The 5th Planet

Goggles Music Manager 0.12.4

2011-10-08T14:03:00.001-05:00

Added Portuguese Translation by Sérgio Marques
Improved notification daemon compatibility
Support for latest FOX 1.7.29.
Added genre and location to mpris information.

Album Covers: Now less sucky!

2011-09-28T21:01:00.000-05:00

Goggles Music Manager 0.12.x currently features an album list with optional cover display. The cover display can be turned on from the preferences and displays a list of albums with a small cover image of 64 by 64 pixels. Here's what it looks like:

For certain cases it may work OK, but in all honesty it does come with some serious drawbacks:

The cover image is rather small. For some people it may be just the right size, but often times I have wished they were bigger. For example, on larger displays like my Home Theater PC, they are barely recognizable. Browsing through your collection by cover is more fun when they're bigger.
With the covers shown, it takes up a lot of useless vertical space. As you can see in the picture, for each item the image takes up the most of the vertical space (3x) with the text centered in the middle. The 'space to information' ratio is rather big. With wide screen displays being more prevalent, we really want to avoid taking up so much vertical space. Increasing the size of the cover would make it only worse.
Covers are loaded in a non-threaded approach which makes the UI sluggish while the covers are loaded at start up. Depending on the number of covers this could take a long while and may consume lots of memory.

Threaded Cover Loader

So obviously there was room for improvement and the first issue I fixed some time ago was loading the covers in a background thread. This was made possible when I implemented the necessary infrastructure to move the importing of music to a background thread.

Every time the database is updated, it will automatically start the cover loader. It fetches covers for each album from disk, re sizes them and stores them in the cover cache. Once it is finished it notifies the UI, which then can display them.

Matrix View

The next change was to replace the list view with a matrix view. The list is still available, but doesn't show any covers. Here's how it looks:

The matrix view takes full advantage of any available horizontal and vertical space. As you can see the artist and album title are underneath the cover. Depending on the font size this may not always show the full name or title, but a tool tip with the complete info is available as well.

One detail I wanted to mention is that the cover loader will automatically apply cropping to a cover if it is close to being square.

Performance & Memory

The matrix view in combination with the new threaded cover loader worked pretty well for small collections. But with large number of albums, creating pixmaps for each of the covers took an awfully long time. What made it worse that this was happening in the UI thread.

I was able to optimize the pixmap creation by combining multiple covers (64) into one pixmap. (for 500 covers that means you only need to create 8 pixmaps instead 500). This seemed to work well, but I hadn't thought about memory consumption yet.

Recently a user was complaining that gogglesmm was using memory in excess of 130MB. Yes, that was over 2000 covers (uncompressed) in memory. That definitely made me rethink my approach of maintaining the cover cache. After all, for drawing purposes we only need to have the pixmaps in memory that are visible on screen.

I changed the cover cache so that all covers will stay compressed in memory until they are ready to be drawn. At the moment that the cover needs to be displayed, it gets uncompressed and transferred to a pixmap. Pixmaps get reused so in most cases you only have about 12 to 16 pixmaps in memory.

Initially I was concerned that decompressing and updating the pixmap from within the drawing routine would be too slow, but surprisingly I hardly noticed any slow down. Granted, this is on Intel Core2duo laptop (couple of years old) but I'm quite hopeful this will work on more ancient hardware as well.

Last but not least, if you're not interested in seeing the covers, you're no longer penalized by it. The cover cache and loader will only be loaded if the cover view has been activated.

Future

Right now the cover size is fixed to 128 by 128 pixels. I'm probably going add a setting to change size of the cover.

Goggles Music Manager 0.12.3

2011-08-16T08:06:00.002-05:00

Do not pass unsupported GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR to GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER.
Enable support for non-power-of-two textures now that Mesa 7.11-rc4 fixes the issue.
Fix incorrect usage of FXAutoPtr.
Fix parallel build.

Development Update

2011-08-15T13:15:00.001-05:00

It's been a while since my last post in June. Quite a few things has happened since then.

Goggles Music Manager:

Dropped support for FOX-1.6. Need at least FOX-1.7.28.
Dropped support for XineLib.
ReplayGain not stored in the database anymore. This is now fully handled by the player backend.
Next/Prev button in the track editor to easily switch to next or previous track while keeping dialog open.

GAP:

Need at least FOX 1.7.28
Meta data now gets parsed and forwarded to the frontend.
Replaygain support for flac, Ogg Vorbis and mp3 (lame, id3v2).
Redesigned the end-of-stream handling:

The decoder now only sends a end-of-stream notification to the output thread. No message is send to the frontend.
After receiving a end-of-stream notification, the output thread enters "drain" mode. Since potentially no data packets will arrive anymore, the output thread needs to wake up every so often to check the status of the playback buffer and update the position and time display.
In the output thread a timer is set to notify the frontend whenever the playback is almost done. (currently 1 second).
If no new stream is opened, the output thread will automatically close the output device and notify the input thread as well.

Morlocks on the Beach

2011-08-15T12:58:00.002-05:00

Jeroen van der Zijp, creator of the FOX toolkit now has his own blog. Check it out!

Upcoming Changes

2011-06-09T21:23:00.001-05:00

Here's a heads-up for those who follow the latest development version of gogglesmm.

I've decided to retire xinelib. It has served us well in the past, but its time has come to be replaced by GAP (Goggles Audio Player Library). Of course, it means we do lose some functionality in the "short term", but hopefully, with the help from other people, missing functionality could easily be added. I do feel we have most of the major functionality available in gap: reliable ogg/flac/mp3/mp4 playback including internet radio streaming. As a matter of fact, for the last year I've haven't used the xine-backend at all.

With the retirement of xinelib, we also can get rid of the libcurl dependency. It was used in the past to download pls/m3u filetypes since those weren't handled by xinelib itself. GAP handles these files without any problem. There's still a chance we may use libcurl again whenever we decide we want to add a podcast manager.

I'm also dropping FOX 1.6 support. Simple reason is that GAP requires FOX 1.7 and I'm not planning on backporting it to FOX 1.6. I also made the last FOX 1.7 release (1.7.26) the minimum required version since this shipped with a renamed pkg-config file (fox17.pc instead of fox.pc) and is also the start of the new BGRA support in FOX. I was able cleanup the source code very nicely and remove all the unneeded ifdefs!

With GAP being the primary playback engine, we no longer need to store the replaygain in the database. I'm planning on GAP being able to read any replaygain tags directly and apply them during playback. So you will have to re-import your music into the database due to the changed tables.

Goggles Music Manager 0.12.2

2011-06-09T09:09:00.001-05:00

Gnome 3 compatibility updates
Fix infinite last.fm warnings when the system time is out of sync with the last.fm server time.
Merge title that were split into multiple entries in vorbiscomments.

AudioPlayerLibrary: Playlist Support

2011-04-04T20:03:00.003-05:00

Streaming suddenly came much more useful as I implemented m3u, xspf and pls support in the audio player library. The library treats them as alternative sources to fetch the requested stream from, not as a list of sources it needs to play. I had disabled the Internet Radio in gogglesmm, but now that http/icecast streaming actually works (aka rather usuable) I've re-enabled support for it.

AudioPlayerLibrary Update 04/02/11

2011-04-02T14:07:00.004-05:00

The development of my new audio player library is progressing nicely. I'm still looking for development help, but in the mean time the following things have been updated in the past couple of weeks:

Added a 'http' input plugin. It's far from finished, but it already supports ice/shout-cast streams and I have been able to playback mp3 streams without problems. Lots of work still needs to happen here: http error checking, http redirects.
The mpeg-audio reader has been made more robust and will now check for several valid consecutive frames to make sure it doesn't get invalid mpeg frames. On regular audio files this was never much a problem, but with streams there's a greater chance of finding garbage bytes.
Started work on a 'cdda' plugin (aka audio cd reader). Basic playback for single tracks works. Most of the work remains to be done in the front end (gogglesmm), which would need to detect audio cd presence, list available tracks and possible lookup of track information on cddb.
Output device configuration can now be changed from within gogglesmm. Configuration can be changed on-the-fly even while playing. Playback does automatically stop if somehow the new device fails to open. There still remains work to be here as well. Not all device settings are exposed yet (like mixer devices), but this work will slowly continually evolve when the need arrives.
I added a 'wav file output' plugin. It sends the pcm output to a WAV file and is mainly for me to debug any "gaples" playback issues and allows me to easily determine whether the gap is in the stream itself or generated somehow by the soundcard.
The mpegaudio reader now correctly parses lame tags and this fixes most of the gapless playback issues I had with some of the mp3 files.

So all in all, progress has been pretty good. Again I'm still hoping I could get some people interested in helping out (development). Even if you just want to test that would be fine too.

For more information please see:
http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/wiki/AudioPlayerLibrary

Goggles Music Manager now uses Mercurial

2011-03-09T15:59:00.008-06:00

I've decided to migrate the Goggles Music Manager source code repository from subversion to mercurial. The subversion repository is still accessible, but won't receive any new commits.

Hopefully this will also help interest some new people to contribute to the development. I'm especially looking for some help with the new audio player library, which hopefully will one day replace xinelib.

The following repositories are available:

Goggles Music Manager 0.12.x

https://gogglesmm-0-12.gogglesmm.googlecode.com/hg/

Goggles Music Manager Development (all the fun stuff happens here):

https://gogglesmm.googlecode.com/hg/

Audio Sync and Conversion Utility (audioconvert)

https://audioconvert.gogglesmm.googlecode.com/hg/

Audio Player Library (libgap)

https://gap.gogglesmm.googlecode.com/hg/

For more information, please visit the Goggles Music Manager website:

http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/

Goggles Music Manager 0.12.1

2011-03-02T20:48:00.000-06:00

Fix crash when right-clicking on the tray icon

Goggles Music Manager 0.12.0

2011-02-28T19:37:00.001-06:00

Updated Look and Feel.
Updated Czech Translation.
Allow relative paths when exporting playlists.
Support for taglib 1.7
Remove support for old miniplayer
Fix audioscrobbler on FOX 1.7

Goggles Music Manager 0.11.6

2011-02-09T20:24:00.001-06:00

Updated Spanish translation.
Improvements to the OpenGL based coverviewer.

Goggles Music Manager 0.11.5

2010-11-14T23:38:00.000-06:00

Fix ignored icon theme (issue 222)
Initial svg icon support through use of rsvg-convert utility (part of librsvg).

Goggles Music Manager 0.11.4

2010-11-02T18:19:00.001-05:00

0.11.4

Link explicitly to X11, GL and GLU (issue 212).
Improved icon theme specification support. Now also load from ~/.icons, $XDG_DATA_DIRS/icons and /usr/share/pixmaps.
Properly initialize libgcrypt to avoid warnings.
Added button to get out of miniplayer mode and make the miniplayer behave the same as the regular browser window. (issue 196).
New additional shortcut to toggle between miniplayer mode and browser mode (Ctrl-M).
Miniplayer is resizeable and remember its size and position. It will no longer automatically resize itself.
Fix crash when importing with specific icon themes selected. (issue 218)
Add big-endian support to flac album art loading. (issue 218)

0.11.3

Icon name in desktop file shouldn't have file extension.
Fix disabled mp4 support.
Translation Updates

Goggles Music Manager 0.11.2

2010-09-08T21:19:00.000-05:00

Support for .oga files.
Allow scrobbling to last.fm or libre.fm.
Fix some threading issues in the audio scrobbler.

Goggles Music Manager 0.11.1

2010-08-30T08:54:00.001-05:00

Updated Hungarian Translation
Fixed MANDIR and LOCALEDIR not being defined by configure, resulting in locale data and manpages to be installed in root.

Goggles Music Manager 0.11.0

2010-08-29T15:03:00.002-05:00

Goggles Music Manager 0.11 is the new stable release. It is mostly a code cleanup release and drops supports for some of the older libraries that gogglesmm has supported in the past.

Support for Taglib 1.5.x, Taglib-Extras and the buildin asf / mp4 tag readers have been removed in favor for taglib 1.6. If you need asf and/or mp4 file support, taglib 1.6 will have to build with those options enabled.

The buildin iconset has been removed and gogglesmm will now load its icons from the standard icon themes in /usr/share/icons.

Also in this release, a new partial mpris dbus interface has been added.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.27

2010-08-20T09:02:00.003-05:00

Use proper uri during dnd (file:// instead of file:) (issue 203).
Added man page.
configure cleanups.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.26

2010-07-14T18:56:00.001-05:00

Improved font selection dialog.
Use posix sh instead of bash for configure script.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.25

2010-07-09T07:35:00.000-05:00

Fix build issue with older taglib releases (1.5.x).
Updated Czech translation.

Goggles Store

2010-07-08T18:13:00.002-05:00

I've opened a zazzle store for your favorite Goggles Music Manager merchandise. I received the first pressing of the Goggles Mug today:

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.24

2010-07-07T19:48:00.002-05:00

Support mp4 and ogg vorbis embedded album art.
New opengl based cover viewer which allows for smooth scaling of the album cover. If opengl is not available or slow, the old x11 cover viewer can be used instead, which now has an option to choose the displayed cover size.
Import Playlists (xspf, m3u and pls) (issue 123)
Export playlist title for xspf playlists.
Changed Open MRL -> Play File or Stream and improved the dialog to make it easier choosing a local file from disk.
Add conditional support to filename format. Window title may now also be customized.
Show import options when dragging or copy/pasting files.
Added Tooltip to trayicon showing the current playing track information.
Open directory of track with right click (issue 146)
Fix active track in playlist when reordering (issue 194).

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.23

2010-06-02T20:14:00.004-05:00

Before 0.10.23 Goggles Music Manager used various abbreviations to refer to itself (musicmanager,gmm,gogglesm). To avoid confusion, this naming has been unified in 0.10.23. Since a lot of distributions already used gogglesmm for their package, it was decided to use 'gogglesmm' as the standard base name. The following things are affected by this change:

The source package has been renamed to 'gogglesmm-x.y.z.tar.*'
The executable has been renamed from 'gmm' to 'gogglesmm'
The extra desktop files (gmm.desktop and gmm.png) have been renamed to (gogglesmm.desktop and gogglesmm.png)

If you provide binary packages for Goggles Music Manager please distribute with the gogglesmm name.

This release also fixes the unnecessary grabbing of keys that are actually not used.

What's happening in GMM!

2010-05-23T23:24:00.003-05:00

Here's a small overview on what's happening with the development in GMM.

Most of the new widget theme is done. A couple of dialogs still need be updated, but those are relative minor issues.
I've been experimenting with new a layout as well. Mostly inspired by the Google Chromium browser. The menu and toolbar are now unified into one toolbar and comes with a new progress / playing status area.
Made several improvements to the cover loading in the album list. Covers are cached so when starting up it should really be quick to load them. Also to minimize X11 loading time, multiple covers are tiled in to larger pixmaps (64 covers per pixmap).
The MPRIS interface is pretty much complete.
Added support for ratings. They can be edited directly in the track list.
Slowly converting GMM to a more multi-task based enviroment. The idea is that expensive tasks like importing, tag writing etc. don't block but continue in the background (and may be cancelled) . This does require some changes in how we access the database though, which is where the most work is still left to do.
I've been working on my audioplayer library with the intention that one day it can replace the xine library. The internal architecture of the engine is slowly evolving based on the needs of the various decoders and output plugins. It's been designed from the start to be really good at gapless playback. It can already be used in GMM instead of xine, but it still lacks a lot of things (though basic playback really works well already).

In other news:

I'll be attending (and presenting at) archcon 2010 in July.
GMM is now part of the Puppeee distribution.
GMM is also available in the AntiX-M8.5 distribution.
GMM made it into the Gentoo Sunrise Overlay.
Packages for Ubuntu are available from getdeb.net.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.22

2010-05-11T19:00:00.002-05:00

Added Czech translation by David Vachulka.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.20 / 0.10.21

2010-05-02T15:17:00.002-05:00

Tray icon background color may now be customized to improve look of the tray icon.
Load album art from tag in the album browser as well. (issue 176)
Fix main library listing genres from the Radio Streams.
Fix empty genre tags in database (issue 162)
Don't try to install mo files we don't have when LINGUAS environment variable is set (issue 165)
libfetch support has been removed and replaced by libcurl. You need this for m3u and pls radio streams.

* 0.10.21 fixes a minor build script issue. There's no need to upgrade from 0.10.20 if it build fine before.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.19

2010-03-04T08:47:00.001-06:00

Support media keys through the Gnome Settings Daemon.
Don't show import dialog when radio streams are in the database. ( issue 154 )
Use ewmh icon hint to specify application icon which should result in a nicer looking icon in the taskbar.
Fix various dbus event handling to prevent crashes ( issue 159 )

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.18

2010-02-08T21:01:00.001-06:00

Fix crash when pressing delete on "All Arists/Genres/Albums"
Be more flexible about the http return code (issue 147).
Make some functions static that don't need global scope.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.17

2010-01-24T15:11:00.001-06:00

Russian translation was added.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.16

2010-01-09T09:38:00.000-06:00

In this release:

Added Hungarian Translation.
Compilation fix for older taglib (<1.6)

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.15

2010-01-08T16:44:00.001-06:00

In this release:

Add additional signal handler(s) to correctly save state on exit.
Fix focus getting stuck in Edit Track dialog.
Year field in edit track dialog should be empty if multiple tracks with different years are selected.
Support bmp and gif embedded album art.
Fix memory leak in embedded album art loader.

Dead Projects: Goggles DVD Player

2010-01-06T22:21:00.004-06:00

Ever since I turned off my server, the download link to the source tarball to Goggles DVD Player had been lost. For those who are still interested, the download link is now available on the right under Software Projects.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.14

2009-12-28T11:53:00.002-06:00

In this release:

Support for m4b files (iTunes Audio Books)
Minor fixes in the tray icon.

Ubuntu Packages are now available from www.getdeb.net

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.13

2009-12-10T21:48:00.002-06:00

In this release:

Fix sorting of disc number in certain cases.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.12

2009-11-29T15:53:00.000-06:00

In this release:

Updated German Translation

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.11

2009-11-16T19:29:00.004-06:00

In this release:

Fix a crash when using a XIM enabled version of FOX.
Fix timeout type mixup with FOX-1.6 vs FOX-1.7

It is also recommended to upgrade to FOX 1.6.37 which fixes several issues affecting GMM.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.10

2009-11-05T21:00:00.001-06:00

Fixed in 0.10.10

Fix crash when removing tracks from the library via a playlist.

Fixed in 0.10.9

Fix segfault in certain cases when no track information is yet available.
Removed support for libdownload.
Fixed segfault when using libfetch.
Improved error checking when downloading m3u and pls files.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.8

2009-10-21T19:59:00.000-05:00

New command line option (--tray) to start gmm minimized in tray.
Album Artist tag support for MP4 files.
Fix shortcut to toggle playback (issue 121)
Use buildin mp4/asf support from taglib 1.6 if available.
Rely on default genre list from taglib.
Build fixes.

Linux Music Manager Memory Comparison

2009-10-10T12:33:00.012-05:00

Music library consisted of about 4700 tracks.
All players were playing a track (to account for music engine memory).
What happened to Amarok... that's a big increase

Application	Memory	Resident Memory	Shared Memory	Virtual Memory
Amarok 2.2.0	81.4 MiB	127.2 MiB	49.6 MiB	933.8 MiB
Quodlibet 2.1	57.8 MiB	80.8 MiB	23.0 MiB	652.0 MiB
Exaile 0.3.0.1	56.7 MiB	78.0 MiB	21.4 MiB	512.5 MiB
Banshee 1.4.3	45.1 MiB	71.3 MiB	26.3 MiB	463.5 MiB
Sonata (1.6.2.1) + MPD (0.15.4)	37.1 MiB	55.4 MiB	21.1 MiB	616.1 MiB
Rhythmbox 0.12.3	36.8 MiB	60.9 MiB	24.2 MiB	607.8 MiB
Audacious 2.1.0	25.6 MiB	42.5 Mib	17.8 MiB	578.6 MiB
Goggles Music Manager 0.10.7	7.5 MiB	18.9 MiB	11.3 MiB	366.1 MiB

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.6

2009-08-22T21:34:00.001-05:00

Added French Translations (thanks to Erwan Inyzant)
Support for FOX 1.7.20
Support for taglib-extras as replacement for the buildin mp4/asf support.
Allow other scrobbler compatiable servers to be used like libre.fm
Fix critical bug when sending album art to notification daemon.
Fix time/duration display to account for tracks longer than an hour.

Goggles Music Manager: Upcoming Features...

2009-07-19T22:51:00.000-05:00

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.3

2009-06-18T20:42:00.001-05:00

Translation fixes and updates.
Warn user when a incompatible (future) version of the database is encountered.
Fix compilation with taglib-1.4.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.2

2009-06-04T18:03:00.001-05:00

Added Spanish Translation
Fixed bug which prevented translations from working with FOX 1.7

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.1

2009-06-02T19:32:00.003-05:00

Fix tray icon issues.
Added German translation.
Properly encode special characters in audio scrobbler now playing submitter.
Fix sorting of album list by year in playlists.
Do not grab "AnyKey" by checking return value of XKeysymToKeycode.

Goggles Music Manager 0.10.0

2009-05-31T09:23:00.003-05:00

Database Improvements:
- Improved performance when modifying the database (importing & removing tracks)
- Added fields for per track artist (issue 72)

Import Improvements:
- Added "Sync Folder" capability, which can also update or remove tracks in the database if needed.
- Added import exclusion filter for file and folders. (issue 84)
- Redesigned import dialog. It now contains the import options that were previously in the preferences dialog.
- Added a filename template input to grab track information from a filename. This replaces the less flexible "title from filename","album from directory" and "artist from directory".
- Added option to choose where to read the track information from: filename, tag or both.
- Replaced "Default Title", "Default Album", "Default Artist" and "Default Genre" with a single "Default Field" since most of time you would likely use the same text anyway.
- Removed the Import File(s) option. I don't think it's needed that much, and it reduces the number of choices a user has to make.
- Importing single files can still be accomplished through drag-and-drop.
- Remove wizard. Just show import dialog first time.

Other Improvements:
- Added Localization Capability. (issue 3)
- Added disc column to track view.
- Allow multiple genre selection in browser.
- Double click in artist and album list will start playing.
- Added button to enable or disable last.fm scrobbler.
- Equalizer with configurable presets.
- Take into account the disc number when sorting albums.
- Send cover art through dbus to notify daemon directly instead of saving it to disk.
- allow to write tags when editing even if tracks have not been modified.
- more flexible input to select which fields need to be searched (issue 51).
- allow quoted strings in search field.
- Support for Multimedia Keys.
- Optionally display playing track in title bar.
- The album list may now also be sorted by album year.

Audio Improvements:
- The audio driver can now be changed. (issue 87)
- Replay Gain (Only Ogg Vorbis, native FLAC and mp3 with APE tags).

Filename Renamer:
- The excluded character set may now be changed for the filename renamer.
- Added year and disc parameters.

Tray Icon Improvements:
- tray icon is now integrated within gmm. gmm-tray has been removed.
- tray icon show/hide miniplayer as well.
- volume may be controlled using the mousewheel.
- middle mouse click will toggle between playing and pausing.

Fixes:
- crash when sorting in Internet Radio view.
- remember "Update Filename" setting in edit dialogs.
- actually try alternative urls in PLS or m3u before failing completely.
- correctly display playing track in playlists.
- do not run event loop in dbus message callback.

Not Dead Yet!

2009-04-09T19:59:00.003-05:00

Just for those who are wondering, I'm currently working hard to get a new Goggles Music Manager release out of the door. In the past few months some really nice new features have been added to GMM, which I'm currently finishing up for the release.

Goggles Music Manager 0.9.18

2008-11-25T14:10:00.003-06:00

The 0.9.16 release had some minor bugs and Jeroen decided to release FOX 1.7.18 yesterday as well.

In this release:

Support for fox-1.7.18.
Fix: more url handling fixes.
Fix: fix crash showing dialogbox when audio device open fails on startup.
Misc: code cleanups.

Direct Download:
http://gogglesmm.googlecode.com/files/musicmanager-0.9.18.tar.bz2

Goggles Music Manager 0.9.16

2008-11-23T23:41:00.005-06:00

In this release:

New: add additional shortcut '/' for search filter.
New: When pressing the search hotkeys, existing search text will be selected.
New: New shortcuts for Repeat Off, Track and All. Added shortcut for Shuffle as well.
New: Made 'repeat' radio buttons instead of checkbuttons.
New: Play file from the commandline.
Fix: Track-less songs should not display 0 (#62)
Fix: disable default key press processing in tracklist.
Fix: Update GUI when done playing.
Fix: incorrect tracklist state when using search filter.
Fix: workaround for older notification daemons that don't show '&'.
Fix: improved URL handling.

Last.fm group for users of Goggles Music Manager:
http://www.last.fm/group/Goggles+Music+Manager

Website:
http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/

Direct Download:
http://gogglesmm.googlecode.com/files/musicmanager-0.9.16.tar.bz2

Finally, Adobe Flash in 64bit

2008-11-18T22:29:00.003-06:00

"Starting to answer the clamorous demand from open-source fans, Adobe Systems plans to release an alpha version of its Flash Player technology on Monday for those using 64-bit Linux software."

Hurray! Adobe finally decided to release a native 64-bit flashplugin. It's about time. I mean, how hard could it be. You get a 64 bit machine, and type 'make'... a 5 year old could do it... Now if only Skype could get do the same thing and I won't need the 32-bit compatibility libraries anymore...

Genesis 1970-1975 boxset

2008-11-14T20:10:00.004-06:00

I recently purchased the Genesis 1970-1975 boxset. It contains the first 5 albums newly remastered and remixed. Each album comes as a CD and DVD. The DVD has the new 5.1 surround mix in DTS.
The DTS surround mix sounds absolutely gorgeous and really makes the music sound fresh. The "Lamb" is the only disc that also contains a pretty cool slideshow while playing the album.

There's a pretty good review at allaboutjazz.com: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=30869

Pinky, where is my chicken?

2008-11-14T19:49:00.000-06:00

Pinky.....?

Great DVD Commentaries

2008-10-23T19:49:00.003-05:00

A lot of dvd have commentary tracks. Not all of them are created equally though. The best ones you can just listen to without having to watch the action on screen. These ones come to mind rightaway:

Ghostbusters - Harold Ramis, Ivan Reitman and Joe Medjuck deliver a very enjoyable and informative commentary. One of the first dvd's I bought that had a commentary track and still one of my favourites.
Star Trek The Wrath of Khan / Star Trek 6 - The Undiscovered Country. Nicholas Meyer has great insights on writing and directing movies.
Oliver Stone commentaries. Except for maybe the Nixon commentary, which contains a long passages of just silence, most of his commentaries are very insightfull and enjoyable to listen to. And just like Bob Ross, he has a 'relaxing' type of voice :)
Almost Famous.
Naked Gun series. Funny commentary by the writers/producers.

Goggles Music Manager 0.9.14

2008-08-05T17:31:00.001-05:00

In this release:

* New: Threaded scrobbler submitter which should prevent locking the
GUI during DNS lookups.
* New: Tray Icon. (contributed by Olivier Duclos).
* New: More complete dbus interface (required by the tray icon)
* New: NetworkManager support to wakeup scrobbler if network
connection becomes available.
* New: Font and colors may now be updated from within GMM and require
no application restart.
* Misc: The filename template settings has been moved from the
preferences panel to the tag editing dialogs.
* Misc: Support for mugshot was removed.
* Misc: Nicer application and tray icon by Olivier Duclos.
* Fix: Incorrect track number was used when renaming files

Last.fm group for users of Goggles Music Manager:
http://www.last.fm/group/Goggles+Music+Manager

Website:
http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/

Direct Download:
http://gogglesmm.googlecode.com/files/musicmanager-0.9.14.tar.bz2

Goggles Music Manager 0.9.11

2008-06-10T21:10:00.001-05:00

New in this release:

Support embedded cover art in flac files (jpg and png only).
Support last-fm 'now playing' notification.
Support album art in notification to notify-daemon.
DBus enabled version now also support the ability to control a running gmm from the command line.
Use "ALBUMARTIST" tag in Ogg / FLAC files and TPE2 for id3v2 tags for artist.

New Hardware

2008-05-22T09:36:00.005-05:00

I ordered one of these gadgets... Can't wait till it gets here...

Music Manager Bugs

2008-05-22T09:23:00.003-05:00

So my last Goggles Music Manager (0.9.4) was really a rough release. It took until 0.9.8 to get all things right. Of course then the next couple of days you discover even more bugs, so a 0.9.9 is on its way.

Yesterday I discovered that in combination with gap less playback the piece of code that updates the playing track information is never called, which affects the status information in the GUI, but also the updating of the play count and eventually also the submission to last-fm. The bug was hard to find, because it would work about 50% of the time.

There was also a crash in the edit track dialog when referring to a deleted file. I also fixed the issue that when you press stop, it will update the current item in the track list, so when next time you press play again, it will start from the last track you played.

Now it wasn't all bugs this week. I also spend some time implementing support for embedded album art in mp3 (and flac files with id3v2 tags) files. I hope to also implement support for album art for regular flac files.

Goggles Music Manager 0.9.4

2008-05-10T20:41:00.003-05:00

Haven't blogged in a while my music manager development. Over the past couple of months I've mostly worked on the development version of GMM (the one day 0.10 release). Since the 0.10 is not ready for public consumption yet and the last 0.9 release was some time ago, I decided to backport some new features to the 0.9 branch.

One of the new features is disc number support. Not wanting to change the database, the disc number now get encoded in the upper 16 bits of the tracknumber field. Disc numbers are handy to have if you have multi-disc collections that have the same album name for each disc but still need to be sorted correctly. Personally when I backup my CDs I always merge all disc into a single album and renumber all tracks, but I guess some people prefer to use disc numbers instead.

The 'Configure Columns' dialog has been changed to use a checklist widget, that can change the order of columns, as well as hide or show the column with a checkbutton embedded in the list. This is a custom widget not available in FOX.

The track list was also expanded to show a year column.

The new mini player got expanded to now include a volume control as well. One of the features most people were complaining about.

Last two weeks I have been working on last-fm support. My first real introduction to socket programming and the HTTP protocol. It took only a few days to get an official 'client id' from the audioscrobbler/lastfm guys. I was surprised how quickly I wrote the scrobbler submitter implementation. I think I spend most of the time on error handling and working around url encoding issues the official FOX version has (had to write my own).

If you haven't, you should really give Goggles Music Manager a try!

FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby

2008-04-10T15:13:00.003-05:00

The FXRuby book from Lyle Johnson finally came out this month. I had an early preview/review of the book back in January before it went to the press. Even though I haven't much experience writing ruby code (I mostly program in C/C++), I think the book is quite easily to follow for non-ruby programmers. There may have been only one or two occurrences where I had to use google to find out what the ruby specific code meant. I guess this a compliment to the ruby language itself but also to Lyle in making the book easily accessible for us non-ruby people.

You can hear Lyle talking about book here.

New Books

2008-03-01T17:53:00.003-06:00

Some recent books I acquired (and now are on my reading list):

Erich Fromm - Escape From Freedom

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

William Gibson & Bruce Sterling - The Difference Engine

And yes, I finally finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. It was well worth it!

How would you like your eggs?

2007-10-17T21:35:00.000-05:00

For future reference and in case I ever forget these are choices:

Over hard - fried both sides
Over medium
Over easy
Sunny Side Up
Scrambled

What's New...

2007-10-15T21:03:00.000-05:00

Vacation
Visited Detroit MI (Genesis Concert), Dayton Ohio (airforce museum) and Mammoth Cave (KY).

Genesis Concert (Detroit)
The concert was totally awesome. They had a nice blend of seventy, eighties and nineties songs. Everytime Mike Rutherford got his double-neck guitar there was this whole excitement in the crowd.

David Gilmour
His new DVD came out which of course I had to get. I actually enjoyed the newer stuff on the DVD the most, though Shine On You Crazy Diamond with Crosby and Nash was awesome. It was great they did Echoes once again. Richard Wright seemed to be in excellent shape and his vocals never sounded so good.

Life of Brian
The life of brian DVD got finally delivered. Great Movie.

Books

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
The God Delusion

Books I have been reading in my vacation. Both are highly recommended.

Tilburg

2007-09-15T19:26:00.000-05:00

I could have traveled to Tilburg, but instead I choose to go to Huntsville, Alabama.

Backup

2007-09-04T20:53:00.000-05:00

For the past week I've been backing up my cd collection. I already did this before, but at the time I stored everything in Ogg Vorbis. I decided to do it again, except this time I'm storing everything in FLAC which is lossless. This will give much greater flexibility later on, when a new more popular lossy codec is coming along. So far the operation has been like this:

Rip CD using Grip to FLAC.
Write FLAC to DVD for storage.
Run oggenc over FLAC to store as Ogg Vorbis on my mp3 player / hard disk. Nice thing that oggenc knows how to read FLAC files and preserves the tags.
Remove FLAC files to clear up disk space.

So far I've already written about 12 DVDs!

Goggles Music Manager 0.8

2007-08-16T20:05:00.001-05:00

It's finally out! A whole bunch of new features and fixes:

New: Support creating custom playlists.
New: Don't show duplicate albums names when multiple artists are selected.
New: Added "All" entry to artist and album lists.
New: Export database and playlists to XSPF, PLS, Extended M3U, M3U and CSV.
New: Clipboard and drag-and-drop support for moving tracks to playlists and importing and exporting files.
New: Configurable toolbar docked on top or bottom, showing big or small icons with optional text.
New: Customizable Icon Theme. Either use buildin icons, or load from disk.
New: Animated icon in scan progress dialog.
New: Support year tag.
New: Support volume normalization plugin.
New: Database now also stores for each track: year, rating, import date, play date and play count.
New: Option to close audio device when playback is stopped.
New: Upgraded to more advanced build system.
New: Include Desktop Application Entry and Icon in distribution
New: New About Dialog.
New: Report An Issue link in Help Menu.
New: Changed License to GPL-3.
New: Warning dialog when FOX without PNG support is used.
New: Fullscreen mode (requires FOX-1.7.11).

Fix: Ctrl-A selection now works in all lists.
Fix: Do not import MP4 files that contain video.
Fix: Track titles are also now sorted using the leading keyword filter.
Fix: Editing Dialogs retain proper sorting order of genres,artists and albums.
Fix: Allow up to 4 digits in track number input in edit dialogs.
Fix: issue preventing filenames with '#' characters from playing.
Fix: compilation fix for older xine libraries.
Fix: status line now shows correct song in repeat mode.
Fix: sleeptimer now works properly in FOX 1.6.
Fix: Write xine configuration file on exit.
Fix: Don't recurse into directories that are symbolic links.

Blow Up Hollywood

2007-07-20T19:07:00.000-05:00

I've just gotten their latest cd titled 'the diaries of private henry hill'. Highly recommended!

Xine Leaks!

2007-07-02T20:37:00.000-05:00

I use xine for audio playback in Goggles Music Manager. So far it has been working very well. The other day I was putting a debug version of xine through valgrind since the memory used by GMM seem to grow overtime. And guess what, the Ogg Vorbis decoder is leaking. I've submitted a bug report to the xine developers and they've already fixed it in their source repository. No official release yet, so if you play a lot of ogg files using xine, I would recommend to get the latest dev-version (1.1.x branch),

Album Lists and Fonts...

2007-07-02T20:10:00.001-05:00

I've been busy getting Goggles Music Manager back to a state that is usable again. There is nothing more frustrating then hacking without a good tune on the background.

Last week someone submitted the first bug report/feature request in the issue tracker. The basic issue was that if multiple artists are selected we list the individual albums of each artist. Now this doesn't work very well with albums that contain multiple artists because GMM considers these multiple albums. Most music managers don't care/have about this problem since they use a different database schema. Most use one table to store all track information including artist and album, while GMM has a separate album and artist tables. In GMM each track belongs to one album, which in itself is associated to one artist.

I've already made the necessary changes not to list duplicate album names and this should come available in the next major release (0.8). I also added the "All Artists" and "All Albums" to easily select all the artists and albums. Inspired by the competitors I've made these entries show in a bold/italic font. A little gotcha I noticed that if you just select the same font size, the bold/italic font will actually look bigger than the non-bold/italic font. I'm not sure if this is the same for all fonts, but at least it is the case for Bitstream Vera Sans. To make them appear the same size, I actually had to select the font one point smaller.

Drag and Drop

2007-05-28T19:51:00.001-05:00

I've been adding drag and drop capability to Goggles Music Manager. Besides moving tracks into certain tracklists, you can also drag files and directories from a file browser to import them into the database. I can also drag it the other way round, making it easy to copy certain songs to a portable harddisk, or to a cd/dvd burner application like k3b!

Car Repair

2007-05-28T10:49:00.000-05:00

Not sure when it broke down, but a nice lady on the parking lot of the grocery store told me yesterday that my left brake/stop light wasn't working. Of course I still wanted to see whether or not she was telling the truth so I took a piece of wood and stuck it between brake and the drivers seat, so I could walk to the back side of the car to check the lights. I wonder why they don't have a simple button that just turns on all the lights so you can just walk around the car without having to resort to large pieces of wood. Of course more expensive cars may have a build in detection in the dashboard to notify that your light has gone out, but more expensive cars also need to go to the dealer ship to replace a simple light bulb...

So I headed down to the auto parts store to get a replacement bulb and managed to have the sales guy also install it for me (just look like you don't know anything about cars, if you're blond like me, this comes very naturally).

Development Update

2007-05-07T23:20:00.000-05:00

I've started working again on the new play list feature in Goggles Music Manager. The database has already been updated to store the playlists, and I've created all the new queries needed to support the flat view and browser view (genre,artist,album filters). The base functionality to create and delete play lists as well adding artists,albums and tracks to play lists are implemented. What's left are mostly major user interface changes. The ToDo list for this week:

Drag 'n Drop capability from track, album and artist list to a playlist in the source list. (mostly working)
Drag 'n Drop capability to rearrange tracks in the track list. This is already working but still needs some design decisions on how and when to save the changes to the queue order in play lists. Since we allow sorting based on any column in the track list, the order of the tracks is not always the queue order.
Each play list needs to remember the view state.
Introduce new icons and update existing ones.
Extend database to keep track of playcount, last play date, comments and such.

Play Lists Revisited

2007-04-27T14:59:00.000-05:00

In traditional sense a play list is a collection of songs that are played in a certain order configured by the user (the winamp way).

When I initially created Goggles Music Manager I was opposed to having play lists. Basically I just wanted to play albums and didn't want to deal with first creating a play list of songs before I could listen to anything. I prefered the iTunes way of doing things, in which you select the artist and the album you want to listen to.

What I didn't realize until now is that a play list can basically function as a subset of your music grouped according to some crititeria. For example: James Bond Soundtracks, Christmas Songs, Star Trek Soundtracks etc.

So in the next major release of Goggles Music Manager you will have the ability to form play lists or subsets of your main music library. You will able to browse these playlists the same way you browse the main music library, but with the additional capability to queue songs as well ( the winamp way ).

Goggles Music Manager 0.7.4

2007-04-18T19:42:00.000-05:00

New: Added Sleep Timer. Stops playback after specified amount of time.
New: Implement command line options to control an already running music manager. This can be used in combination with XBindKeys to control GMM from the multimedia keys.
Fix: Reset Display after end playlist.
Fix: Remember import files directory as well.
Fix: Even more error handling in xine.

New Music Manager webpage

2007-04-13T22:05:00.000-05:00

I've transferred my Goggles Music Manager web page to Google's open source project hosting service. Hopefully I won't confuse any more people who think that "Goggles" has anything to do with Google. Anyway, the project hosting is pretty neat. It contains an issue database, wiki-based document system, SVN repository and download area. I'm now up and running; I transferred most of the information from my old site to the new site, and put the source code into the SVN repository. The old website url will forward visitors to the new website.

Check it out!

Discovering Fuse!

2007-04-12T11:08:00.000-05:00

The day before yesterday I was trying to find a way to make FOX applications open and browse remote samba shares. Samba provides a Posix API in libsmbclient that allows you to integrate this easily in your application or toolkit. Unfortunally it is licensed under GPL and not LGPL, making it totally useless to integrate this into FOX. What's the point releasing this under GPL. Basically any toolkit that wants to use this can't, since most of them are licensed under LGPL type licenses...

Fortunally for me I discovered FUSE. There is no more need for every toolkit to implement it's own virtual filesystem. We just let FUSE handle the hard part. We can just use the normal file io operations to access remote machines. Even better yet it has sshfs, which allows you to mount a remote filesystem securely using a ssh connection.... 'totally awesome dude'!

Genesis Tickets

2007-04-10T21:00:00.000-05:00

I've got Genesis Tickets for their concert on Sept. 30 in Detroit! Now if only I could wait that long...

Interesting Upcoming Movies

2007-03-29T22:32:00.000-05:00

Memory used by Linux Music Players

2007-03-15T00:03:00.000-05:00

Granted, each application may have different features that may require way more memory than Goggles Music Manager. After all, GMM only indexes all the track information and does nothing fancy like album art and such. I'm not sure if these numbers are at all scientific. Still they're fun to look at. The numbers were taking after starting the application and starting playback.

(application) (VmSize) / (VmRss) / (Num Songs)
GMM 85 MB / 23 MB / 10606
RhythmBox 116 MB / 29 MB / 9005
Quod Libet 107 MB / 51 MB / 10545
Amarok 137 MB / 54 MB / 10562
Banshee 161 MB / 77 MB / 10263

Genesis Favorites: We Can't Dance

2007-03-10T13:52:00.000-06:00

I practically grew up on this album and it is my first ever Genesis album. So I have a little bit of trouble listing my favorites tracks without listing all of them.
Also the album cover art is one of my favorites as well. Genesis definitely sounds more 'earthy' and less 'plastic' on this album then their previous 80's efforts.

The album has some really great short tracks like Jesus he knows me, No Son of Mine, and Hold On my Heart. But the long tracks on this album are definitely my favorites:

Driving The Last Spike
This song is about the many people that died building the english railroads. I think it's a great piece of song writing.

Dreaming While You Sleep
Great Song!

Living Forever
Living forever is about how so called experts tell you how to live you life healthy (and sane) and years later tell the exact opposite. Garlic used to be good for your heart, but not anymore. Feeling confused?
Anyway, it ends with a great instrumental with some good guitar work from Rutherford.

Fading Lights
Great album closer. Love the lyrics and the good old instrumental piece in the middle.

300

2007-03-09T21:44:00.000-06:00

Yawn.... it definitely looked fantastic.... but how about some character development and story? It had some recognizable characters though. The whole movie was a combination of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Gladiator. I spotted The Emporer, Jabba the Hutt and Gollum. Lots of grass from Gladiator as well...

Updating MP3 filenames

2007-03-06T09:04:00.000-06:00

I already have tag editing in Goggles Music Manager, but that feature is not really complete unless you also have the ability to update the corresponding filename. Imagine that you change the title of a track, the filename would probably need to reflect the new title as well. Often you might have filenames that are not correct, stored in the wrong location, or stored in a flat directory instead of hierarchy type directory structure. So there is definitely a need to change the filename.

What's not easy is to determine what the new filename should be. There are several factors we should take care of:

Character encoding of the file system. This may be specified by the current locale, but also you should be able to override it. For example, your current locale is UTF8 but you only want to write 7-bit ASCII to support transferring files to devices with no UTF8 support.
Then there is this issue of converting unicode to 8 bit character encodings. Some combined characters in unicode may not have a equivelant character in the target encoding, but in decomposed form they may (for example the character "ë").
Characters that have a special meaning in shells should be removed.
Simplify white space usage.
Optionally substitute any spaces for underscores.
Optionally only use lower case characters.
Optionally only use lower case characters for the file extension.

Genesis Favorites: A Trick of the Tail

2007-03-03T12:26:00.000-06:00

Since Genesis starts touring again this summer, I thought I might list all my favorite songs from each Genesis album. Who knows, may be they read my blog and consider playing some of them. Since they've so many great songs, I'll try to limit my selections up to 4 songs from each album.

Dance on a Volcano / Los Endos
I don't like the album version of these songs, but live they sound fantastic. Dance on a Volcano is a great song when you're hiking.

Mad Man Moon
Absolutely love this song. From what I've heard they're never played it live. Shame on them!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg7FiL-7HXs

Entangled
I love this song on the album. The live version on the archives set is a bit of a disappointment. It just didn't sound as good as on the album.

Ripples
Beautiful song about getting older. Absolute masterpiece. (Live even better)

(and yes... these were 5 songs... I know)

Goggles Music Manager 0.7.0

2007-03-02T07:53:00.000-06:00

I've released Goggles Music Manager 0.7.0 with whole bunch of new features:

gapless playback support.
Tag Editing Support.
Repeat Track Support.
Speed improvements in SQL database.
Minimize jumping of slider control when seeking.
Background color for every other row.
Import of single files now also possible.
Columns in tracklist are also now configurable in browse mode.
Fix Crash when clearing database and reimporting in List Mode.
Set default value for saving tag changes to file to false.
Manage own taglib string memory because taglib is leaking.
Also search for .m4p files.
mp4 support is now optional.

You can download it here

I'm 28!

2007-02-11T11:31:00.000-06:00

Yee Ha, it's my birthday today! Probably spending most of my time cleaning up the aftermath of my party last night...

Winter Wonderland

2007-02-01T08:08:00.000-06:00

Music Manager and Beyond

2007-01-26T22:25:00.000-06:00

After a quite succesfull release this week of Goggles Music Manager 0.6.2, I'm already working on its successor. Some long time fan who has been using a beta version for a while now complained that some features were missing that were previous there. Of course I never released those specific features out in the big world, so officially they never existed.

For a while now I've been working on meta information editing capability. From the file editing (mp3,ogg etc) standpoint I'm already done. I'm using taglib and the mp4v2 libraries to write back the meta information. Updating the database itself still requires some work, but should almost be done as well. I still need to create some dialogs for Artist and Genre editing. Also I like to implement a feature that will change the filename as well, when writing out the meta information to the original files. This mainly requires some changes to the preferences panel to set the filename template.

Anyway, hopefully I can release it soon.

It's Goggles, not Googles....

2007-01-26T22:00:00.000-06:00

'nuff said.

Back from India, going to Holland next...

2006-12-22T15:46:00.000-06:00

subject says it all..

Day 1 - Huntsville - Waiting for my flight...

2006-10-27T09:27:00.000-05:00

Friends of mine brought me to the airport this morning. They picked me up at 8:00am and about 15 minutes later I was at the airport. Check-in went fairly smoothly and the security check was pretty quickly. Even better, they have wireless internet in the waiting area!. Flight will leave in about 1.5 hours.

India, here I come!

2006-10-26T21:04:00.000-05:00

My last post before I go to India for a two week business trip!

Canon A530

2006-10-19T21:26:00.000-05:00

I ordered a new digital camera from NewEgg for my upcoming trip to India. It's a Canon A530. I submitted the order on tuesday and I got it by mail today.

Hiking in Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina

2006-10-19T16:29:00.000-05:00

The past couple of weeks I've been hiking in the weekends. This is where I went:

Foster Falls (TN)

This was a tough hike from one end of the park to the other. Mainly because of me being out of shape. The first part is pretty steep and several times you have to climb over rocks. The middle part is pretty boring but very easy. There's almost no incline or decline at all. The last part goes through a small canyon (don't disturb the bees like we did) and ends with a steep incline to get to end of the trail. It takes about 6 hours. I was really tired after this one. Subsequent hikes went a lot better though.

Walls of Jericho (AL)

Very nice trail that leads you to the bottom of the canyon. Only way out is to go the same way back. On the main trail there are two ways to come down. A long way and a short cut so to say. The shortcut isn't that much shorter and forces you to cross a stream. The long way provides a handy bridge to cross the stream, although you need to cross a second stream without a bridge. Now when we went there wasn't any water so we didn't have any problems "crossing streams". From the camp site down in the valley there are two paths that lead to the "walls of jericho". Both are dead ends, one going along the top of the canyon, while the other goes on the bottom.

Lookout Mountain (Chattanooga, TN)

Lots of trails here. We started a Point Park going down first and ended up climbing back to Point Park. We did a 5 hour hike that day (about 11 miles). We took the bluff trail to Georgia went down to one of the lower trails and went back north to Tennessee all the way to cravens house. From cravens house we took the shortcut straight to Point Park (which is quite steep I must say)

Lake Guntersville (AL)

Nothing much to say about. Close by, very easy.

Smoky Mountains (Cherokee, NC)

More on this later.

Little Miss Sunshine

2006-09-06T23:23:00.000-05:00

This labor day I saw Little Miss Sunshine in the new theater here in Huntsville. The first theater that actually doesn't suck. Prices are reasonable though I haven't checked the consession stand. Furthermore and more importantly, the sounds was good and the projection of the movie correctly centered in the middle and in focus. All in all, I'm very happy they decided to come to this little town :)

The movie was great btw. Highly recommended. Go see it!

Little Children

2006-09-01T22:20:00.000-05:00

I'm looking forward to the new movie by Todd Field, the director of the fantastic In the Bed Room. It's called Little Children and stars Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Connelly. Also starring Raymond J. Barry from Born on the fourth of July.

Jesus he knows me

2006-09-01T19:23:00.000-05:00

Speaking of mind control and indoctrination:

"And he knows I'm right
Ive been talking to Jesus all my life"

Check out the "Jesus Camp" trailer at Apple.

Movies

2006-08-06T13:43:00.000-05:00

Picked up a couple of movies from the video rental place. (buy 3 for $25):

The Squid and the Whale
Story about a family in which the parents are divorcing and how it affects each of the family members. This movie is actually very funny and serious at the same time. Jeff Daniels is briljant.

The Constant Gardnerer
Still have to see this movie. I heard it was good.

Everything is Illuminated
Made it about half way through this movie before I fell asleep. Nothing to do with the movie, just was very tired. From what I've seen it's very good.

Zathura: A Space Adventure
Jumanji in space. Nice entertainment

Week Numbers

2006-07-22T01:01:00.000-05:00

I've implemented the ISO 8601 week number display. The generated week numbers are only valid if the calendar has set the first day of the week to Monday. I'm not sure if I should put any effort into week number display for other non-standard systems. As far as I know weeknumbers are more a European thing and they all use ISO 8601 anyway (the only documented standard).

Calendar Widget (cont'd.)

2006-07-20T08:17:00.000-05:00

Last night the calendar widget made it into FOX 1.7.x. In the next snapshot or release you should be able to try it out. I have made a bunch of fixes since yesterday, including resizing capability so that the LAYOUT_FILL_X|Y flags will work properly on it. Also the widget can be configured to display any day as the first day of the week.

From the beginning I already implemented a week number display. The display is there, but I still have to research the algorithm a little bit more that actually determines the week number. Which day of the week is first may need to be restricted if week numbers are on.

The calendar widget also has a option to restrict the user from navigating to other months. In addition the days not currently in the displayed month can be hidden as well:

Calendar Widget

2006-07-18T21:42:00.000-05:00

The calendar widget I have been making for FOX is coming along. Check out the screenshot:

The widget will probably get introduced in one of the FOX 1.7.x releases.

RIP Syd Barrett

2006-07-11T20:37:00.000-05:00

"Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!"