mDNS madness

I have spent the weekend trying to get my head around Apples implementation of mDNS. In my efforts I have concluded two things:

1. The code-monkey at Apple that created the API was probably high on LSD
2. I needed to create a wrapper as soon as possible to get away from the madness.

The result is GLib mDNS Wrapper 0.1. Download it here: http://exodus.xmms.se/~tru/gmdns/

This will allow you to integrate the DNS-SD API into GMainLoop and give you a somewhat more understandable API. It will only do browsing for now. Maybe I add more features in the future, maybe not.

Maybe this will save some frustration for someone in the future.

Qt4.2 Technology Preview

As many of you might already know, I am a strong Qt4 follower. The latest TP for 4.2 looks very very good. It's funpacked with a lot of new nifty features that I would like to start using in my programs allready :) Here is some of the things I know I can use directly:

* The "clearlooks" theme. This makes Qt4 look like GNOME. This will finaly (hopefully) stop all the whining about how "ugly" Qt4 is.
* GMainLoop integration. Qt4 programs can now share mainloop with Gtk Programs, great for interoperbillity.
* QCompleter. A completion framework that can make your applications complete the text input.
* QFileSystemWatcher. Wrapper around KQueue, Inotify and friends, since gamin suck nuts I really want this.
* Also the possibility to customize your widgets with CSS like syntax.

I will probably start using a lot of these features whenever PyQt is available for 4.2.

MallocDebug.app

Just after I released DrEvil I found this nifty little program included in XCode called MallocDebug. I thought, hey, let's take it for a ride on XMMS2. Man what a ride. In under 20 minutes I found four memory leaks that has been eluding me for a long time. I just love Apple when they do things as right as this. The program seems to work with libc in OSX to track allocations and then show it to you in a not-so-intuitive GUI, but when you finaly learn how to use it, it's great. You can sort the leaks on counts or used memory which makes it easy to understand if it's really a leak or just a one time problem. To bad I discovered it 20 minutes after a release :-)

Black MacBook

So I got myself a black MacBook and considering all the negative press this piece of equipment has gotten lately I got a bit worried after I ordered it. Now I have had it for a couple of days and I just wanted to share what I found out.

Heat
Yes it does get hot, no it doesn't get hotter then my PowerBook 12" that I had before. Dunno why people are whining about that.

Speed
It's SOOO fast. This computer out-preforms most laptops I have owned, ever. I really like how my macosx is all snappy and fun again!

Glossy screen
I like it! It gives nice colors, good viewing angels and it's really nice when I look at movies. Widescreen is a big plus too :)

Style
Yes the black makes it more sexy, I promise :-) Keyboard is as good as on my Powerbook, no problems here.

Overall
I am happy with this computer, I will get back to more information when the honeymoon phase is over, but I dooooo like it. No outstanding problems for now.

Summer of Code and Dr. Evil Testing.

I am mentoring two Summer of Code projects. Since we are still very early on I can't say anything about the progress, but I can comment on the projects.

TurboX2 - By DraX, is a webbased AJAX client. My aim for the end of the summer is to have my girlfriend use and like turbox2. :-) Since she is going to live with me I must have her stop using Windows Media Player for her own small speakers.... So the idea is that she is going to use TurboX2 that is running on my Mac Mini. Right now I am experiencing some really wierd preformance problems that DraX can't reproduce. I hope we will solve this pretty soon.


DAAP support - by Cole Thompson. DAAP is the protocol that iTunes use to exchange music between two instances of iTunes, so that you can stream and play your friends music (if he allows you too). Adding this to XMMS2 would be cool since you will be able to share music with iTunes user and also with other XMMS2 users.

I have a good feeling about both my students and I hope to be able to update on their progress after the 8th of June when we have our first checkpoint.

Oh, and the first Release Canidate of Dr. Evil is out there now. I think you will find it a even better and cooler version of XMMS2. Please give it a try and donate test data.

DrDolittle and Random hacking.

Hello everyone. It's blogging time again.

We released DrDolittle the other day. Check it out, it has some very fancy fixes and feature additions.

I have also done some random hacking lately.

• Promoe - A winamp2 skinable XMMS2 client. We are hacking it good and hopefully it will fill a void that we had in the community.
• Last.FM tool - It will get information about top rated entries over at last.fm and create XMMS2 playlists of it.
• Music Applet - A XMMS2 proxy for the Gnome Music Applet. This fits fine into your Gnome Desktop. It's still not in the authors main branch, but I hope it will be soon :)

Have fun with XMMS2 :-)

XMMS2 0.2 DrCox

Get your dope at http://sf.net/projects/xmms2.

Now the fun starts.