Planet Amarok

(This is a guest post by Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch, an “open source involvement engine.” OpenHatch is a website and ongoing project to help new contributors find their place in free software projects. A few months ago, he imported some bugs in KDE’s bug tracker into the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder. I invited him to write about it for my blog. OpenHatch has its own blog, too.)

KDE is doing something wonderful with its Junior Jobs. These are issues (often small feature requests) that are appropriate for a first-time contributor. When maintainers create these opportunities, they take information that would otherwise be trapped in their head — how easy or hard an issue is — and make it available as hint to new contributors. Conveniently, creating a “Junior Job” doesn’t take any special work: maintainers just have to find the relevant bug in KDE Bugzilla and add the junior-jobs keyword.

But KDE Bugzilla isn’t necessarily a friendly welcome mat. Probably everyone reading this post can remember a time when Bugzilla seemed like a difficult, arcane tool. Bugzilla works well (enough) as an interface for project maintainers to share the status of what they’re working on with each other.

But imagine you are a prospective contributor. Aim your web browser at the list of junior jobs. (To get that link, I went to KDE Bugzilla and clicked the “Junior Jobs” link on the left side.) This is what I saw when writing this post:

Here are some questions I might have as a new contributor (and some commentary as myself):

• What do “wis” and “UNCO” mean?
• Who is JJ? (Maybe that’s a person’s initials; maybe he or she plans to fix it.)
• What project are these bugs in? (I can guess from the assignee….)
• Where do I get the source code? (The wrong answer might lead the new contributor to submit a patch against the most recent release; that patch might not apply against trunk.)
• If I get started on this, who can help me when I get stuck? (Otherwise, a new contributor might make an effort, become confused by something, and fall away.)

I like to joke that bug trackers say lots of information about what the problem is, but they don’t provide any information on how to solve it.

We at OpenHatch noticed that a great number of projects were in a similar situation: they label bugs as “easy”, “bitesize”, or “Junior Jobs” and point first-time contributors straight at the bug tracker. So we created what we call the volunteer opportunity finder to help people find something to work on. It wakes up late at night to download issues from bug trackers representing hundreds of projects. (Since OpenHatch is itself a free software project, we also import the bitesize bugs from our own bug tracker.)

When you browse the available issues, you can click on the project name and see its page on OpenHatch. (We make one for every project that someone says they’ve contributed to, or where we’ve imported bugs for it.) The pages showcase the people who have listed themselves as possible mentors. Contributors can also write instructions or suggestions for how to get involved; for example, the page for Gally does a great job of answering “Other than writing code, how can I contribute?”

If you don’t know how to get involved, you can also browse opportunities by programming language, the kind of help you want to give (such as writing documentation) or flip through a few projects you might want to work on. You can narrow your search to just the ones we call “bitesize” (“Junior Jobs” in KDE, bugs labeled as “easy” in the Python programming language, and so forth).

So OpenHatch is a project to think through how people join free software communities and to build technical tools and social structures to make that better. This browsing tool is one thing we’ve built. It’s a community project, so you can help out! Say hi on IRC or email if you want to join in.

I’d like to hear (in the comments on this post) from you guys and gals: What do you think about our “volunteer opportunity finder”? What works about it for you? What would you change?

If Lydia invites me back, I plan to write about getting non-coders more involved in free software projects. During the weekend I first met Lydia and Jeff Mitchell of Amarok, I had a crazy idea for something you can build on top of OpenHatch. If you want to stay in touch until then, join our IRC channel or subscribe to us on Identi.ca/Twitter/RSS!

Google Summer of Code 2010 finished. It’s been a blast again for KDE. Of our 50 students 46 completed the program successfully and one withdrew after successful midterm evaluation to start an internship he couldn’t say no to. Each of them has produced something really cool, has learned a lot and I’m sure also found a few new friends. Check PlanetKDE for updates on their projects. Thanks to each of our students and thanks x2 to our amazing mentors who once again rocked very much. And of course thanks to Google for making the whole program possible. A dot story including details about each project will follow soon – stay tuned.

Season of KDE hasn’t wrapped up just yet. Updates on that when it finished.

Oh and if you want to hear me ramble about GSoC and Season of KDE with the awesome Guillermo and Paul, go and listen to the latest KDE and the Masters of the Universe podcast.

While lots of new features are still pouring in from this year’s Google Summer of Code projects, it will take us a while to make sure they don’t crash and burn and hopefully release them some time later this fall. In the meantime, why don’t you help us weed out some bugs to make Amarok 2.3.2 the rock solid release we would like it to be?

To make the task easier, we have deployed a sentinel to look out for bugs: Amarok 2.3.2 Beta 1, codename “Sentinel” is out.

Since the last release in the 2.3 series the Amarok team has been working through the laziest days of summer to implement very much needed fixes, changes and even some new features, especially concerning filtering and podcasts. Read the full announcement here and don’t forget that to make Amarok 2.3.2 even better, bugs.kde.org is the place to be

Filed under: Amarok, KDE Tagged: Amarok, KDE

As part of my computer science studies I needed to work on a research project which I finally finished not too long ago – the title: “Planning of 3-dimensional complex cutting trajectories for robot-assisted surgery”. I worked on a program for a robot-assisted laser surgery on bones (in particular the human skull). It’s written in C++ using Qt and VTK. My task was to work on the planning module. The surgeon can mark points on a model of the patient’s skull and then connect them either with straight lines on the skull or create more complex connections. This was then used in another module to calculate positions and movements of the robot that was handling the laser. Laser beams ZOMG! All this will hopefully help make skull surgeries safer and less invasive as well as allow surgeries currently not possible due to tool limitations.

Despite having contributed to KDE for a few years now pretty much all over the place this was my first really big C++/Qt coding experience. I’ve not really touched KDE code in all those years except a few small changes here and there. Unbelievable right? Not really. On the one hand I think that so far KDE was better served with me doing community work – and maybe always will? And on the other hand it was damn scary. Oh and of course there was no pressure to climb that rather huge imaginary mountain and learn all the stuff I’d need to actually be any useful in that area. This university project helped quite a bit with both now This is btw also one of the reasons why I think GSoC is so invaluable: It gives the needed pressure and incentive to not give up when things get tough that some people (including me) need.

The robot, laser head and a plastic skull:

Cut on the plastic skull:

Cut on a part of a pig’s bone:

And the actual planning program:

Thanks to Jessica, my advisor, for having patience and letting me screw up a few times. Thanks to everyone working on Qt and VTK for letting me do amazing stuff.

Guess it’s time now to find a good KDE project to get my hands dirty on. Be warned

Oh and next time a new contributor vanishes: Nudge them a bit. They might just be standing in front of that huge imaginary mountain and need someone to tell them it’s not actually that huge or give a helping hand. And if you’re standing in front of it yourself right now: Don’t give up! Take it step by step. You’ll get up there.

Eike has been collecting KDE sightings in movies and tv series for quite a while already. It seems he’ll have to add books as well now. One of our attentive users (thank you!) brought this to my attention today:

Amarok gets mentioned in “The Fuller Memorandum”, the new SiFi book by Charles Stross. Rocking!

Following recent tradition, here is another post mostly unrelated to Amarok (next one will be on topic, I promise)

The company that I have recently co-founded, Memolane.com is in need of a graphical and interactive lead designer.

So what do we offer?

As a very young startup, we offer long hours, constantly changing tasks (we all need to pitch in wherever needed) and huge responsibility for doing the best you can as there is no one else to fall back on.

But for the right person we also offer a unique opportunity to help shape a new company from a very early stage, to become a key part of a small, young and dynamic team, a very decent (for a young startup) salary and a nice little bag of lottery tic... uhm... stock options

If this person is you, get in touch with some examples of your previous work. If it is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, a good bottle of champagne or two is up for grabs for the person who refers us the designer we end up hiring.

Anyone interested or who wants to know more can mail me a "Nikolaj{at}memolane.com" or leave a comment below.

When walking in a big group of people you have to check every now and then for the slower ones so you don’t leave them behind and lose them. It’s the same in a community like KDE. Every now and then you have to check if everyone can still keep up and if not take the necessary steps. That’s why for the second time now I’ve asked KDE developers to tell me which parts of KDE they think really needs some new blood or more helping hands. This is the list of answers I got:

• KDE bindings needs a maintainer for PHPQt and some helping hands for Qyoto/Kimono (the C# bindings). – contact kde-bindings@kde.org
• KDEPIM looking for someone to work on Akgregator and the Kontact shell. – contact the kde-pim mailing list
• Juk could benefit from a port to actual KDE Platform 4 technologies (away from KDE3 Support and possibly port Bangarang’s Nepomuk storage to Juk). – contact the kde-multimedia list
• KOffice is in need of people poking Karbon and Kivio. – contact the koffice mailing list
• KCalc, KFloppy, Kdf, KTimer and Sweeper from kdeutils do not have maintainers at the moment. Most of these applications are almost unused, but they haven’t been excluded from the module and might at least provide some fun to newcomers. – contact kde-utils-devel@kde.org
• Okular could use some help fixing crashes and finishing features. – contact aacid@kde.org
• UserBase is looking for people to help improve documentation. Tasks and guidelines are available on http://userbase.kde.org/Tasks_and_Tools. – contact annew@kde.org

Quite the mix – surely there’s something exciting in there for everyone. So if you are someone who wants to contribute to KDE and looking for a place to start or an experienced contributor looking for a new project, this is where your help would be really appreciated. Choose your direction and get your hands dirty

I’m back from conference touring (which was awesome btw – more about that later) and Tom reminded me that the release parties for 4.5 are not planned yet. And the release is planned for August 4th, so in a bit more than a week. OMG!

Clearly it is time to fix this situation and give the world a chance to meet some cool KDE people. So go to the 4.5 release party planning page and check if there is one near you already. If there is one then sign up for it and have fun. If there is none yet it’s time to start one. Pick a date and time (preferably within 3 weeks of release) and reserve a place in a local restaurant, bar, meeting room, university, whateverelsefits. Add it to the wiki page, spread the word and then have lots of fun.

Of course it’s my pleasure to announce the first of hopefully many release parties: Stuttgart, Germany on 7th of August. Exact place and time is still to be determined. Check the wiki page every now and then for updates.

For those who have never planned or attended a release party: You can do pretty much everything you want from simply getting together for a beer and chatting to full day event with talks, workshops and so on. It’s up to you. You can find a few tips on the community wiki. Everyone is welcome from active contributor to interested user. Just let the person organizing it know you’re coming so they can plan better.

(more akademy blogs including write-up of my talks will follow later – just need to get this out before I leave to Portland to join Jeff, Valorie and Knut for the CLS and a bit of OSCON)

Not long before Akademy Tomaz told me about the awesome Qt/KDE courses he and his team are giving at Brazilian universities to a few hundred students each. (They seriously rock!) At the same time he was working with a student who wanted to do his internship that is required by university with KDE and I was in a similar situation looking for a topic for my diploma thesis. And I’m sure you’ve all heard about Kevin ruling French university students and giving them KDE projects to work on to help them learn how to work in a large distributed team and develop software in the open that is actually getting used by a lot of people. (Unlike a lot of the code I have written so far for university…)

So there we have a few KDE contributors doing awesome stuff – teaching students about KDE, KDE software and how we develop it. We sat down at Akademy with a few more people and talked about how we can adapt what Tomaz and Kevin are doing to other universities (and maybe schools?). And the first step in that direction is the creation of the kde-teaching mailing list. If you’re interested in helping out or are already doing something similar please subscribe. There is a lot of awesome waiting there (and maybe some cookies)

(Update at the bottom.)

Some people can't be helped.

Today I saw a post by The Linux Critic. In the post the author, Trent, says "I’m really not a fan of the new Amarok", which naturally got me curious as to why. After all, if you don't know what problems people have with your software, it can be hard to improve it.

I had never interacted with Trent or any other member of The Linux Critic before, nor had I ever visited their site. I was there with the best of intentions.

I'm going to let the discussion we had speak for itself. I've reproduced it below, because Trent started removing my comments and modifying his own. You can see the original blog post here -- it's not even really relevant to most of the ensuing discussion -- however I strongly recommend, in case further modification has been made to the discussion on that page, that you read the reproduction of the discussion below which is accurate as of the time of writing this post. At the beginning Trent was fairly hostile; by the end he was outright nasty.

Me:

What about Amarok 2.3 are you not a fan of?

Trent:

The fact that now it’s just another iTunes clone.

Me:

Um. Right.

I guess I will just assume you’re mixing Amarok up with Banshee or Rhythmbox. No other explanation for it.

Trent:

*sigh*

The purpose of this discussion wasn’t to discuss the problems with newer versions of Amarok. It was to discuss the new music player, Clementine

I guess I will just assume you’re mixing Amarok up with Banshee or Rhythmbox. No other explanation for it.

No. I’ve tried Amarok 2.

I don’t like the layout.

I don’t like the entire UI.

I don’t like that the playlist is too small and in the wrong place.

I don’t like the volume control.

I don’t like that it requires KDE4 to run.

I don’t like the enormous waste of space that is the center panel.

I don’t like the ugly look of the buttons.

I don’t like that I can’t figure out how to do a lot of the things I do in Amarok 1.4.

If it were more like Amarok 1, I’d probably be fine with it.

Me:

Sure, I understand the purpose was to discuss Clementine, but when you said you weren’t a fan of the new Amarok, I was interested in knowing why.

The reasons you give are at least mostly valid — aesthetic differences, which are personal for everyone — as opposed to calling it an iTunes clone, which would be very hard to justify. (I say mostly because it doesn’t require you running KDE4 to run. And if you take issue with it depending on KDE libraries, then it seems odd that this would not be an issue for you with Amarok 1.4, which also depended on KDE libraries.)

Trent:

Amarok 1.4 depended on KDE3 libraries. I’m not opposed to KDE3.

Me:

I don’t know why you’re opposed to KDE4. But it doesn’t really matter; they’re just libraries. I don’t run GNOME, but I don’t get upset when something depends on GTK+. If it’s a useful application, then it’s a useful application.

I then attempted to be helpful, by letting him know that many of his complaints could be addressed if he wished to give Amarok another try:

Me:

FWIW — again, not to go into too much detail, since as you said this post is about Clementine — you can adjust Amarok 2′s entire layout, as well as its playlist layout, however you want.

If you go to the View menu you can unselect the Context View if you don’t want it. You can also unselect Lock Layout and relayout the entire thing — have parts of it top-to-bottom, change the order…you can even drag the components on each other to turn them into tabs, so that your entire view could be the playlist, except for when you want to switch to the Media Sources pane to add music to it.

If you go to the Playlist menu, you can select one of four pre-defined playlist layouts, or customize it to your own layout, including a single line per track with whatever data shown that you want.

Also under View, you may want to check out the Slim toolbar — it has a different volume slider.

This is all based on Amarok 2.3.1; not sure which version(s) you’ve tried.

Trent:

Amarok 2.2 was the last one I tried. One could change a lot of that there too, but after about an hour of futzing around with it I just found myself getting too frustrated with it.

I shouldn’t have to go to those lengths just to get around the goofy design philosophy that went into Amarok 2 (much like the rest of KDE4 for that matter).

It’s like they took a look at Amarok 1.4 and said “Ok, let’s see… how can we break everything about this?”.

Ugh.

Clementine isn’t even close to finished yet, and it’s already more usable out of the box than Amarok 2.

Unless they made some rather massive, sweeping usability changes from 2.2 to 2.3.1, which I doubt.

Me:

I don’t remember all the changes between 2.2 and 2.3, but there are plenty. The Amarok team has always been very responsive to user feedback, and that has driven much of our development in the Amarok 2 series just as it did with Amarok 1.

Regardless of you considering the design philosophy of Amarok 2 to be goofy, the entire point of Amarok was always to provide contextual information to your music — Rediscover Your Music. Amarok 2′s goal was to take that further, by allowing for a context space that didn’t have to compete with your collection browsing, so you can still e.g. see lyrics to the song that’s playing while you browse your collection for the next track.

These days Amarok 2 is pretty much feature-complete w.r.t. 1.4 features, and has huge numbers of features never in Amarok 1. It’s always interesting to me how if you look at Amarok 1.1 vs. 1.4 you see *huge* differences, and people tried out each release and gave feedback which made things even better. With Amarok 2 some people seem to think that it’s static, and never changing, and never improving — so they, say, try Amarok 2.1, don’t like how it works or miss some feature that hadn’t been ported yet, and don’t bother trying 2.3, regardless of the fact that in the same series of point releases in the Amarok 1 days they would have seen massive changes. So instead of providing useful feedback and helping Amarok grow and improve, which it still continues to do quite rapidly, they simply turn venemous about it, often complaining about things that have long been fixed or capabilities that have long since been added.

Fortunately, not everyone is like that, and we still have a great user base that provides feedback that we try to address. For instance, the ability to change layouts and make the playlist hugely customizable was the direct result of feedback from Amarok 2 users that wanted to be able to make it behave similarly to Amarok 1.4, which it can do to a very large extent.

Trent:

So instead of providing useful feedback and helping Amarok grow and improve, which it still continues to do quite rapidly, they simply turn venemous about it, often complaining about things that have long been fixed or capabilities that have long since been added.

I’ve seen the KDE forums and I’ve seen enough of the attacks on users who try to provide feedback. It was enough to tell me that if a person isn’t gushing with love over it, a person is therefore just “resistant to change” or “doesn’t get it”.

Most of the things I label as bugs or design flaws are pointed out time and time again as intentional in KDE4 and related applications.

The philosophy itself I find repugnant. That’s why I left KDE completely after trying KDE 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3.

While I’m sure Amarok 2.3.1 might be different and maybe even flexible enough to emulate Amarok 1.4, I’ve found that every time I’ve tried anything KDE related in the last 2 years I get frustrated, angry, and venomous.

So no, I haven’t been forthcoming with feedback. I never even know where to begin. There are so many things wrong with the directions KDE4 and Amarok devs have gone, I find myself overwhelmed any time I try to enumerate them.

And again, this discussion is about Clementine, not Amarok 2.3.1. Amarok 2.3.1 might be awesome, that’s great. For people that don’t mind the layout, and the difficult UI, and all the other stuff I simply can’t stand, that’s fine by me. They can use it.

But as Jules said in Pulp Fiction, “Sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie, but I wouldn’t know, because I wouldn’t eat the filthy m**********r.”

Fortunately, not everyone is like that, and we still have a great user base that provides feedback that we try to address.

Ah. Gotcha. “We”. Meaning that you’re one of the Amarok developers that ruined my favorite music player.

Well, that explains why you’re trolling my blog post.

Me:

Yes. Trolling. Asking for details as to a comment you made in your blog post, and then trying to provide helpful information based on your feedback. Right.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. From your comment, you clearly are determined to put down KDE4 and anything related to it, and attempts to be helpful are unwanted.

This is the point where Trent starts modifying history. This was his original reply:

Considering that I don’t use KDE4, I’m not sure that “attempts to be helpful” are even relevant.

To which I replied:

You listed complaints about Amarok 2; I explained how they could be addressed. That's attempting to be helpful, and relevant to the discussion.

At this point Trent deleted my comment above, and went through two revisions of his previous comment. The first one is below:

Considering that I don’t use KDE4, I’m not sure that “attempts to be helpful” are even relevant.

As an FYI to any other KDE developers or fans that might be reading: If you have something useful to contribute to any discussion on The Linux Critic, your comments are welcome.

If all you are going to do is pick fights about why EVERYBODY can’t love every little thing KDE4 and its apps, your comments are not.

This has happened again and again, and I’m not going to tolerate it any further.

And here is his second revision, which is still the latest at the time of publishing this post:

Considering that I don’t use KDE4, I’m not sure that “attempts to be helpful” are even relevant.

As an FYI to any other KDE developers or fans that might be reading: If you have something useful to contribute to any discussion on The Linux Critic, your comments are welcome.

If all you are going to do is pick fights about why EVERYBODY can’t love every little thing about KDE4 and its apps, your comments are not.

This has happened again and again, and I’m not going to tolerate it any further. Play nice, or play somewhere else.

Thanks.

So there you have it. Not much else to say. I'd never heard of The Linux Critic before, and now I know why.

Update: Trent replied with more accusations of trolling (does he even know what that word means, considering he's the one trolling on KDE4?), of purposefully trying to derail a discussion about Clementine (what discussion?), of some sort of KDE4 lovefest, and all sorts of other manners of odd accusations against a person he'd never met before today and the discussion above. This guy is off his rocker. Here's the comment:

And I see my KDE troll has gone off to sulk.

Just as a heads-up, trying to derail a discussion about the Clementine music player and turning it into all about KDE4 is not “trying to be helpful”, and it is not “relevant”. It’s rude, insulting, and I consider it to be trolling.

While I don’t typically behave like a topic nazi here with respect to keeping every single comment on-topic, when it comes to KDE4 trolls, I have very little patience, because those comments always end up going the same places, and it’s never constructive, always just fight-picking.

In this case, I’ll freely admit at least some culpability, because I responded to the initial question about Amarok, despite my better judgement.

Here’s a hint: not everybody loves KDE4. Not everybody wants to use it. Some of us prefer not to use KDE4, and some of us (gasp!) even prefer the KDE3 versions of those apps!

Baffling, I know. But it’s true. That’s why I made this post yesterday about Clementine. There are lots of other people out there that used to love Amarok 1, and don’t want Amarok 2.

For those people, seeing a new, stable, usable fork of Amarok 1.4 is a really great and exciting thing, and I thought that others should know about it. It’s very positive news when for a lot of us, the past few years have been spent trying in vain to find a replacement for that now dead application.

And in my experience, when KDE4 trolls come around, trying to change the discussion into an argument about why????????, it’s not relevant, not helpful, and is anything but useful to the topic at hand.

The reason I’m commenting like this is because I want to clarify that. I’m drawing a line on this subject because I’m tired of this.

To Jeff: those of us who have left the KDE world don’t want your help. You can keep it. Don’t call us. We’ll call you. So scurry off to your KDE4 lovefest and leave the rest of us be to solve the problems you created for us. You’ve done more than enough.

What a swell guy.

Update 2: Here's Trent's response to one person who attempted to go onto his blog and tell it like it is (thanks Marand!). One editorial note: Trent claims "you also didn't see some of the other garbage of his I deleted." Every tiny bit of my interaction with him is in the original post above. Not one word has been omitted. It's possible he has since deleted some more of my comments from his blog in order to rewrite history, as I have shown above, but what you see above in the original post is all of the "garbage".

Marand:

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how he was trolling. I see a developer trying to communicate with a former user to get useful feedback and being treated with hostility for it.

If you don’t like something, that’s fine. If you can’t explain why you don’t like it, that’s also fine. However, it isn’t his fault you can’t offer a well-reasoned explanation of why you dislike the application, so I think you crossed a line lashing out at him over your inability to express your opinions constructively.

It looks like the discussion fell apart when constructive advice was offered to solve your various complaints. Lacking better arguments, you lashed out. You should have just left it at “I don’t like it because it’s different, and I have an irrational hatred of the number 4″, it would have been more mature.

Here, let me give you a better example to use when saying you dislike Amarok 2. This is a problem that has plagued the app for me in all versions since the change. Frequently (several times a day), I have to restart Amarok 2 because the dynamic playlist breaks and stops updating. Haven’t been able to figure out why, but it seems to be related to the collection scanning. It’s frustrated me enough that I’ve considered changing players, though I like Amarok enough (even 2!) to still use it despite this problem.

For the record, I’m not a developer of KDE, Amarok, or anything else. I use KDE4 and I actually like it, but I don’t care what anyone else uses or likes. My only motivation for this post is I think that, if you like or dislike something, you should either be able to provide clear explanation of why, or you should admit you cannot.

Trent:

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how he was trolling.

He was, as happens frequently, someone who tried (successfully, I might add) to derail a topic to talk about something else after being repeatedly warned that it was off-topic. While that can pretty easily fit the definition of someone needing their comments moderated, he was doing it in an inflammatory, extraneous manner. You also didn’t see some of the other garbage of his I deleted.

My biggest mistake was in responding to him to begin with, given that his very first comment was off-topic (and I know from experience where those usually end up leading).

If you don’t like something, that’s fine. If you can’t explain why you don’t like it, that’s also fine. However, it isn’t his fault you can’t offer a well-reasoned explanation of why you dislike the application, so I think you crossed a line lashing out at him over your inability to express your opinions constructively.

I’m perfectly capable of explaining why I don’t like Amarok 2. If you bothered reading before you posted, you’d notice that I gave him several valid reasons why I don’t use Amarok 2, despite the fact that this article was about something else, specifically a program that Amarok 1.4 users may not be aware of that I’ve found to be a very positive direction in music player development for a change.

And considering that The Linux Critic is my blog — not his, and not yours –, and it’s my prerogative to determine content here, including content of discussions about posts, and considering that his discussion was off-topic and inflammatory, I was in no way “out of line” in lashing out at him. As I’m sure you know, Jeff has his own blog where he went to whine, and note that I didn’t go over there and change the subject to something that he found inappropriate, or spout idiocy at his opinions. He can have his opinions, he can say what he wants.

And he can express them somewhere else. They were inappropriate here. As I mentioned, I made a mistake in responding to him to begin with.

It looks like the discussion fell apart when constructive advice was offered to solve your various complaints.

The discussion “fell apart” when he tried to change the subject from Clementine 0.4 to Amarok 2 and KDE4. After repeated warnings he continued to do it, so I deleted his further attempts at doing so and I blacklisted his IP. I have made it very clear here in the past that I will not tolerate spammers and trolls, and I felt that I was pretty reasonable in the amount of leeway I gave him. Most of the time I just delete those types of comments outright, because they inevitably lead to (surprise!) more off-topic discussion like we’re having right now. 

Lacking better arguments, you lashed out.

Ah. So, since I went out of my way to present arguments that were in response to off-topic, inflammatory trolling, and you happen to disagree with my opinion, they’re “lacking better arguments”. Gotcha.

You should have just left it at “I don’t like it because it’s different, and I have an irrational hatred of the number 4″, it would have been more mature.

And you were wondering why I don’t like KDE4 trolls commenting on my blog posts? Again, you apparently missed the several valid reasons I gave why I dislike Amarok 2. And you apparently missed the part where I mentioned that I’ve used KDE 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3, and have dismissed it as a valid replacement for KDE 3.5.10.

If I didn’t like things because they are “different”, I’d still be using Windows 2000.

And on the subject of maturity, derailing a topic to insult people because you disagree with their opinions, that wins a prize too, sport. Keep it up.

Here, let me give you a better example to use when saying you dislike Amarok 2. This is a problem that has plagued the app for me in all versions since the change. Frequently (several times a day), I have to restart Amarok 2 because the dynamic playlist breaks and stops updating. Haven’t been able to figure out why, but it seems to be related to the collection scanning. It’s frustrated me enough that I’ve considered changing players, though I like Amarok enough (even 2!) to still use it despite this problem.

And the next time I write an article here about the problems with Amarok 2 and how they could be improved, that will be a valid and relevant thing to discuss. But considering that this particular one is about Clementine, that would be a bit out of place here, as I told Jeff several times before I banned him.

I use KDE4 and I actually like it, but I don’t care what anyone else uses or likes.

No, like other KDE4 fanboys I’ve encountered, you obviously can’t stand it when someone doesn’t get all starry-eyed at the desktop environment you love so much, and just have to shoot your mouth off any time someone expresses an opinion to the contrary, whether it’s appropriate for you to do so or not.

My only motivation for this post is I think that, if you like or dislike something, you should either be able to provide clear explanation of why, or you should admit you cannot.

And I did, above, in response to Jeff. Even though it was against my better judgement, and in violation of my own policy against feeding the trolls here as it was off-topic and inflammatory.

What I probably should have done was delete his posts and ban him right off the bat. Had I known he was just an Amarok developer coming here to pick a fight, that’s what I would have done.

The biggest problem is, I tend to give people far too much leeway here sometimes, and look what it gets me.

Yes, look what it gets him.

Update 3: Another brilliant post from Trent in the comments of his blog. The real highlight is his characterization of my interaction with him, in which I apparently expressed, using lots of punctuation marks and emphasis, my disbelief that he didn't like every tiny thing about, apparently, anything. He says "here's how these almost always go" and finishes by saying "Every. Single. Time." Which shows that his arguments aren't even internally consistent.

Trent:

I actually like KDE4  but I’m certainly not going to push it on someone who’s not interested.

There’s nothing wrong with liking KDE4. It’s not for me, that’s all. 

I’ve tried engaging with the developers at the Amarok forums, they are not interested in any critiques or comments on the UI. Politeness gets you ignored or patronised, frustration gets you deleted. Unless you’re part of the echo chamber don’t bother.

*nods*

I found that most of the issues I had with KDE4 and Amarok, when I looked around where one would submit such feedback, were things that were there by design, and would never be “fixed”, because they weren’t broken. Things like this convinced me it was best to just move on entirely. Despite what any of them said, they weren’t really interested in feedback that didn’t reinforce what they were doing.

They even come here and try to offer “help”. 

If they truly wanted to help, they’d have done what the little team working on Clementine has done. Port Amarok 1.4 to Qt4 to take advantage of some of Qt4′s features, and make it worthy of the name, rather than… whatever it is they’ve done with it.

That would have helped. Trolling blog posts about replacement applications doesn’t help at all. It just makes me mad. 

I actually don’t mind they have their vision and are somewhat single minded about it – that’s their prerogative as the developers, its this pretence that they are open to feedback that is quite irritating and the tendency to evangelise.

Yeah, that’s exactly what spins me up so much. Here’s how these almost always go.

1) Wait, you don’t LIKE *whatever*???? Inconceivable! Why?
2) Well what don’t you like about it?
3) Oh. Well, I think you don’t like it because youdon’t understand it.
4) Oh. In that case then, you don’t like it becauseyou’re resistant to change.
5) Well, I’m going to assume you’re stupid then, since you don’t like it. Here’s how to use it.
6) Why are you getting mad at me? I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP.

Every. Single. Time.

Meh – Amarok is dead (for me anyway). Long live Clementine. And RhythmBox. And Banshee. And Bangarang … you get the idea 

Yeah. Amarok died with 1.4 for me. I’ve moved on, particularly now that it looks like a replacement (in Clementine) is in the works. It might take a while for it to catch up, but I’m pretty hopeful that those of us still using Amarok 1.4 can move on from it soon enough.

Thanks for the comment. 

Update 4: Valorie Zimmerman wrote a nice reply on Trent's blog encouraging him to work with others, instead of simply spewing bile. Trent's idea of responding to such a nice comment is to entirely miss her well-articulated point, insult me some more (to be expected), continue to insist that my comments were inflammatory and "intended to start an argument", and then command her to "move on":

Valorie:

You’ve completely misconstrued Jefferai’s response to you. Why the hatefullness?

Really, everyone here agrees on two things: we love music, and we love free and open software. So why not use the player you like, and contribute to that if you can. F/OSS works when people work on the projects they love.

F/OSS is just dragged down by hating on people and projects. Please stop doing that. I love Amarok, but point people to Clementine (or other players) if they want help finding alternatives. No project can meet all needs, or keep everyone happy. Enjoy diversity!

Trent:

I love Amarok, but point people to Clementine (or other players) if they want help finding alternatives. No project can meet all needs, or keep everyone happy. Enjoy diversity!

That was precisely the entire point of this article. To point people to Clementine, and to provide some reasons “why”. I think I did a reasonable job of that, unless you read a different article than I did.

My responses to Jeff were responses to off-topic, inflammatory comments intended to start an argument. I’ve already admitted that I should not have responded to him. It was my fault, I’ll freely admit that. Move on.

The rapidly moving and Qt based Gluon game creation and distribution framework will be present at Akademy, where two events in particular will happen:

On Sunday at 16.45 in Room 1, the Social Games talk will be happening. The goal of this talk is both describe what, in fact, this odd entity Gluon is (hint, what is KDE? Yeah, the new version ), and how you use it. There's also a quick round-up of what our Summer of Code students Kevin and Shantanu have been working on.

On Friday at 09:30 in Area 2, the Games with Gluon BoF session will happen. This is aimed squarely at everybody in our community who have even the slightest interest in game construction. Also, free breakfast included, but registration required for that, so if you want to get in on that, make sure you've registered (no worries, easy registration ).

Hopefully we'll have a good time together there, let's make it happen! We've got a world to take over


And so, in case that was not already clear:

Ever had the urge to be a chair? Not the wooden kind with 4 legs. I’m talking about session chairs for Akademy. The program committee is still looking for session chairs and this is your chance to help out and do your part to make Akademy rock. (If you don’t have anything to help out with yet you should feel guilty right about now )

What would you need to do? Easy enough. You pick a track you want to chair. At Akademy you’d help the speakers of your track get set up, introduce them to the audience and make sure they finish on time.

Sounds like something you could do? Awesome. Leave a comment, email me or ping me on IRC.

So as you might have heard KDE is going to host its own git infrastructure. This means that the projects currently on gitorious will have to be moved one by one. Amarok and Konversation made the move yesterday to once again test the waters and make sure it is good to go for everyone else.

To quote Jeff’s email to the Amarok lists:

Amarok, along with Konversation, is trailblazing, and today the new official location of the repository is at git://git.kde.org/amarok/amarok.git

If you already have an existing checkout, simply edit the .git/config file and change “gitorious.org” to “git.kde.org” for the main repository (not any personal clones you may have in remotes).

If you are a committer, the clone URL is git@git.kde.org:amarok/amarok.git. SSH keys have been migrated from those used for your KDE SVN server account.

You can browse the repository via cgit at http://git.kde.org/amarok/amarok or via Redmine at the Project page on http://projects.kde.org/projects/amarok — both are still a work in progress (there is e.g. no KDE theming, and accounts on redmine have yet to be set up for all but a few of the KDE sysadmins), so please keep in mind that this is still a test infrastructure.

Thanks to our rocking sysadmins (especially Eike and Jeff) for setting everything up so quickly.

Please let us know if there is still any docu left to update due to this move that we missed so we can update it quickly.

Last year around this time everyone was getting ready for the Desktop Summit. I couldn’t make it and I could still kick myself for it tbh. Watching it remotely was rather painful as the information flow wasn’t as good as it could have been. So I promised myself two things for this year’s Akademy: 1) I’m soooooo going to be there. 2) I’m going to help make it easier on the people who can not go for whatever reason.

So here is the run-up of resources you will need to keep up-to-date on all things Akademy while it is happening in 2 weeks:

• identi.ca: search for akademy, the @akademy account and the !akademy group
• twitter: search for akademy and the @akademy account
• flickr: search for the tag akademy
• the irc channel: #akademy on freenode
• planetKDE
• the dot
• the workshop and BoF schedule
• various etherpad installations to follow live meeting notes (ask your specific team if they have one)
• place for slides of the talks will be announced later
• talks will be recorded and if there are no major ooopses uploaded after the event

Most of them have RSS feeds you can subscribe to – use them

If there is anything else that would be helpful please leave a note in the comments.

Now if you are going to be in Tampere and going to make the world rock more, spread the coolness:

• identi.ca: join the !akademy group (you can’t post without joining)  and post about what you’re doing
• identi.ca: poke me, Claudia or Kenny to get useful stuff posted to @akademy
• twitter: tweet about cool stuff and tag it with #akademy
• twitter: poke me, Claudia or Kenny to get useful stuff posted to @akademy
• flickr: upload photos and tag them with #akademy and #akademy2010
• write blog posts and have it aggregated to planetKDE
• ping jefferai to get etherpad set up for your team for live meeting notes if your team doesn’t have one yet (I know at least promo and edu do)
• if you’re a speaker: get your slides to the program committee, the friendly folks who sent you your talk confirmation

And you might have guessed it already…

(Special thanks to my employer ontoprise and the KDE e.V. for paying travel and accommodation. It would not be possible without you. *hint* individual supporting membership *hint*)

Hmmm and while I’m at it I might as well create some buzz for my talks, right? So I’ll be doing 3 talks it seems:

• Pimp my Community
• Highlights of KDE Women 2010 (with Celeste, Alexandra, Anne and others)
• KDE’s wikis – getting closer to world domination with SMW and SMW+

Be there! You know you want to  I’ll also be doing 3 BoF’s on git, community and wikis for those interested. Oh and I’m writing on a paper on mentoring to accompany my community talk. I’ll post it here when it’s published.

CU in Tampere!

It’s been GSoC season for over a month now and I haven’t blogged, so now I’m going to try to fix that. After last year’s Multilevel playlist sorting project, one of my proposals has been accepted again for GSoC 2010: I’m going to implement on-the-fly transcoding in Amarok.

Amarok is a music player and manager built around very general concepts of tracks and media sources. The collection tries to decouple the format from the data itself and presents the music as tracks (with metadata) rather than files. In other cases, music isn’t even stored in local files. These concepts, and others, allow one to truly rediscover music through seamless internet sources and media devices integration, and the user in fact doesn’t have to care where the actual data comes from. The many sources at one’s fingertips are accessible in a consistent way and playable from the playlist.

However, even in this day and age of stuff in the cloud, there are situations in which the user still has to worry about media formats, e.g. when acquiring new music, or copying existing music from one collection to another or from the collection to a portable music player. That’s where transcoding kicks in.

For example, one might have a quantity of Windows Media Audio files that should be transcoded to a more Free format in order to be usable in the future, or a quantity of Monkey’s Audio files, which, while lossless, are not well supported everywhere, especially in PMPs. And then of course, even if someone has a collection full of FLAC files, which is a reliable and Free codec, a conversion into a lossy format such as Ogg Vorbis or MP3 might be necessary for use with a PMP simply for reasons of storage capacity.

So my idea is this: whenever the user can copy files, give him or her the choice to either just copy, just transcode or transcode with custom options. That way, we cover both of the following use cases:

• “I’m running late for a 4 hour train ride and I haven’t updated the music collection on my portable player, I need to quickly copy over my tunes while making sure they will compatible with the portable player”
• “if I tweak the quality rating of the Vorbis encoder exactly the way I want it I’m going to save 1% of the space on my portable music player and still get the audio quality my sensitive ears deserve”.

The current situation is that the transcoding operation (in the strictest possible sense) works, so the next thing I have to do is integrate it nicely with Amarok’s existing collections framework. The current implementation uses FFmpeg, but I’ve placed FFmpeg-specific stuff in a wrapper class so something else could quite easily be used in the future if need arises.

The following screenshot represents the current state of the still quite unfinished transcoding GUI.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I’ve been to the  KDE Multimedia+Edu sprint in Randa, Switzerland.

It was a lot of fun and very productive too. I wish to thank the whole organizers team. Special thanks go to Mario Fux for his mad organizational skills, to the cooking team which I had the pleasure to share the kitchen with while preparing vegan stuff and to Knut Yrvin for arranging a much needed meeting with the Brisbane office of Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks regarding QtMultimedia and the future of Phonon. Finally, thanks Anne-Marie Mahfouf for a gift she gave me which allowed me to taste again something I like very much but haven’t been able to eat because of nickel allergy.

Filed under: Amarok, GSoC2010, KDE Tagged: Amarok, GSoC2010, KDE

This is just an entry so the Chinese spammers I keep getting with random links to probably viruses and malware can all focus here, until I write a real blog later. I'm getting sick of deleting the comments.

Amarok 2.3.1 “The Bell” has been released. Check out the release notes, download, install and enjoy rediscovering your music

I’m back at home from the multimedia and edu sprint in Switzerland (yea the one some people call cheeseland and others chocolateland) and things are finally getting back to normal so time for a bit of blogging. It was productive, fluffy and awesome! Those three pictures sum it up pretty well



Check out my Flickr page for more pics.

Having a lot of projects at the sprint was really great. For example I’ve worked with j-b of VideoLan fame on some announcements and website restructuring and helped the edu team with promo and community building advice. A lot of progress has been made on the VLC backend for Phonon which will hopefully solve a lot of the small pain points we still have in Amarok. Besides getting the VLC backend in shape the next weeks in Amarok land will be spend on improving startup time for example. New script bindings by Ian and Richard should help quite a bit with that hopefully. Colin did not have an easy job being the PulseAudio guy but he was a really good sport in not-so-friendly territory . We also had a telephone meeting with the QtMultimedia guys in Brisbane which cleared up quite a few things even though the setup of the meeting was a bit adventurous. Sharing knowledge not only inside the KDE teams but also meeting with other free software teams like this is invaluable and should be done more often.

A big thank you to everyone who helped make it possible. You’re fluffy.

Oh and btw: Car trains rock.

This post is actually rather after the fact. I've been super busy, and my blogging tends to fall way, way behind when that happens. But I wanted to tell people about plans for Amarok Mobile, where things stand now, and what needs to be done. (And how you could help!)

First off, I need to give a big shout-out to Nokia. A while back, they donated ten n900 devices to KDE developers who submitted proposals describing what they would work on. I was one of the lucky winners, and this provided both the motivation and means to start working on an Amarok Mobile.

I actually was not initially supposed to use this for Amarok Mobile development -- I had sumitted a proposal to bring functionality similar to the beloved* Popup Dropper into a library for Maemo programs. Problem: having never used Maemo before, I didn't realize it had longpress functionality (my previous phone was an iPhone).

So, not wanting to reinvent the wheel needlessely, I instead decided to start working on exactly what everyone had assumed/thought/wanted me to be working on when they heard I was one of the n900 recipients: Amarok Mobile.

Below is a record of some of the work that has been done, and that remains to be done.

Core work

In large part due to its very rapid pace of development, Amarok's code base has had a habit of growing haphazardly, and one of the results has been a lot of incestuous code...things coupled when they really shouldn't be, code being referenced and implemented all over the place, and so on.

As a result, one of the first things I did was to work on separating out code that provide core functionality -- things like podcasts, playlists, our metadata system, collections, and more -- and boil them down to the basics. The rule for the core library is: no GUI code, and nothing inside core may reference any files outside of core. The point is that core should comprise the essence of Amarok, and much of what's left are the possibly platform-specific implementations. In addition, I standardized namespaces for the parts of core, standardized include headers (which makes it much easier to handle file moves later, since they are fully-pathed from the top level source directory), and had absolutely countless compilation cycles. It was an absolute fsckload of work.

However, I think it paid off. We now have, inside src/, a core/ directory and a core-impl/ directory. If we studiously keep core/ separated, it will provide an excellent base on which alternative GUIs and implementations of those core classes can be built. In addition, more things will be moved there, or at least the paradigm will continue being followed; for instance, our great contributor Erik Hovland has been making progress on separating out the GUI layer from our Services framework so that we can have the great services like Ampache and Magnatune and Last.fm and so on be relatively easily activated on other platforms.

SQL

Amarok 2 currently uses MySQL exclusively, allowing you to either use a MySQL server or libmysqld for an embedded database. This has pros and cons, but the really relevant pro is the huge speed gains we get over SQLite. (Before people comment about how we must be doing something wrong: we're not the only project that has seen serious speed problems with SQLite -- I know that Quassel has had similar issues; and if you're convinced that it's our schema or some other such thing, you're welcome to help us improve it. Many others have made this claim, and none of them have ever taken our invitation to actually help us improve things.)

So the obvious question comes up: what about Amarok Mobile? I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect that we can get libmysqld running efficiently on the n900, especially given its memory limitations. At the same time, SQLite is readily available. But, we want to avoid writing tons of custom code.

As it turns out Quassel has a really great storage abstraction using QtSql, and they use both SQLite and PostgreSQL. So, if we copied their really nice approach, we could maybe support SQLite with Amarok Mobile while reducing developer effort to a minimum (since none of us are SQL experts).

One of the big problems we've had with QtSql before is that the QMYSQL plugin can support libmysqld (except that it can't; more on that in a second), but in one of the most boneheaded software design choices I've ever seen in my life, MySQL determines whether you're connecting to a server or an embedded server based on which library your program *links* to. This is not a runtime option. Wut.

So -- the obvious option is to bring to Qt what we do in Amarok -- instead of having a QMYSQL driver that has to link to one of the other, have a QMYSQL driver linking to the server libraries and a QMYSQLE driver linking to the embedded libraries, and let application developers choose one or both. I began working on this, and have been successful in building both drivers, and have high hopes I can get it included into Qt 4.8 (there's necessarily a lot of code duplication, so I'll have to see what they say about that...I may be able to abstract some of it into shared functions, but anywhere that mysql in any case was used, I had to replace with mysqle).

Now, I said that it can't actually support libmysqld. The reason is that you pass in options for the embedded server upon library init -- but QtSql *always* initializes the library with null options. Which means, among other things, that it will use /var/lib/mysql (or whatever your compiled-in default is) for its database directory, which normally means that if you're not the root user, you can't actually do anything because it can't create its files. Whoops.

I can't break ABI or API, so I've been wondering what to do about this -- some of the Qt guys suggested I create a new SQL framework with these drivers in it, but I don't think that's a great option. Instead, I plan on creating a new connection option (see the table here). Normally these are basically mapped to MySQL options and used like this:

db.setConnectOptions("CLIENT_SSL=1;CLIENT_IGNORE_SPACE=1");

This connection option will not be mapped directly to a MySQL option, but will instead take a delimited list of options, something like this:

db.setConnectOptions("CLIENT_SSL=1;CLIENT_IGNORE_SPACE=1;MYSQLD_INIT_OPTIONS=myoption1=myvalue1;;myoption2=myvalue2;;myoption3=myvalue3");

This would let you pass arbitrary options, and this list would be split and each of the options would be passed into library initialization. It's API/ABI compatible and relatively straightforward, so it's the best thing I can think of right now.

Future work

The next steps are to finish the QtSql modifications and get those submitted upstream. Maemo right now has Qt 4.6, but *eventually* will have 4.8...so when 4.8 is coming around, if my QtSql changes are in there, Amarok can try migrating to QtSql; to finish services GUI separation and separation of other parts of Amarok (like AmarokURLs), and to begin writing a GUI, ideally using the Qt Kinetic declarative UI library -- when you're starting from scratch, you might as well do it right. Fortunately some of these tasks will be much easier now that Qt is fully supported/included in the proper locations with the n900 PR 1.2 firmware release.

My time has become incredibly limited in the past month, so if you have time and are interested in helping, join us!

* Okay, I know one person that really, really hates it. And a lot of people that never really realized it was there. But a lot like it!

.. is the total number of countries where the Multimedia/Edu sprint participants in Randa are from. You read that right: seventeen! We had developers from Austria, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland (the Netherlands), Italy, Norway, Peru, Poland, Scotland (yeah, I know…), Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA.
Impressive, isn’t it? So sad I had to leave this afternoon already, but here are a few highlights of the weekend: we had a very talented chef who spent his holiday to prepare our yummy meals, very productive sessions in the various rooms of the huge building during the day, gorgeous weather, the worlds most beautiful mountain right around the corner ( I am biased ) and of course the mandatory Raclette evening, prepared by Mr. Fux: And here is the man who made all this possible: Mario, the most efficient Sprint organizer I know: Kudos, Mario, well done!

I should not forget the reason why we were in Randa: Amarok and the Mulitmedia people gathered in this lovely Swiss village to concentrate on various themes, amongst them the current state of Amarok and it’s roadmap, presenting the state of Pulseaudio, sharing a vision of the Multimedia future, possible uses of Nepomuk in Amarok, and many more like Sound events in KDE, a VLC presentation by Jean-Baptiste Kempf and the future of KMix by Christian Esken. But I better leave it to the developers to blog about the details

A special Thank You! goes to the currently most famous man in Norway, Knut Yrvin. He made it possible to have an online presentation and discussion over the phone with the Qt Multimedia developers in Brisbane, who kindly stayed in their office much longer than usual to talk with us. A big hug to Knut for being such a great Community Manager, and a big sorry from me, I totally forgot to take a picture of him, so I am shamelessly using a picture made by Thorsten Rahn on the Little Matterhorn: And no, they didn’t break it, the Matterhorn is still up in all it’s glory