Bloggy

Since I haven’t blogged in awhile I thought I’d give an update as to what I’ve been doing in the past month or so:

• This is only tangentially related to KDE at best but I’ve been pushing to get an improved video game music emulation library supported by GStreamer. The library in question is simply called Game Music Emu (or libgme depending on where you’re looking ;). It is an all-in-one emulation framework allowing for decoding and playback of Super NES, NES, Sega MegaDrive/Genesis formats and more. This has ended up with me having commit access to libgme and fostering a mini-revival by the library author to turn it into a proper library. Based on this work, the GStreamer devs have applied my patch to use libgme and then improved my patch several times from there. The next releases of gst-plugins-bad (for SNES SPC, etc. playback) and gst-plugins-base (for the typeinfo fixes) will be able to make use of these changes. JuK requires TagLib support to add files to a collection so even if you use phonon-gst you’ll still need to use a separate player to test it out though (Qt’s example musicplayer is perfectly sufficient though).
• I haven’t forgotten about kdesvn-build’s git support (it’s actually there, but not plugged into anything other than qt-copy). My major hiccup has been handling the case where the user changes the “repository” option on me (especially with regards to qt-copy). I may just punt and make the user manually do it since I’m not sure what the best way is to switch over the remote tracking options in git (i.e. make git pull work from the new repository from now on)
• I’m trying to get started in a Master’s degree program for a M.S. in Computer Science. I’ve taken the required entrance exam (the GRE) and although I’ll not post the exact scores I will say I did well (and without studying to boot. I tried to study but couldn’t get the “PowerPrep” software to work in Wine). It’s been a bit of a special case for me as I was a couple of weeks past the deadline due to the timing of showing up at my present command, but I think everything will work out to start ASAP.
• If you’re just getting started with KDE 4.3 and you start seeing dialogs warning about being about to start executing a file, that’s by design. I’ve heard of a bug where dragging a working desktop link will make an “unsafe” desktop link since the destination doesn’t fall under the same exemptions as the old location which I may try to look into. Just remember that this is for your own good, and is a one-time only dialog per file! If you are writing your own .desktop links which you want to launch applications, just make sure to set it as executable.
• Finally I’m going to be putting an old unused computer of mine to good use and setting it up for my 2.5 year old son. He enjoys computers too much, now it’s time for him to click on his instead of mine and my wife’s! ;) So I’d prefer it to have a guest account arrangement on super-lockdown (no Web, edu games, paint applets, etc. available, locked or healing desktop, that kind of thing). Any suggestions for KDE-friendly distributions for this kind of thing? I’m trying to keep download size for the install media under 1 GB.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & kdesvn-build | 4 Comments »