10/6

Once upon a time there was much excitement about a music player, Muine, and it was good. A plugin system was developed, crazy plugins started showing up, and there seemed to be much momentum.

Then, real life drew the main developer away, and things in Muine-land seemed to slow to a crawl. No one is to blame, by any means, as real life has a way of derailing the best of intenentions/projects/whatever. None the less, that was the state of things.

Right before xmas I got gnome CVS commit access, and Jorn’s approval to do commits to muine. He still wants approval on GUI/behavioural changes, which I understand completely. Since then, I’ve gotten cover art fetching mostly working again (Amazon switched to *requiring* a valid dev tag, so now we try MusicBrainz fetching first, then fall back to trying to use a amazon dev key from GConf if that fails. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least *something*), and just now commited an update to the InotifyPlugin from Snorp which finally makes the inotify stuff jive again with the current iteration of inotify.

Here’s what I hope to come *soon* for muine:

• Updates to docs stuff to handle new monodoc/mono-tools split
• A NEW RELEASE - Lots of small fixes, and several fairly big updates have hit since 0.8.3, I’ve love to see a 0.8.4 release with these changes. I’m going to email jorn/muine-list to broach that subject sometime today

In the long term (and hopefully once the aforementioned release has happened), I’m planning on working on:

• gstreamer-0.10 support. A patch was sent to the list that works great, but could be worked on even more it seems, especially with the next thing i want to work on, which is:
• gnome-vfs support - We need to get muine able to bloody play songs hosted on your samba shared, over sftp, whatever. This may require quite a bit of change, beyond just plugging in gnomevfssrc in the gstreamer stuff, as muine has it’s own tag reading code which is also gnome-vfs unaware. This may require moving to either gstreamer, or entagged for tag reading. No definites here yet, but I’d really like to see it happen.
• The two proposals Jorn had created. I’d love to see this stuff get implemented. Want to talk to Jorn first though to make sure I’d not be stepping on any toes if I started hacking on this.
• DAAP support? - Maybe add daap support so you can play music shared by iTunes, etc. We really gotta think how to integrate this properly so it doesn’t just completely f*ck with the usage model (a possibility, slim or not).

Anybody else got muine stuff they’d like to see?

My long-time friend Noah plays the ukulele; now, when I say he plays the uke, i really mean “he rocks that sh*t like no one else in the state of New York”. He’s recently done some demo type recordings of some of his songs, which can be found here. They rock my socks. In particular, I’m a big fan of Alyson and Winter, but they’re all good.

Check his music out, or I’ll punch you in the face with a cod, then kick you in the junk for good measure.

’nuff said.

My brother, always the great tech gift giver, gave me a Blackdog for christmas this year.

Blurry photo:

Size comparison next to a drink:

The thing runs Debian PPC (their own apt repos and packages, since they had to do fairly significant modifications of the base packages). The stats on the device are pretty shnazzy (beware, too lazy to type it out, so just pasting output of relevant commands):

sh-3.00# uname -a
Linux blackdog 2.6.10-blackdog.1 #2 Tue Oct 4 11:02:07 MDT 2005 ppc GNU/Linux
sh-3.00# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
cpu             : Virtex-II Pro
clock           : 384MHz
revision        : 8.160 (pvr 2001 08a0)
bogomips        : 379.90
machine         : Realm MPS
plb bus clock   : 96MHz
sh-3.00# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            61         40         20          0          0         27
-/+ buffers/cache:         13         48
Swap:            0          0          0
sh-3.00# df -m
Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                     508      114       395  23% /

The thing has *no* general IO ports, having only a USB connector, over which all power and communication with the device occurs, a finger print scanner for authentication stuff, and an MMC card slot for storage expansion (I can’t imagine the MMC slot is MMC 4, which would include the ability for general IO stuff). Setup on linux is not currently “automatic”, as linux tends to shun away from implicit ‘autorun’ and other things, but here’s the general rundown of how the device initially boots/spits things to your screen, etc. Some of the steps are skipped/differ depending on if the thing is plugged into a linux or a windows box, but for the most part the same process is used. I’ll be posting info on how to get the automatic stuff fully working in linux soon. Here’s the deal:

1. Plug the device (hereby abbreviated “BD”) into a machine.
2. The BD gets power over USB and *quickly* boots linux.
3. Linux running on the BD uses the 2.6 kernel USB Gadget filesystem driver to make a SCSI CD-ROM/USB Storage type device show up on the USB port.
4. If on windows, a small script copies the xming xorg server to the host, and runs it.
5. Somehow (i’ve not looked at the details fully) the BD is poked to start “phase 2″ of the process.
6. The BD shuts down the gadget FS stuff, and kicks off USB *networking* on the device. Windows/Linux detects a new USB network device, and runs DHCP which picks up the correct IP for the host endpoint.
8. The BD spits up an auth window to the host via remote X. Same exact d*mn window weather running on windows (via Xming xorg server) or on linux (using normal X TCP stuff).
9. You get prompted for your finger print:
   
   
   
10. BD fires up the small ‘launcher’ app, which is a small utility for running X apps from the BD:
    

That’s it! It’s a very hackable device, they provide an SDK in the form of a device image and qemu-ppc for developing things for it. gtk+ is already on it, so one of my short term goals is to create packages for mono and gtk-sharp, and publish an apt repo for it. In the long run, it’d be a heck of a lot of fun to try to build a gentoo image for this sucker, if only for sh*ts and giggles. All in all, an awesome tech gift, and one my brother claims will help me ‘get the ladies’. Only time will tell.

Since everyone else is doing it, i figured i’d jump on the “what went down in 2005′ train, as well as join the ‘wtf should i do in ‘06′ camp. I’m gonna stay more general than gentoo stuff though, since so much more than just that has really impacted me.

2005:

• Lots of fun boo stuff throughout the year.
• Reality check in early may, and the onset of the UPEG saga. (HI UPEG!)
• Continue with the fun house work, and the house gets final certificate of occupancy and my dad and step mother move in.
• Fly a helicopter into the grand canyon while in vegas.
• Out of the blue get a job offer in southern california, throw all my stuff into a truck, say some quick goodbyes, and head west
• Buy a new used car, all by my lonesome.
• Start a spinoff website for photos of me… well… spinning things.

2006:

• Learn to paraglide - This is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never really was in a position to. I took one lesson while in high school and *loved* it, but never really had time time/opportunity to pursue. What better time to start than now that i’m living in sunny CA? The instructor I’ve contacted says April is the best time in the spring to start, so April, here I come!
• Actually leave this bloody country for once - I’ve got a passport, I should f*cking use it already (and canada and mexico don’t count).
• Find bigger, odder, and more obscure things to spin - Some current ideas include a 4×8 panel of sheetrock, a human, my coffee table, spin something while paragliding (see bullet item above), something while riding the plane to the foreign countries i want to see, etc.
• Play my guitar more (i know, i’ve been neglecting you, sweet thing).