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.

MacOSX sweeties.

I've done it. It's a fulhack but it's working (at least for me).

Instead of fiddeling with fink, scons and python in macosx you can now download xmms2 binaries for MacOSX tiger! I have created a .pkg file for DrBombay that will install all the things you need.

Beware! It's not tested that much. but it should work (since all macs are almost identical).

Download it and test it here!

DrBombay

Enjoy another release by the XMMS2 team. This one fixes most critical issues found in DrAlban, except one that was found like a couple of minutes after the release by Anders. Bleh ;) It's an old bug that could lead to a deadlock in the IPC layer, it happens very seldom, so don't be alarmed.

I have not been that much involved in the DrBombay release due to real-life issuse. I am now situated in Santiago de Chile instead of Stockholm. I will live here for a year. This doesn't mean that I have quit worked on XMMS2 just that before I have everything in order over here it's kind of crazy.

Stay tuned for next release of XMMS2 which will be DrCox, we are still debating what should be included and not. Feel like contributing? Join our IRC channel and start the patching.