Planet Banshee

Ruben Vermeersch: Summer of Code Update

ruben@savanne.be (Ruben Vermeersch) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:12:34 +0000

Google Summer of Code
Lots of activity around F-Spot lately. As there's a number of people very curious about what I'm doing, I've made a small screencast providing a sneak preview.

In the screencast I first highlight the old editing tools below, which are quite hidden. I then show you how the new tools will be implemented.

Click for screencast (Ogg Theora)

The UI is still very basic, as my GTK+-fu isn't all that strong.

F-Spot performance enhancements
At the same time, both Stephane Delcroix (my mentor, who should really blog more!) and me are working on big patches to improve F-Spot performance. Expect a much smoother experience soon!

Will Farrington: Summa on OSX

wcfarrington@gmail.com (Will Farrington) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:10:03 +0000

Why yes, it is doable.

I’m not even sure we want to consider making a Cocoa# UI for it yet. ;)

Jorge Castro: Outta here for a week

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:33:15 +0000

I'm on vacation for a week; moving to Royal Oak, MI. I'll be checking mail, but probably won't respond too early. :) See everyone at GUADEC!!!

Will Farrington: Summa is Getting Close

wcfarrington@gmail.com (Will Farrington) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:54:24 +0000

After my last post, it seems a few people are interested in Summa. I’m pleased to announce that 0.1 will be out “soon”. Don’t worry—I’ll be sure to let you all know the minute it does.

However, for release, there are a few pre-requisites we need to fix: namely, icons. Simply put, the icons we are using at the moment are “place-holders” (ideally).

Right now, here are the icons we need:

summa-feed-unread (16×16 only)
summa-feed-read (16×16 only)
summa-item-unread (16×16 only)
summa-item-read (16×16 only)
summa-item-flagged (16×16 only)
summa-all-feeds (16×16 only) (though hopefully we can just take the one from ephy)
summa-tag (16×16 only) hopefully we can use the one I stole from Tomboy, by jimmac)
summa (all sizes)

Anyone willing to make these icons up would not only receive an iCookie, but also the never-ending admiration of Ethan Osten and myself (for what that’s worth).

In addition to icons, here’s a quick “todo” list of items we want to address before 0.1:

Fix autotools/makefiles (both hardcoded path issues, configure issues, and lack of make install)
Fix ATOM parser to suck (much) less
Fix issues with hardcoded icons
Miscellaneous bug fixes
General code cleanup

Some folks have already expressed interest in contributing to Summa. We’re more than happy to have you helping out, especially if you’re working on the above issues. That said, if you’re interested (and please, for now, only those of you who are truly interested in contributing immediately), please send an email to both Ethan and myself, at senoki@gmail.com and wcfarrington@gmail.com respectively.

Once 0.1 is out the door, I’ll be sure to broadcast the location of the code for all to grab, but for now, we simply want to keep a tight focus on getting 0.1 out the door before any rush (imaginary or no) of developers running at the project.

Jorge Castro: The perfect thin client?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:09:10 +0000

Surely everyone has heard of the "desktop Eee", the Eee box.

I've been wishing for an Intel-video powered thin client, but I've never seen one. A typical decent LTSP thin client will cost you about $300 bucks. The sell cheaper ones, but generally, $300 is the sweet spot. (By the way you can buy these from Diskless Workstations)

Having deployed thin clients at Oakland University, they're totally awesome. The big problem is that in our case there are plenty of CAD applications that make use of graphics. Typical thin clients come with VIA or similar video, which either are way too slow, or have terrible drivers. Netbooting a PC with an i965 however, yields impressive performance. Sure, you wouldn't want to design the next Corvette on it, but for mass student labs, it's more than enough horsepower.

I am willing to take a guess that the desktop Eee will be around the same cost as a thin client. (~$300) So is this new Eee the inadvertent thin client LTSP deployers have always wanted? I wonder what the video performance will be like, so I am chomping at the bit to get my hands on one. Of course, I am excited about playing with an Atom processor-based system. It would be interesting to see how responsive it is locally vs. in thin client mode.

On a related note, Dave Richards deploys thin clients in Largo, Florida, and his blog has detailed specifics on his deployment. (He's also written a book on the subject. Required reading for thin client folks. :D

Discuss below!

EDIT: I am assuming it will even be netbootable ... it better be!

Will Farrington: "College Experience": Continued

wcfarrington@gmail.com (Will Farrington) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:40:47 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted last.

That tends to happen when one is busy.

I’m settled in here at Georgia Tech now—enjoying my classes and what-have-you. Naturally, this has cut down a little bit of my personal, and GSoC, time; however, things still don’t seem to be falling too far behind. I anticipate that I’ll be back ahead of schedule in no time.

Beyond that, I was lucky enough to get myself one of the heavily discounted Macbooks at the Tech Barnes & Noble (including the “free” iPod Touch it comes with). It’s certainly nice, and OSX is definitely a bit of a venture from my normal day-to-day activities. I do anticipate to dual-boot this eventually, but as for right now, I’ve been setting up my OSX environment to be friendly towards the development I’m doing, through MacPorts and lots and lots of compilation. Hopefully I’ll have my environment set up suitable today, and then I can dive right back into development.

Jorge Castro: How many hogheads does it take to make a gallon?

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:31:30 +0000

LWN covered Free Software Magazine's coverage of hotwire. One person on LWN commented "What a completely pointless exercise."

What I love about hotwire is it takes the old "unix model", spins it on it's head, and shoots for new ways for people to interact with a terminal. Apparently it also highly upsets UNIX greybeards; Colin Walters, I owe you a case of beer.

Jorge Castro: On phones....

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:41:19 +0000

It's no secret that I hate phones. With a vengeance.

I have a blackberry 8830. It's supposed to be one of the world's finest smartphones. I hate it. It's slow, the apps suck, the UI sucks, and mostly everything about it sucks. I hate using it. It hates me. When I bought it apparently it was like the world's best phone. Ok, fair enough, maybe I just don't grok it. Or maybe it's just a piece of crap.

The best thing about having it is when I go out with friends and I pull it out; someone always asks "How do you like your phone?"

I always say, "I hate it." Then for some reason they get all emotional about it.

"Well, have you tried the iphone?" they always say. First of all, in order to make the iphone useful, you have to jailbreak it. This is apparently ok, because if you don't know, iphones are apparently ok, and blackberries to a certain extent, but not windows phones, they're apparently more evil. Apprentley if you're into OSS, then the iphone is the place to be.

So I live with my blackberry with the google features; mail, calendar, etc. "Exchange for the rest of us".

I am waiting to see what android brings to the table, and as of today what symbian brings to the game as well. I think RIM is in trouble because they suck at UI and making an easy-to-use phone. I think apple sucks for the obvious reasons, though I suspect they'll get the typical get-out-of-jail free card that they seem to enjoy.

But "Wait Jorge, I saw 'David Garrett' and 'Matthew Zeuthen' using iPhones at FOSSCamp, FOSDEM and other open source conferences, surely how dare you lecture us on fucking cellular phones!" I can't speak for these mythological creatures, but I'm sure they'll be at guadec trying to justify how they sold us out. :)

What phone are you looking forward to? Is Android the long sought after solution to this problem? Will I finally get an easy to use phone that doesn't suck? And even if it does suck, will it being open source make it suck less?

Alan McGovern: MonoTorrent 0.4 and Monsoon 0.15

noreply@blogger.com (Alan) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:58:02 +0000

MonoTorrent 0.40 has been released. There weren't many changes feature-wise, but there's been quite a lot of under the hood changes. Details can be found on www.monotorrent.com

Also, Monsoon 0.15 has been released. The release notes are available and your packages can be gotten from here.

Fun times, eh?

MonoTorrent 0.50 is slated for a few weeks time (don't hold me to this). There are a bucket load of features in the works which will definitely kick some ass. I've been getting some great patches recently from Olivier Dufour, which he has detailed in his post. These should all make 0.50. I've also been getting some awesome work from Karthik Kailash, and his friend David (whose second name i can't find now), implementing a fancy debugging GUI which exposes all the internals in a nice GUI to make it easy for me to detect bugs/issues. He's also implementing Ono support, which helps get faster transfers; Bit-tyrant like unchoking which prioritises peers who reciprocate data resulting in faster transfers along with a new Piece Picking algorithm which allows you to stream a media file via torrent efficiently.

I'm unsure how many of those features will hit 0.50, it depends on when they hit SVN and how much testing i can get in. But hopefully a few of them will get there.

Jorge Castro: Mango Lassi call for help

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:23:35 +0000

One of Lennart Poettering's lesser-known projects is Mango Lassi. To put it simply, Mango Lassi connects your PCs together to share screens. It's sort of like Synergy except that it uses Avahi to auto discover clients on your network, making it dead simple to set up, and the neat overlays make for a slicker user experience.

With Lennart's TODO list growing daily he's had less and less time to work on it, so I asked if I could blog about it to see if there's anyone interested in picking it up. Head to the Mango Lassi homepage for hacking details. I've also made a corresponding Launchpad page. If you want to hack on it and want ownership of the page, let me know! Lennart also mentioned some things about MPX:

I had some discussions with Peter Hutterer, who's doing MPX (Multi Pointer X). My plan was to make ML register and forward X input devices instead of the ugly core pointer magic it does right now. Would be much much cleaner, and way more sexy, because every networked machine would get its own mouse pointer instead of sharing just a single one among all screens. If we had this Mango Lassi would not just be a help for a single user using multiple machines, but also could be useful as a collaboration tool where every user controls his own machine and can control those of his friends nearby. MPX is hot anyway, and with this network sharing stuff it would be even hotter. ;-)

... and then my personal favorite ...

With MPX and window migration you can just click on a window on your screen and move it to the screen of a co-worker. And he might move it to the screen of another co-worker. And all three of you could control the app at the same time, with one mouse pointer for each [...] Take one part Avahi, one part D-Bus, one part MPX, one part window migration, shake well, and you'll have the sexiest input sharing system ever invented on this planet. This system would be even better then the real drink Mango Lassi! :-)

Jorge Castro: Global Bug Jam Preperation

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:07:51 +0000

Is your local team or LUG participating in a group effort during the Global Bug Jam? Have you thought about a location, power availability, network connectivity, and other logistical things?

Fret not! We've decided to run some sessions on #ubuntu-meeting for those of you out there planning on participating during the jam. We're going to be covering things like "best practices" and tips and tricks for running a smooth jam. PLEASE NOTE that these "How to run a Bug Jam" sessions are useful for people organizing and running the jams, if you're planning on just participating during the jam then these sessions probably won't be useful for you. :)

All sessions will be in #ubuntu-meeting on Freenode.

Friday, June 20th 16:00 UTC with Caspar Clemens Mierau and Daniel Holbach
Saturday, June 21st 19:00 UTC with Greg Grossmeier and Jorge Castro

Friday, July 4th 16:00 UTC with Caspar Clemens Mierau and Daniel Holbach
Saturday, July 5th 19:00 UTC with Wolfger and Greg Grossmeier

EDIT: The IRC room is #ubuntu-meeting, NOT -classroom, I have edited my post.

Jorge Castro: Terminator moves to beta

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:22:50 +0000

Chris Jones sends along that the terminator team has started uploading Terminator 0.9 Betas into their team PPA.

Terminator, in case you don't know, let's you put many terminals in one window. It's full of sysadminy goodness.

Gabriel Burt: Banshee Momentum

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Burt) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:24:33 +0000

We're planning a Banshee 1.2 release for early July, before GUADEC. It should be a really great release, including multi-artist album fixes, internet radio, library directory watching, recommendations, and probably a couple other big items.

You can grab Banshee from svn trunk to test the latest changes - internet radio and multi-artist support are already committed - and to contribute by reporting and fixing bugs, translating Banshee, or writing some new code.

If you haven't tried Banshee 1.0 yet, you should!

Patrick van Staveren: Firefox Three, Guinness World Records, and bananas.

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:08:20 +0000

So I guess bananas has nothing to do with it, although all you monkeys will be jealous to know I had one with my dinner, and it was tasty.

However the real fruit of the day is (you guessed it) Firefox Three. I’m pretty happy to see this release; I’ve used the betas on and off for a while and been impressed how far it’s come. It’ll still struggle to compete with the simplicity of Epiphany, but that’s just because I’m human.

It should also be noted that the Spread Firefox group has coordinated a campaign to start a new Guinness World Record for “the most software downloaded in 24 hours.” So far since they opened the download floodgates about 18:16 UTC, and in the past ~ten hours or so, the Spread Firefox Download Day page is reporting over three million downloads, although I’m willing to bet that this is thus far an unofficial number.

There’s been a lot of commentary on the bad choice of starting time, the lack of advertising, some issues with the map not showing all the countries accurately but please spare us. This is supposed to be a fun thing, so have fun with it! Three million downloads thus far implies that the masses are quite happy. You can’t seriously expect the organizers of this to make everyone just oh-so-peachy, so just roll with it! Go download Firefox Three and enjoy!

Well done to everyone working with Mozilla!

Jorge Castro: Awesome.

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:27:12 +0000

I think it's starting to sound good!! Anthony brings us more metallica pics.

Aaron Bockover: openSUSE 11.0 Launch Party, Boston/Cambridge

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:03:16 +0000

On Thursday, June 19th at 6 PM, we'll be holding an openSUSE 11.0 launch party at the Novell Cambridge office at 8 Cambridge Center (Kendall Square area). If you're in the area, stop by with your appetite and a laptop. We'll provide the pizza, network, install media, and live CDs!

Please RSVP in a comment on this post as I need a head count for the pizza order.

We hope to see you there!

Jorge Castro: Calm down ....

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:13:40 +0000

With this whole controversy about music and Metallica ... oh man, I had this like 10 page post on metal, copyright, freedom, and music and stuff ... but I deleted it in favor of this comment by Dave Camp:

"I don't care what happens, no one will take this album away from us, ever."

I have nothing to add .. other than "goddamn it isn't this the best thing you've ever listened to in your life."

Jorge Castro: I should get out more ...

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:48:53 +0000

I just spent 2 hours of my life arranging my Pieces of Flair. For some reason this picture seems like a good approximation of me as a person. This is scary.

This seems to be the only fun application on all of Facebook!

James Willcox: 2 + 1

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:31:53 +0000

Alexander James, 30 minutes old

Alan McGovern: MonoTorrent - Expanding your universe

noreply@blogger.com (Alan) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:58:43 +0000

As i'm sure everyone has heard at this stage, Banshee 1.0 has been released. It's a huge step up from the old 0.13.x releases, and well worth checking out!

So, now that banshee has some kickass podcast support, along with video support, wouldn't it be nice if you could download video podcasts which have a .torrent payload?

Wouldn't it be awesome if there as a .NET based torrent library, that maybe was exposed via a DBus service that could be integrated with banshee with just a few lines of code. Of course, once you've integrated the actual torrent downloading, how do you make banshee realise that .torrent files need to be handled specially? Well, write another few lines of code.

So all in all, because of banshees awesome extension framework, i wrote less than 200 lines of code of banshee code to enable banshee to download torrents. I was surprised by how easy everything was. I was up with creating the new extension within about 10 minutes. So, if you're interested in this extension, attach yourself to the bug report and you'll be able to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings.

After all this, what exactly does it look like when you download a torrent podcast? Well, it looks exactly like it does for a regular podcast download. You don't have to do anything special, it's all just MAGIC! Check out the screencast.

Jorge Castro: Banshee 1.0 is here!

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:14:31 +0000

Banshee 1.0 is out and ready for public consumption.

For about the last 8 months I've had the priviledge of following Banshee 1.0 development very closely.

It's come a long way since abock's search prototype that was being shown last October. Search is fast, import is fast, and MTP support is rocking. I think the deep integration with Last.fm is a sign of things to come. The possibilities with web service integration with your local mp3 player opens up a bunch of possibilities. Maybe someday I can keep my playlists on last.fm and have my local Banshee play it, regardless of what PC I am on. The podcast plugin's UI is also one of my favorite features. In general, Banshee just makes me happy when I listen to music. I am looking forward to see how the video management part will be improved post-1.0.

I'd also like to personally thank Gabriel for hacking in a corner during Lugradio Live USA to implement MTP support. Stuff of legend.

Aaron's announcement
Gabriel's announcement

My favorite feature is the Queue, with the slick "pulse" effect when you add songs to it. Effective, but not tacky ... it's what snorp calls "Classy". What's your favorite feature in Banshee 1.0? Leave a comment!

Gabriel Burt: Banshee 1.0 Released!

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Burt) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:08:21 +0000

We have released Banshee 1.0, with all the great features we've blogged about in Alpha 1 through RC1. And we have an awesome new website!

I'm loving using Banshee 1.0 every day, rediscovering my music library (and album art!), discovering new music on Last.fm, and enjoying podcasts and video podcasts I never knew existed.

Don't forget to come to our BoF, lightning talk, and main talk at GUADEC 2008!

Digg It!

Aaron Bockover: Banshee 1.0 Released!

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:14:03 +0000

It is my immense pleasure to formally announce the release of Banshee 1.0. After nearly eight months of vigorous, non-stop work (since the last major Banshee release), it's here - and we couldn't be happier!

I'm not going to highlight much of the release in this post since we have written up some rather dashing release notes, full of pretty pictures and exciting detail.

Do yourself a service today, and try the release for yourself!

Install Banshee 1.0 - Binaries Ready Today

Release Highlights

I would however feel a little disappointed if I didn't at least mention some of the awesomeness that Banshee 1.0 has in store, but really, you should read our release notes. We spent a lot of time on them!

Artist/Album browser
Visually filter your collection with album art
Video playback and management
Create video playlists, smart playlists, browse, search, and sort your video library -- just like your music library
Powerful Podcasting
Supporting video podcasts and stream content before or while you download -- no waiting!
Rich Last.fm integration
Create your own radio stations and discover new music
Play Queue Source
You be the DJ
Lots of supported hardware
MTP/PlaysForSure players, USB mass storage players, iPods, audio CD playback and ripping, CD burning
Performance improvements
Better scalability, impressive speed, lower memory footprint
Compelling framework
It's easy to bring new features to life in Banshee through its powerful extension framework and rich APIs. In fact, most of the features in Banshee are extensions themselves. Drop into IRC and start hacking on your favorite feature today!

New Web Site -- Finally

Gabriel and I have spent the last four days cranking out the new Banshee web site. We've still got tons of content to organize and migrate from the old wiki, but we think this new web site will become a strong asset to the Banshee Project in due time.

Why are you still reading this?

Digg It!

The Banshee Blog: Banshee 1.0 Released!

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:59:02 +0000

After many months of hard work from dozens of contributors, Banshee 1.0 is finally out in the wild! read about all the great things Banshee has to offer, and of course download it now!

Will Farrington: The "College Experience" -- Whatever That Means

wcfarrington@gmail.com (Will Farrington) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:39:35 +0000

I just had a thought. Well, rather, I had a thought of particular interest to myself (I have uninteresting thoughts frequently enough).

I’m headed off to college in little more than a day and a half, yet I’m not entirely, 100% sure that I’m all set as far as supplies and whatnot.

That’s where you (whomever you may be) come in.

I’m sure most of you have already done or are doing the whole college/university thing, and thus are already several steps ahead of me. As such, I’m asking for a potpourri of general recommendations, whether it be general axioms of college life, or something that you forgot to bring with you first semester, etc (ad infinitum).

Really, anything you might have to say about the whole experience would be appreciated.

Jorge Castro: Do it ....

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:38:08 +0000

GNOME Do .5 "The Fighting .5" now out. There's been so much work done in this release that I can't even mention it all, so just go check it out. Also, Dave is looking for donations for maintenance of the domain and hosting for plugins, etc., so if dig Do and want to send him a few bucks we'd appreciate it!

RAOF is working on the PPA builds as we speak ... so stay tuned!

Jorge Castro: This will NOT be stock.

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:41:43 +0000

Digg it

Jorge Castro: For immediate release ...

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:15:16 +0000

Hockeytown - 9 July 2008 - The Ubuntu-Michigan Local Team, a leading provider of Ubuntu Community today announced their ground breaking "Bug Jam" event. Inspired but the Stanley Cup winning Detroit Red Wings, the Local Team continues to pursue world-class level volunteership, peer pressure, and group alcoholism.

"It's going to be a lot of fun bringing people from around the community and smashing bugs." mentioned Local Team leader Greg Grossmeier. "We are having a hard time finding out where the Stanley Cup is touring, so we decided to lock ourselves up in a library and geek out instead. I mean, seriously, we live in Detroit."

"I honestly don't have anything better to do with my time" mentioned long time contributor Craig Maloney, "now that hockey is done for the season I look forward to triaging bugs and cross-stitching." Even the local trolls were excited: "I look forward to disrupting the team and talking about how great Visual Studio is..." remarked 'that-guy-no-one-likes-but-fun-to-drink-with', Jay Wren.

The team expects to participate in the Global Bug Jam in August, which has drawn ire from competing organizations. "It's really unfair, the league needs some kind of 'awesomeness cap' or something, " commented Richard Johnson from the Chicago team, "we never get to think of fun things and I'm too busy hanging out with the Foresight guys." Members from the Ohio community were also distraught. "I wish I was from Michigan, but I'm not, I'm from freaking Ohio." lamented Ohio native Steve Stalcup.

The Jam runs today, Monday June 9th at 6:30pm at the Main branch of the Clinton-Macomb Public Library. Members will be in a conference room with free wifi to library card holders. People without local library cards can sign up for one in 5 minutes, but if you are planning on doing that, please try to show up a little bit early. Directions can be found here.

The team plans on getting a bunch of practice in before the Global Bug Jam ... "Wow, that's today?" remarked a surprised Trevor Jagoda.

Alex Hixon: Wow…

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:06:41 +0000

I don’t usually listen to Radiohead, but for the Nude Remix competiton, this guy went one weirder than everyone else:
http://www.vimeo.com/1109226?pg=embed&sec=1109226

Who else do you know who can play a bass part with their scanner?

Will Farrington: GSoC: Week Two

wcfarrington@gmail.com (Will Farrington) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 04:21:10 +0000

Week Two is on the trek, and it’s forging a trail through my few days of summer with machete in hand.

Where does that leave our hero (I’m modest—I swear!) and his code?

The bindings are near done. There’s a few issues with GAPI that are getting sorted out today/tomorrow (timezones and what-not), but other than that they’re pretty much good to go. Tomorrow I plan to finish my hand-sketches of the UI and scan them so I can get some feedback from my mentor (Xavier).

Sounds like awfully little to do this week, but do bear in mind that Wednesday I move into my dorm room, and Thursday and Friday are Orientation all day. Essentially, I’ve got half a week available instead of a whole one.

At best, I’ll be creating the dummy GUI on the weekend.