Posted
8 days
ago
Got a new laptop at work yesterday, the long awaited ThinkPad X200.
Hands down best laptop ever. Everyone should throw away their old crappy laptops and get this one, or the X200s. I’ve started writing a page over at ThinkWiki on how to install Debian on it.
Posted
22 days
ago
I’m still waiting for nesciens’ conclusion notes about his very successful project, Collections 2.0, but he’s been busy with his starting university so it will take a few more days.
In the meantime, I wanted to write a
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wrap-up post about this year’s mildly successful Google Summer of Code with XMMS2. Out of 6 projects, we’ve had 3 successful projects and 3 failed ones. That’s a pretty high and disappointing failure rate to be honest. You always have to be prepared to face unplanned obstacles, but it got a bit out of hand this time.
It is especially frustrating as the projects were all pretty sexy or important, or both.
The long-awaited Generic IPC project seems to be one of those cursed projects that nobody manages to get done. We ran that project last year but it was not finished in time, so Leonid Evdokimov (darkk) took over this year, but he wasn’t able to complete it either.
We had been lucky to get an extra slot to run the S4 project, an experimental new backend for the medialib optimized (in structure, space and performance) for the specific semantics of our data (basically, short property strings attached to objects). Unfortunately, Tobias Bengtsson (ydo) got more busy than expected with his master thesis and a major hardware failure put an end to his hopes of completing S4.
The last failing project was probably the most original/experimental: cloudstream, or a smart blend of xmms2 local music playing and last.fm’s social & semantic information, allowing to play “local radios” of your tracks using a sexy graphical cloud interface. We were especially excited as it had come as a spontaneous suggestion by the student, Arpith Siromoney. Sadly, only little code was produced; we hope that the idea will live on and end up being implemented in one way or the other!
On the brighter side of things, the three other projects were a great success and we hope to include them in the -devel tree and the main release ASAP.
Daniel Chokola (puzzles) worked on getting Ning Shi (zeegeek)’s Service clients (which I mentored for GSoC ‘07) ready for merge. He reworked the concept a bit (operations involved, atomicity of registration, etc), gave the API a refresh and rebased the tree onto the latest -devel releases. From early on, it had also become clear that it would all be nicer with the result/value-split refactoring that had been discussed for some time. Nobody had time to hack it up so I did, and I worked closely with puzzles to update service clients to use the new code and giving him a hand cleaning up the server-side and IPC layer. It’s now a good showcase of the cool new xmmsv_t API!
The first project I mentored was nycli, also referred to as “the new korving CLI”, a new CLI client for XMMS2 in C that I had started to take over from my previous C client, nyello. I had run out of time to work on nycli but Igor Ribeiro de Assis (greafine) did a great job taking over the code, improving it and completing all the missing features and adding some of his own: commands to interact with the playlist, collections and server actions, support for subcommands, file path globbing, interactive status command, and the super cool aliases!
The second student I mentored, Erik Massop (nesciens), hacked heaps of new features into Collections (my GSoC ‘06 project): new operators (incl. Order, Limit, generic comparison, Token, etc.), server-side source preferences, support for medialists (ordered collections), new query mechanisms allowing aggregates, functions on values and more complex results, conversion of all values to strings, optimized prefix matching, etc. Here come Collections 2.0!
As an organization, we acknowledge our failure at choosing students able to complete their projects in full and in time. We had a much better success ratio in the previous editions, so I guess this year is a combination of bad luck and small defects on the part of mentors and students.
Next year, I’d like us to improve communication between mentor and student, and also between the GSoC participants and the XMMS2 community. Status updates on the planet, clearer project descriptions, better linking throughout the wiki, etc. I’d also like to focus on working on a stricter list of objectives, roadmap and deadlines with the student, to help us keep track of progress more formally. I think we already had a pretty good selection process, but that might be improved too.
Nevertheless, I’m very happy with the students I mentored (nesciens, greafine, and puzzles unofficially): they all showed dedication and genuine interest in their projects, they were very open to criticism but also ready to provide arguments and new ideas to make solutions more elegant.
I look forward to seeing the GSoC code merged in official releases; it has sometimes taken longer than we would have liked in the past, but nycli and service clients should make it to your Git tree in the near future. Collections 2.0 still need review and tests, but the possibilities are already quite exciting!
Congratulations to all the successful students, thanks to Google for sponsoring this program, and let’s make it even more successful next year! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Here is the conclusion post by Igor Ribeiro de Assis (AKA greafine) about his nycli project (new command-line XMMS2 client) which I mentored for this year’s Google Summer of Code, with XMMS2 of course!
As Google Summer of Code is
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finishing I would like summarize my experience working on the NyCLI for XMMS2.
Looking what have been done and comparing with my application I would say things went pretty well. Most FIXMEs have been fixed (well some new appeared too :-|), collections and server commands implemented and subcommands help done.
Now come the coolest things (to implement and to use), new status mode is a simple player with basic controls, configuration file support and last but not least and in my opinion the coolest, alias support. It’s really rewarding when you write ‘stop ; playlist clear ; add $@ ; sort ; play‘ and it works. Let’s call this alias ’scap’ then to change the current playlist and start play something new I just do:
In nycli-shell:
nycli> scap artist:The\ Gaslight\ Anthem AND album:"The '59 Sound"
Or
$ nyxmms2 scap artist:The\ Gaslight\ Anthem AND album:"The '59 Sound"
And it’ll clear the playlist and start playing songs by The Gaslight Anthem ordered first by year then album then track number as ’sort’ is an alias for ‘playlist sort -o artist,date,album,tracknr‘.
My mentor (theefer) was really great in helping me: answering my questions, reviewing my code, finding bugs and making me focus on doing things with high priority first. I would like to thank all the xmms2 community too.
Some things I’ve learned are: the xmms2 api, glib, git, that code review is good and
The bad thing is that GSoC is over, the good thing is that I can continue coding, to quote my application "From this project I expect ... to dive in the open-source community ... continue to contribute/stay in the xmms2-community", and this really happened, now I'm more motivated to keep coding as there are still cool things to be done: virtual paths, collparser extensions, auto-complete, service clients support, etc.
To finish, I would say the current version of nycli is in a good state to substitute current CLI, and that all this experience was NICE!
--
Igor Ribeiro de Assis / 2008-08-25
I’d like to add my own congratulations to greafine, whose project was very successful!
Gonna write my own wrap-up post about this year’s GSoC soon, but I first want to publish the summary of the other project I mentored, “Collections 2.0″, by nesciens/Erik Massop. RSN. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (puzzles)
Well, it's not really over, but yesterday, the 18th, was the last day of coding for Google Summer of Code students. Service clients are 90% done as of this writing, and it shouldn't be hard to get the other 10% done in a day or two, plus some
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bugfixes. But deadline or no deadline, service clients are a sugary-sweet feature that XMMS2 really needs, and I will be hacking on them for a long time to come.
SoC certainly solidified a few lessons about the real world for me. Most importantly, in my humble opinion, is that money changes things. When you're coding for money, you're coding under a deadline, and it's incredibly easy to fall behind. The result/value split code that service clients depended on was supposed to be completed and merged before SoC even began. It's only now that SoC is over that the result/value split is "done" and it's still unmerged. The API for my project changed half a dozen times before I wrote a line of its code. And a myriad of personal issues took days and days of quality hacking time away from me. Lucky for me my mentor(s) were great in helping me sort out issues with the design and code, and reestablishing goals to fit the program into the summer. Thank you, nano and theefer!
A sure bonus is I now have a jumpstart on understanding the result/value split code and all that it brings. Since it is a pervasive change to both the client library and server-side, there's no getting anywhere without knowing how to work with it. Plus, as a member of the XMMS2 team, I'll be there after SoC to help merge, document, and answer questions.
Now with the finish line in sight, the thought of the upcoming mergefest and eventually, users using service clients has me more motivated than ever before. And I'm filled with a sense of great pride that I stuck it out through the summer and created something I feel is worth being proud of. But for now, I'm going to play a quick round of DDR with my little sister and get back to work. [Less]
Posted
3 months
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (puzzles)
Well, the client-side of things is mostly done for now, so it's time I turned my attention to the remaining items. The server side of things needs to be updated/fixed and the service client manager (SCM) needs updating. The server is fairly
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straightforward, but I have some concerns about the SCM.
Does the SCM record clients in its configuration when they are run? Probably not. How would it record the executable path, for example? We should find a way to make this more automatic.
Provide methods to read/write SCM configuration.
service_client --register #registers its configuration using above methods
The above command can be called by waf during build to eliminate user intervention. The clients are already registered and ready for use upon installation!
Can we rename the SCM's shutdown function to "kill" (and perhaps redefine its functionality) or something that can't be confused with xmmsc_service_shutdown?
Can we change the default value of the "monitor" option (to check the configuration directory for updates) to true? This seems to cooperate much better with user expectations.
Can we get rid of the "timeout" option (to wait before killing a service client after a shutdown request is received)? If we rename the method to "kill" its intentions will be a lot more obvious--take down the client now. [Less]
Openbox gkrellm 
dvdrip 
Audacious Media Player 
cdrdao 
