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	<title>Bangin&#039; on a Rok</title>
	<link>http://jefferai.org</link>
	<description>Amarok, KDE, and all that good stuff</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:31:13 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<language>en</language>
	
	<item>
		<title>For Shame, &#8220;The Linux Critic&#8221;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[(Update at the bottom.)
Some people can't be helped.
Today I saw a post by The Linux Critic. In the post the author, Trent, says "I’m really not a fan of the new Amarok", which naturally got me curious as to why. After all, if you don't know what problems people have with your software, it can [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2010/07/for-shame-the-linux-critic/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Prosody, the first password-hashing XMPP server</title>
		<description><![CDATA[(At least, AFAIK!)
Recently, I have been contributing to another project outside of KDE: the Prosody XMPP server. Prosody is fairly new (the project began in 2008) and is written in Lua. I've been using it for a long time now, and it's a really nice, rock-solid server. The code is also pretty hackable, being both [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2010/06/prosody-the-first-password-hashing-xmpp-server/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Amarok Mobile &#8211; The Beginning</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This post is actually rather after the fact. I've been super busy, and my blogging tends to fall way, way behind when that happens. But I wanted to tell people about plans for Amarok Mobile, where things stand now, and what needs to be done. (And how you could help!)
First off, I need to give [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2010/05/amarok-mobile-the-beginning/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Rescanning Single Folders</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Quite often -- or at least, "often enough" -- we get people that want to rescan a particular folder in Amarok. This is usually the result of them changing tags and wanting Amarok to pick it up. (Remember, for efficiency reasons Amarok watches the modified times of the collection directories, not the collection files, so [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2010/01/rescanning-single-folders/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>The Collection Scanner&#8217;s Ultimate Speed Bump</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A couple of weeks ago I spent a long period of time looking at ways to increase scanning speed. Yes, again. I had written previously (here and here) on changes I'd made to increase the speed of scanning collections, and I'd made a lot of other changes that I didn't write about. These certainly helped [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/11/the-collection-scanners-ultimate-speed-bump-and-cases/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Award-winning professor Philip Bourne to speak at Camp KDE</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Philip Bourne, the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award-winning computational biologist, will be speaking at Camp KDE 2010.
Professor Bourne is well-known in his field for contributions to open-source bioinformatics software and is a leading advocate of open access to data. Quoting from the UCSD News Center:
Bourne is co-founder of SciVee, the Web 2.0 resource dedicated to the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/10/award-winning-professor-philip-bourne-to-speak-at-camp-kde/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Speed never gets old. At least, in software.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As my regular readers -- such as that may be, considering how rarely I post -- may know, I've been doing all sorts of things to speed up scanning your files into Amarok's local collection. I have some really nice news on that front: a few goodies that will be very useful to you, especially [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/10/speed-never-gets-old-at-least-in-software/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Say goodbye to history</title>
		<description><![CDATA[And by that, I mean say goodbye to an historical (read: old) bug.
I'd heard these whispers recently about "whenever I add or remove an album from the collection and do an incremental update, my collection gets messed up." Okay -- we've heard these whispers for a long time, but there were so many other things [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/09/say-goodbye-to-history/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>AFT and MusicBrainz track identifiers, redux</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A bit ago I blogged about how Amarok File Tracking can now use MusicBrainz identifiers to do its stuff.
Then, a little while later, I started getting bug reports of peoples' music disappearing from their collection, and requested some of the reporters send me some files. One of the users did so, and I found something [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/09/aft-and-musicbrainz-track-identifiers-redux/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Camp KDE 2010 Announced!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I'm pleased as punch/as a fat cat/etc. to point you to The Dot (specifically here) to see the official announcement and some details. More details will be forthcoming soon (and especially as we get the web site in order). Start clearing your schedule and working on your presentations!
]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/08/camp-kde-2010-announced/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>AFT and MusicBrainz track identifiers</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A heads-up: Amarok File Tracking can now use MusicBrainz track identifiers for its embedded IDs. This means people that have used Picard to tag their files but not amarok_afttagger can still get some embedded AFT goodness! It also enables an interesting &#34;mode&#34; because it essentially enables song tracking vs. actual file tracking (which you may [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/08/aft-and-musicbrainz-track-identifiers/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Presenting the KDE network on Facebook</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Many KDE developers are on Facebook. A while back I wondered if it would be possible to have an official KDE developers' network on Facebook -- after all, there are networks for schools, jobs, cities, and more (and for many developers, KDE is literally or figuratively a job...)
As it turned out, there was a &#34;Kde&#34; [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/07/presenting-the-kde-network-on-facebook/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>DB changes &#8212; call for benchmarkers!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I've done some work in trunk over the past week that may have a huge impact on many of you Amarokers. Read on, and if you can do some benchmarks for me, fantastic.
 First, the schema/table changes.

We've seen some issues where people have, for whatever reason, ended up with InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM tables. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/07/db-changes-call-for-benchmarkers/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>More Info on Gitorious.org</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Today at the Akademy General Meeting, it was mentioned that Gitorious.org is being seriously looked at as a hosting solution for our Git repositories (as opposed to running an instance of Gitorious ourselves). Since I have been a major part of pushing in that direction, I feel that it would be prudent to make sure [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/07/more-info-on-gitorious-org/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>AFT fixed on the Playlist</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Yes, another one of my semi-habitual posts about AFT.&#160; Just a short one though.
In revision 992942, I finally fixed a bug that has kept AFT working for the playlist in certain situations (although it had previously been working for both saved user playlists and statistics). This means that if you have a track in the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/07/aft-fixed-on-the-playlist/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MySQL Server Support &#8212; Promised and Delivered</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
We told you it was coming. Sure, that was a while back, so you probably thought we forgot about it.&#160; Or maybe you thought we were simply playing politics, tossing empty promises to our users.
Well...you were wrong.  
It may be a bit later than planned -- we wanted to have it in time for [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/06/mysql-server-support-promised-and-delivered/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>UTF-8 and Your Music</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A heads-up on something new in Amarok SVN (and coming in 2.2 for those of you not living on the bleeding edge):
 We've had various bug reports over the years relating to character sets and collation, causing issues with matching searches for music or mis-sorted items.&#160; Well, hopefully no longer.
When you update to 2.2 (recent [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/06/utf-8-and-your-music/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>AFT Embedded Tagging: now on FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, Ogg/FLAC, and Ogg/Speex!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I've blogged about Amarok File Tracking before and there's a lot of information about it on the wiki.&#160; For those that haven't heard about the goodness of embedded file tracking, check out those links.&#160; There are a couple pieces of good news, and one piece of bad news.
The good news: in current SVN (and thus [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/06/aft-embedded-tagging-now-on-flac-oggvorbis-oggflac-and-oggspeex/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning (Redux)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A long time ago I promised to post an update when I got incremental batch scanning working.  Well, as it turns out, that happened a long time ago too, but I never got around to writing the Wiki page for it.  I've corrected that flaw.
Anyone interested in scanning their collection locally instead of across a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/05/amarok-power-user-feature-batch-mode-collection-scanning-redux/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Free Developer Sprint for North American GSoC students!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For anyone that hasn't seen the Dot story, check it out.
]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/04/free-developer-sprint-for-north-american-gsoc-students/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>GSoC 2009: Last chance for student applications</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A friendly reminder: you have just under 24 hours to get your applications updated (if you are a student...you've already submitted it, right?) or to get students to update their applications (if you are a mentor).  Applications that arrive before the deadline will not be penalized (and applications that arrive afterwards won't be accepted at [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/04/gsoc-2009-last-chance-for-student-applications/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Important: Submit your GSoC application *NOW*</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Google has just asked all students to ensure that their application is submitted *now*, even if they are not done.  You will still have until 19:00 UTC April 3rd to modify them, but Google is having trouble gauging participation because so many students (in all organizations) are discussing applications with mentors and refining them outside [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/03/important-submit-your-gsoc-application-now/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>GSoC 2009: Student Application Deadline Reminder</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Remember: the student application deadline is April 3rd at 19:00 UTC.  If you are a student, you should be checking for comments and revising your application while you still have the chance.  If you are a mentor, you should be checking the applications and commenting on them as appropriate.
]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/03/gsoc-2009-student-application-deadline-reminder/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Reminder: Student Application period for GSoC2009 open&#8230;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[...NOW!  Students have until April 3rd to get their applications finalized and turned in.  Good luck!
]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/03/reminder-student-application-period-for-gsoc2009-open/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>GSoC 2009: We&#8217;re in!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[We've been accepted to participate in GSoC 2009.  Hooray!
This means we have a lot of great work ahead of us.  The first order of business is that everyone that wants to be a mentor needs to sign up at http://socghop.appspot.com.  You'll need a Google account (which does not have to be a Gmail account).  Click [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/03/gsoc-2009-were-in/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>GSoC 2009: Application Submitted</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Today the application for KDE to participate in GSoC 2009 was submitted.  They check out our ideas page when they're evaluating applications, so be sure to get your ideas up there!  We'll hear back by March 18th.  Some other upcoming dates:

March 18-23: Students discuss applications with mentoring organizations (you can and should do this earlier, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/03/gsoc-2009-application-submitted/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Licensing to Kill</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Could FLEXlm be one of the world's worst-designed programs?
They've just rechristened it FLEXnet Publisher, and I can only think it's to try to get away from existing FLEXlm stigmas.  It's so bad that according to a VMware engineer I spoke to on the phone a few months ago, in the next release of ESX (whatever [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/03/licensing-to-kill/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A long-requested feature has been a way to decouple Amarok's collection scanning from its GUI.  There are various use-cases for this.  For one, it can actually help us with debugging, by allowing us to control the inputs into the scan parser.  For another, many people have all of their music stored on a single machine, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/02/amarok-power-user-feature-batch-mode-collection-scanning/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Camp KDE videos: Come and get &#8216;em</title>
		<description><![CDATA[After a month's delay, they're done.
In the interim (after the delays mentioned in my last post on this topic), my poor, underpowered desktop machine has endured transcode after transcode (from the original source material) and my Internet connection upload after upload as I tried to figure out just why Blip.tv wouldn't work with X or [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/02/camp-kde-videos-come-and-get-em/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>#kde-soc</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Just a note to make people aware that #kde-soc exists.  There's basically no activity in there right now, which is rather expected, but as SoC-related activities pick up steam so will the channel.
]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/02/kde-soc/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Qt 4.5 RC1 packages for Intrepid, built with -graphicssystem raster</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Update: These packages are for testing only!  Things that rely on the default native backend WILL break.  If you want a build of Qt 4.5 RC1 for Intrepid without -graphicssystem raster, try pollycoke's PPA.

The title says it all.  They're available from my PPA.  Enjoy!
]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/02/qt-4-5-rc1-packages-for-intrepid-built-with-graphicssystem-raster/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Where *are* those Camp KDE videos anyways?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Hello there.  I have good news and bad news regarding the Camp KDE videos.
The Bad News
I've run into a series of setbacks regarding getting them prepared for posting.  The first was that the Monday I got back from Jamaica, I had the following schedule at work:

9:15 AM: Check email
9:16 AM: &#34;My details have been confirmed [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/02/where-are-those-camp-kde-videos-anyways/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Oh god: I had to use VBA</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I'm working on putting together the Camp KDE 2009 videos using the excellent Kdenlive, a non-linear video editor whose name is, well, an acronym for KDE Non LInear Video Editor.  More on Kdenlive in a later blog post from me and/or Wade, but trust me -- with the latest versions it's much more stable, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2009/01/oh-god-i-had-to-use-vba/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Avast, We Be Getting Slandered, Yar</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Poisonous people.  They exist everywhere, sucking the light and good out of things and repurposing them for all sorts of nasty activities.  Like the rest of KDE, and the rest of the software world (both free and non-free) in general, the Amarok team has taken its fair share of abuse over the years. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2008/12/avast-we-be-getting-slandered-yar/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MySQL in Amarok 2 &#8211; The Reality</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There has been a lot of chatter lately regarding Amarok's switch to MySQL as its only SQL backend.  A decent amount is FUD -- either by people simply pushing back against change, or by people that simply don't understand the decision.  Some of it (particularly Adriaan's blog post) has been insightful and interesting, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2008/10/mysql-in-amarok-2-the-reality/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Amarok File Tracking</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I don't blog often, but when I do it tends to be meaty.  I won't disappoint.  I'll be covering Amarok, Amarok history, and a possible future part of kdelibs.
&#34;We can rebuild him. We have the technology. Better than before. Better, stronger, faster.&#34;
A little-known feature in Amarok 1, starting at about 1.4.3, was what was known [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2008/08/amarok-file-tracking/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Wanted: Portable Media Devices</title>
		<description><![CDATA[(I'm proxy-posting this for my SoC student, who already posted it on the Amarok blog, so that it gets wider distribution on Planet KDE.  Apologies to anyone seeing this twice.)

So iPod support should be pretty well set by this next weekend, and the next thing on my list is support for MTP devices.
So, what's an [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2008/07/wanted-portable-media-devices/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Popup Dropper &#8212; now with 400% more droppinness!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[First off -- the PUD now lives in the KDE Subversion repository!  It's at svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/libs/popupdropper -- it builds with CMake and acts as a standalone library.  Included in there is a testapp that you can build with qmake that I use for my testing and that you can use to check it out, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2008/06/popup-dropper-now-with-400-more-droppinness/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Introducing the Popup Dropper</title>
		<description><![CDATA[About a year ago we had an issue in Amarok 2 development because we wanted to be able to move portable device track access into collections (this is happening with Alejandro's GSoC project), but we couldn't figure out a good paradigm for accessing the various device specific functions.  There were some other concerns too, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2008/06/introducing-the-popup-dropper/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Amarok SoC: Media Devices + Awesome iPod support</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Introducing Alejandro Wainzinger (xevix on IRC), who is going to be working on media device support in Amarok for SoC 2008:

My name is Alejandro Wainzinger, and I'm going for a Computer Science B.S. at the University of California Santa Cruz, USA.  This summer, I'll be bringing back media device support to Amarok for Apple [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2008/04/amarok-soc-media-devices-awesome-ipod-support/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Go Solid Go!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I've been rather silent on the topic of progress in media devices.  Part of this is that much of the work has happened behind the scenes.  Just yesterday I spent hours editing device definitions in libmtp and libnjb so that they'd be able to propagate the correct vendor and product info through hal, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2007/10/go-solid-go/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>The *real* first KHTML browser on Windows</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There's been a lot of hubbub lately about Safari being released on Windows, which is based on WebKit, which is based on KHTML, and how it'll beat Konqueror as the first KHTML-based browser on Windows.
Then you hear this other camp firing back about Swift, whose homepage proudly declares &#34;The First KHTML Browser for Windows.&#34;
However, I'm [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2007/06/the-real-first-khtml-browser-on-windows/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Device Handling and HAL</title>
		<description><![CDATA[My blog's been rather inactive for a while.  Most of this has been because of being busy, and because of not doing hugely exciting things when I have had Amarok hacking time (mainly some bugfixes in stable branch).  But now something's come along that warrants an entry.
Amarok's device handling is pretty adequate.  [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2007/05/device-handling-and-hal/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Amarok on Mac</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Been a while since I posted, but I thought I'd give you guys a glimpse of a (very ugly) Amarok running on a Mac.  I used  the excellent packages from Ranger Rick to get KDE4 libs up and running (you can do it from svn but many of the tools required are most [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2007/02/amarok-on-mac/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Bang, bam, boom</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I've been knocking down my to-do list like there's no tomorrow.  I posted recently about the VFAT device rewrite; it is now complete and early testing results seem to be positive (it's been renamed to &#34;Generic Audio Player&#34; by the way).  In addition, ATF backend support should now be fairly complete.  I've [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2006/05/bang-bam-boom/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>More on the VFAT rewrite</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The VFAT rewrite continues apace (it may get renamed for 1.4 final).  Many functions have now been implemented, and far from scaring me, I now feel quite comfortable with the code I've written.  Just goes to show how taking a fresh perspective can really make a difference.  It should be working much better than the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2006/05/more-on-the-vfat-rewrite/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Karma!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[While updating my box at work today to kernel 2.6.16, I noticed that it now has support for Rio Karma partitions.  This rocks, as the Karma is a very capable player that can play FLAC (and I think Ogg Vorbis) in addition to MP3, but previous had no Linux support.  I'll have to find a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2006/05/karma/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>VFAT Rewrite</title>
		<description><![CDATA[    ATF stuff has taken a backseat for a bit while I rewrite the VFAT device plugin.  Originally I had ported the code over from the ifp media device plugin...the problem is that to deal with the differences between the two kinds of devices the code quickly became full of hacks.  Changing one [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2006/05/vfat-rewrite/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Rip your CDs with KIO and amaroK</title>
		<description><![CDATA[    Yesterday I commited some code to the Collection Browser that allows it to accept URLs with the audiocd:/ protocol.  If your machine supports this (the audiocd:/ kioslave is probably in the kdemultimedia package), you can rip by doing the following;

Open KControl.  Go to Sound and Multimedia-&#62;Audio CDs.  Configure your ripping preferences.
Open Konqueror. Go to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2006/04/rip-your-cds-with-kio-and-amarok/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Updated ATF Info</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ATF, or Advanced Tag Features, will hopefully enable a whole range of really cool features in amaroK.  I've updated the Wiki with new information that reflects the changes that have gone on.  Fortunately none have been in the API, just under-the-hood changes.  Regardless, as it's still so new and untested, I doubt [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://jefferai.org/2006/04/updated-atf-info/</link>
			</item>
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