First Day of Coding

Finally got my environment set up a few days ago, turns out Qt was compiled with some very strange flags and it was having a ripple effect on kdelibs. I was gone last weekend in Berkeley and had some school stuff to catch up on, but I did get a bit started at least.

I started looking into collections, and I ripped off the Daap directory, ripped out the Daap references and replaced it with MediaDevice and now I have a new toy to play with =). There's a lot of things that aren't commented on too much, like Observer in MetaBase, but I'm sure it'll make sense with a bit more time. Other than that, making a collection seems pretty straightforward (albeit involved).

I'm trying to find a balance between studying the MediaDevice code and Collection code since I'll have to end up using both, but since I'm going to be using both in related ways there doesn't seem to be a way around this. Either way, I hope I get my first real commit sometime next week (this week is going to be a bit involved with schoolwork as well).

New Laptop

My cell phone camera doesn't take great shots, but this'll do. First is of the laptop itself, running Firefox on KDE 4. Second of the fingerprint scanner.

Stats:

Lenovo Thinkpad T61p
Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron KDE 4 Remix
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz 6144kb cache (each core) 800 MHz FSB
160 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
nVidia Quadro FX 570M 256MB
2 Gb PC-5700 667 MHz
Bluetooth/Wireless/Usual
Fingerprint Reader

Summary:

Despite Windows Vista's best attempts to stop me from shrinking the partition, I did it anyway, though I guess I'll have to "recover" Vista later, when I feel like a masochist and want to run Windows. That aside, Kubuntu works like a charm, so I'm pretty satisfied. Only regret is that I don't have enough time right now to do anything for Amarok, thanks again to school. Hope to have free time starting Tuesday.

Media Device Support for Amarok 2 in Google's Summer of Code

It looks like I'll be the one bringing media devices back for the next major version of Amarok.

Looks awesome so far right?  Well there's still a lot missing, and media device support is part of that.  My job is going to be adding iPod, MTP, and generic device support.  Over the next many many weeks, I'm going to try to keep track of what I'm doing here, but I don't promise anything too exciting non-technically speaking =p

Status Report:

I've looked into the MediaDeviceCache stuff that interfaces with Solid, KDE 4's backend for hardware recognition, and it's amazingly simple.  Solid code is beautiful and easy to read, I like =).

I started looking into MediaDevicePluginManager but haven't gotten too deep into it yet.

One of the ultimate goals of this project is to implement a Collection class, tentatively called MediaDeviceCollection, which will let songs on a media device get all the advantages of any other Collection, and I believe a few more that are specific to media devices (e.g. sync'ing of music, artwork).  I haven't made progress there yet because I'm still working on the previous stuff, but it's on the backburner.  Hopefully I'll have a more concrete idea of how that'll work after some more discussion with other devs.

In other news, my laptop has arrived!  So I'll spend a good part of this weekend setting it up for development.