Entries by Seb Ruiz

I do believe that my recommendations very much match the mainstream of the opinions of the key people in Linux multimedia and desktop audio. Of course I don’t nearly know everyone of the key hackers in Linux multimedia. But I do know most of those who are actively interested in collaboration, whose projects have a lot mindshare and who attend the conferences that matter for Linux desktop audio.

Lennart forgets that Amarok is definitely a contender for the most popular music player on desktop Linux today. It possibly has the most mindshare of any Linux music player project. Remember that a long time ago, Amarok supported aRts, xine, GStreamer and helix. Now we can take advantage of not needing to care about a specific implementation for an audio output device by using Phonon.

Lennart again:

“Use GStreamer! (Unless your focus is only KDE in which cases Phonon might be an alternative.)”

This implies that a developer should only use Phonon if and only if the developer is targeting a KDE application. Frankly, this reasoning is not very well formed and is shameful. Perhaps what Lennart meant to say belongs along the lines of “Developers using the KDE development libraries might want to use Phonon”.

Amarok is a perfect example of an application which uses the KDE development libraries, but is not tied into the KDE plasma workspace. A grand portion of GNOME users pro actively install Amarok on their system because it is their preferred application for listening to music. Time to pick up the slack and get with the times.

It’s taken me the better part of a month to get home, settle in and upload my photos from Akademy to the cloud. Granted, I don’t have many photos since there were enough paparazzi at the event *glares at Bart and Sebas*.

The Grote Markt in Mechelen (HDR).

The HDR which I’ve posted here proves that you can indeed create impressive shots only using free software, as long as you have a little perseverance and know how. Maybe Uga’s blogs will get there eventually .

The rest of the images are on flickr.

I should have blogged much more from Akademy, but having hardware which insisted on frequently overheating made life a little difficult. I’m still in Belgium - in Bruges actually, blogging from my N810 courtesy of Nokia. More on that later.

I’ll start by saying that l think we had very productive week, getting lots of design and development done towards our goals for Amarok 2.0. We focused heavily on critiqueing the user interfaces of the major components in our GUI: the playlist, context view and each of our sidebar browsers. In between hacking hours, Mark, Leo and myself hosted design and release-breaking-issue sessions. These have provided valuable direction and motivation to all of our developers, so you can look forward to some exciting progress as we gear up to an imminent beta (and eventually final) release!

We also brainstormed a number of post 2.0 ideas such as interface adjustments to enhance your application experience, including, but not withstanding, mobile and embedded devices. Yes, that’s right folks, before too long (hopefully) you’ll be able to run Amarok on your favourite (maybe) small form factor device. The main use case would be for remote collections and streaming, but we’re not going to shut out users who like carrying 8GB of music on memory cards.

All this talk of small form factor devices is making me drool over my N810 as I write this. Some observations: all this very slow and awkward typing makes me much more coherent; leeching off random wireless to blog has never been easier; and, the inbuilt GPS has already proven invaluable to the Amarok crew as we used it to find our restaurant when we got lost cycling through the mid-west of Belgium. Note: never cycle 15km immediately after eating a huge meal, and never let Casey on a bicycle.

Finally, a big thanks to all that made Akademy so great: the organisers, the participants, the speakers, the boffers, the paparazzi, and all the people that were responsible for either brewing, frying or coating things in sugar.

Last night I managed to have nearly 100 people sign Lydia’s little black notebook at the Akademy beer-event. It was fun and a perfect example of how beer can give you a reason to do practically anything.

Coming up: Amarok talk. Must write notes.

The world has seen a significant amount of complaining about NVidia cards (the 8600 has had it’s fair share of whippings).

However, I’ve come to a great realisation:

with my exceptionally slow nvidia card I can see absolutely every draw that occurs on the screen. Great for debugging paint events, and no need to export QT_FLUSH_PAINT=1.

All you devs should go out and get one

My last couple of weeks has been spent focusing on getting cover art back up to scratch in Amarok 2. Cover art really adds a lot of spice and colour into the UI of the application, especially now that we are showing the artwork in the collection browser, context view and playlist. For those of you who are supremely organised, the collection scanner will now trawl through directories and try to pick up images it thinks are relevant to the songs which are being scanned. Embedded artwork is not implemented currently but it is certainly on the todo list.

Most of the relevant actions can now be executed for artwork: fetching from amazon, setting a custom image, removal and full size display. Music lovers with non English songs can now rejoice because we’ve also fixed some problems fetching artwork for album/artists that have accented characters, which Amazon seemed to have problems with. Another cool feature that we’ve experimented with is automatic cover fetching if there is an album with no artwork. Keep in mind that this is entirely tentative, as we are not sure that the false-positive rate from Amazon is low enough to justify polluting your database with random covers (although this will improve with our recent fix to non English tags). Maybe we’ll keep it, maybe we won’t, but it certainly is a cool feature which I’m loving at the moment - I am really lazy and hate having to explicitly fetch a cover, even though artwork is great to have.

Here you can see albums with artwork as well as a full size cover display

In other news, I did some more work migrating statistics from Amarok 1.4 databases to the new and improved A2 schema. Here you can see how the play count, score and first/last played date for this track. Migration of lyrics and actual cover art isn’t yet implemented but that, like everything else is also on the cards.

Oh - one more thing:

My tickets are finalised, see you in Belgium in August!

What: Autopano (registered version @ 99 euro)

Verdict: totally awesome.

Pros:

• Very fast, reliable stitching of images together


• Excellent colour and exposure correction, even if you don’t lock your exposures


• Supports HDR imaging! Create panoramas out of raw format files and then use tone mapping software like Qtpfsgui


• Excellent barrel distortion compensation on wide angled shots


• Qt4! (and cross platform)

Pros:

• It’s not free software


• Expensive


• User interface could use some work

Example:

Panorama created out of 8 individual raw images, then tone-mapped with Qtpfsgui. I can’t get a larger version because Qtpfsgui runs out of memory - the resultant panoraic raw image is over 130MB!

The Google-AU blog reports that Google is going to be holding another one of it’s brain busting adventures soon. The post is ended with the following text/clue:

Arrrrrrrr you ready? Onward to the first puzzle, matey! And good luck!

aHR0cDovL3RyZWFzdXJlaHVudC5hcHBzcG90LmNvbS8=

Soon . 1210550400

Warning: links below contain spoilers.

Shouldn’t take long to figure out. The 10 digits of the final number is a dead giveaway that it’s a unix timestamp, and maps to a particular time. That’s soon.

The seemingly random string is a base64 encoding of a particular website.

I’d just like to wish everyone a hearty and happy star wars day.

May the fourth be with you!

Icon credit: everaldo

I never really got to say much about sightseeing in Taiwan after the conference since everything got so busy. After our wonderful post-conference dinner in Danshui, we crashed back the hostel and woke up to a disappointingly drizzly morning. It was a silly idea considering the cloudy skies, but we headed straight to the Taipei 101 - the tallest tower in the world at 101 floors. It is impressively huge. So huge that the tower poked through the clouds and we wouldn’t have been able to have seen anything from the top so we decided to come back later after visiting the Sun-Yat Sen (who forced the Empress out of power) memorial around the corner.

The Taipei 101 is also really cool because it has the fastest elevator in the world, going from top to bottom in an incredible 36 seconds! That’s 1000m per minute! Charlie and his glass elevator really need to upgrade. We also managed to find some Taiwanese fried chicken with mixed vegies for lunch in some back alley behind the world trade center (which we casually strolled through, thongs, singlets and cameras in hand) before discovering a totally awesome suburb of Taipei which only sold computer and camera gear. Seriously, it was streets and streets worth, probably bigger than my university campus (and that’s big, folks!).

The Confucius temple was lots of fun and very colourful, with red and gold decorations and pagoda rooftops adorned with intricate dragons. Seeing as our hostel was close to one of the most famous landmarks, the Chiang Kai Shek memorial, we visited this enormous plaza at the end of the day so that we had a quick getaway back to the hostel for feet resting time. I could not believe the magnitude of this place. It is probably possible to fit over 100 football fields in the space. My camera couldn’t capture the entire space, so here’s a panorama. If you want to get a feel for JUST HOW FREAKING HUGE it is, click on the photo.

Another grand attraction of Taipei is the Shilin night market where you can experience things such as:

- Stinky tofu (it smells worse than gtk+)

- Asian Elvis impersonators with awesome gold pants

- Never-ending arcades stacked full of Dance-Dance-Revolution machines

- Random old Taiwanese men giving random hints on life

- Buying “pets” as close to being Bonsai as you can get without shoving them into a jar

- Awesome fruits, like durian, dragon fruit and rose apple

And then there is the Grand Palace Museum, which true to it’s name is both very grand, palatial and is host to the finest collection of Chinese art in the world.

That’s a lot of links in one post. Here’s another one for good measure:linkety clinkety (completely factual)

Didn’t get a chance to blog about day 2 of the OTST2008 meeting yesterday since everything has been so hectic. Day 2 was similar in order to Saturday, hearing lots of excellent talks about open hardware and software. I found the talks on Freifunk.net and Open Street Map particularly exciting and look forward to seeing how the future plays out.

Later in the afternoon Pradeepto spoke about the kde-edu project, and Ian and I spoke about Amarok 2. It was a little unfortunate that the number of attendees waned towards the end of the day but I still think the event was more than fantastic. Ellis and the folk from Asus treated us all to a wonderful Taiwanese dinner by the seafront in the waterfront town of Danshui. It was great fun . Here’s most of the team in a group photo:

Summing up, I had a great time. The summit was definitely a great endeavour and hopefully has brought on the right change and the first step to have free software and hardware promoted throughout Taiwan and the Asian world.

Reporting from the luxuries of free Internet at our hostel in Taipei, Ian and I have been going over the talk that we’ll be giving on Amarok tomorrow at the Open Tech Summit here in Taiwan. The entire day today has been spent at the (very nice) Asus corporate headquarters - about 20 minutes on the metro ride outside of Taipei. The metro itself is a nice analogy to the Taiwanese people. Exceptionally efficient, very friendly and hospitable, immaculately clean and well thought out. Kudos to you, Taiwanese government. So friendly have the Taiwanese people been that I’ve been escorted up 10 flights of stairs, around train stations and through chaotic traffic - just to lend a hand. The Asus headquarters are totally awesome, if simply for this rendition of the Mona Lisa created entirely out of motherboard parts.

The aim of OTST is to promote open software and hardware to the Taiwanese, who are quite backward in their thinking of FOSS culture. We’re here on a religious missionary crusade to try and convince them to pick up free software! There were a number of interesting talks today, such as an introductions to OHI and OpenPattern, ultra cool speech recognition software for the EeePC and a general EeePC hacking howto. There were a few talks in Chinese, but I still found it easy to understand how cool it was to see compositing support on the EeePC.

In the early evening we had a light dinner party (which was quite heavy as we’d been fed all day), with two performances by local creative-commons artists. It’s heart-warming to see that Asus is putting a lot of effort into hosting this event and really trying to push the FOSS movement in Taiwan.

I’ve just been interviewed at a Spanish website which promotes open source software, zatune.es. The interview follows one of my pet projects, squash, and really stretched out my spanish skills .

interview link (spanish)

It’s that never ending story once again. Upgrade the video card, suffer extreme performance loss in the desktop:

1. swap nvidia 7900 card for 8600 (a meager upgrade, but still)


2. notice the desktop has dramatically slowed down (expected)


3. recompile the newest nvidia kernel drivers


4. reboot, and to no avail, no performance increase


5. repeat steps 3 and 4, each time tweaking something else. xorg.conf, ubuntu restricted drivers etc

DRI is enabled:

seb@hammerhead:~$ glxinfo | grep "direct"

direct rendering: Yes

I know glxgears is no good benchmark, but at least it provides a slight indication to the performance of the card. 5000 fps is a rubbish result. Also, I’d expect to be able to run the desktop with compositing without an problems - which I can’t.

Can anybody provide a fool proof method of fixing this? I’m reaching out for the sake of my sanity!

Hi all,

Just a quick message that I’m sure many of you have discovered already. Cover art retrieval from Amazon is now broken due to a change in API that Amazon has introduced in it’s web service.

We will release Amarok version 1.4.9 very soon which will re-enable cover art downloads.

Thanks for your patience.