Bloggy

Well, it’s finally happened, KDE 3.3 has been released! I’m especially excited about this release, because it turns out that one of the features I coded for JuK ended up in the press release, under the integration option.

To be honest though, I didn’t code the burn CD with K3B feature in order to make JuK better integrated or anything, it just seemed to be by far the easiest way to add CD burning support. =D

In other JuK news, JuK in CVS HEAD now has a Play Queue feature, which at the time I committed it, was the #1 requested JuK feature.

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After reading Ian Geiser’s recent post admiring the DCOP functionality in JuK, I thought it would cool if I elaborated a bit about what would be nice about it.

First of all, some of the things that you can do with JuK through DCOP include:

• Add files to a given playlist.
• List the tracks in a playlist.
• List all the playlists.
• Create a new playlist.
• Remove a track from the playlist.
• Remove a playlist.
• Set the current playlist.
• You CAN’T remove a track from disk through DCOP. Scott and I judged that this is too risky for potential abuse or mistakes.
• Find out the track that’s playing.
• Get/set the volume.
• Get/set the player status.
• The basics (stop, play, pause, next, forward, seeking).

However, what’s REALLY cool is that you can query information about a given track. And the interface is mostly future-proof. You can make a DCOP call to see what properties JuK can query. And Ian Geiser just added two more properties the other day, using 2 lines of code. Which is what I think he was happy about.

During the development process for KDE 3.3, Scott and I came up with a way to easily add properties in the JuK code, using *GASP* macros. Since so much of the property code was the same ol’ boilerplate, we setup a system of macros and a map of property names to auto-generated classes to return the property value. This means that with ONE line of code, we can add a property to the DCOP property map. Pretty neat, huh?

Just for completeness, as of now in CVS HEAD, the currently defined properties for a track are as follows:

• Album
• Artist
• Bitrate
• Comment
• Extension — This is the extension of the track’s file name, added by Ian.
• Genre
• Path — This is the absolute file path of the track.
• Seconds
• Size — Added by Ian
• Title
• Track
• Year

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OK, so I ended up having a birthday party after all. Still no drinking or club hopping, but instead my grandma and wife setup a party at my grandma’s house. Lots of pizza, lots of soda, lots of cake, and lots of me kicking ass in Mario Kart! :-)

We also went to see Alien vs. Predator today. The movie itself was better than I had expected (I had only gone to see the movie because everyone else wanted to). I was expecting a piece-of-crap movie like Freddy vs. Jason, but there was actually a semblance of a plot to the movie, which pleasantly surprised me.

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So today’s my 21^st birthday, so we all know what that means, right??

Well, maybe for other new 21-year-olds, but I don’t drink and I hate clubbing, so for myself that means more JuK coding!!! =D. At least I’ll get to have fun on my birthday and remember doing so! ;-)

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Hurricane Charley can kiss my ass. I’m not going anywhere.

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Yay! CVS HEAD is open for normal development again! What this means is:

• HEAD is open for normal development, including string changes, feature additions, bugfixes, etc.
• KDE_3_3_BRANCH is open for bugfixes ONLY. These bugfixes can’t change or add any strings.
• KDE_3_3_0_RELEASE is frozen, and can’t be touched by mere mortals such as you or myself. ;-) If a showstopper happens to appear, you should email kde-core-devel.

BTW, this also means that KDE 3.3.0 is near release, and if you want it early, you can get it from CVS. ;-)

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After seeing Sashmit’s blog entry on adding notifications to akregator, I figured the secret to showing images on Planet KDE was out. Of course, it was only a secret since clee and I forgot to mention it. :-)

Firstly, images from blogs were disabled on Planet KDE so that people hosting images on their own computer wouldn’t have their computer turned into a nice pile of molten slag. Of course, the image isn’t always hosted on the blogger’s computer, or perhaps it’s really really small. In that case, you can make an image show up on Planet KDE by adding an attribute to the tag, class=”rapemewithachainsawthanks”. The attribute was named by clee, to remind you that a lot of people will potentially be viewing your image. So either make sure you can handle it, or that’s it hosted somewhere else that allows direct linking to images.

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So, my work on upcoming playlist support continues to go relatively well. It’s more or less working now, just needs some polishing. The graphic you see is the monstrosity I came up with for the icon. Any budding artists that would like to send me an improved icon for the upcoming playlists are more than welcome: michael (DOT) pyne (AT) kdemail (DOT) net

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KDE 3.3 is coming out soon, so I thought I’d relate one of my favorite new features. It’s quite simple really (but aren’t they all?).

When you configure your Window Decoration (kcmshell kwindecoration), and click on the Buttons tab, there is a few new buttons you can add to your titlebar. The one in particular I’m fond of is Keep Above Others, which is just like Always-on-Top from Windows. Although the Keep Above feature has been in KWin for ages, it’s never been easier to enable! :-)

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So, I’ve been trying to do some *cough* quality testing of KDE, making sure
it will build from scratch. Since I’m doing this, I figured I might as well
upgrade GCC as well. So I get GCC 3.4.1 installed, no problems, and started
compiling KDE.

Unfortunately, I was getting the weirdest errors. Stuff like
undefined virtual thunks and such. It soundest like a libstdc++ problem, but
g++ was using the correct version.

Turns out that the problem was that I was using distcc, and forgot to
upgrade gcc on my other machine. I had even realized I was using distcc, and
it still didn’t occur to me earlier. Go figure.

This is what makes icecream (in kdenonbeta) so nice. From what I
understand, icecream will send over the GCC binary to each build machine, saving
you the trouble of upgrading yourself. The catch is that GCC has to be
compiled for the lowest common denominator machine, but that should be no big
issue.

I’m suffering from too much inertia to switch now, but for all of you other
distcc users, just remember: If you upgrade GCC on one machine, don’t forget
to upgrade GCC on all of them!

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