Wednesday, May 31. 2006Tuesday, May 23. 2006gearing up
We've been getting into some of the nitty gritty details of the multimedia meeting in the Netherlands this weekend. Like with the help of the Wikipedia picture of Amsterdam's Centraal Station, we decided that I would meet Leinir on the west side of the main entrance on that blank wall. Hoo-ray for the Internet.
First order of business: How do you pronounce Leinir?  Since I dislike walking, and its the "when in Rome" thing to do besides, I'll probably be renting a bicycle for Thursday. If I'm not too jetlagged, and after looking at the other touristy things to do during the day in Amsterdam, I decided to see the Van Gogh museum again. The things I didn't do in Amsterdam the last time, like the Anne Frank house or the Heinkein Experience (Come on Heinkein, 10 Euros? Budweiser makes watery beer, but at least Grant's farm is free and has a zoo!) still don't sound as appealing. Thursday, May 11. 2006Backends, Phonon, GStreamer
Chris Schaller's (a gstreamer dev) blog, as pointed out by Aaron Seigo, does pretty much miss the point. KDE has already been down the road of hitching up to the one true media framework. GStreamer simply does not offer "a believable API/ABI stability guarantee that covers kde4's lifespan." And one can't really blame it, we can't even be sure how long KDE4 will last. And portablity as well - why wouldn't KDE use the available "advanced media frameworks on other platforms" (as Schaller puts it)?
So an abstract multimedia layer is just a technical necessity for a project like KDE. However some of the issues Schaller identified are in fact real issues, ones we've experienced developing amaroK. We have an abstract multimedia backend system. One thing we've discovered is that it is very important to make sure all engines are fully functional. A user can only use one engine at a time. So an engine that is less then functional is actually quite damaging to the application - Murphy's law dictates that distros will pick the least functional backend as the default. We've considered options such as notifying the user of features that their engine lacked. But ultimately whats the point of an incomplete or instable engine when a better one exists? So a few days ago, amaroK's gstreamer engine was turned off - the Xine and Helix backends are fine, there are several open bugs on it and it does not support streaming yet. Phonon should have a similar policy of not tolerating incomplete engines. So Schaller's points regarding the problems of having 5 different engines is one to be concerned about - however there is really no reason why Phonon has to have 5 engines and I hope it doesn't. Any additional released engine should have some justifaction (like the advanced features of NMM). Thursday, May 11. 2006Concluding the Delete Controversy?
I borrowed the delete dialog from JuK at the suggestion of a bugzilla comment.
 It also cleaned up the code a bit; previously it was respecting the setting from Konqueror which for some reason resulted in a lot of redundant Trash/Delete code. We're in a string freeze so it won't be in until 1.4.1. Wednesday, May 10. 2006To Europe
Got my e-ticket in the mail this morning: I'm going to Europe! First, flying into Amsterdam, where I will probably sleep all day and party all night. Not because I'm some sort of nocturnal party animal, but Europe is 7 hours ahead of Missouri so I don't have much choice. Last time I went to Europe (flew into Amsterdam that time as well) I got over my jet lag fairly quickly through the judicious use of naps; hopefully this time will be the same.
I just loved Amsterdam last time I was there, a big city with lots bike traffic instead of car or vespa. From there we go on south to the Multimedia Meeting. It will be great to finally see all these people I've known over IRC for >1 year in the flesh. I'm still in the midst of finals this week, next week I plan on preparing some ideas to bring to the meeting. This semester I had a Software Engineering class, some of it was academic silliness, but I think some of it might be useful to think about. Especially in light of how the latter stages of this 1.4 release has been marked by many regressions. I think some "system decomposition" is in-order (read: reorganize the source tree). Automatic regression testing would also be a useful tool. Sometimes I think a more formal decision making process would make sense, though this would be contrary to how amaroK has ever done things. We do certainly need to gain some consensus on when would be the best time to start amaroK 2.0 development. Personally I'm in the "as soon as 1.4 is doing well" camp. From there Seb and I are going to tour around a bit. Seb wants to go to Belgium for some reason, but it is only like 10 minutes away from the MM meeting, so why not. Then I'm going to London; I've never been to England before so that should be fun. I will join Seb in thanking the folks at KDE.nl like Martijn Klingens and Adriaan de Groot for organizing the event, and of course, paying for my ticket.
Monday, April 17. 2006Poking the Qt API with QtRuby
Several months ago, Leinir made a mockup (not sure what happened to it) for the Dynamic Playlist bar. Its mostly been implemented, but the original mockup looked pretty snazzy - more colors and bevels if I remember correctly.
I often open up the Ruby interactive shell `irb`, run a require 'Korundum' and ask simple questions about the API with the help of Ruby's great introspection features. What does this KURL function do? What color is colorGroup.highlight? This time the task was more complicated; I've never used QPainter before. Rather then code it in C++ and have to deal with the code-compile-link-run cycle that inevitably follows whenever I'm using an unfamiliar API, I decided to use Ruby. Even when not used interactively, code-run is just faster and is a real benefit when having to test and fiddle around with the details. So here is the beveled result:  Not much, but at least I know how to use QPainter now. Converting to C++ will be easy; the function calls will be the same, just need to adapt the syntax a little.Read on to see the source code. Continue reading "Poking the Qt API with QtRuby" Saturday, April 8. 2006To Remember The Good Old Time...Not many people in the world will understand this blog-entry. So if you're not one of them, I'm really sorry. Keep walking. Nothing to see here, really. For the others: enjoy.  Friday, April 7. 2006Lehmann im Tor?Na dann haben wir ja endlich ein arrogantes Arschloch-Team zusammen, bei dem man sich kollektiv ueber das Ausscheiden in der Vorrunde freuen kann und darf. Lasset die Spiele beginnen und die Peinlichkeiten auf Deutschland herabprasseln. Ich freue mich schon  ...muesli Sunday, April 2. 2006Spam. All the time. That's how I feel every day. Sunday, March 5. 2006Saturday, February 18. 2006Saturday, January 21. 2006Thursday, January 12. 2006Monday, November 14. 2005Matisyahu concert
A few friends and I made the 1.5 hour drive down to Columbia, MO. We live in Kirksville (pop. <20000) so Columbia (pop. ~85000-100000) is quite a contrast. So we lived it up in the "big city" - did a little (unsuccessful) bicycle shopping, had lunch, saw Good Night, and Good Luck (a great movie), went to the mall (I read a manga cover-to-cover) and had some yummy sushi at Osaka before preceding to the evening concert.
I've been listening to Matisyahu for a little while now so I knew the songs and such, but I still didn't really expect the concert to be as awesome as it was. There was virtuoso guitar, drum and some great beatboxing. The only downside was how smoky it was, Kade agreed. Obviously its really hard to get pictures in the middle of a concert, but Ben was able to get a few I was able to touch up in showfoto. Showfoto really is a gem of a KDE app (and it doesn't even have a proper webpage), it does its one thing quite well (now the blog is KDE-related  ).  
Wednesday, November 2. 2005 |
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