Yarr! · There · be · penguins · on · the · horizon.

I have been in the world of windoze far too long.

I notice this mainly in my attitude towards systems. I see a system, and I see its flaws, and I see how complicated it is, and I immediately think, not that I should learn the system and see if I can fix it, but that I should re-implement my own system from the ground up, since that is the only way I could possibly understand anything.

I really should start poking my nose into the code more. I learnt binary space partitioning not my reading tutorials (I tried, many times, and always failed), but by reading the doom source code. I can learn x-windows the same way, maybe.

Although, while the ways of x teach me some valuable insights, and the way of apple shows me an alternative, I do believe that it would still be worthwhile attempting to forge a new path, with the separation of x, but with a modular extensible nature to create a unified, harmonized interface, in such a way as to still be unified and harmonized for applications that need new styles of interface and interaction not dreampt of at the original source. Of course such a prospect would require a total re-invention of the wheel, and a break with the past, but Apple have shown us that backwards comparability is really not very important, they've continually reinvented themselves and keep pushing new ideas, and they manage it in a closed proprietary environment that distributes only binaries.

I think perhaps this would be a good project should I ever make it to uni.

I have just spend a good few hours making my KDE linux system look and to some extent behave like osX.

I should probably be very worried by this.

( Large screenshot for those interested )

Baghira is however not just an osX clone, its a damned beautiful set of widgets, and in many ways surpasses those of osX itself (or maybe thats just cause you can poke at more options than you can on a mac). It even has this weird knack of making my non-qt apps feel less alien.

All that remains now is to build and install kxdocker, and find a nice little icon set to go with this new look. Oh, and then find a cheap (hah!) massive monitor to replace my twin 16" displays, so I can give up using xinerama, and start playing with composite rendering x-servers. Ah what fun that'll be, not that I'll ever afford a nice enough screen (I'm thinking 48" widescreen here folks. What? I can dream!).

Well, I have written my first Qt/KDE application, and its something of a Scooty-Puff Jr. but it was quite fun none the less, and explained some useful stuff. I cant help feeling however that Qt-Designer is some kind of bastard child of visual basic and macOS classic. Its just something about its interface, and the fact that it is very much like vb, or how vb should have been.

On the whole I think I'm goina like Qt, it seems to be both easy and powerful all at once, which is a rare thing. It also seems very much like vb, which I'm afraid to say makes me feel at home as I tended to use it far too much. I think perhaps I should go and pick up a good book on c++ with Qt. Any suggestions?

Oh, and in other news, juk looks to be quite nice, tho still lacking in many ways, its visual simplicity is a virtue and a welcome change from amaroK. It does the popup track announcements in a nicer way too, less pretty, but they actually sit still if you hover over them (something kopete developers could do well to implement) and they have track change buttons right there on the popup in case you don't like the song it decided to play.

Ok, thanks to this excellent howto, I now have the ivtv drivers for my hauppage pvr-250 installed, and I can cat random garbage from /dev/video0 so I assume its working, although I've yet to persuade any of my various media players to treat that as an mpeg stream and play it.

In somewhat related news, I've discovered that I cant install mythTV yet anyway, since all my drives are ext3 and it explicitly states it will have hideous problems on ext3, oh, and also I'm thinking of ditching the pvr-250 and going with an all dvb solution, taking the raw streams from the air and/or satellite, cutting out the analog step in between and doing away with the need for a complex hacked together interface between myth and the set top box(es). I highly doubt I can find a cable provider who'd allow me to use non-authorised hardware but satellite providers are more used to such things I hope, but that of course requires the extra expense of a dish and accompanying hardware... ho hum... decisions decisions...

Update: Well, I've managed to set up the card with ivtvctl, tune it with ivtv-tune, and can capture video by redirecting a cat of /dev/video0 into a file. The quality is lovely, the bitrate is crazy, and there is no audio, which is most annoying and puzzling, but I can capture, just about.
Thus far all my efforts to get the audio out of it have failed, I shall forget about it for now until I can test with s-video (Andy, I'm goina need my nuon back and the loan of an s-video cable plz). I've also had problems getting any of the various app's I've tried to play it. xawtv I think is having odd issues with xinerama, but maybe its just me not being able to tell it what to do, I'll check that out later. kdetv is unable to detect the card it seems... ho hum... bed now methinks.

Well thats one thing done at least, Logjam (my LJ client) can now detect music from amaroK, even if I did have to use a script running in amaroK to write it out to a text file and then get LogJam to cat that file in order to work it out. Woo, Does this mean I'm attaining some small notion of the unix nature? Stringing small tools together to make big ones does seem much more practical now, although I still worry about how everything will sort its output.

Well what a surprise, two more id3 tools have failed the sanity check for being useful. Do any of these authors actually use their own software? Am I an exceptional edge case for wanting to embed album piccies in my mp3's? Has the concept of id3v2 actually penetrated the unix world at all?

A little command line tool called "id3v2" which you would think could edit id3v2 tags, seems only to be able to edit the same basic tags used in the id3v1 spec... what exactly its purpose is I'm not sure, but its sure as hell not designed for flexibility. Oh, sure, you can add any known tag, but how the hell do I paste the entire contents of an image file onto a command line, and why should I have to do it? EasyTAG seems to have a lot more potential. Its config dialog has a ton of options and it seems most of them do fairly sensible things. This led me to believe it would be a good tool, except its support for doing things to multiple files at once seems really flaky, with changes only infact being applied to the last file selected. Its picture support is nice however, in that it supports multiple pictures, and can extract them from the files again (but not into the same directory, its browser starts at home... why!? However, yet again it fails the sanity test of actually being able to batch import pics to an entire album at once. What is the point in these people even writing such software? He who goes to the point of adding pictures to mp3's is obviously someone who'd want to put the same picture on each track of an album, clearly.

I give up, I'll really have to write my own... which means learning qt, and infact picking up the ++ in C++ (and brushing up my C), and of course finding a library to interact with the files... but I think thats the easy part.

Thus far I must report my abject failure at getting an adequate id3 toolchain. All I want is way to mass fill out v2 tags, to copy from v1 to v2 and the inverse, and to mass-add embedded pictures, an album at a time. This should not be too much to ask, but it seems it is. I may end up writing my own tool one day, since I think there are libraries to do the actual tag reading and writing, so it shouldn't be too hard. I'm annoyed that I have to do this however since under windoze it only took me an afternoon to find a lovely little tool called "mp3tagtool" which did it all, and had a pretty nice interface (strongly recommended for those still on windoze).

In other news, I seem to now have a copy of wine installed which I think works nicely, I should probably go through the documentation properly and tie it into my dual boot windows registry, but that can wait (there's nothing installed on that copy of windows anyway yet). However, I've had problems running the only two programs I really wanted to run, paint shop pro issues an unhandled exception and crashes with a ton of debug info, and the aforementioned mp3tagtool issues four messages beginning with a most annoying "fixme:" and hangs.

Not an ideal situation then. I might see if I can replace the incomplete library with a real windows dll, but that too shall have to wait for another day.

Oh, and ktorrent (an otherwise rather nice bittorrent client) keeps crashing on me for no obvious reason.

Ok, so today my only real achievement towards the betterment of my environment was the setting up of my eBook toolchain, or part of it anyway. I can now use a lovely little tool called clit (no, really), to open microsoft .lit format ebooks and turn them to html. I would say I could then use html2text to convert them to text and never leave the command shell, except html2text insists on inserting line feeds at the 78 column boundary and seems not to have an option to turn that off. Instead I just copied the entire text from konqueror to kate via the clipboard, which stressed it out for a good 30 seconds curiously.

I suppose I should really sit down and learn kates regular expression syntax too, for when I need to clean up more complicated documents, and of course install other useful tools like pdf2text, but that can wait for now. Oh, and it seems my compiler toolchain is working too, clit had to be compiled from source but worked nicely with the supplied makefiles. Its nice when things Just Work.

edit: I have also now put the mouse button remapping command into a kde startup script so hopefully it will remap the buttons all the time. I suspect it will not remap them in kdm which is annoying so I may have to find its startup scripts and see if there's something I can do about that. Also, it appears that under xinerama, my monitors are not plug and play. If they're not turned on when I boot up, they default to 640x480. I may want to remove the other resolutions from the conf file at some point.

Ok, so it always amuses me when a browser plugin gets the wrong end of the stick and tries to display something in totally the wrong way. The classic example was quicktime on windoze, which for some reason would always try to handle exe files and play them as videos. No matter how many times I uninstalled quicktime, it kept doing it just the same.

Linux plugin errors are however that little bit more cool, I just tried to view a video file, and instead of offering to let me download it, instead of opening in a media player so I could stream it, it opened in an embedded hex editor inside the browser.

Ok, so today it seems my main updates to the system have been in terms of p2p systems, I've now got KTorrent, which is lovely and seems quite polished. I've also got a DC++ client, which is extremely raggedy about the edges and just makes me think a big fat "wtf were they thinking?!"

Y'see, the story with DC++ is, that this company, presumably in the interregnum after the demise of napster, thought it'd be a good idea to hack together a p2p program in vb6, slap some adware on it, and proffit. For some strange reason this unwanted bastard child of the worst possible parents (vb6 and profit grabbing) was cloned by someone, using C++, to make DC++, which enhanced and improved upon the original to become the defacto standard on the network, cutting the original parent company off from its users and taking their creation away from them.

Alas, DC++ is windows only. Or rather, there are half a dozen abandoned and half dead linux projects trying to port it. The most successful one calls itself valknut, for reasons that have thus far escaped me. It's crude, its lacking any kind of real refinement or useful features in terms of usability. It does add one key feature missing in the "official" DC++ windows client however and that is multipoint downloads. However, the curious part of this tale is this:

It's a qt app, thus designed for kde, except its interface is a clone of its windows cousin. It has an MDI window structure, the child windows have the identical window menu that they would have in windows, the overall layout of the program is the same, in the trivial details, yet in the things that matter, like the ability to actually manage all the data a program like this presents, its all different. Instead of the transfer window, you have half a dozen tabs full of multi-column lists with no horizontal scrollbar... instead of one single tabstrip showing every window open, there is a tabstrip that shows the hubs connected, but then each hub has more tabs inside itself for the hub, and any private message windows you might have open, and there's no way to close those windows without exiting the whole hub.

It just makes you think *what the proverbial f***!?"

Still, it's downloading nicely so I guess I can get used to it, and maybe even take their source for the core and write a whole new front end to it... one day.