Blog entries from Neuros Technology SoC students and mentors

Look what I got !

guillaumebel — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:30:53 +0100

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 !

First post-SoC Last.fm radio update!

guillaumebel — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:19:39 +0200

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.
I also added the xmms2-audioscrobbler to the OSD build system. It work as expected apart from the fact that it need to be started manually. I need to find a way to start it automatically each time the xmms2 daemon start. On a standard xmms2 installation this would be quite simple but on the OSD it’s an other story. Anyway I should have more times to work on these things in the next few weeks, once the first few weeks rush at the University will pass.
On a side note, Google released the traditional KML file representing all passing students linked to their mentors all over the planet (also available on Google Maps). I always find it interesting how people from all around the world worked together during the summer to create and develop exiting open source project.

GSoC end and beyond

guillaumebel — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:30:57 +0200

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.

First screenshot

guillaumebel — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:10:00 +0200

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.
This is just a minimal preview but the whole app is running fine but not yet ready for prime time but this should happen next week if not earlier.

First screenshot

guillaumebel — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:10:00 +0200

First half is now over

guillaumebel — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:36:38 +0200

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”

Since I’m now more familiar with the xmmsclient library than I ever was, I plan to code and finish my client this week and maybe tie everything together for the weekend. After that I’ll have plenty of time to design the graphical user interface, track bug and add functionalities !

Long time no update

guillaumebel — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:37:50 +0200

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.
In parallel, during the last two weeks or so I started to work on the core of my Summer Of Code project, Last.fm radio and Last.fm Web Services integration to the OSD. As I previously said, the Last.fm radio part will be handled by xmms2 plugin of the same name so I concentrated my work on Last.fm Web Services. It is quite straight forward, retrieve information, parse information and store information for future use. The library is taking shape quite fast and I’m quite happy with it. It’s the second thing I want to be completed before the mid-term evaluation and so far it shouldn’t be a problem.
June 15 , xmms2 0.5 “DrLecter” was released, which mean that it’s the version of xmms2 that will be ported to the OSD. So sadly all my work and time spent on porting version 0.4 DrKosmos was in vain, or sort of because I learned a lot about the OSD build system and cross compiling during this first attempt to port a newer version of xmms2 to OSD. I started to work on it last week and I’m now back where I was with my first attempt so it shouldn’t be too long before the port is complete and functional. But I fear that I’ll have to patch the current xmms2 client on the OSD to be compatible with this newer version. In fact It shouldn’t be a bad thing because it’ll allow me to get more familiar with the xmmsclient++ library.
So In a perfect world I would have finished the audioscrobbler, the web service library and the xmms2 port before the mid-term evaluation and for the second part of the summer I would have the radio client and the user interface to code. That’s exactly what I’m planning to do.

First week down

guillaumebel — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 05:13:57 +0200

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.
The second part, which is recompiling the whole OSD environment is a little bit more of trouble and I’m still not done with it. I get new compiling error that I haven’t had the time to investigate. I’m looking forward to investigate more next week. The port of this newer version of xmms2 as well as two new plugin (lastfm and lastfmeta) will greatly ease my task. These two plugin take care of Last.fm Radio playback as well as the metadata provided by Last.fm. Once the port done I will be able to concentrate my effort on the OSD client.
In parallel I’ve been working on an audioscrobbler client/plugin written in C. Xmms2 already had a audioscrobbler client/plugin but it was written in Ruby and Ruby is not suitable for the OSD environment. So I’m coding a C version which will work with my Last.fm Radio client as well as with the audio player already available on the OSD (and any xmms2 build as well).

Slave of technology

guillaumebel — Sun, 11 May 2008 19:08:56 +0200

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.
Once my Internet got fixed I updated my OSD to the latest Arizona build released this week. This update bring the Qt software stack to the OSD. This is a huge change for the OSD, while the GUI look roughly the same, I have to say it feel much more robust. This also ease the development of third party application which is a very good thing. I’m so exited to develop on this platform. This will be a real pleasure. This week gave me the precious time to play with the device in order to be aware of the possibilities in term of graphical interface as well as interaction with the user.
I’ve been busy for the rest of the week but I managed to update the wiki page of my project. I built a nice road map, It took me a lot of time to built this table and not get lost with the mix of HTML and wiki markup. I tried to sum up every component of my project and assigned a priority to each of them. I also redone the graph representing the flow of information through the application. I made it with Inkscape and I’m quite satisfied with the result.
So next step is to manage to compile my first lines of code on the OSD which mean to set up my working environment properly and then I’ll be ready to start for good. But until that day, I still have time to re-think how things will get in place. I want my road map to be optimal because I don’t want to end up changing too much things while coding.

Ready, set… code !

guillaumebel — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:59:14 +0200

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.

I took a quick look at it, played some music and video, just enough for a first impression. This thing is small and very light, That’s funny to think that the kernel 2.6.15 of Linux run on this device. Linux is so amazing, I bet it run on a toaster. Well, It’s a really nice device and I’m very happy to work on it this summer. Speaking of which, I spent some times this week when I wasn’t studying building a nice wiki page of my project on the Neuros wiki. I wrote down what I think is a good summary of the project and what need to be done. I also putted together a somehow funny logo mixing the happy duck of Neuros with the Audiocrobbler logo from Last.fm. I will try to keep this wiki the most up to date possible with design, development information, graph, screenshots and other such things. I want my project to be as documented as possible in every possible way.
So I will spend the next week getting familiar with the OSD (which mean watch and record TV all week long… just kidding) and with its source code. I checked out the SVN repository at some point last week but I did not had the time to look at it seriously. It will also be a good time to establish a solid road map in order to be structured and separate the work properly. But for now, I’m going back playing with my new geek hardware.