(Ignore)

This is just an entry so the Chinese spammers I keep getting with random links to probably viruses and malware can all focus here, until I write a real blog later. I'm getting sick of deleting the comments.

DO NOT CLICK ON ANY OF THE CHINESE LINKS THAT WILL UNDOUBTEDLY APPEAR HERE LATER, THEY ARE BOTS AND WILL FILL YOU WITH BAD THINGS!

Amarok on Windows (Work In Progress)

The last few days I've spent with Amarok on Windows XP, and I've managed to fix one heavily annoying thing:

- non-ascii paths to music in the collection are now scanned

It was actually a trivial fix, but took a bit of hunting down. So for any of you with non-ascii file paths (e.g. Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean) you can now have all of your wonderful tracks be picked up.

I recently installed Windows XP on my machine as a secondary OS for a very valiant purpose (I got into the Starcraft 2 beta) and decided to give KDE on Windows a whirl. Overall I have to say I'm very impressed at how almost everything compiles, and runs quite snappily. The wiki on techbase for installing things with emerge needs a little bit of love, but overall proved to be a great resource. Hopefully I can fix things up there when I have some free time.

With respect to Amarok, the following things need to be addressed, and some of them I will be working on in the weeks to come, time permitting:

• liblastfm will not compile on Windows with the msvc (free as in beer) compiler, need to replace a class or two with a free (as in beer) version provided within the msvc libraries
• phonon-vlc for some odd reason, while kcm recognizes it and lists it, cannot be loaded, claiming that vlc cannot be found (mplayer for its part, does work, but not with non-ascii filenames, grrrrr)
• Solid's WMI backend for hardware detection on Windows is rather far from completion, so no media devices until that gets implemented
• libgpod needs a few more things before it will work on Windows

The first two are of utmost priority, as I have grown accustomed to having all of my plays scrobbled, and am averse to playing music and not having it scrobbled, forcing me to use iTunes (far from the optimal music player) to play music. Imagine, also, not being able to play part of your library simply because your current backend doesn't support non-ascii filenames. I could rename my files using some bizarre romanization scheme, but why should I have to?

I have other impressions of KDE on Windows, but that will be addressed in another post. In closing, so far so good, but there's still a long way to go.

Big Bang Theory

So I was watching Big Bang Theory the other day, and a recurring thought I had had, came back to me. Am I totally crazy, or does somebody else see this?