Amarok Blog - mxcl

A Weekend's Work

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:37:15 +0000

This unintentionally turned up on the Amarok blog, so apologies for that. The original post is here.

I warn you, this post is not one of my best. Nonetheless I have written it — I just wanted to document what I did this weekend.

I just finished importing the emails I sent when I went travelling, eighteen years of age, into WordPress. The trip is an interesting read. Certainly the first few are pretentious and make me cringe, but you can really see me grow up during the 72 days I was away. Especially when I get to Thailand and have to make it on my own.

I wrote the script to turn the HTML static page I had into an RSS feed to import into Wordpress using Ruby. That was a surprising pain in the arse. I kept slipping up due to not knowing the syntax quite right, or not understanding nuances of the weak typing and type conversion. Still it’s a language which feels promising. I need to do read some better reference code. The documentation on Ruby out there is rubbish. Suggestions welcome.

I was going to fix my activity-feed/life-feed thing. Especially since Steve at work is getting me all excited about DataPortability and Microformats and that. But I will have to rewrite chunks since for some reason my server no longer has the PHP SimpleXml module compiled in.

Looking through my epic eight years of blog entries I realise I must spend a whole weekend at some point just categorising and tagging it correctly. Categories are tough. I don’t like my current set. Work is easy enough to classify. But Detritus? Life? Should Life be about me or about Life-issues like philosophy? I feel the latter. I may make a category called Me. Boring crap like this can then be neatly avoided by those who wish it .

I have to say, classification and naming is a tough problem that I absolutely love to get right, but I find it as hard as the next person.

Tagging is easy but I want to be consistent with my tags. That’s the hell of web2.0 init? Tagging well. Tagging consistently. Mass tag editing is conveniently lacking too so you can’t easily change your mind later about naming decisions.

Also I find myself tagging posts eg. Amarok, but not categorising them as such. I’m using the two systems separately. The category is only Amarok if the whole post is about Amarok. But if it mentions Amarok, I tag it as such.

I checked up on my site backup solution. I have a cronjob running which does a backup everyday at 1:03am server time. On the last day of each month it makes a monthly backup. I created this system about six months ago after catastrophic data loss (MacFuse at fault grr!) But I’m not backing up my database. Which means I could lose all my blog entries. I don’t want to put my password in plaintext in the backup script though. Which made me wish we could do push notification across the Internet already. My backup script should be able to stick a dialog in my face once a week asking for the db password even though it’s on a completely different computer. Isn’t this just an extension of D-Bus?

I cleaned up my ClaimID somewhat. I also fixed the MicroID I was broadcasting on my blog to get the verified sticker at ClaimID. I cleaned up MyPlaxo even though I hardly use it. I feel Plaxo has some interesting possibilities in the future. That being cross site and application syncing. I think they actually will allow me to sync iCal with Facebook and Last.fm events within a few months. That is pretty awesome.

I also made my site OpenID 2.0 compliant, even sending the XRDS header. Although MyOpenID do all the actual authentication work. I added a Pavatar too. Which made me want to pick a new avatar image. I host my avatar at methylblue.com/avatar/, and more and more sites nowadays allow you to specify a URL rather than upload an image as your site avatar. Off the top of my head, ClaimID do and so do Blogger. Also a bunch of other sites nowdays allow you to use your Flickr avatar image, which is almost as good. At least it’s easy to change it in one place and reflect that change across your online presence.

And speaking of Blogger, they now let you login with an OpenID. Which is both fabulous and interesting. Does this mean Google will be rolling out OpenID authentication across their whole suite? I can only hope so.

I did most of this due to interest in what Steve is doing at mokele.co.uk. He’s combining a lot of new web technologies and making a system he calls OpenFriend. He was calling it OpenRelationship, but I think he wanted to be taken more seriously . He’s making an open Facebook essentially. You keep your data. Your friends keep there’s. Everyone authenticates their friends in a distributed social network. It’s fun and I want to be along for the ride.

I also edited this post enough times to realise I want inline editing for WordPress. Does that exist yet?

Comments here please.

Adapting Wocka for OSX

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 23:57:00 +0000

I will prolly adapt Wocka for OSX.

Installwatch, should work on OSX. I’ve already almost compiled it. It requires itself to be loaded as a library before other libraries, and it then displaces all applicable file system functions with its own so it can write the install log. It’s clever

This is possible on OSX with some env variable, on Linux it’s LD_PRELOAD. If that doesn’t work though, I’ll compile my own version of make that has installwatch built in. Although this isn’t as handy since you are then restricted to installations that use make.

OSX packages either install via dmg and thus are self contained directories, or use the NeXT packaging format. This format writes installation logs to /Library/Receipts. This system is awesome an very unix, and further reason I love OSX. So all wocka has to do is create a receipt for installations.

No need to port pacman to OSX, or use the Fink APT db which I was considering.

I always wanted wocka for debian too. But don’t use it enough. So I’ll make wocka flexible so other people could do that if they choose.

Teh Life Feed

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:55:52 +0000

I wrote a life-feed implementation, based on the idea by Jeremy Keith.

It’s here, and the source is here.

It needs databasing, as for instance, the recent music feed from Last.fm is just 10 tracks, which is usually about 40 minutes. And I want at least a week’s music history. Also the feeds are downloaded in background php processes, and thus the page the user gets is usually old. So some ajax magic to update the page would be good.

It’s all completely free, so take it modify it, and send me patches if you do good stuff. Subscribe to the projects category for updates.

Teh Life Feed

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:55:52 +0000

I wrote a life-feed implementation, based on the idea by Jeremy Keith.

It’s here, and the source is here.

It’s all completely free, so take it modify it, and send me patches if you do good stuff. Subscribe to the projects category for updates.

Comments here please.

Site Makeover

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 04:19:06 +0000

Yay! Makeover!

I gave it thought every so often over the last few months, and then finished it all up today. I’m rather pleased too that I managed to wrap my site around wordpress quite easily too. As I don’t run wordpress everywhere, just here in /blog/.

I may publish how I did that at some point. It’s not too hard. But you need to do some magic.

Anyway I am quite pleased with the new look. It’s about the 5th time I’ve changed the appearance now. And I have no screenshots of the old styles, which is a pity. My test will be, do I still like it in the morning? If I do, then I can relax and move onto another project.

Interestingly, it looks worst in Firefox, and best in Opera, followed by Konqueror, although there isn’t much in it.

And finally, yes, I know it’s not methylorange.com, but that’s just how it worked out.. shrug

Site Makeover

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:19:06 +0000

Yay! Makeover!

I may publish how I did that at some point. It’s not too hard. But you need to do some magic.

Interestingly, it looks worst in Firefox, and best in Opera, followed by Konqueror, although there isn’t much in it.

And finally, yes, I know it’s not methylorange.com, but that’s just how it worked out.. shrug

6 Reasons You Will Love OpenID

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:09:52 +0000

Here are six reasons OpenID is great that other sites haven’t seemingly mentioned:

Convenience

Try out your OpenID on the new phpBB OpenID-enabled test forum. After a quick authentication with your OpenID provider, phpbb has created an account for you with all the details filled in.

No email back-and-forth. You can post your comment to a new forum/blog that requires registration with hardly any delay.
Withhold your email address

Email is generally not required for most OpenID-enabled sites currently. They no longer handle your password so the primary reason for requiring an email no longer exists.
Keep track of which sites have what information centrally

OpenID providers like MyOpenID.com keep track of which sites you’ve authenticated with and what data you gave them.
Stop typing in all your personal info again and again

Your OpenID provider will give the site you’re logging in to the data. Registration is practically instant. You decide what info is provided too. Don’t trust the site? Don’t provide them with your postcode or email address then.
Reputation

Your OpenID can actually build up a reputation because it is linked to you. Nobody can masquerade as you unless they can guess your password. So you should make it a good one
Site-wide registration

Another cool benefit of OpenID will be sites like archlinux.org, or kde.org which currently have 5 or 6 separate services that require separate registration and logon. With OpenID you can authorise the entire domain, then each service, provided it has OpenID support would automatically be authenticated.

People seem a little scared of OpenID, but I’ve been using it for a few months and I find it to be absolutely a step forward in how I use the Internet. I’m having more fun now with OpenID as I can sign up for fun little services with no qualms about registration or what data I’m handing over.

If you want a quick and easy OpenID, try FreeYourID.com, you get an ID of the form firstname.lastname.name, it’s free, no credit-card details are taken, and you can start using it straight away. I already registered http://max.howell.name, so bad luck if you wanted to annoy me

Fun OpenID-enabled sites to try:

http://jyte.com

http://stikis.com

http://imakemistakes.com

None of these sites require anything other than authentication, so they are fun and hassle free.

6 Reasons You Will Love OpenID

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:09:52 +0000

Here are six reasons OpenID is great that other sites haven’t seemingly mentioned:

Convenience

Try out your OpenID on the new phpBB OpenID-enabled test forum. After a quick authentication with your OpenID provider, phpbb has created an account for you with all the details filled in.

No email back-and-forth. You can post your comment to a new forum/blog that requires registration with hardly any delay.
Withhold your email address

Email is generally not required for most OpenID-enabled sites currently. They no longer handle your password so the primary reason for requiring an email no longer exists.
Keep track of which sites have what information centrally

OpenID providers like MyOpenID.com keep track of which sites you’ve authenticated with and what data you gave them.
Stop typing in all your personal info again and again

Your OpenID provider will give the site you’re logging in to the data. Registration is practically instant. You decide what info is provided too. Don’t trust the site? Don’t provide them with your postcode or email address then.
Reputation

Your OpenID can actually build up a reputation because it is linked to you. Nobody can masquerade as you unless they can guess your password. So you should make it a good one
Site-wide registration

Another cool benefit of OpenID will be sites like archlinux.org, or kde.org which currently have 5 or 6 separate services that require separate registration and logon. With OpenID you can authorise the entire domain, then each service, provided it has OpenID support would automatically be authenticated.

Fun OpenID-enabled sites to try:

http://jyte.com

http://stikis.com

http://imakemistakes.com

None of these sites require anything other than authentication, so they are fun and hassle free.

Comments here pls!

Wocka 0.5 Released

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 03:02:28 +0000

I have released a new version of Wocka.

I rewrote it in D. I thought I’d love D and I do. And I’m sure I’ve written better less buggy code with it.

Fortunately it introduces no new dependencies, and I lose the Qt dependency that was fairly unpopular.

I fixed the bugs, made it more robust, and added –set-version, –set-name, and some other things like package revision incrementation when you –upgrade.

Packages are available here.

Comments here pls!

A Job at Last.fm

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:32:02 +0000

Well I’m really pleased

From January I can work at Last.fm, and they’ll pay me too! How sweet is that?

A Job at Last FM

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:32:02 +0000

Well I’m really pleased

From January I can work at Last FM, and they’ll pay me too! How sweet is that?

Simple WordPress Captcha Plugin

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:01:39 +0000

I got fed up clearing out the moderation queue every day, so I adapted one of the botcheck plugins for WordPress to be much simpler in terms of code size, because that was a fun project, and I had time to spare.

It asks, “Are you a spam-bot?”, and the user has to type ‘no’.

I think this is both amusing and capable, although very easy to bypass, but I’d be interested to see if any bot authors bother.

To install:

View the source code
Paste the code into notepad and save the file as ’simple_captcha.php’
Upload that file to your ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory
Activate the ‘Simple Captcha’ plugin from the WordPress Plugins control panel.

Simple WordPress Captcha Plugin

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:01:39 +0000

It asks, “Are you a spam-bot?”, and the user has to type ‘no’.

I think this is both amusing and capable, although very easy to bypass, but I’d be interested to see if any bot authors bother.

To install:

View the source code
Paste the code into notepad and save the file as ’simple_captcha.php’
Upload that file to your ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory
Activate the ‘Simple Captcha’ plugin from the WordPress Plugins control panel.

Inconsistent GUIs on Linux

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:32:27 +0000

It’s a commonly repeated opinion, that on Linux all application GUIs look different, but on Windows all/most applications feel like Windows applications.

Now obviously people mean the difference between, for instance, KDE and Gnome apps, and they mostly also refer to even more horrible toolkits like whatever it is that xine-ui uses.

But if you actually looked closely at Windows applications, you’d notice that every major MS application uses different toolkits and “skins”, and so do all the other applications from other companies. In fact Win32 only offers a few basic controls, namely:

push-buttons
scrollbars
really basic menus
combo boxes

The menus that win32 offers are so basic that nobody uses them, they implement their own so they can add things like icons, and menu-separators.

In my opinion, the reasons that Windows applications are consistent are:

Consistent fonts
Consistent colours.

Absolutely the number one reason is fonts. Windows offers a default font that GUI controls like menus, buttons and text widgets use. Apparently, the API for drawing text is different on Windows compared to X11 in that it developers end up using the right font when they roll their own widgets. On Windows, all text looks consistent.

Colours are almost as important. On Windows the colorscheme is a globally accesible property, on Linux schemes are toolkit/desktop specific. If toolkits just used the same colours, people wouldn’t notice small, or even larger differences in the widget styling.

So in conclusion, if Linux just standardised fonts and colors I think applications would feel consistent, just like they do on Windows. If toolkits did just these two things, their other differences would not be nearly as noticeable in general use. Frankly I feel if Linux could do these things, we’d be more consistent, since if you use mostly KDE apps, they have far more internal consistency than the Microsoft port-folio.

Disclaimers

Of course there are other more subtle considerations, like one toolkit on linux has 4 pixel bevels. It just looks ugly, there’s no way to hide that. But if it had consistent fonts and colouring it’d look a lot better and would fit in with a KDE desktop more easily.

It is also true that Windows appliations copy whatever is the latest MS-app appearance. MS Office 2003 has a neat style that has rapidly been copied and emulated in all other major toolkits, ie check out the latest version of Delphi, it looks similar to Office 2003, but the similarity is subtely different, eg. menus are narrower and more compact. And this makes sense since MS didn’t release any API or DLL to allow you to use the Office 2003 style, so Borland implemented their own clone. Trolltech even claimed to considering emulating it when I attended their roadshow in Cambridge. My point in this paragraph is that Windows apps emulate a general “Windows” consensus that is defined by MS, so this helps somewhat.

And yes, I’m just ranting an opinion here, maybe someone who reads this would like to do something about it, as I’m not the man for that job.

Inconsistent GUIs on Linux

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:32:27 +0000

It’s a commonly repeated opinion, that on Linux all application GUIs look different, but on Windows all/most applications feel like Windows applications.

Now obviously people mean the difference between, for instance, KDE and Gnome apps, and they mostly also refer to even more horrible toolkits like whatever it is that xine-ui uses.

push-buttons
scrollbars
really basic menus
combo boxes

The menus that win32 offers are so basic that nobody uses them, they implement their own so they can add things like icons, and menu-separators.

In my opinion, the reasons that Windows applications are consistent are:

Consistent fonts
Consistent colours.

And yes, I’m just ranting an opinion here, maybe someone who reads this would like to do something about it, as I’m not the man for that job.

Inconsistent GUIs on Linux

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:32:27 +0000

It’s a commonly repeated opinion, that on Linux all application GUIs look different, but on Windows all/most applications feel like Windows applications.

Now obviously people mean the difference between, for instance, KDE and Gnome apps, and they mostly also refer to even more horrible toolkits like whatever it is that xine-ui uses.

push-buttons
scrollbars
really basic menus
combo boxes

The menus that win32 offers are so basic that nobody uses them, they implement their own so they can add things like icons, and menu-separators.

In my opinion, the reasons that Windows applications are consistent are:

Consistent fonts
Consistent colours.

And yes, I’m just ranting an opinion here, maybe someone who reads this would like to do something about it, as I’m not the man for that job.

Filelight 1.0-rc1

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 22:30:12 +0000

Filelight creates an interactive map of concentric segmented-rings that represent the sizes of files and directories on your computer.

I fixed up all the bugs that I’ve been alerted to, and added some polish.

1.0 will follow provided I managed to fix the bug where non latin1 files/directories don’t get displayed properly for the label texts. Can someone please check this! Thanks 1.0 will be a few weeks away since I have to allow translation time, I had to change a few strings. Many thanks to the people at kde-i18n.

Downloads and more info here.

Filelight 1.0-rc1

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 18:30:12 +0000

Filelight creates an interactive map of concentric segmented-rings that represent the sizes of files and directories on your computer.

I fixed up all the bugs that I’ve been alerted to, and added some polish.

Downloads and more info here.

TODO: Xbox 360 Streaming From Amarok

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 14:24:27 +0000

I haven’t written this yet. But I’ve been googling for information, and I’m stuck. So here’s an appeal to the wider community.

Xbox 360 can accept streams from Windows Media Center Edition. But I don’t have that, does anyone? So I want to stream from Amarok. Can anyone recommend something that can do this already, or a whitepaper about it? Am I going to have to reverse engineer the MS protocol? Because that may put me off unless someone can give me some pointers.

If I made it I’d make it an independent app to Amarok and then interface it. Is there some general purpose streaming solution out there that I may be able to write a plugin or something for? As reinventing the wheel is not for me.

With this feature I could play geometry wars while listening to some of my collection, which would be nice as the GW theme gets a little repetitive after about 30 seconds.

Please don’t slate me for my 360 purchase! It rocks too much for me to not have one.

Real URL: http://www.methylblue.com/blog/?p=48

TODO: Xbox 360 Streaming From Amarok

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 10:24:27 +0000

I haven’t written this yet. But I’ve been googling for information, and I’m stuck. So here’s an appeal to the wider community.

With this feature I could play geometry wars while listening to some of my collection, which would be nice as the GW theme gets a little repetitive after about 30 seconds.

Please don’t slate me for my 360 purchase! It rocks too much for me to not have one.

Defeating Wordpress Trackback Spam

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:31:54 +0000

Until yesterday I was getting 200 trackback spams a day.

Firstly I installed Trackback Validator, which works a treat at preventing trackback spam from going directly to your blog comments listing.

But you still get an email about the trackback, even though it is already classified as spam.

So I was looking through my referral logs and I noticed that I get a lot of visitors searching with the suspicious string “l3av3 a r3ply pr0udly p0w3r3d by w0rdpr3ss”. I used leet-speak so that google doesn’t flag up this site anew!

So I edited the wordpress code to change that string. You can find it in footer.php, and this is editable in the theme editor in wordpress admin. Hope this helps some people out there! (But not too many as then the spammers will catch on…)

I still wanted to attribute the blog to Wordpress, as it’s awesome, so the string now reads:

The Future Comes Second was formulated using teh awesome WordPress

Update [30-Jun-2006]

Actually, it turns out the www-redirect plugin I coincidentally activated on the same day as the above hack, had a bug that made it impossible to submit trackbacks and comments to this blog.. Although I still expect my measures to have some affect, I doubt it’ll be that much. Too good to be true eh?

Update [25-Jul-2006]

I changed the address for the site from http://methylblue.com/blog/ to http://www.methylblue.com/blog/, because I use the www-redirect plugin for Wordpress attacks by trackback spammers to the old address fail, as the POST is lost. Very little new trackback spam comes my way now and I’m hoping this is because I changed the string above.

Defeating Wordpress Trackback Spam

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:31:54 +0000

Until yesterday I was getting 200 trackback spams a day.

Firstly I installed Trackback Validator, which works a treat at preventing trackback spam from going directly to your blog comments listing.

But you still get an email about the trackback, even though it is already classified as spam.

I still wanted to attribute the blog to Wordpress, as it’s awesome, so the string now reads:

The Future Comes Second was formulated using teh awesome WordPress

Update [30-Jun-2006]

Update [25-Jul-2006]

K3M

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Tue, 30 May 2006 17:47:19 +0000

I had a great time at the meeting, there’s nothing like the intensity of a hackathon, and actual face-to-face discussion to make you super productive. Many thanks to KDE NL for organising the event, especially since we offered such amazing disorganisation in return!

For fun, here’s me, markey and muesli (left-to-right) in Amsterdam, and then at aKademy 2 years ago in Stutgart.

I picked on us three as there was the comparison shot. Overtime though we’ve been visited by more and more people, some submitted a patch or two then joined development more actively. Getting involved really is that easy. Send a patch, come to IRC, prove you cope with the sometimes obscure mxcl/oggb4mp3/sebr sense of humor and you’ll soon be being asked for your opinion on stuff.

Sebr mentioned that we have an excellent development team quite a few times at the meet, and it’s true. And may it long continue because we work well as a group and have each our own unique talents that when combined, keep the quality high.

That’s not to say we can’t improve, and we discussed among other things, what should be done to make code quality higher, while not lessening release rate, and how to keep exploring new features, without making amaroK unwelcoming to new (and old) users.

K3M

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Tue, 30 May 2006 13:47:19 +0000

For fun, here’s me, markey and muesli (left-to-right) in Amsterdam, and then at aKademy 2 years ago in Stutgart.

Codeine 1.0.1

nospam@example.com (Max Howell) — Fri, 12 May 2006 01:04:51 +0000

I release Codeine 1.0.1, my simple, (hopefully) usable video player.

I hope to release more frequently from now on. And also finally get Filelight 1.0 out. It’s nice to be releasing software on Linux again.

I confess I was partially motivated by me going to Florence for the weekend. I’ve developed an odd fear of flying over the last year. I hated the idea of something happening to me and Codeine still being stuck at 1.0. Dedication eh?

Full changelog at the kde-apps entry.

Comments on Codeine, its design, etc. and requests for its future are welcome.

On an unrelated note, watch this. I’m so getting a Wii when they come out! But I also want a PS3 for Heavenly Sword, but who will be able to afford a PS3? I spose I could move to a smaller place..