Planet SoC

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 !
Last week I also released a first alpha/beta version of the Last.fm Radio on the OSD to the Neuros mailing-list. Everything in this release work fine so far, I can create and listen to as much Last.fm stream as I want. Look up my profile information as well as some Artist related chart. Of course there’s room for improvement and there’s also room for more great features. I don’t know when it will be available in the upstream development update of Arizona but I wish it won’t be long. Last.fm released their Web Service API 2.0 during the summer, just after I finished my implementation of the 1.0 API. It’s not a surprise that I want to port my implementation to 2.0. In fact, this shouldn’t be very long and it should provide easier integration of more features like the ability to ‘Love’ and ‘Ban’ a track as well as the ability to tag a track or an artist.
I’m also thinking about a way to browse radio instead of creating new station every time I want a new one. I already have an idea how this could be done. Last.fm provide some feeds of tags, I could take these tags and make a tag cloud and let the user choose a tag from this cloud and create a radio station based on it. This would also be a way to ’suggest’ new music to user and it would ease the radio station creation process, especially since this program is running on a television and controlled with a remote control.
This summer was awesome, I couldn’t be more thankfull to Neuros Technology and Google for letting me be a part of this.