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.

KDE4 on Gentoo

After weeks of trying to get to setting up a KDE4 development environment for Amarok, success is finally at my door =D. First Kubuntu and kdesvn-build needing every dependency imaginable and building issues, then Gentoo and the broken qt-4.4 ebuilds, but a combination of kdesvn-build and manually building Amarok has finally granted me my dream.



For a higher quality version, download from here(note: .ogv file) : http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=03f4722730dfa9115d143701fd0d3db1

For an avi version (lesser quality a bit) :
http://www.filesend.net/download.php?f=bdbe2dcd1626b6aa2f3ab5d78888bcae

KDE4 on OS X 10.4

(From left to right: Konqueror, KPatience, KStars)

So it turns out KDE4 isn't just being ported to Windows, but Mac as well (universal binaries, both PPC and x86).  It runs slow for now, and a lot of stuff doesn't work, but the games and education programs work alright.  Very exciting stuff.  Soon as Konqueror and Amarok 2 start working properly it'll be a happy day for OS X users, or... not.  The new Konqueror will be using Webkit (Safari's engine, which itself is based on KHTML, Konqueror's current engine), and iTunes will likely run faster than Amarok.  But at least tech demos can be done natively... all the easier to then lure people to an FOSS system =)

Packages available at:http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/KDE_on_Mac_OS_X#Installation

Firefox's Gecko vs. KHTML and Webkit

Firefox has a large user and developer base which has led to its wide circulation and varied plugins, but some things are hurting.  The Gecko rendering engine pales in comparison to Konqueror's KHTML and Safari's Webkit.  The same pages take up to about 3x as long to render in Gecko.  While KHTML has issues rendering Google-related things such as Gmail and Google documents, Webkit shows no such failure and will become Konqueror's new engine soon.  Plugins aside, once Konqueror from KDE 4 becomes a standard, the developer community around it should expand and Firefox will begin to see a big run for its money.

On Macintosh OS 10.4, Firefox not only takes roughly 5-10x as long to load as Safari but eats up resources substantially.  At one point, when not loading any videos and with 4 tabs open, Firefox was eating 40-60% of cpu time and my fans were blaring.  One minute after closing it, the machine's responsiveness picked up and the fans slowed to a near halt.

On Gentoo, Konqueror also loads significantly faster than Firefox, and Firefox is there also a proc/memory hog.

Recently I tested Firefox 3 beta on Kubuntu Hardy and I have to say, it's not getting any faster and actually I can notice a further slowdown.  If Mozilla doesn't do something soon, it might find itself losing favor in the community.

Kubuntu PPC

After some painstaking efforts, I got Kubuntu running on my PPC Powerbook G4 a few months ago, and recently upgraded to Hardy. After 7.04 or so, Ubuntu stopped officially supporting the PPC platform and it really is starting to show. Configuration and installation issues aside, the computer runs hot, the fans are always blaring, and the speed is remarkably slow. These are probably the result of the kernel using non-specific drivers, the lack of a PPC nVidia driver that isn't terrible, and generic configuration without any real testing.

I don't really like OS X, but given that I can't get an x86-based laptop any time soon, I was hoping to run Linux on PPC but it seems I'm barking up the wrong tree. Gentoo is out of the question given the struggle this poor old processor goes through compiling the smallest of things. Linux is a good alternative, but perhaps the PPC world isn't a good place to be.