Present Perfect

Today the team released another development version of Flumotion! Strangely enough I still made it to the contributors list. Maybe I should look up what I am guilty of.

Here's what the guys say:

Yet another step in the long march towards a stable release. We made
sure we close more bugs than we create, hence the scarce features and
numerous fixes.

The bulk of the improvements is centered around the administration
interface. The configuration assistant gained in functionality,
stability and consistency.

More information here

Not sure why the guys decided to break with tradition and name this release after a restaurant (they probably assume it doubles as a bar). According to Flumotion tradition, micro releases are named after bars where we celebrate the release, and major/minor releases are named after the restaurants where we celebrate the release.

Today the team released another development version of Flumotion! Strangely enough I still made it to the contributors list. Maybe I should look up what I am guilty of. Here's...

Went to FNAC to get the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. For some reason when I left I had 80 euros worth of CD's in my bag.

The problem was I discovered a small section called 'tributes', where I picked up

• John Peel, a tribute
• Phil's Spectre, a collection of Phil Spector-produced tracks
• Kerouac - Kicks Joy Darkness
• Controversy - a Prince tribute with Soulwax, Hefner, D'Angelo and Stina Nordenstam
• Sing a song for you - tribute to Tim Buckley

I have a collector gene that keeps getting me into trouble.
Besides that, I also get the YYY one, a CD box called "Now that's what I call No. 1's" which at 10 euros for 60 tracks just represents good value for money, and some Arctic Monkeys EP.

Went to FNAC to get the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. For some reason when I left I had 80 euros worth of CD's in my bag. The problem was...

today give me, as a followup to yesterday's task post:

• an implementation of MultiTask that tracks progress across all tasks combined
• a new task that calculates the MusicBrainz TRM id/fingerprint of a track
• an example that uses the new MultiTask with the new TRMTask to calculate the fingerprints of a playlist given

Not bad for 90 minutes of hacking. I really like my expressiveness in Python. And all of this done while listening to beautifully mixed music with my current jukebox script. I'm actually enjoying hacking again!

The example doesn't actually save the fingerprints yet. My mini-goal with this for DAD is to fingerprint all audio on all my devices, as a basis to uniquely identify audio tracks, and then layer the rating of tracks on various machines on top of that information.

today give me, as a followup to yesterday's task post: an implementation of MultiTask that tracks progress across all tasks combined a new task that calculates the MusicBrainz TRM id/fingerprint...

In a previous post, I mentioned looking for some code implementing asynchronous operations that you can then attach a progress bar to.

I didn't end up finding anything, so as part of the ripping code I'm writing I prototyped a simple approach to it.

It's working nicely already; I have the basic class for a Task, a class for MultiTasks, and two runners - a command-line blocking one and a GtkProgressBar-using widget.

Here's the code if you're interested. You can run that file to see a simple DummyTask (one that takes 10 seconds to complete) progressing on the command line. Another example you can run (for which you need to check out the whole code) is examples/gtkchecksum.py which checksums decoded audio data using GStreamer and shows you a GTK+ progress bar. An even better example (but you'll need a complete CD rip with matching .cue file) is the ARcue.py program, which calculates AccurateRip checksums and compares them against the online database, and you can choose whether you want to run it in cli or gtk mode.

The cli one uses a GObject main loop to make the asynchronous code seem blocking again. I could easily add a Twisted reactor-using runner, but haven't needed it yet. Also, the one big annoyance I have with the otherwise excellent Twisted is the fact that you can't do much at all without the ugly 'global variable' that is the reactor.

I don't think I'm completely happy with these classes yet. I realized last week that unconsciously I was again moving towards an MVC approach with this, and realizing that also made me realize I'm not yet there. If you consider the Task the Model, then the Runner is currently both the View and Controller. I will probably need to split out the View part again, so I can attach multiple Views to the Model that is the task.

Also, I need to add a way to report on errors while executing the task, I'm considering adding timing statistics and finish estimation, and maybe something that allows doing global progress and subtask progress, the way ripping programs do too (showing current track percentage and complete disc percentage). Not sure how much I want to overengineer it though.

Feel free to comment, suggest improvements, or show me similar concepts and implementations!

In a previous post, I mentioned looking for some code implementing asynchronous operations that you can then attach a progress bar to. I didn't end up finding anything, so as...

Today, Jan and I did some hacking over Skype! It was fun, worked out well. Jaime was off shopping and Kristien had her radio show and some interview with Flowrida.

Jan mostly helped me with stuff though, he didn't seem to need any help from me. I started ripping CD's to flac this week, and was very disappointed yesterday when my jukebox program didn't seem to work at all with .flac files. With Jan's help I narrowed down the problem, checked with Edward, then I fixed it on a git branch.

I also set up http publishing of my personal git branches, and a cgit installation. cgit was a little more difficult to configure than I'd like, the documentation isn't much help. I'll keep that for a separate post though.

Anyway, my jukebox is happily playing again with all the freshly and accurately ripped .flac files I have. My life just improved by 20% !

Although, I don't know whether it was switching to uridecodebin for decoding, or some bug in .flac, but sometimes the composition just seems to jump a few seconds.

I'll worry about that later, first fix some more bugs and make the jukebox example a bit more featureful. I'm wondering what to do on 'next' and 'previous' - rearrange the composition on the fly to match ? I hope gnonlin will be able to keep up...

Tip from our hacking session: add persistent history to your gdb session by putting the following in .gdbinit:

set history filename ~/.gdbhistory
set history save on


Today, Jan and I did some hacking over Skype! It was fun, worked out well. Jaime was off shopping and Kristien had her radio show and some interview with Flowrida....