July 30th, 2008 |
Published in
Life, Technology | 1 Comment
The ball has been dropped by me - dropped hard - during the past several weeks. First, I was stumped for a week and a half by the glib+qt fiasco, then my development machine’s hard drive shuffled off the mortal coil. Replacing it took a solid week, and when it finally arrived I installed Gentoo. Two days later, the finally install completes as I’m frantically throwing my life’s possessions into a car:
- clothes
- 2 laptops
- 1 Target desk (retail $50)
- assorted books
- 1 blow-up air mattress
Fast forward through seven hours of me hurtling down the interstate at not-so-safe velocities, and here I am, pardoning my recent idleness as my flight to Paris boards at gate D32. Not accomplishing much over the past several weeks suddenly doesn’t seem so bad: I’m going to Europe! There is a week long hack-a-thon at Akademy; I’ll catch up then.
A bientôt!
July 17th, 2008 |
Published in
Code, Technology | 3 Comments
I’ve been slacking on the update reports over the past two weeks, because I’m holding out for the exciting post where I say “MP3tunes AutoSync is working! Huzzah!” Sadly, this report isn’t that one.
For the past week I’ve been banging my head against the wall of glib, QtEventLoop, and QThreads. I have quite a headache to say the least, but yesterday thanks to my mentor and Ian, both Amarok developers, my head actually broke through that wall. Literally. GLIB, and Qt are kowtowing at my feet swearing oaths of fealty. They have promised to work together and let me get back to doing fun things, like code new features.
July 8th, 2008 |
Published in
Code | 2 Comments
Some non-Summer-of-Code related business popped up over the weekend, to take care of which required a slight road-trip. As such, I haven’t had much time to work on my project, however I’m heading back home today and I plan to get the code I have chilling in my local branch pushed to the main subversion repository.
Surprisingly, bulleted lists seem to be the most concise means to list progress [/sarcasm]
- Still working on Harmony integration.
- Harmony authentication is working (Thanks Lateralus from MP3tunes!).
- The daemon is receiving notification updates.
- Notification processing is what I’m working on now.
While looking at my last couple reports about harmony, I realized that the information is somewhat dry. I think this is because harmony is a highly technical, behind the scenes feature, and, also, often it is difficult to inject excitement into mundane programming updates. The humdrum is slightly symbolic of harmony. You will enable it once and forget about it as it silently keeps your music collection synced.
Related posts: GSoC Report Week 5: Harmonizing Amarok, One small step for Amarok…
July 2nd, 2008 |
Published in
Code | 1 Comment
Total Commits: 106 Weekly Commits: 26
I usually aim to post these reports on Monday, but I’m usually wrapping up a final commit or two on Monday night so I wait till Tuesday to post the report. Well now it’s 3:30 on Wednesday morning and I’m just starting. My last commit for “this week” was, oh, about 30 seconds ago.
During the last 7 days I:
- Patched libmp3tunes to support track fetching based off a filekey.
- Used the aforementioned patch in Amarok to enable saving of MP3tunes tracks to playlists.
- Made the MP3tunes Service “Lazy Load” upon Amarok’s start-up.
- Fixed misc non-mp3tunes related Amarok bugs.
- Added libmp3tunes::Harmony to the source tree.
- Created a harmony daemon that runs asynchronously within Amarok.
As usual you can see a list of my most recent commits via my fisheye page.
What the heck is this Harmony nonsense?
Harmony, itself, is a subset of libmp3tunes that provides an api for receiving event notifications from the MP3tunes servers. Essentially, what it boils down to is harmony enables the MP3tunes servers to notify Amarok when a user’s Locker has been changed. This will allow Amarok to assess the changes and perform an appropriate action (e.g., download a new track).
Suppose Jenni buys a song from eClassical and has it loaded directly to her locker. When this happens her Amarok will receive a notification: “Hey Amarok, Jenni just had a track added to her locker.” At which point Amarok will seamlessly download the track to Jenni’s local collection.
Pretty cool right? Sure is, there’s just one caveat: it’s not working yet. Getting harmony to play nice with Amarok was a challenge that took a couple days, but as of this morning harmony is running in Amarok.
By this time next week I plan to have harmony fully integrated with Amarok, so the above scenario can actually take place. Even though the feature freeze that was announced for Amarok 2.0 technically doesn’t include me, I will still be taking some time to polish all the work I’ve done since May.
June 24th, 2008 |
Published in
Code, Technology
Total Commits: 84 Weekly Commits: 36
Starting these posts with “It was another busy week..” is starting to get boring; I’ll cook up something more exciting for next week.
In case you missed it, in the past seven days history has been made. I’ll let that stand in as the bulk of my weekly report, but a few worthwhile things have occurred since then that deserve a mention.
Remote Track Upload - You can now sideload tracks to your MP3tunes collection from remote sources in Amarok. What the heck is sideload and what remote sources you ask? Sideload is a feature of the MP3tunes API that allows for server-to-server transfers. This means you can give your Locker a URL to a track, and it will automatically be downloaded into your Locker. Currently Amarok sports three services with remote collections that are sideloadable to MP3tunes: Ampache, Magnatune, and Jamendo. This method of transferring is generally very fast, because the transfer bypasses your slow internet connection.
Upload Progress Bar - When you upload (or sideload) tracks to MP3tunes there is now a simple status bar to let you know how far along in the process you are.
Non-Supported Track Filtering - This one is simple: If you try and upload a file-type that MP3tunes doesn’t support, Amarok will tell you and stop that track from being transferred.
- Work on allowing MP3tunes tracks to persist after a restart.
- Flesh out the synchronization system: what it’s going to do, and how it’s going to do it.
- Design any UI widgets needed for the syncing system
The first one will be simple, in fact I plan to code it up after writing this report. These second and third tasks, however, signify that I’m moving into the last stage of the project. According to my original proposal I am ahead by a week, so I’ll be using this week as extra time to plan and get a jump-start on the synchronization framework.
