insomnia bytes

This is a repost from the article published in LWN and mentioned earlier on this blog. Thanks to LWN for publishing it in the first place, and to all the people who proofread and commented on it! I hope this will serve as a more up-to-date introduction to Collections in XMMS2 (I should probably post it on the wiki). Discussion is welcome, naturally.

The number of music players on Linux has been steadily increasing lately, but while these projects have been getting more and more polished, we have yet to see revolutionary improvements in terms of user experience. Indeed, the trend has privileged borrowing as many features as possible from other projects, rather than questioning the reasons behind their design.

This article describes XMMS2’s attempt to address long-standing limitations of music players, through its new support for Collections. First, I will summarize the rationale behind this feature, then present its concept and implementation. A conclusion about the current state and future directions of Collections will close the article.
read the rest of this entry »

To anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention, it is clear that the situation of the music industry has become largely surrealistic. Lately, settlements to avoid lawsuits represent a profitable business for the RIAA (the trade group representing the American recording industry). In essence, they could stop producing music and live purely out of threatening people who download music illegally. This fear campaign has recently been extended to Europe, including France, Denmark and Switzerland.

However, there remains questions nobody cares to answer: what kind of business model involves threatening and potentially suing the vast majority of your customers? And after having paid thousands of dollars in settlements, do people really start buying CDs again?
read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t blogged about XMMS2 in a while now, but a lot has happened since last summer!

First, the new DrJekyll release finally includes the code I developed as part of my Google Summer of Code 2006. That thing where you spend your summer nights coding Free Software on an Open Source project and Google sponsors you for it, yes that one. My project was to implement Collections, a new (awesome, life-changing) abstraction layer to help developers give more power to the users for organizing their digital music library, and listening to songs in all sorts of crazy way.

I just published an article in the LWN to explain the how’s and why’s of it all. For two weeks, it’s only available to subscribers, but after that it will be publicly available and I’ll repost it here, so stay tuned…

In addition, I’m now mentoring a student for XMMS2 as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007. ZeeGeek is working on Service Clients, a new sexy feature to allow XMMS2 clients to offer services to other clients. He’s doing a great job so far, and I’m looking forward to more power and modularity in XMMS2!

Finally, I started hacking on the new korving CLI (codenamed nycli, because I said so). It’s in my Git tree on exodus, but it doesn’t really do anything useful yet (let alone wrestle crocodiles). More on that when it becomes actually usable!

Conclusion: when the music is end xmms power of the pc.

Granted, automatic translation from Japanese to English is a hard job, but sometimes it yields true gems:

The many user is in the midst of connecting. At present the server to be packed, we apply annoyance. It is the number of hands, but putting in place time, accessing for the second time, it can receive, the fish we ask.

I see.

Registering online (tickets, concerts, etc) is major fun when all the forms are in Japanese. The important information is usually displayed as images on buttons, which you have no way to translate. Also, you better know how to write your name in Japanese katakanas… In my case: セヴェイ セバスチャン (sebei sebasuchan)!

If you want to train your Japanese, the original text was:

多数のユーザーが接続中です。 ただ今サーバーが混み合いご迷惑をおかけしております。お手数ですが時間をおいて再度アクセスしていただけますようお願いいたします。

Now hopefully, I did not order pink skirts and successfully bought my ticket for the incredible Summer Sonic Festival!