Exaile! The amaroK replacement for GNOME

My search for the perfect music player has continued for a long time. I like Rhythmbox-like players with good library management over the straightforward XMMS-style players. Lately, I’ve been using Quod Libet a lot. Its search function is second to none, and Ex Falso, its companion application for tag editing is really sweet. I never felt comfortable with Quod Libet’s radio stream support. So, most of the time I reverted to browsing Shoutcast streams with Streamtuner and playing them with Beep.

I’ve always admired amaroK’s all-in-one philosophy. Functionally, it’s the undisputed champion of players. Alas, amaroK is very resource-hungry and my poor box is slow. To make matters worse, amaroK loads a bunch of KDE libraries along with it, so running it in GNOME is painful.

Thus, I have been on a lookout for an amaroK replacement for GNOME for some time now. Listen seems promising, but frankly it has always felt a bit unstable (not that amaroK itself never crashes, but that’s one thing we don’t want to clone from it.) Then I stumbled upon an even younger Exaile! on the Ubuntu forums and it is awesome. Written by synic in Python, it promises to be all i’m looking for. Rock!

Exaile! player jazz action

Exaile has all I want:

• You can easily browse either your library or the file system
• Good search function
• Streaming radio support and shoutcast directory browsing
• Tag editing
• Album art fetching from amazon.com
• Is a GTK+ app and fits well into the GNOME desktop
• iPod and mp3 player support (well, I don’t need this but there it is if you have python-gpod installed)

Of course, after testing this app and falling in love with it, i had to biuld a package for Ubuntu Dapper. Enjoy, but remember that this project is very young and you might find bugs (all standard disclaimers about my packages’ reliablility apply too, of course.)

Technorati Tags: multimedia, gnome

Ubuntu: Past, Present and Future look in parallel

Today’s updates brought some things that make it seem like Ubuntu Dapper is finalizing: neither login messages, release identificators, nor the artwork advertises Dapper’s beta status anymore, the system default look is awesome, and everything works as advertised.

What better way to celebrate the official release of Dapper on June 1st than remember old times? Matt has made the artwork from all previous Ubuntu releases parallel installable, so if you feel nostalgic, you can use the Warty theme and wallpaper.

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, debian

BBC 6music radio channel’s Last.fm statistics

MetaFilter reports on the neatest hack I’ve heard about for a while. A BBC systems architect wrote a Last.fm plugin that submitted all the songs played on BBC’s 6radio channel to a Last.fm account called Sekrit.  Not only can you see what kind of “musical taste” BBC’s player robots have, but you can also check out what kind of friends the channel has. Judging from these statistics, I just might try this channel myself and see if I like it :)
 

Linus still delivers mature, balanced arguments

In the middle of a technical debate about virtual memory in different kernels, Linus Torvalds showed again his charm and tact by claiming that “Mach people (and apparently FreeBSD) are incompetent idiots.” After Slashdot reported this, Linus wrote a nice, friendly response on his own medium (the lkml), not on Slashdot of course, pointing out that the Slashdot people “usually are smelly and eat their boogers, and have an IQ slightly lower than my daughters pet hamster”. He is in a position to say this because not only is he “the smartest person around” but also “incredibly good-looking”.

This flamebait is a worthy continuation of a long tradition of Linus’ communication, starting back in 1992 with his own master when it comes to operating system programming, and a more recent evaluation of the competence of the makers of the world’s premiere business Unix desktop.

All this is well in line with the fact that he is so smart he knows free software licensing matters better than the FSF which enabled him to write Linux in the first place, and its lawyers when it comes to the upcoming version of the GPL, the license which he licensed Linux under.

Linus fixes Kaspersky’s flawed “cross platform virus”

Kaspersky Lab's announcement of a Windows/Linux cross-platform virus was the scoop of last week (source code available of course).

Now, there are obvious difficulties to spreading viruses on Linux and other properly designed systems, as demonstrated the lack of Linux viruses despite the availability of the ELF Virus Writing HOWTO since 2002. But the saddest part is that the virus didn't actually work on Linux kernels later than 2.6.16, as demonstrated by the testing and analysis published by Hans-Werner Hilse.

Linus Torvalds agreed with Hilse's analysis but was left wondering why the virus worked on older kernels but not the post-2.6.16 ones. He examined the situation and found a bug in GCC (the GNU C compiler) which was triggered by some code in the new kernels (I'm not going to pretend I understand any of this). Naturally he was intrigued by a program which could run natively on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Linus's explanation about the bug was published today on Newsforge. The funniest thing is, Linux has fixed the flaw and made the virus work on all versions of Linux. This might come as an embarrassment to Kaspersky, who obviously was going to cash in on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt triggered by a Linux virus and the users' need to suddenly buy Linux anti-virus software from them. Fortunately the free software hackers were again more than happy to help make broken code work again.

Let's see if anybody will buy anti-virus software for Linux now, or Kaspersky's software for any platform.

Easter eggs

Warning: Easter Egg spoilers ahead!

Celebrating Easter, Jonathan has gone egg hunting. He first exposes a known liar, aptitude. We all know of APT’s Super Cow Powers because they’re documented (type “apt-get” with no arguments and hit ENTER), but aptitude keeps its powers hidden. The key to finding aptitude’s Super Cow Powers is endurance and liberal use of the -v switch.

Firefox’s secret message from the Book of Mozilla is well known as well, but the really great OpenOffice.org Easter Egg that Jonathan unveils was news to me. Of course, Jonathan sees such an elaborate Easter Egg as “proof that OpenOffice.org is bloated”. Not that we would need further proof of that! :) I didn’t know about the funny release names in the Ubuntu kernel documentation either.

Here are a couple of GNOME eggs I’m aware of. Open the “Run” dialog (press alt+F2). Type “gegls from outer space” as the command. You get to play a game that “will change the way you think of your desktop forever.” It features GEGLs (Genetically Engineered Goat, Large). GEGL is a mythical creature in GIMP and GNOME lore, and the unofficial secret logo of the GNOME project.

The other GNOME egg i know about features Wanda, the fortune telling fish from the Fish Applet. Type “free the fish” into the Run dialog and Wanda will swim around your desktop occasionally. (You can accomplish the same thing by hitting the ‘f’ key three times after opening the “About” box of a panel.) If you click it with your mouse, it will flee, only to return later. You cannot kill this process because it’s hidden in the gnome-panel process (or one of its children – killiing gnome-panel does help).

Of course, Easter Eggs in free software have given rise to some complaints as well. An OpenOffice.org user argues that a piece of free software should work as advertised and only in that manner. There are bug reports demanding the removal of Easter Eggs from OO.o, or at least an easy method for sysadmins to disable them. Issue 61685 has extensively discursive comments for and against eggs.

Power

t0rbad> so there i was in this hallway right
BlackAdder> i believe i speak for all of us when i say…
BlackAdder> WRONG BTICH
BlackAdder> IM SICK OF YOU
BlackAdder> AND YOUR LAME STORIES
BlackAdder> NOBODY HERE THINKS YOURE FUNNY
BlackAdder> NOBODY HERE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR STORIES
BlackAdder> IN FACT
BlackAdder> IF YOU DIED RIGHT NOW
BlackAdder> I DON“T THINK NOBODY WOULD CARE
BlackAdder> SO WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT FAG
*** t0rbad sets mode: +b BlackAdder*!*@*.*
*** BlackAdder has been kicked my t0rbad ( )
t0rbad> so there i was in this hallway right
CRCError> right
heartless> Right.
r3v> right

My totl.net Human virus scanner report: 9 viruses

Linux
Install the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Learn to love it.

Free BSD
The GPL isn't that bad really. Adopt a penguin at the zoo.

Junkfood
Eat some real food. Something which you can identify the source of every ingredient, not the point of manufacture.

Religion
Read "God's Debris" by Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy)

8-Bit
Polygons, all the polygons you can get are not enough.

UNIX
Anything this old must be obselete. Go and install a nice modern operating system. I hear MSDOS has come a long way lately.

vi
Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.

Politics
Stop caring!

Macintosh
Use a mouse with more than one button.

Viruses I might suffer from:

Industrial (70%)
Everyone likes folk. No, really. Maybe you should listen to the Incredible String Band.

Discordia (90%)
Buy a suit. Invest your money. Eat hotdog buns on a friday.

X11 (60%)
I hear Mac OS 10 Aqua is nice at this time of year.

Computer Games (90%)
Stop staring at the screen and get some fresh air. You should see a doctor about the RSI in your thumbs.

Conspiracy Theory (68%)
Face it, the elected government is in control. Actually that's quite scary.

Hippyism (80%)
Free love is passe and potentially dangerous, and patchouli smells like cat piss.

Environmentalism (63%)
Consume more stuff! It's easier to buy new stuff than to recycle.

British (65%)
No need for cure. Benign virus.

TotL.net Human Virus Scanner

Time Travellers’ Convention

MIT students are organizing the first (and only) Time Traveler Convention. Since time travellers can easily make it to a single location at a specified time, this can be a one-time conference. Be sure to show up at 42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W on May 8th 2005, 20:00:00 UTC! Too bad I'm busy that day, but will certainly attend once time travelling makes it convenient.

“X Windows” information from Linspire

Dan Stone has found a fascinating piece of information about the X Window System: "Linspire's page about X is the most factually incorrect thing ever." I'm trying to think about a competing page but it sure is damn hard.

Davix takes over

Dave Jones has great news on this April 1st, announcing Davix, a free Linux-like kernel for those who "pine for the nice days of Linux-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers".

Hamster controlled MIDI device

Slashdot pointed out a cool student project at Cornell: Levy Lorenzo has built a MIDI device controlled by six hamsters. The music sounds much better than most music today, and the hamsters probably are more entertaining than most videos too!