Wednesday, December 13. 2006
Here's a really nice review of Amarok 1.4.4. The reviewer goes into great detail and presents many of Amarok's features, including the recently added Magnatune store.
Check it out over at Sourcetrunk.
Monday, December 11. 2006
Good news, everyone!
Thanks to the generous donations from our last fundraiser, the Amarok project will soon move to a much better web server. As some of you have probably noticed, our current hosting (AMD Duron, 512MB RAM) is hopelessly underpowered for the growing traffic on amarok.kde.org. We've had a lot of downtime over the last months, especially when the site was hammered by digg.com, heise.de, etc.
The new server will be a dedicated AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2 gigs of RAM, 2 x 300 GB SATA HDD, from Hetzner.de. This should provide us with enough power to survive the slashdot/digg-effect. Paleo (Olivier Bédard) will continue to be the main administrator, and, in other good news, we will continue to host a number of other KDE projects (Konversation, Akregator..) for free
We will try to make the migration over the next few weeks as smooth as possible, by running the old server in parallel until everything is ready to go.
Thursday, December 7. 2006
Koennten Frauen bitte einfach mal ihre beschissene Fresse halten? Danke.
Wednesday, December 6. 2006
I’m now in Istanbul, and was able to meet up with the infamous ‘cartman’, aka ismail. or maybe its the other way around, i’m not sure! we went out the the hip center of the city, taksim, to visit some of the cool water-holes. there, we were joined by local lug member, arda. if you want to read more about what i’ve been up to in the country, you can read my blog; i don’t need to spam you all!
However, heres a photo to prove myself!
 Arda, Myself and Ismail (cartman)
Monday, December 4. 2006
Well I’m really pleased
From January I can work at Last FM, and they’ll pay me too! How sweet is that?
Friday, December 1. 2006
Please look at the above screenshot. Yes, I know, it hurts. No, I did not draw this with The Gimp. This is an actual Amarok screenshot, running under KDE 3.5.5. How the hell did those ugly squares appear all over the screen, is it a virus? No, it's a KDE feature!
How to reproduce: Fire up a KDE application (Konqueror, Amarok, or KMail will do) and press the ctrl key. It's not even a new feature; it has been there since KDE 3.3 or somesuch. And this feature even has a name, which I can't be bothered to look up.
Questions naturally coming to my mind:
How the hell could this "feature" pass the KDE usability team?
Is the person who invented it ashamed of it?
In Amarok development, whenever someone comes up with an idea like that, we'd go like: "Dude, are you out of your mind?"
Food for thought?
Monday, November 27. 2006
I’ve had a week of freedom from the entanglements of university and it has been great. Europe and America should be jealous of me, because I’ve been spending days on end at the beach browning up. I’ve had some much needed time to finish of Splinter Cell, and get back into the coding routine - especially now that I have my motherboard back after five weeks of awol maintenance. At least it all works now.
Today my house was attacked by a kookaburra, and after trying to get it out of the house i realised i’d never been so close one before. A pair of the birds live in the gum tree out the back, and they come back every year to have babies and get fed chicken by us. If you’ve never seen one before, here’s a photo I took of it trying to understand how something could be so transparent but so solid.
In other news, in 6 days I’ll be leaving for my next adventure, to the wonders of Turkey, Egypt & Israel. I’ll be gone for 7 weeks to grab some fresh (or very polluted) air for my clogged up head. Very exciting!
Sunday, November 26. 2006
Laptop
For Black Friday I got an early Christmas present, a Toshiba Satellite. Its innards are all Intel, so everything works fine in Linux. Its nice coming from the hassle and incomplete support of ndiswrapper to the open source drivers that Intel apparently helps support.
Kubuntu
My main desktop is Gentoo and has been for the past 4 years. I'm rather happy with it: I know how it all works, its continuously updated, has good support for commercial software. However this laptop has only 512 of RAM (rather painful for compiling) and I had heard that Kubuntu has good laptop support.
And indeed thats pretty much the case. All of my hardware was recognized: the dual-core, the wireless, the Intel graphics chip and power saving and status features are all working without any configuration. It was the easiest install I've ever done. And I'm happy with the result too, Kubuntu does a good job of putting everything together. The complaints I'm about to go into don't take away too much from this fact.
The problem with Kubuntu and Ubuntu are their defaults for the repos. I'm pretty sure the fact that the default repos get better support then the 'universe' 'multiverse' etc. repos is something that is only understood by only a few. And apparently thats the entire reason for not having them on by default. So when I wanted to install kdevelop, I was a little puzzled at first. Gentoo currently shines in this area, I've only ever had to use an "overlay" if I wanted to install unreleased software.
The other issue I've had is with wireless network configuration (at least its not wireless driver configuration!) If there's a Kubuntu equivalent to Gentoo's /etc/conf.d/wireless I haven't found it. Right now wireless works if I run wlassistant (a GUI interface to configure the wireless) try to connect, it fails, and then I restart /etc/init.d/networking. That doesn't make too much sense, I know.
In general their startup scripts seem to be all pretty unorganized. All written in plain /bin/sh and with no clear design (like instead of a general dependency system, there are scripts that are run before and after specifically network goes up and down). Gentoo's startup and configuration system is hardly revolutionary which I suppose makes Kubuntu's antiquated system that much more frustrating.
x2x
x2x is a cool little utility. It lets you control two computers easily with one mouse/keyboard. I made an icon in my quick launch to the following:
ssh -X ian@`kdialog --inputbox 'Connect with what host?' some.host` "x2x -west -from :0."
And with that I can just set my laptop down and start using my desktop's mouse and keyboard to control both.
Kirksville
I'm returning to Kirksville, Missouri tomorrow. Its felt like a long time even though it was only a half week: it will be good to be back.
Sunday, November 19. 2006
--> jefferai has joined this channel (n=jeff@amarok/developer/mitchell).
*** jefferai sets the channel topic to "jefferai got his Wii -- see all you suckaz l8tr :: We're pulling a Linus: 1.4 will be our 2.6. Add features!".
<jefferai> Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
<-- jefferai has left this server (Remote closed the connection).
I've also noticed that my friend Josh is uncharacteristically not signed into AIM. I think I might know why.
Tuesday, November 14. 2006
Someone out there looking for a new job opportunity? Enjoy accessing a huge music-library? Even more important: always wanted a red user-icon on Last.fm?
There you go, start working at Last.fm as a C++ Developer. You will be working on the Last.fm Client, a Qt4-driven piece of software for Windows, Linux and OS X. Want more info? Click the link. It's worth it. Oh, and it's fun.
Now I wanna see you guys applying
cheers,
muesli
Friday, November 10. 2006
I am proud to announce the first release of Tripod, the premier application for managing photos on your iPod.
http://www.sebruiz.net/tripod/
Tripod is targeted towards a KDE environment, but requires only kdelibs and libgpod (cvs), so it is easy to use in any environment. Currently, Tripod allows for creating, removing, renaming of photo albums, as well as adding and removing of photos to albums.
The application is very stable, but released as beta software since it is the first public offering .
Enjoy!
Thursday, November 2. 2006
Some people might know that since about a month I'm suffering from no, or actually very low, motivation to do anything. As result of this I decided to take a timeout from Amarok, KDE and FOSS development/management, for a not yet known period of time. This will most likely start after release of Amarok 1.4.4 I will unsubscribe from every mailing list, not aggregate planets or blogs or IT related news, not join any IRC channel, not log into my jabber account @ kdetalk, not answer any mail about Amarok, KDE or FOSS (as long as it's not really important to do so) and probably some more I didn't think of as I also stopped drinking coffee (doctor's advice). Now, why do I do this? Mainly because I have far too much responsibilities right now (not only in FOSS), and this is putting a lot of pressure on me, but also because I want to get an all new view at the whole open source movement, and last but not least, because I want to spend more time on learning French  So, watch out for Amarok 1.4.4
Arrr..... aKademy is starting in some days, and I'm kinda busy with doing last organization for the trip (even forgot to learn for the french test tomorrow  - it's not that easy to go to Vienna (Duesseldor f was easier at least  I will arrive on Firday 13:55 @ Dublin Airport (check the wiki) and will le ave on 7:30 the following M onday - and currently have no clue how to go to hostel or college or anywhere  Anyway, to make it easy for everyone to recognize and lead me to the right direction, here's a short description: tux cap on my head, big Kay on my black t-shirt, black trouser, black shoes, laptop bag on the righten side, (sliver colored) backpack on the back, a Kay pin on my jacket and no clue of anything but location of next coffee shop... If you still have no idea how I look like:  <-- the Kayed one. So, I hope someone will guide me to aKademy location and ensures that I don't tumble in a big hole (->O<-) gotta pray a bit now (getting the plane is already quite difficult). Anyway, finally I just want to thank my school for making it possible to travel on Firday and Monday, so that I can at least enjoy the weekend of this year's KDE Conference. (BTW: there will be no Amarok release, live from aKademy - 1.4.3 was just too ASAP and .4 is not finished - maybe a special aKademy snapshot, though I wonder about the sense...)
So, Aaron asked in first of his latest tripple-blog-post-mode-action (?) for visitor bump on march 15, 2005. As we didn't use Urchin analytics back then (as we usually only use Google services if KDE doesn't offer them  - and only Google services in that case) I can't show lovely graphics and big load of background information, but I guess Webalizer also does a good job   In particular:
A friend recently went to Dublin for some days, and he brought interessting information with him.  As we can see here, MS Windows wants to welcome everybody with a well known look, which just reminds on home. In fact, this is a research done by the government, to find out whether it is possible to control the amount of visitors with such welcome messages. I can tell you, since they started to welcome visitors like this, the amount of visitors got unhalved. Now, I, as an free desktop enthusiast, think we should prepare for the worst when entering the plain/train to Dublin. So, don't forget your Kubuntu CD's, your Kay-Shirts and last but not least the Kay's. Also make sure you know every single detail about KDE, people usually take you more serious, if they notice you know what you're talking about 
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