Metroid Prime: Corrpution

I got my copy of Metroid Prime 3 today. Strange since the release-date for Europe is next week :) Wonder if someone did something funny!

Broken free!

I just jailbroked my ipod. It worked without a problem with the iJailbreak application. The only thing to keep in mind is that when they say "this will take a while" they are not kidding. It takes forever to retrieve and upload the new firmware, just give it some time, it will work. But now I have a working calendar (with input events feature!), mobilemail and google maps. Works just great! Thanks internet to make this available.

Update

Spent the whole week in Berlin, at the BBWF trade-show. It was pretty quiet, but still it hurts your body to stand in the booth for that long. Berlin was nice, actually nicer than I remember, last time I was there (ages ago) it was still a big construction space, now you couldn't see much of that. Otherwise pretty eventless week.

This morning I picked up my iPod touch (yes I am trading the N800 for the iPod Touch, found myself a buyer) and I must say that I am sold. It's too bad that the opensource world has so little success in attracting good graphical designers, the UI of the touch is awesome. Looking forward to hack a bit for it in the future.

Also I pre-ordered the new Mesh DVD, I am such a fan-boy. Hope the material is better than the old Live VHS, it was a ok concert but pretty boring stageshow. This time it looks better, with the back projections and the full band on scene.

Next week I will go to Frankfurt over two days, but nothing else planned for that week. Next weekend is the Apoptygma concert and then my parents arrive for a full week of hanging out. Going to be fun but crowded I guess :-)

Rabia Sorda @ Ritmo y Compas, Madrid

Rabia Sorda is the a project by the singer of Hocico, Erk Aicrag. Comparing the music to Hocico Rabia Sorda is a bit more indie like, clean vocals with real drums and more guitar sounds, but still aggressive and energetic.

The concert was great, Erk had a lot of energy as always and it sounded good. Unfortunately the audience was missing, only 70 something people attending, a shame with the quality of the music.

I had a great time in any way and I look forward to see both Rabia Sorda and Hocico soon again.

Damn you Apple.

Why do you have to introduce a product that obsoletes my N800? STFU and so on.

Working on getting the new Qtopia 4.3 to work on the N800. My plan is to create a flash image that gives you all the Qtopia neatness. Stay tuned.

General Update

I am god damned tired right now. Yesterday I worked for a lot more hours than usual, because I had to go up very early (4:00) to make a installation at a customer site. That totally destroyed my rhythm so I am still totally lost.

Finished Pattern Recognition by William Gibson yesterday. It was ok, not as good as everyone says it is, but still pretty intense. I think my main objection towards the book is that the main story is pretty strange and in the end it doesn't get really that clear why everything happened the way it did. I have started a new Alistair Reynolds book right now, I'll get back to that.

Talking about intense I played a lot of World in Conflict the last week. It's a strategy game created by a Massive Entertainment from Malmö, Sweden where some of my friends work. It's a great multi player / online game and I recommend it to everyone into strategy.

Next week I am going to South America again, Brazil first and then Argentina. Two trade shows in two weeks. Going to kill me I think.

As for XMMS2, haven't had so much time for this lately. I have worked a bit on the new playlist in Esperanza, it will be pretty cool whenever I have time to release it. You can see a teaser here.

Paradise Lost @ La Sala Live!, Madrid

Last week me and Lisa went to the Paradise Lost concert in Madrid. It was a blast! I haven't seen them live in 4 years, actually that concert was the first time I meet Lisa ever, so it was fun in that sense also. That last time they where ok, but not really good. This time though they did shine! Th e new songs worked really really well live and the audience was really into it. PL played a good set with lot of songs from the new album (In Requiem) which was great since the new album is really really the best album in years. The did play some old nice songs and some surprises, I did miss some songs from Draconian though.

Pics are in crappy mobile-quality.

I got my XMMS2 tshirts!

I have got my XMMS2 t-shirts! Looks good, feels good! I have attached some pics! Go fetch!

Ok, I am a QZealot

After I have been playing around with Hildon / Maemo a couple of days, trying to make a PyMaemo client for XMMS2 I have a really bad headache. GTK feels soo different from Qt and frankly I couldn't loath the API any more. I have decided to scrap that effort, right now I want to see what it would take to be able to use Qt properly under Maemo. I searched the internet for good advice but it seems like all the efforts to make Qt work well under Maemo has been very scattered and disorganized. I have created a wiki page and try to collect information about how to "port" Qt4 to Maemo. If you have any information I lack please head over to the wiki and help me out!

On another note I am thinking about going to the Trolltech Dev Days in Germany the 16-17th of October. Come buy me a beer ;-)

First step towards a xmms2/maemo client

Since I got a Nokia N800 device, I just HAD to port xmmsclient to it. It was a lot easier than I had suspected. Once I had scratchbox up and running (this was actually the hard part), it was very straight forward to just do ./waf configure ; ./waf build. I had to tweak waf to find the correct python binary but nothing more than this. I now have xmmsclient + python bindings running on my n800 :) Expect a small client soon!

Post from n800!

I now got my new toy, the nokia n800! I am posting this using the built-in browser and it seems to work just fine, but why did they put the spacebar at the leftend corner? I will write a longer review later when I have had a chance to use it more!

Back in Madrid.

I am back in Europe again, even though my physical body is here my soul is a bit behind (Daimens law of jetlag). The last days in Santiago was pretty good, work-wise it was a much more relaxed trip than it usually is, which of course just means that usually it's insane.

Friday I felt like celebrating, so I went to "Happening" and had a great Argentinan steak. The service and food was as usual excellent and it was sooo cheap. The rest of the night was spent with the movie Equilibrium. I do like the movie a lot, it's a great dystopian universe and Christian Bale does a great role.

For the whole week I tried to figure out what I should do on my Saturday, I ended up just taking an extra trip around the city and not going outside Santiago. So I started to walk from the Hotel over to Domino's (the Santiago hotdog company) and had a Completo. A completo is a Chilean hotdog with avocado, mayo, tomatoes and onion.


After that I took a stroll up the San Cristobal as I have done so many times when I lived in Santiago. The smog was pretty bad that day (as you can see in the pictures) so the city was pretty clouded. It's a pretty intense walk upwards the "Hill" (In a country where the Andes is always visible, a 800m high mountain is considered a hill).


That evening I went out with Sergio and Jenny (old colleague + wife) to a old favorite restaurant "Como Agua para Chocolate", as water to chocolate. The place is mexican type of place with beautiful decor, great food and great presentation of the food.


The trip home was uneventful, I got upgraded to first class because of space problems in economy, I didn't complain much about that. Since I got the "sapphire" status in oneworld the "random" upgrades seems so much more frequent. Not a coincident if you ask me. I couldn't sleep on the plane though, so now I am in for a world of jetlag changes that I hate.

And oh, I am getting my N800 in a couple of hours. :)

Two days ago, I woke up ... under water ...

With "Crossroads" by mind.in.a.box we return to their intense electro-world. With cool vocal effects, multilayered soundscapes and addictive melodies this is nothing but a masterpiece. If you never heard a mind.in.a.box album before you'll need to know that they are thematic records with the protagonist "Mr. Black". At the start of this record (chapter three in the story) Mr. Black wakes up in the water and cannot remember who he is. The first songs deal with his memory loss (amnesia, into to the night) and then mr. black manages to figure out who he is (the song identity), but things spiral out of hand and our "hero" realizes that he is not alone (songs fear and stalkers). I won't spoil the rest of the story for you, you should listen to it yourself! The CD comes with a booklet that contains a small story written by the Austrian sci/fi author Andreas Gruber that takes place in the "crossroads universe".

I must say that I love the idea of not just writing cool songs, but also add to a wholeness, like NIN did with Year Zero. This gives you something more than just music.

I recommend everyone that like electronic music to get this record, listen to the stories and read the booklet, you won't be sorry!

Absolution Gap

Last night, while eating excellent mexican food at Taqueria El Rancho, I finished "Absolution Gap" by Alastair Reynolds. It was my second (or third, if you count that I just finished half of "Revelation Space" before it was destroyed by rain) Reynolds book. The whole book was very captive and the pace was incredible. From the start you follow three different settings in different parts of the universe, after half the book it merges into just two stories you follow. And in the last three high paced chapters all the loose ends tie up and you get eject into a reading frenzy that is unavoidable!

In Reynolds universe every book add to the details and it feels richer and richer all the time.

But this book is not for everyone, it's "hard" science fiction with a lot of reference to physics and space science. Reynolds has worked at ESA so he probably know more about physics than most people. His books are very careful to not break any rules of natures, even though they bend them pretty far in some cases (see the Hypometric weapons for example). The books also challenge the reader to follow at least three different story-lines.

I am looking forward to my next Reynolds book (I need to surf amazon I guess :)), in the meanwhile I will finish Gibsons "Pattern Recognition".

Nokia N800

I am seriously thinking about getting a Nokia N800. All the mobile phones with built-in webbrowsers and stuff has always let me down. But I would like to be able to go down to starbucks, read some webpages, update my blog and chat without having to bring the laptop. The lack of a keyboard is a bit unsettling, but I have heard that the on screen keyboard works just perfectly.

So maybe we will see a maemo xmms2 client soon? :)

Chilean...

It's funny how different the Chilean Spanish is to the Spanish Spanish. I almost forgot how funny and unpronounced they speak here. Some of the language changes I can understand, Chileans has a lot of indian (mapuche) words mixed in their Spanish, for example "Palta" for avocado which is Avacata in Spain. But there are things I never really got my head around... in Chile they never ever use "Vale", an expression for Okey in Spain and they look very funny at you when you say it. They do use "listo" instead (even though they can't pronounce it so it becomes "litto"), which brings us to the way the brutally remove 's' from words...

Anyway... I am still enjoying the fact that I am back in Santiago. Went downtown around lunch today and had some lunch at that place I "always" had lunch when I worked right next to it. Took a stroll around Plaza de Armas and used the metro, it all feels so familiar. Also, I miss the ensalada chilena in Spain, why don't people do it proper but here?

I am thinking about next weekend, maybe I should take a trip up to the andes or go out dancing at the disco place? Dunno yet...

Santiago 25-26th of August.

I am in Santiago for a week doing some work, but it also gives me some times to enjoy the city again. I really really like Santiago even if it shitty cold here right now (around 3-10 Celsius). It feels a bit like coming home again, the streets and houses all look very familiar.

Saturday:
I left Madrid late Friday (or very early Saturday) and arrived Saturday morning in Santiago. I could sleep ok on the airplane and I only had to kill 3-4 hours in the end of trip. I took a cab to the hotel and I had a flash of recognition when I rode the taxi into the city. The rest of the morning was filled with me checking in, unpacking and taking a shower.

I went for a walk from the hotel where I live on Richardo Lyon up towards Tobalaba and my old apartment. A bit of nostalgia hit me when I went up my old stream (Callao). By now it was time for a bit of lunch, so I went to my favorite italian (Tiramisu) and had a pisco sour :-) It was very good, haven't had any in a long long time. After enjoying this very nice meal I took a long walk to Parque Araco. I planned to kill some time by watching a movie and do some shopping. It ended up so that I had to kill some time until the movie started. So I went shopping, got a new pair of trousers, a music dvd with hooverphonic and a nice bottle of wine.

I watched transformers again, it was my second time. I selected that movie mostly because it was the only one that wasn't dubbed to spanish and was somewhat interesting. I still find it a OK film. The action is great and the humor is very funny. But it's not a film that sticks or leaves a impression. After the movie I went and picked up some sushi to take with me to the hotel.

Went home to eat sushi and sleep. I slept well.

Sunday:
Today I just had a walk to Los Leones, had some lunch at Subways and then walked over to a coffeplace and had a dount and coffe. Rest of the afternoon I have spent online. Tonight I will go out for dinner with my friend here in Santiago. Be back with more reports later on :-)

XMMS2 DrJekyll, Esperanza 0.3.0 and more.

Today I uploaded the final of XMMS2 DrJekyll and 0.3.0 of Esperanza.

There is a lot of changes in both. Noteworthy changes for XMMS2 includes:

• Collections. After almost a year in development (it was last years SoC) the API is pretty stable and very usable. I was amazed how much you could do with it when I started to convert Esperanza to it.
• Playlist plugins are available again. Lot of people have asked for that.
• WAF. We switched build system from SCons to WAF and it has helped us a lot (also created new wondrous problems).

The noteworthy changes for Esperanza is the following:

• Medialib browser.
• Collections API conversion.
• Stream browser.
• Lot of stability changes

Now I will probably go a bit silent within XMMS2 for a while since I am going to the WGT festival in Leipzig, Germany (drop by and buy me a beer!) and after that to San Francisco (drop by and buy me a glass of wine!). Hopefully this summer will give me some time to make some internal changes in Esperanza.

Enjoy the releases!

Open Audio Summit?

The idea crossed my mind when I saw this: http://2007.oscms-summit.org/

Wouldn't it be cool to invite all open source audio related projects and people and organize a OpenAudio summit? I think a lot of things could be gained from that. Like interoperability and idea sharing. I am willing to help organize to do this. What do you other projects think? Also we should locate a good sponsor to be able to do it.

XMMS2: State of the Union

I haven't really posted here as much as I should. I just wanted to quickly update the current status of XMMS2.

XMMS2 DrJekyll pre-testing:
DrJekyll is the next developer-release. We should start pre-testing this week. Jekyll contains tons of cool goodies. Most notable is the additions of Collections. You should all look into porting your clients to this concept since we are going to deprecate the API for touching SQL directly.

Google: Summer of Code:
We have decided to apply for summer of code once more. Hopefully we will be picked and we can accept a few student this year also. You can visit our project ideas page and give some insights on what you want to see in XMMS2.

Graphic contest:
We have a strong need for a graphic profile in XMMS2 so we are going to spend some SOC money from last year on announcing a contest that will bring us (hopefully) a logotype and a nice wiki design. This project will probably be launched within a few weeks. Look at this spot later on.