Amarok Blog - jefferai

Camp KDE 2010 Announced!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:18:06 +0000

I'm pleased as punch/as a fat cat/etc. to point you to The Dot (specifically here) to see the official announcement and some details. More details will be forthcoming soon (and especially as we get the web site in order). Start clearing your schedule and working on your presentations!

AFT and MusicBrainz track identifiers

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:15:31 +0000

A heads-up: Amarok File Tracking can now use MusicBrainz track identifiers for its embedded IDs. This means people that have used Picard to tag their files but not amarok_afttagger can still get some embedded AFT goodness! It also enables an interesting "mode" because it essentially enables song tracking vs. actual file tracking (which you may or may not want, depending on your particular needs).

Full details are here.

Presenting the KDE network on Facebook

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:45:00 +0000

Many KDE developers are on Facebook. A while back I wondered if it would be possible to have an official KDE developers' network on Facebook -- after all, there are networks for schools, jobs, cities, and more (and for many developers, KDE is literally or figuratively a job...)

As it turned out, there was a "Kde" network -- but something was odd. To join a work network you have to have an email address affiliated with the network. KDE owns kde.com and kde.org -- so who was this? The only other "KDE" I could find that seemed like it would be legit was the Kentucky Department of Education, and I rather doubted it was them, because they would likely have used all-uppercase KDE as well. So I started an inquiry with Facebook, trying to figure out if either it was someone squatting on our name (and trademark) or whether it was some legit organization -- in which case, would they mind donating the network to us?

After several months of back-and-forth with the people at Facebook, who were very nice (if a bit slow ), I'm happy to say that we've regained the KDE network (properly capitalized) as our own. I still don't know the whole story as to who was there before, and never will due to their privacy policies, but I'll say this:

If you were in the "Kde" network before and Facebook asked if you would mind donating it to us, and you did, thanks so much!

If someone was simply squatting in the "Kde" network before, then thanks, Facebook, for kicking them out!

To join the network, go to Settings -> Networks, and enter KDE and your kde.org email address in the appropriate fields.

DB changes -- call for benchmarkers!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:06:00 +0000

I've done some work in trunk over the past week that may have a huge impact on many of you Amarokers. Read on, and if you can do some benchmarks for me, fantastic.

First, the schema/table changes.

We've seen some issues where people have, for whatever reason, ended up with InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM tables. This is probably the result of their DB being created long ago before we were explicitly telling the mysqle startup to skip InnoDB. This mainly causes a problem because some columns cannot be as wide as we'd like them to be when using InnoDB. So, the first thing being done is that an ALTER TABLE is being forced on every table to explicitly convert to MyISAM. In addition, ENGINE parameters are now used during table creation to be more explicit in the future.

Some of you might have seen complaints in the debug output about indexes not being able to be created due to a max key length, which by default in MySQL is 1000 (compile-time option). So, some columns have had their widths adjusted so that all indexes are now successfully created.

Now, the other changes:

As we added more features, scanning got slow. Like, really slow. You'd spend more time running SQL queries than actually scanning your files. So I've been aiming to change that.

Over the past week I've committed changes that remove, per track, anywhere from 1 to 6 SQL queries. The exact amount is highly dependent on your file set, but there is a minimum of one less SQL query per track. If you've done a lot of file moves and AFT kicks in, it'll be an even more massive speedup. I'm going to try to do some further tuning, but already results are looking positive.

Nikolaj has reported that his scan time went from 68 seconds to 18 seconds -- more than 3x faster. Mikko didn't notice a speedup, but he said that whereas scanning used to peg his CPU at 100%, it no longer does so. What I want to know is: how does this affect *you*?

If you want to help, do the following:

Backup your DB. If you're using external MySQL do a mysqldump, if you're using internal MySQLe backup the mysqle folder in the Amarok data directory.

Update to a revision from a week ago...say, 995000.

Wipe your DB.

Start Amarok -- it will do a full scan because of the empty DB. Time it as it does the scan.

Repeat steps 3 & 4, so that you can see what the time is like after caching.

Update to current trunk (at least 998470).

Repeat step 3.

Repeat steps 4 and 5.

Then leave a reply here with your values. If you watch your CPU during each of the scans, report that here too. Thanks!

More Info on Gitorious.org

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:30:00 +0000

Today at the Akademy General Meeting, it was mentioned that Gitorious.org is being seriously looked at as a hosting solution for our Git repositories (as opposed to running an instance of Gitorious ourselves). Since I have been a major part of pushing in that direction, I feel that it would be prudent to make sure that those interested are aware of the relevant discussion and the current status. So, for those interested, read on.

Please note that this is not a post about why KDE is migrating to Git, why this is a good idea/bad idea/neutral idea, etc. This is purely discussing the hosting aspect of Git.

First, I would encourage you to read this kde-scm-interest mail, which I sent to the list on July 2nd. It goes into a good amount of depth as to why Gitorious.org could be beneficial for us, and the rest of this post will assume that you have read that email and the others in the thread, as it will simply update the information therein.

On Monday a large group of interested people, including KDE sysadmins and the guys from Shortcut AS, went to lunch to discuss the technical issues. The output from that discussion is as follows:

The vast majority of those present feel that Gitorious.org would be the best choice, with the following being the main reasons:

Shorcut could provide a SLA (Service Level Agreement) guaranteeing a minimum level of service, such as uptime and available bandwidth, providing professional hosting services and easing burden on our system administrators.

As David Faure noted, user account creation is becoming a large burden on our system administrators, which is not something that we would have to administer if using Gitorious.org.

It should be noted that the above was not a unanimous opinion.

KDE does have infrastructure and bandwidth; it could keep one read-only Subversion server available for historical reasons, and convert the rest to serve as backups or possibly load-balancers. Or to put it in a more general fashion, KDE can reduce hosting costs (which will likely be covered by sponsors) by working with Shortcut. It is not a question that this could be done, but rather what the right method would be for doing so.

The Gitorious developers have a feature branch where they have already fixed one or both of the current showstopping bugs relating to rights within the shared Git repository. They have said that this should be merged into mainline within a week (not sure if they meant a week from then, or from the end of GCDS).

The hosting could be set up in such a way that it can be accessed via git.kde.org.

Post-commit-hook functionality will be available; the Shortcut guys are currently working with us to determine how we can migrate or emulate pre-commit-hook functionality.

We have two projects that are chomping at the bit to get onto Git ASAP: Amarok and TagLib. Amarok will be converted first and will serve as the initial guinea pigs to iron out any issues. Barring any major issues being found, TagLib will be converted in short order.

I hope this gives everyone a better idea of KDE's Git-hosting plans. If you haven't checked out Gitorious.org, I encourage you to do so; it's made huge leaps and bounds in the past six months and has become quite a great tool.

Please direct any questions or feedback to the kde-scm-interest mailing list at: kde-scm-interest at kay dee eee dot ooo arr gee, not to the comments section on this blog.

AFT fixed on the Playlist

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:29:00 +0000

Yes, another one of my semi-habitual posts about AFT. Just a short one though.

In revision 992942, I finally fixed a bug that has kept AFT working for the playlist in certain situations (although it had previously been working for both saved user playlists and statistics). This means that if you have a track in the playlist, move it to another location, and it is then scanned in that new location (remember, kids, it uses folder mtime to determine whether to scan a folder, so when in doubt do a "touch ."), the track in the playlist should remain valid and play the song in the new location. As the playlist use case was one of the initial reasons for the development of AFT back in Amarok 1.4, you can imagine I'm happy that it's finally (seeming to be) working again in all scenarios, instead of failing in certain situations.

MySQL Server Support -- Promised and Delivered

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:54:00 +0000

We told you it was coming. Sure, that was a while back, so you probably thought we forgot about it. Or maybe you thought we were simply playing politics, tossing empty promises to our users.

Well...you were wrong.

It may be a bit later than planned -- we wanted to have it in time for 2.1, but it didn't happen -- but as of revision 984572, there is now support for storing an Amarok database on a MySQL server instead of the embedded MySQL database. There's no configuration dialog in the GUI yet, but it's pretty simple to set up, as explained below. All you have to do is add a few things into your amarokrc file and make a valid user on the MySQL server instance of your choice -- you don't even need to create the database yourself. (In fact, you shouldn't -- you should let Amarok create the database so we can ensure that the character set and collation are set right.)

Here's how to do it.

Update to at least r984572 (of course, updating to the latest revision is probably your best bet).

Wipe your build dir clean and rebuild. Not necessarily necessary, but as 47 files were changed in that commit, it's not a bad idea.

After install, run kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental, just in case.

On your MySQL server, run a command like: "GRANT ALL ON amarokdb.* TO 'amarokuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;" Be sure to substitute for "amarokdb", "amarokuser", "localhost", and "mypassword" as appropriate.

Open up your amarokrc file, usually in ~/.kde4/share/config/amarokrc. Add a [MySQL] section:
[MySQL]
UseServer=true
Database=amarokdb
Host=localhost
Password=mypassword
User=amarokuser

Close the file and start Amarok. It should create the database and start a scan of your files. If you want to switch back to the embedded collection, simply set "UseServer" to false.

Pretty easy! Be sure to let me know if you have problems -- file a bug and assign it to "mitchell" at a domain of "kde" plus a dot plus "org".

UTF-8 and Your Music

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:32:00 +0000

A heads-up on something new in Amarok SVN (and coming in 2.2 for those of you not living on the bleeding edge):

We've had various bug reports over the years relating to character sets and collation, causing issues with matching searches for music or mis-sorted items. Well, hopefully no longer.

When you update to 2.2 (recent SVN users, see the note at the end of this post), your Amarok database and tables will be converted to use the 'utf8' character set and 'utf8_unicode_ci' collation as default for any table or column created from this point on. Every single text/varchar field will also be converted through a two-step process to use 'utf8' as the character set (the data inside was always UTF-8, but there was a possible mismatch between what the data was and what the database thought it was, if your mysql wasn't built to use 'utf8' by default). In addition, the character set used when talking to the embedded server (the protocol in the socket) will be 'utf8'.

Fixing this mismatch between what the server might have been using for character set/collation and the data we're putting in there should hopefully ensure that sorting and tags work very well for our users with some files wth non-Latin1 tags (probably just about everybody these days).

* Recent SVN users: if your build date is earlier than this post I'd recommend wiping your mysqle directory (not just a full rescan), as the initial commit of the updating code contained a bug that could possibly cause trouble down the line with user playlists...but you bleeding edge users should be expecting database wipes every now and then

AFT Embedded Tagging: now on FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, Ogg/FLAC, and Ogg/Speex!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:57:58 +0000

I've blogged about Amarok File Tracking before and there's a lot of information about it on the wiki. For those that haven't heard about the goodness of embedded file tracking, check out those links. There are a couple pieces of good news, and one piece of bad news.

The good news: in current SVN (and thus 2.2) the amarok_afttagger executable will also now handle FLAC and various Ogg-contained formats. Another piece of good news - the amarok_afttagger executable is now contained in the amarok-utilities package, and thus can be run on headless machines without X! And lastly -- AFT now works with user playlists, so you can move your files around (keep in mind the caveats if you're not using embedded AFT tags) and your playlists will always stay current, in addition to statistics and The Playlist.

The bad news? Something is currently a bit broken somewhere deep inside with Observers which means that The Playlist will only update with the correct new URL once (the metadata observers seem to die after that). This doesn't seem to be AFT specific but rather seems like a bug that AFT is exposing. Closing Amarok and reopening it will cause the proper new URLs to be in the playlist. I'm working on trying to fix that.

(Important note: it writes into the FLAC Xiph comment. This is the only metadata type actually required by the FLAC spec, and thus is the proper place to put it, but a lot of FLAC files incorrectly only have ID3v2 tags, so depending on the tagger you're using you may only see one or the other.)

Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning (Redux)

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:48:00 +0000

A long time ago I promised to post an update when I got incremental batch scanning working. Well, as it turns out, that happened a long time ago too, but I never got around to writing the Wiki page for it. I've corrected that flaw.

Anyone interested in scanning their collection locally instead of across a network connection, or keeping their collection up-to-date when Amarok is closed, should definitely give it a read!

http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Batch_Mode

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Free Developer Sprint for North American GSoC students!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:34:46 +0000

For anyone that hasn't seen the Dot story, check it out.

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GSoC 2009: Last chance for student applications

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:58:38 +0000

A friendly reminder: you have just under 24 hours to get your applications updated (if you are a student...you've already submitted it, right?) or to get students to update their applications (if you are a mentor). Applications that arrive before the deadline will not be penalized (and applications that arrive afterwards won't be accepted at all) so it's not too late to get your SoC on...

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Important: Submit your GSoC application NOW

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:40:35 +0000

Google has just asked all students to ensure that their application is submitted *now*, even if they are not done. You will still have until 19:00 UTC April 3rd to modify them, but Google is having trouble gauging participation because so many students (in all organizations) are discussing applications with mentors and refining them outside of the official site. So if you are a student, or mentoring students, please ensure that your applications are submitted ASAP.

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GSoC 2009: Student Application Deadline Reminder

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:26:11 +0000

Remember: the student application deadline is April 3rd at 19:00 UTC. If you are a student, you should be checking for comments and revising your application while you still have the chance. If you are a mentor, you should be checking the applications and commenting on them as appropriate.

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Reminder: Student Application period for GSoC2009 open...

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:15:59 +0000

...NOW! Students have until April 3rd to get their applications finalized and turned in. Good luck!

Continue reading "Reminder: Student Application period for GSoC2009 open..."

GSoC 2009: We're in!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:47:00 +0000

We've been accepted to participate in GSoC 2009. Hooray!

This means we have a lot of great work ahead of us. The first order of business is that everyone that wants to be a mentor needs to sign up at http://socghop.appspot.com. You'll need a Google account (which does not have to be a Gmail account). Click the link that says "Apply to become a Mentor" and proceed as instructed. You should also ensure that you're on the kde-soc-mentor mailing list.

Students: now that we're accepted, get to it with contacting mentors! The application period opens March 23rd and closes April 3rd, so it's not a huge amount of time to get all the details of your proposals worked out. Be sure to check the ideas page at http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Summer_of_Code/2009/Ideas, or contact the appropriate mentor if you have a different idea for a project that you'd like to work on.

I'll be sure to keep everyone informed of events as they occur and deadlines as they arrive. Here's to a successful summer!

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GSoC 2009: Application Submitted

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:49:00 +0000

Today the application for KDE to participate in GSoC 2009 was submitted. They check out our ideas page when they're evaluating applications, so be sure to get your ideas up there! We'll hear back by March 18th. Some other upcoming dates:

March 18-23: Students discuss applications with mentoring organizations (you can and should do this earlier, of course)
March 23: Student application period opens
April 3: Student application period closes

Of course, this hinges on us being accepted...but past years have shown that we have a good shot.

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Licensing to Kill

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:43:00 +0000

Could FLEXlm be one of the world's worst-designed programs?

They've just rechristened it FLEXnet Publisher, and I can only think it's to try to get away from existing FLEXlm stigmas. It's so bad that according to a VMware engineer I spoke to on the phone a few months ago, in the next release of ESX (whatever the new name is going to be) they're ditching it to go back to their own serial-number based scheme, entirely because of a large amount of hugely negative customer feedback. This is only one major release after they switched to it.

Let me describe the structure of it (if I were to go into the user interface issues, this would become far too long a post, so maybe another time). There's a management daemon, called lmgrd, and vendor daemons. These vendor daemons are (often along with the management daemon) provided to you, often without an installer and simply as a bunch of files. There's also quite often a node-locking generator (based on things like hostname, MAC address, and all manner of things easily faked in a VM) provided to you by the vendors, which as far as I can tell is different for every vendor. This is possibly so that they can build in their own criteria, but more likely because the FLEXlm people are lazy and can't be bothered to provide a comprehensive set of criteria on their own.

Now, why is there a vendor daemon and a management daemon? Good question, and I don't know the authoritative answer, but from using it I can make an educated guess or two: either to allow vendors to validate some part of the licenses in their own manner, or to simply confuse and annoy the hell out of you. See, the different vendor daemons are built against some version of the FLEXlm software, and they may, or may not, have been built against the same version. This may, or may not, cause problems, including crashes. It may explain why every time the license server reboots (thanks, generally, to automatic Windows updates), lmgrd fails to start up successfully.

Now, you can run multiple instances of lmgrd -- if you can figure out how to get it installed so that it starts up on bootup, since there isn't much in the way of help in the official help PDF, and only one of the three vendors whose licenses I deal with actually provided an installer (thanks, VMware, I'll be using your installer long after you've switched off of FLEXlm). This lets you have each license under a different copy of lmgrd, perhaps so that you can attempt matching versions, but mainly so that if one of the lmgrd instances crashes, it will only take down that license. (Actually, it's because in this configuration you need to run them on multiple machines, so if one machine goes down, most of your licenses stay up. But I know what they really meant.)

Alternately, you can combine licenses into a single file, a process that the manual warns is time-consuming and error-prone.

Finally, you can simply have all your licenses be handled by a single lmgrd instance. Now, this isn't really a bad idea, except for port numbers.

See, each vendor daemon needs to run on its own TCP port number. You can specify the port number in the license file, except when you can't because some vendor hardcoded it into their software. If you don't specify a port number in the license file, the vendor daemon will be given a port number starting at 27000 on up, giving you an address like 27000@mylicenses.thissucks.com. Now, because everyone likes autoconfiguration, if in your program you leave out the port number (giving you something like @mylicenses.thissucks.com), then it will automatically search ports 27000 through 27009 for a matching vendor daemon. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a single vendor product that doesn't puke on such an address, claiming it is invalid because of faulty validation, even when the FLEXlm manual in front of me says it's perfectly legal.

If you don't then modify your license files to specify ports (which you have to remember to do every time you get a new license file), then you better be aware of when the license server reboots, because the ports are given out in the order that the services come up. So if you're in my situation, where the first of the vendor daemons always crashes the first time it tries to load on bootup, then the other two will have their normal ports decreased by 1.

I haven't even gotten to things like functions to reread license files that don't actually reread them, a UI that doesn't tell you if a server is running or stopped until you hit the buttons to try to run it or stop it, a status window that displays a large amount of license data in a tiny, non-resizable window, and more. The product feels like it was developed in 1988 (it was) and is a study in market leader stagnation. I would be very surprised if they have a single developer left and haven't fired everyone to just sit there and watch the money roll in.

If license servers are necessary for some product you're creating, there are other license servers out there that simply run on a well-known port and don't require any of this idiocy. Unfortunately, in my experience I've seen more companies switch to FLEXlm than away from it. I hope this isn't an industry-wide trend.

Where's the KDE angle? There isn't one specifically, other than this: if someone in the KDE community thinks this is a good design, or can see themselves designing such a scheme, please just leave. Now. (Don't worry, I'm sure this doesn't apply to any of you. )

Continue reading "Licensing to Kill"

Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:58:00 +0000

A long-requested feature has been a way to decouple Amarok's collection scanning from its GUI. There are various use-cases for this. For one, it can actually help us with debugging, by allowing us to control the inputs into the scan parser. For another, many people have all of their music stored on a single machine, and would like to do the scanning locally where it's fast instead of on their e.g. laptop running Amarok, where it's over wireless and slow.

Yesterday and today (as of r933010) I put half of the solution into trunk. I say half, because full collection rescans are now supported in batch modes, but I am still working on the methodology for incremental scans (I have a few ideas, but have to sort out which is the most reasonable/doable/makes the most sense). Below, I'll explain how to do it. Keep in mind that this is designed to be (lightly) scripted, not done by hand...so it can be done by hand (which I did during testing) but it has some safeguards in place so that if you script it, and forget about it, Amarok still works normally. However, there are actually some interesting things you can do now if you script the scanner...

One important thing to note: the scanner requires various bits of Amarok code, mainly centering around the extra taglib plugins we support. So you're unlikely to have it work on a machine that doesn't have A2 installed, and certainly won't be able to compile it without the rest of the Amarok source, although you may be able to get it to work in a binary-only fashion with just kdelibs and taglib...YMMV.

So, here's the flow:

Run amarokcollectionscanner with the -b or --batch option. Although this doesn't directly modify the output, it sets some internal flags (some for safety, some to enable other options). The output goes to stdout; save this output as amarokcollectionscanner_batchfullscan.xml (yes, it must be that specific filename). You'll probably want to use the -r flag too...check --help for more options.
Cool feature: if your scan is of files that have a different mount point on the local machine than the machine that will be using the output, add the --rpath option and give it the mountpoint of the directory on the consuming machine. For instance, if on the local machine your music is at /opt/music, and this directory (music) is mounted as /mnt/music on the remote machine, run amarokcollectionscanner from /opt and use --batch --rpath /mnt/music.
Cool feature: You can scan multiple directories and simply append the output to the end of the file from step #1. Yes, directly append, including the xml version/encoding header. Amarok's scan manager will detect and handle this. You can even scan directories that are not defined as collection directories in Amarok (these entries will work fine, but the next time you do a full rescan from within Amarok without using the saved output, they will be gone).
Place the amarokcollectionscanner_batchfullscan.xml file in your Amarok data dir. Usually, this is ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok.
Trigger a full rescan from inside Amarok (in Settings->Collection). It should be super-fast. :-) Note that this step deletes the amarokcollectionscanner_batchfullscan.xml file. This is on purpose, so if you want to keep re-using it, you'll have to keep copying it over.

As you can see, it's designed for scripting, but it's not terribly complicated even to do by hand. I'll post more as I get incremental scanning working, and will at some point put a Wiki page up that has all of these instructions in a less transient form.

Continue reading "Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning"

Camp KDE videos: Come and get 'em

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:41:00 +0000

After a month's delay, they're done.

In the interim (after the delays mentioned in my last post on this topic), my poor, underpowered desktop machine has endured transcode after transcode (from the original source material) and my Internet connection upload after upload as I tried to figure out just why Blip.tv wouldn't work with X or Y. (In fact, I can quantify these: X is Vorbis/Theora, which produced awful audio and very desynchronized audio/video upon their conversion to .flv; Y is a lot of things related to the original anamorphic encoding of the videos, which Blip.tv can't handle, and finding the right combination of settings and flags and adjustements to make the aspect ratios come out so that everyone didn't look like Gumby®.)

This was followed by a few days of uploading; Blip seems to max out uploading speeds somewhere between 100kbit and 200kbit, so uploading almost 6GB of data, one chunk at a time, took a bit.

The end result is thirteen videos, each Xvid-encoded (at least it's OSS, although patent-encumbered...see Vorbis/Theora problems above) with a Matroska container. You can get to them through my show or to individual videos directly (these might not be in strict as-presented order):

Enjoy!
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#kde-soc

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:21:00 +0000

Just a note to make people aware that #kde-soc exists. There's basically no activity in there right now, which is rather expected, but as SoC-related activities pick up steam so will the channel.
Continue reading "#kde-soc"

Qt 4.5 RC1 packages for Intrepid, built with -graphicssystem raster

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:32:00 +0000

Update: These packages are for testing only! Things that rely on the default native backend WILL break. If you want a build of Qt 4.5 RC1 for Intrepid without -graphicssystem raster, try pollycoke's PPA.

The title says it all. They're available from my PPA. Enjoy!

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Where are those Camp KDE videos anyways?

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:15:00 +0000

Hello there. I have good news and bad news regarding the Camp KDE videos.

The Bad News

I've run into a series of setbacks regarding getting them prepared for posting. The first was that the Monday I got back from Jamaica, I had the following schedule at work:

9:15 AM: Check email
9:16 AM: "My details have been confirmed for my upcoming trip? What trip?"
2:00 PM: At the airport awaiting departure, thinking that I knew I should have checked work email sometime over the weekend...

Regardless, I did manage to have some of the files with me, and did actually get a few of the videos done during that week that I was away. I then got held back a bit waiting for the videos on Wade's camera to arrive -- they were 16GB or so in total, and so he had to fetch them off the tapes, encode them, and get them uploaded to me. After that, I started to put Wade's videos together with slides, only to find out that the videos would not properly work inside kdenlive. Or so I thought. After a period of long transcodings that I performed during my free time over the last few days, I find out this morning that the issue with the videos was a massive dose of PEBKAC.

There's only one other piece of bad news, which is that due to a bug in (ffmpeg? libmlt?) kdenlive's Ogg/Theora export is borked. So, I've ended up coding in XviD, which while using a patented algorithm is at least otherwise free software. I've thought about transcoding everything to Ogg/Theora afterwards, and I may end up doing so before posting them up, if the quality is okay. And before you ask -- it didn't seem right to post them up without having Wade's keynote up there to kick things off, which is why I've not posted some of the ones that are already done up before now.

The Good News

The good news is that 11/13 of the videos are done, and I forsee no obstacles in getting the rest of them to behave. So I am hopeful that I can start getting them up to Blip.tv within a couple days. Thanks for bearing with me.

Continue reading "Where *are* those Camp KDE videos anyways?"

Oh god: I had to use VBA

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:40:00 +0000

I'm working on putting together the Camp KDE 2009 videos using the excellent Kdenlive, a non-linear video editor whose name is, well, an acronym for KDE Non LInear Video Editor. More on Kdenlive in a later blog post from me and/or Wade, but trust me -- with the latest versions it's much more stable, and it's getting very good.

Anyways, one of the reasons I'm using it is to splice the slides into the videos, because they're just not readable inside the videos for the most part. So I needed a way to turn each slide into some sort of an image.

It turns out that OO.o doesn't have this capability natively, but some users on the OO.o Forum came up with a script at the bottom of this page to export each slide into PDF. I modified it to do the following:

Export to JPG instead of PDF (PNG export didn't work)
Add extra 0s to numbers such that you always have three digits

The code is pasted below. One really fun (not) thing I found out: VBA (or just OO.o's implementation of it) doesn't really do type checking. As a result, if r is a string instead of an integer (which I had forgotten), the following code will always execute as True:

If r < 10 Then

Anyways, here is the code, in case it helps anyone at some point:

REM ***** BASIC *****

Function MakePropertyValue( Optional cName As String, Optional uValue ) As com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
   oPropertyValue = createUnoStruct( "com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue" )
   If Not IsMissing( cName ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Name = cName
   EndIf
   If Not IsMissing( uValue ) Then
      oPropertyValue.Value = uValue
   EndIf
   MakePropertyValue() = oPropertyValue
End Function

Sub SplitPDFs
dim oDoc as object
oDoc = ThisComponent
dim url as string
url = oDoc.getURL()
baseURL = Left( url, Len( url ) - 4 )
nNumPages = oDoc.getDrawPages().getCount()
For nPageToSave = 1 To nNumPages
    dim r as string
    r = Str(nPageToSave)+"-"+Str(nPageToSave)
    If CInt(r) < 10 Then
        oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"00"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
         MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"), _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
            MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))
    Else
        oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"0"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
         MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"), _
         MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
            MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))

    End If
Next
End Sub

Continue reading "Oh god: I had to use VBA"

Avast, We Be Getting Slandered, Yar

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:20:00 +0000

Poisonous people. They exist everywhere, sucking the light and good out of things and repurposing them for all sorts of nasty activities. Like the rest of KDE, and the rest of the software world (both free and non-free) in general, the Amarok team has taken its fair share of abuse over the years. Normally I ignore it. However, today I got my KDE 4.0 Release Event talk twisted around in malicious ways and the blame placed right at my own feet. So I'm rising to the bait.

The latest perpetrator of bile and venom is one Antal István Miklós. This ~~blathering idiot~~ Web Developer called me out personally on his Great Blog (yes, that's really what it's called, if you want to see his post), and turned my well-received talk at the KDE 4.0 Release Event into complaint-a-thon.

I'm not going to pick apart all of the technical wrongheadedness he portrays with MySQL/e, Akonadi, and the capabilities therein -- Nikolaj posted a nice response to the blog, and the guy would be very well served to fully read my posting about mysqle (as well as many of the comments). Much of the blog can also easily be decoded as baseless, factless trolling ("amarok1.x is the slowest KDE3 program, if not it's surely in the top 3 slowest KDE3 programs"), and the-developers-don't-agree-with-me-so-they're-wrong syndrome. But I am going to defend my statements at the Release Event.

Let me explain, up front, the format of my Release Event talk. I presented a short introduction to Amarok, for those that did not know it. I then stated some drawbacks we found with the KDE3 platform. With these drawbacks, plus a desire to go cross-platform like many other media players (VNC, Banshee, iTunes, etc.), we had considered the possibility of switching to a Qt-only architecture. But then, KDE4 comes along, with elegant solutions to our problems -- Phonon, Solid, Plasma, targeting multiple platforms, and more. Boom -- the thoughts of Qt-only go out of our heads, and we commit ourselves fully to KDE4.

Far from a long series of complaints, it's a success story, showing how the benefits the KDE4 platform offer to us solved our problems, and how they could solve yours too. Apparently, however, it simply shows -- from Antal's blog post title, and probably because he hasn't bothered to watch past five minutes in -- how we just don't get KDE4.

This may not be apparent to everyone, but Amarok was an early poster child for adoption of many of the Pillars of KDE. We are the only application, to date, that has embedded Plasma inside of our application (with our developers doing a large amount of work to make that possible). (Update: we are technically the first, outside of the plasma workspace, but there are others playing with that now.) Device detection completely relies on Solid (which is one reason Mac and Windows ports have no device support right now). And we have completely standardized on Phonon for our media engine. We've also had Oxygen team members working on our icons and our interface.

It's hard to imagine ways for us to more fully integrate with KDE4 than what we are doing. We've gone for KDE4 whole-hog, and it's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Picking out random Pillars that we don't fully integrate with (yet) does not mean that we are not KDE4-oriented. After all, right now we don't have a use for Marble (who knows? that could change) -- but does that mean we don't get KDE4?

it just reminds me of one of the KDE4.0 release event, where a KDE dev complained that how KDE3 sucked, because they couldn't port Amarok to Windows, and KHTML had bad performance

It'd be nice for Antal to realize that there is a difference between complaining, and listing drawbacks of a platform. (This doesn't really fit into how trolls work, of course.) Yes, I said that two of KDE3's drawbacks were that it made it impossible to port Amarok to Windows (and Mac) and that KHTML rendering was found to be slow. No, I did not say that KDE3 sucked.

But there's nothing new here. It's not like Amarok was alone in wanting to port to other platforms. The Release Event had showcases of KDE4 applications running on both Windows and Mac. But Antal has this fixation that Windows and Mac are suddenly all we care about, taking an out-of-context "consider the majority" statement someone (he doesn't say who) made on IRC about some topic (he doesn't say what, only that it's vaguely somehow about performance):

Using mysqle mostly benefits non-KDE4 desktops, because as I said earlier KDE4 will probably have a mysql server anyway, but isn't improving the KDE4 user experiance top release priority anymore? Is amarok on Windows on Mac more important than getting the best out of amarok on KDE4?

[then, later]

What did the people in the IRC channel had to say about this?

.......

My favorite quote from here is: "consider the majority"

It's like saying: "consider the majority, which are Windows and Mac users, and screw the KDE4 users"

I think Antal fails to realize that KDE is not just a desktop. Windows and Mac users that might be using Amarok are going to be using lots of KDE technologies in the process. Regardless of his mistake, there is certainly no evidence that Amarok cares more about Windows and Mac users, or thinks them the majority of our users. Speaking as a developer, I can tell you that the exact opposite is true.

Antal also clearly doesn't realize that Akonadi is not a requirement of KDE to run (even if it's installed), and therefore the best Amarok could do would be to integrate with Akonadi, but not to depend or rely upon it. Maybe he kind of gets it when he says, my emphasis, "KDE4 will probably have a mysql server anyway" -- we can't rely on probably, or maybe. We need to use what works, always.

He even contradicts himself:

He begins with complaining, how slow was rendering amarok's context with KHTML, so it looks like performance matters in amarok, not that anyone forced them to use KHTML for rendering context...

Make up your mind, Antal. You're right that no one forced us to use KHTML for rendering context, although WebKit wasn't available back then, and hooking into Mozilla was a non-starter. But you want us to be integrating with other KDE technologies...right?

One last point:

Jeff Mitchell the developer who spoke at the event that I was referring to, referenced KDE as a family, but where is the love now? The lack of communication between Amarok and the rest of KDE4(Akonandi) doens't seem to back up Amarok as being a family member.

It is not surprising, given how little he understands of Amarok, KDE, and the integration thereof, that he thinks both that there is a lack of communication between Amarok and the rest of KDE4, and that he implies that Akonadi is the entire rest of KDE4.

I've covered a small fraction of the untruths and inaccuracies in his post, but it's enough -- I've made my points. I love KDE, I have not publicly disparaged it, we Amarok developers are fully committed to the platform, and we are not putting the Windows and Mac ports at a higher priority than the *nix base.

Any comments will be read, but I may decide not to post them.

Continue reading "Avast, We Be Getting Slandered, Yar"