main administrator, and, in other good news, we will continue to host a number of other KDE projects (Konversation, Akregator..) for free

We will try to make the migration over the next few weeks as smooth as possible, by running the old server in parallel until everything is ready to go.

Please look at the above screenshot. Yes, I know, it hurts. No, I did not draw this with The Gimp. This is an actual Amarok screenshot, running under KDE 3.5.5. How the hell did those ugly squares appear all over the screen, is it a virus? No, it's a KDE feature!

How to reproduce: Fire up a KDE application (Konqueror, Amarok, or KMail will do) and press the ctrl key. It's not even a new feature; it has been there since KDE 3.3 or somesuch. And this feature even has a name, which I can't be bothered to look up.

Questions naturally coming to my mind:

• 
  How the hell could this "feature" pass the KDE usability team?
  


• 
  Is the person who invented it ashamed of it?
  

In Amarok development, whenever someone comes up with an idea like that, we'd go like: "Dude, are you out of your mind?"


Food for thought?

Yesterday, Arab of Nectarine Radio fame interviewed me on the future of Amarok. Check out the interview for some interesting tidbits about current Amarok development, and our future plans regarding Amarok 2.

Ahoy, ye scurvy sea dogs. Today be the day for talkin' like a pirate! Have a mug o' fine rum an' set out for some swashbucklin' fun. Show them land lubbers what a pirate is made of, yarrrr!


Fair Winds,
Yer Cap'n Marrrrrkey

Yesterday Rob Levin, the founder of the freenode IRC network, died after a tragic accident. The Amarok project (and I think the free software world) ows much to his work. It was on freenode where our project was started. Freenode made it possible to bring together our developers from all around the world.

Rob Levin shall be remembered.

This weekend a KDE delegation attended the Come2Linux expo in Essen, a city in western Germany. I was one of the KDE booth babes, along with Harald (from Austria), Carsten (Germany), Eckhart (Germany), and Benoit (France).



I met up with Harald and Carsten on Saturday morning at the central station in Essen. There I also had the honor to meet Bernhard Reiter, one of the leaders from the FSF Germany, who had coincidentally taken the same train as Carsten. The four of us (and 200 Kubuntu CDs) then travelled to the expo location at the university of Essen. When we arrived at the location, things looked promising. There was a nice huge room with glass walls, sunlight streaming in (the weather was wonderful!), and many exhibitors had already set up their booths. We talked to the organizers and were given our badges and information material. Then we learned that our booth would not be in this room, but actually in another building on the campus. Oh well, so we took our gear and walked to this building. Turned out it was actually quite far away, maybe half a kilometer from the main building.

Arriving at our building, we found that our booth location was in a corner at the end of a long corridor. Scattered along this corridor were booths from the FSF, FreeBSD, a Linux gaming group, and a number of other exhibitors. We set up our booth, explored the location and then settled behind our booth table. After some hours we began to realize that our booth location wasn't exactly ideal. As opposed to the folks in the main hall, we had no sunlight, no internet, no waffles, and no visitors. Well, not very many visitors at least. Some found us simply by chance while searching for the talk rooms, which were located in the same building.

On saturday night we went for beers in a nice restaurant in the city. Afterward we wanted to visit the Gnome release party, but couldn't find the location. Instead we ended up in a heavy metal club. Five geeks and a laptop among the crowd of grim looking, long haired heavy metal dudes, I'm sure that was quite the sight to behold. We didn't mind and had some fun anyway, and many more beers. On our way back to the hotel we pondered what to do about our frustrating booth situation. We were not looking forward to sitting another day in our dark corner in that corridor. So we decided, if things would not improve, we would simply pack all our stuff and sit at a table outside of the building. As we didn't have internet anyway, we could at least enjoy some sunlight, we reckoned.

And indeed, on the next day things did not improve. No internet, even less visitors. Sigh. As we prepared to move our table outside, a friendly guy from LW Systems made the generous offer to share their booth space in the main hall with us. We gladly accepted this offer and moved our booth. Now we could also enjoy internet access, waffles, and sunlight. Quite the improvement!

What rocked:

• When we discovered how to get kick ass sound out of crappy notebook speakers: Put a second notebook next to it, and start playback on both machines simultaneously. Eckhart and Harald came up with this idea, fired up Amarok on both boxen and then clicked Play at the same time. The result was amazing. The slight delay generates something like a chorus effect, which made the sound so much fuller and more enjoyable. Bomb the bass! In fact it bombed so much that we were quickly told to "turn off that noise", heh.


• Harald doing the Qt4 dance.


• Meeting the other KDE folks.


• Our accomodation on Saturday night in the "Unperfekt House", a famous artists' residence and hotel in Essen, who have a great attitude towards free software. They use free software exclusively on all computers in the house (including an internet cafe with KDE running on all computers), and in turn they will let open source developers reside in the house for free. This simply rocked, big thanks to the Unperfekt House and the organizers who made this possible.

What did not rock so much:

• No internet on the first day.


• Our crappy booth location at the end of the world.


• Relatively low number of visitors. It was a rather small event, and apparently not very well advertised. At any time there were far more exhibitors than actual visitors in the room.


• Due to miscommunication, we had no KDE merch with us for sale. Worse still, we didn't even have KDE t-shirts and badges for ourselves. Most of us were wearing normal street clothing. Next time we really need to plan this better.


• No press attended the event.

Summary:
I did enjoy this event and would do it again, but the organizational troubles and low attendance flawed the experience somewhat. However, I'm sure some of these issues can be overcome the next time.

Well, I don't know why you're doing it. I keep on using C++ because Amarok is written in it, which can't be changed easily. And that's about the only reason.

This morning I intended to review a code change in amarok.h, one of Amarok's central headers files. Accidentally, I pressed :w in vim, touching the file although it was not modified. The following build cycle left me ample time to shower, have breakfast, and write most of this blog entry! Just changing a single line in one of Amarok's C++ sources (heck, a single character), means a whopping 10 minutes of compiling and linking, until you actually get to see the result. Made a mistake? Oh well, fix it, and wait another 10 minutes. To summarize: Compiling is driving me nuts. I've wasted enough time for it in my life. Life's too short to wait for a freaking compiler.

Alas, there is no need for this madness. We have been given two wonderful tools, that present a true alternative for KDE application development. One is Ruby, given to us by Yukihiro Matsumoto, and the other is Korundum, by our very own Richard Dale. Using these tools, we can create applications and actually have fun doing it! Why bother with endless compile times, when we can have the same result in a much shorter time? Ruby is less performant than C++, but many programmers don't realize that this is utterly irrelevant for GUI applications, which spend 99% of their time in library calls, waiting for an event.

Two days ago I had this wonderful encounter with Gregor Karzelek in our new IRC channel #kde-ruby. He told me this:

"It is unbelievable how fast you can develop with ruby and how easy and fast you can create GUIs with korundum. i started a project for my brother a week ago and have done already about 80% of the functions and 90% of the gui. when i think how long it took my to create such things in java.."

"And for the speed: i don't know whether it really is that slower like so many say. i do think the gui of my project works quite fast. at least fast enough."

I think this speaks for itself. I, for one, don't plan to create another KDE application in C++. I have better tools now


Did this blog spark your interest? If so, join us in #kde-ruby to learn more about Ruby and Korundum.

As my fellow KDE developer Carsten wrote yesterday, we have lately observed an increased interest in Ruby in the KDE community. There's a lot of buzz everywhere, and we often see Ruby related questions on IRC. Being Ruby fans ourselves, we've decided it's a good time to bring KDE-Ruby folks together, and start a little "Ruby Corner". For now, this means blogging, and our new IRC channel #kde-ruby on freenode.

Everyone interested in Ruby is invited to join #kde-ruby, both newbies and experienced hackers. We're happy to help with Ruby related questions, and we also use this channel to plan further activities. The channel is also home to insanity, our powerful Ruby bot, that can be programmed directly from IRC - a nice tool for quickly checking out some code.

Hope to meet you in #kde-ruby


PS: Did you know that Ruby is currently one of the fastest growing programming languages?