No News Is Good News
For people out there who are not running Sound Juicer from CVS (boring fools), I'll provide a little update.
- The album artist on multiple-artist CDs is handled correctly at last. I finally ripped a CD which was tagged correctly in MusicBrainz!
- I've added error handling support, so if the pipeline has a problem you'll actually know about it.
- I've also made patches for GStreamer, so the cdparanoia element actually reports errors.
- Frederic Crozat has fixed various problems when cancelling the rip, and fixed drive detection with using devfs.
- Bastien Nocera has been quite so far, only adding a dialog for when the cdparanoia element can't be found. :) However, I think he cracked MPEG encoding crashing bug today, so that is good.
I also plan on getting the threaded MusicBrainz lookup sorted in the next few days. Now that the code base is working fine with signalled metadata testing the threaded signal emision should be trivial.
SPARC, Python, Jamboree
What a fun day. Played with Jamboree for a minute, which passes our medium-sized music archive test (7gig of music over NFS). It indexed the lot in a minute, where with Rhythmbox builds I generally did it in pieces, or over lunch. Send a massive list of requests to Johan, and am looking forward to the new RhythmDB work Colin Walters' has done, to compare.
Python is fun. I'd forgotten a lot of it but in my mission to write a tool to compare trees of supposedly identical Java interfaces, I've ended up with a hash of hashes, where some of the elements in the sub-hashes are actually lists of hashes. The children in this chaotic data structure are function prototypes, and I have a feeling these will be classes soon.
I interrupt your reading pleasure for this side note: my train home and the current time of dusk is perfectly suited to lovely going-home sunsets. Tonight is another lovely one, but it will never beat last Wednesday's deep orange through to purple clouds, reflected in the lake at Broxbourne. Resuming normal programming.
Also got to play with our Debian/SPARC box again. At some point in the past 64-bit gcc started to work, but after some testing it turned out that something was up. gcc -o test test.c produced a 64-bit binary, but ./test said it wasn't a valid binary. After a quick chat with Ben Collins, it turns out that the kernel needs updating: the userspace tools detect that I can run 64-bit processes, but the kernel is was 32-bit only. A quick update and reboot later, and I'm running 64-bit "Hello, World!". What an overkill. Still have the problem that gcc builds 64-bit by default, whereas g++ builds 32-bit...
Bastards
The annoying baspeople-of-questionable-parentage
signal controllers at Liverpool Street station have taken to playing Music
Chairs with us, saying a train will arrive on platform 2 until about a
minute before it is due to leave, when it then turns up on platform 5. Cue a
rush-hour train-load of people charging between platforms.
Hell hath no fury as a woman scorn. Or a commuter whose minidisc player decides to stop playing mid-track.
Life
This coming weekend Vicky and myself are off to see one of her aunts get married, this obviously calls for smart clothes. Of which I own little. My casual wear (jeans/cords/combats with t-shirt/casual shirt/jumper) is the same as my work wear (did I mention I love my office?), so I had to buy some new trousers/shirt/tie. I'll skip past huge amounts of dull trouser shopping and just say that I've gone for black trousers and a dark red shirt/tie combo, nothing too radical but quite cool.
Vicky, however, is something else. Damn. Cream flowing skirt from Monsoon, with either a blank sparkly top (Monsoon again) or a woolen jumper, and black pointy shoes. She looks terrific. :-)
Had a John/Allen/Dave around for a few drinks Friday night, which soon turned into pizza with 5 bottles of wine, or maybe 6. I can't quite remember. I must have been a little drunk: I said to John that going out and cycling together though the woods in the winter would be a good idea when blatantly it would be a) dirty b) tiring and c) exhausting. Not to mention d) knackering. Damn you, red wine, DAMN YOU.
