insomnia bytes

Posting well thought out blog entries every other century might help trick the world into believing that you’re an insightful young man, but it’s also a waste of the mountain of ideas which are not yet finalized, completed or polished, yet might still interest or amuse readers.

So here we go, I will try to blog more regularly and spontaneously about the weird stuff that infects my head.

Today’s just a short farewell notice to nyello, an advanced command-line client for XMMS2 and my first program ever packaged in distros such as Debian (thanks rafl!). According to statistics, it only peaked at about a hundred installs, but hey, that’s a start, and people were also building from source.

The package has been marked for removal, because I discontinued the upstream version. nyello was a lovely project, but after the Google Summer of Code, most of its logic was implemented in XMMS2 in the form of Collections.

nyello (which, as you know, means “singer” in Quenya, i.e. elvish) doesn’t die completely either, since I’m working on the new official CLI for XMMS2, codenamed nycli. It can be found in the

branch in my Git tree. I haven’t had time to work on it much lately, partly because some of its features depend on more work on the XMMS2 core, but I truly think that it has the potential to be a killer CLI interface!

If you have a lot of spare time, either sell it to busy people or help hack nycli to a releasable state! And if you are a normal geek and you don’t have any spare time, drop by IRC (#xmms2 @freenode) anyway to motivate me to do the work!

Farewell, nyello.

And long live nycli and XMMS2!

Blogging now from the SCons talk at FOSDEM’08, in Brussels, along, physically, with many of the XMMS2 folks I’ve been hanging out with, virtually, for the past year or two.

Time flies fast but we had time to (in no particular order) consume large and varied amounts of Belgian beer, tease the Amarok2 devs, eat piles of argentinean meat (sponsored by Google SoC money, which also paid for the hotel), resume hacking on mpd-bridge with rafl, arouse the world about XMMS2 with tru’s Lightning Talk, benchmark weird perf issues in the hotel lobby late at night, meet a random DB dude in the bus who questioned a year of S4 brainstorming with an easy optimization tweak for our DB (which might or might not work, anders is still scratching its beard at it), stare wide-eyed at the Macbook Air’s thinness (the laptop is bundled with a Swedish party organizer named tru), etc.

Hopefully, more work, more releases, better PR and features to come to an XMMS2 near you in the following days!

Until then, you can still check out the flickr gallery for the event (tru’s also been blogging and posting some of nano’s pics to his blog).