home :)

I have for a while now been a bit frustrated with the music player situation on KDE4 desktops. Amarok was being slow for me, and on a KDE4 desktop it looks foreign. Amarok 2 is still a while off; the first few releases are unlikely to be very usable. I am also not sure I like the direction it is headed. As for Juk, I do not really like the UI approach. This leaves few credible choices.

So what's a software guy to do? Write yet another player of course. So, without further ado, I give you Soitin!

Soitin has a far more limited scope than Amarok and Juk. It does not try to be a collection manager at all; instead, it deals with tracks in the traditional sense. Standing on the shoulders of giants, it has support for almost any kind of file you throw at it, as well as things like streaming media. But mostly I have so far had in mind local files.

In addition to playing music, there is support for playing video. When video data is encountered in a file, the view switches from the playlist to the video widget, and back when there is no more video.

I'm currently debugging a weird qmake bug, where the generated Makefile tries to strip the soitin icon and installs it with 755 permissions. I assume some automagic binary detection is going wrong. Looking forward, a few things that I want to implement are session management, playlist saving and loading, and better support for media sources other than local files.

So, if you are interested, you can either download a source package at the url above, or check out the latest source in svn.

Something I whipped up in a few evenings because I needed a break from other projects. Behold the bounce.

More later. Source here. Hack, share, have fun. :)

I was recently looking for seamless patterns for websites and such. Google would only ever find images on commercial sites, or collections with low quality tiles.

Today I stumbled across DinPattern which has some great tiles up for free. Check it out. :)

Hmm.

What's that weird blob I hear you ask? Why, it's an argb window with partial alpha transparency in a composited X11 environment! How do you do it? It is really quite simple. Take a look at the source. :)

I thought a static slogan is a bit boring, so I added dynamic slogans to my blog. It was quite simple to do. In kukkaisvoima_settings.py, add the following line near the top:

from slogans import slogan

and set the slogan like this:

slogan = slogan()

Next, create a file slogans.py. Mine currently looks like the following. The important thing is to define a function called slogan.

import random

slogans = [
"polly wants a cracker",
"shiver me timbers",
"16 men on a dead man's chest",
"i'll be back",
"you're gonna need a bigger boat",
"houston, we have a problem",
"E.T. phone home",
"open the pod bay doors, HAL",
"a martini. shaken, not stirred.",
"i see dead people",
"this is sparta",
"my precious"
]

def slogan():
    index = random.randint(1, len(slogans))
    return slogans[index - 1]


Done :)

Because friends are important to me I added a friends field to the right. Behold all two of my blogging friends. :)

I'm really liking kukkaisvoima. It is very simple to extend.

I set up a new blog as you can see. This time it's based on Kukkaisvoima, which is a nice and simple blog engine written in python.

Who knows, maybe this time I will actually have something to say :)