Grab bag

I can’t think of any one thing to blog about, so I’ll just blog about many little things.

  • I’ve made a quick PHP/MySQL rewrite of the main page of my site, so that it dynamically lists the different software I have. That way I can (after I convert the rest of my site) update the various programs I have without having to edit 3 different pages per program. This was much easier than I thought it would be.
  • Java sucks less now, but every time I want to like the language, I remember why the syntax annoys me so.
  • Screenshot of JuK's track announcement popup with cover art JuK is becoming niftier again. I need to finish my work on the Play Queue, but in the meantime gstreamer-0.8 support and album cover art support has been added (to clarify, by wheels and Nathan Toone). The album cover art is quite nifty in combination with the track announcement popup, it is just a pity that we can’t use the Amazon Web Services API for downloading the cover art. If you’re wondering why, check out their Terms and Conditions. Needless to say, it is ever so GPL-incompatible.

    Before anyone bugs me about this, though, yes, I know that JuK has a Get Cover From Internet option (it currently uses a Google search). I don’t think this is quite legal either so I’ll be lobbying to have it removed, unfortunately.

    The only workaround I can think of is to open up an interface by which JuK can get images from some external program, and we don’t really care how that program does it. The only problem is that such an external program probably couldn’t be packaged with KDE, so it would have to live eternally as a user addon.

    All these petty problems aside, it *is* still rather nice, although the UI integration could be better.

  • One of these days I need to A) Add Tacky (my oh-so-simple blogging tool) to my homepage, B) Add support for previewing your post in Tacky, and C) Make Tacky use qmake or my simple Makefile template instead of the KDE build system, as there’s no way I’m putting up 630K of source for a program that simple. And oh yeah, D) Add XML-RPC support as soon as clee’s done with his secure pyblosxom post plugin. (Sorry clee! ;)
  • Edit: Oh yeah, the Steelers creamed the Philadelphia Eagles, thus becoming the best team in the NFL up to this point. :)