Planet SoC

This is it, now that I have received my certificate and t-shirt I think we can say that the 2008 Summer Of Code is really over. It was a tremendous experience. Thank you Google !

Last weeks have been quite busy, It marked the beginning of the fall semester at my University so you can imagine I had a couple things to take care of but still I had time to work a little on the Last.fm radio for the OSD. I corrected some bugs, enhanced the navigation, made a couple of aesthetic enhancement and right now I can only see one show-stopper bug. It’s related to the lastfmeta plugin of xmms2, the plug-in have a hard time getting the meta data from Last.fm. This result no meta data for 80% of the track playing. It’s not a big deal but it’s not perfect. I’ll try to find a solution in a near future.

Last week marked the end of the 2008 Google Summer Of Code. I must say it was a hell a of a summer. It was my first programming related ‘employment’ and I’m so happy that it was to work on an open source project. I learned a bunch during my summer, working with language such as C and C++ which I was barely familiar, only had done basic stuff at school. I learned to work with different tool kit and libraries  and I also learned a few things about cross-compiling and developing for a different device than a computer. I think those experiences are definitively a huge plus on my arsenal. I can already say that I’ll do everything I can to be part of the next Summer Of Code !

Here they are the first screenshot of the Last.fm Radio on the Neuros OSD. The user interface is far from being complete but It’s a good preview of what It look like.
So here’s the ‘Now Playing’ screen, very minimal with temporary duck logo:

And here the ‘Available Stations’ screen where the user choose pre-built Last.fm Station

And this one is more a proof of concept. This is obviously not very elegant but don’t worry, it will shine very soon. It showcase my own Last.fm profile information, Top tracks, Top albums and Top Artists.

There’s also a similar screen for Artist related information.

Here they are the first screenshot of the Last.fm Radio on the Neuros OSD. The user interface is far from being complete but It’s a good preview of what It look like.
So here’s the ‘Now Playing’ screen, very minimal with temporary duck logo:

And here the ‘Available Stations’ screen where the user choose pre-built Last.fm Station

And this one is more a proof of concept. This is obviously not very elegant but don’t worry, it will shine very soon. It showcase my own Last.fm profile information, Top tracks, Top albums and Top Artists.

There’s also a similar screen for Artist related information.

Midterm evaluation is now over and I’ve managed to do most of the things I wanted for the midterm. I have a working audioscrobbler plugin for XMMS2, I finished my Last.fm library which allow me to access Last.fm Web Service and I also wrote some classes to manage (get, save) a Collection of Last.fm Radio station. So basically all my low level work is done. Only the XMMS2 client left to code. It feel good to see everything taking place at the same time.  By the way  I updated my project page on the Neuros wiki, in particular my progress chart, It feel good to see all those “High priority” task marked as “Done”

It’s been a long time since I last wrote on my blog, well almost a month! June has been a very busy month for multiple reasons. But It didn’t  stop me to make progress on my GSoC project. Last month I wrote about an audioscrobbler plugin for xmms2 written in C. Well this audioscrobbler is almost finished. All submission are functional, the only thing left to be done is to improve the whole submission process. This means to be completely compliant with the Audioscrobbler protocol version 1.2. This audioscrobbler is a good part of what I wanted to accomplish befor the first evaluation and it turn out that my scrobbler will be more useful than I first thought. It can be used with any xmms2 installation, which means on the OSD as well as on your linux box.

So that was the first official week for the summer of code and I spent it compiling and compiling over and over again. Basically my first task is to port a newer version of xmms2 to the OSD. This mean applying and adapting patches, cross compile the xmms2 source and then rebuild the whole OSD environment. This is a lot of code and a lot of time spent compiling. So basically I spent the week figuring out the build system of the OSD and how to cross compile properly. Then I started my work on the port of xmms2 0.4 DrKosmos to the OSD. This part was quite straight forward except some confusing compiling error but once these was figured out everything went right.

This week started slowly as I had some troubles with my Internet provider. It made me realize how much I depend on the Internet. It’s my primary mean of communication as well as one of my primary source of information. I spent nearly 3 days offline and it was hard, I guess it make me a slave of technology. So I took this time offline to think about my project as well as playing around with my OSD. I recorded some shows and played around with the device. I set up my development virtual machine and took some time to look at the OSD source code. I also set a samba share in order to play media from my computers with my OSD. This is a bliss, seriously I was looking for such a solution for a long time.

My summer of code is finally on! I had my last exam today, everything went fine and I’m now ready to begin my work for the summer of code. It was a fairly busy day, I had a couple things to do and I had to move my things back home because it was my last day at university and I’m gonna spend my summer in my hometown. Talking about home, guess what was waiting for me there ? Indeed, a shinny Neuros OSD! Big thanks to Neuros for giving me this nice piece of hardware.

What a crazy week I had. Of course it all started Monday when I received a wonderful e-mail telling me that one of my proposals was accepted for the Google summer of code. Then since it’s the end of the semester at university I had exams to study and papers to submit. Now I have to take care of all the paper work needed for the summer of code and find a way to fax it to Google. Well, to be brief, this week was crazy, I had a lot of good news and I must say I’m very happy on how things take their places.

The deadline is tomorrow and I only managed to prepare 4 proposal for the Google Summer of Code. Although I’m confident and exited about every proposal I did, I wish I had the time and the skills to apply on more project. There’s a lot of interesting project but most of them are about topic I simply don’t know or don’t get. Most of the time the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to do what’s needed, it’s more that I don’t have the time right now to investigate and write a decent proposal with good ideas.
Anyway, like I said I’m confident with  the applications I had time to prepare and I hope that concerned peoples will like my ideas. Let see what will happen. Fingers crossed until April 14th.

The list of organization approved for this year GSoC has been released yesterday. I took a look at most of the ideas proposed and I’m surprised by the level of complexity of some. Just for an example the GCC compiler offer a lot of idea with a very high level of complexity.  Though I wish I had the skills to apply on them, compiler stuff and language design always been something I’m particularly interested in.