Planet SoC

The blog is moving!

Yes, it’s like the 5th or 6th time, but this one’s the last. Really.

New location: http://wfarr.org/

The feed can now be found at: http://wfarr.org/posts.atom

There isn’t a theme there yet, so I’ll probably take some time to make one this weekend, amid some Banshee and GSOC hacking.

I am now a high school graduate.

Also hot and sweaty.

Finally, throwing a barbecue.

Good times.

Thomas - While delicious is certainly nice in its own way, you may also want to peek at Mozilla Weave, which is a Firefox 3-only extension that allows you to synchronize bookmarks, history, and cookies securely.

=)

So, I’m now on Planet GNOME as a GSoC student.

Speaking of, the project is slowly starting to come along now. I’ve spent a few hours here or there looking through libempathy and getting a feel for the APIs. Still have yet to really see what kind of condition the Python bindings are in — probably saving that for next week.

Though, that might not happen since it’s vying for time against GEB, and that’s some stiff competition to run against.

This is my last week of school-related activities for a while, so I can finally get full swing into Summer of Code work. This means, according to my schedule, to be looking over documentation and APIs right now. Hopefully tomorrow night I can take a crack at that.

Additionally, I’ve started to fill up my new-found time with a rather fun undertaking — my own personal copy of Godel, Escher, Bach. I’m enjoying it rather much.

Those who follow me on Twitter, or put up with my constant complaining via Google Talk are well aware that I’ve had sound issues with Fedora 9 lately (installed on my slave HDD).

Turns out, these issues are fixable, if hard to track down.

What issues per se? Tinny, scratchy sound. Oh noes, mi amigos.

Here’s how to see if this is your issue:

$ dmesg | grep intel8x0

If you see something about it setting to ###### usecs, and that lovely number isn’t 48000, add this to your /etc/modprobe.conf:

options sndintel8x0 ac97clock=48000

Thanks to ivasquez, nirik, yarddog, and tyrok from #fedora!

Some users have reported not being able to get their iPods working with Banshee in the latest Ubuntu release.

This would be Ubuntu’s fault.

Simply unplug your iPod, run this command, and plug it back in to experience screamin’ goodness:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart

Enjoy kiddos.

Basically, I’m just making sure that Planet-SOC is now aggregating my blog.

Planet Banshee & Planet Foresight guys and gals - sorry for the ‘spam’!

I am officially a participating student in Google’s Summer of Code 2008.

Awesome. =]

Disappearing completely would just make too many folks happy - and I certainly can’t have that.

Anyway, during the course of upgrading my internet subscription, I mysteriously and unexpectedly lost my connection for well over a day. Thankfully, all seems sorted out after AT&T tweaked some of their wiring in my neighborhood.

I also, during the course of my downtime, have had my current feed built into the Planet Foresight appliance, so I’m once again syndicated there.

Now to catch up on hundreds of feeds and dozens of emails. =[

Though I’ve been a little quiet about it, I’m currently working on bringing the Radio extension to trunk. I know I enjoy listening to a few stations, so hopefully it’ll be in before the next alpha release.

Of course, one of the cool things about our Radio extension is that — like in the past — we have some pre-defined radio stations that cover a variety of music and talk so anyone can just go ahead and listen, whether or not they know of any stations.

But, there were some musical tastes and what-not that weren’t really included in the old list.

Thanks to Kens and Nathan Weizenbaum, I now have a bit of date sanity achieved on my blog.

Rather than use a call to system — which isn’t as super clean or fast as it could be — I now talk directly to MZScheme.

How? $!

I’ve introduced some new hacks into the code in order to get Arc to formulate a proper RSS feed with times.

Manually edited all old posts to have “compliant”, but made-up times (still correct dates though).

Not ideal, but using date -R was faster than implementing strftime via the FFI.

Though it hasn’t been released officially yet, the third alpha on our trip to the big OnePointOh is soon going to be popping its head out the door.

Naturally, I’m going to go ahead and spill some of the information for those of you who don’t follow Banshee SVN religiously.

Some of the latest goodies aren’t going to be enabled in the build process, but they will be showing up as they approach stability:

I’d like to send my congratulations to GitHub for coming on out of Beta, on new hardware to boot.

While I’m sure Google Code does you (whoever you are) just fine, it’s time to leave svn behind and get with the times my friend! (You know who you are, maybe.)

Since it seems to be all the rage among some folks, here’s my own little top 10 list for this session:

wfarr@localhost:~/src/banshee$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
217 cd
210 git
93 svn
87 sudo
57 make
47 nano
37 ./autogen.sh
35 rm
18 mv
15 ls

It’s probably a bit skewed though, because I use emacsclient as my $EDITOR, and make use of git-mode and gitsum in Emacs near religiously.

Some very neat work has gone in with Conkeror development lately.

Of particular note, is the page-modes work to offer a set of built-in, default modes that allow Conkeror to interact effectively with various web applications without causing keybinding conflicts. Since Conkeror is a keyboard-drive application, this makes things very sweet as far as the browser goes; before now, one had to use C-M-q in order to send commands to the application directly, and Esc to return to “normal mode”.