I was sitting about thinking the other day about why Microsoft are so underhand on occasion when talking about Linux and other open-source software. (I’m thinking here of things like an advert that claimed running Windows on a thousand-dollar standard PC was cheaper than running Linux on a several thousand-dollar mainframe. Whilst true, you might as well say that buying Word is cheaper than hiring a full time secretary to type your letters. They’re completely different things.)

The main news on bluefunk today is that the backend used to actually play the music is no longer mpg123! I took libmuine from my Muine install and combined it with some other code from Muine to make bluefunk use the same player that Muine uses (either Xine or GStreamer, depending on a compile-time option).

This gives several benefits, including: more information about what is playing — though this isn’t not hooked into the UI yet — and songs can now be paused! In addition, bluefunk seems to use less memory with the new backend. I have a feeling that there was a large memory leak due to the use of an external process to play the mp3s; I hope that has also gone away. As a bonus, the code is much cleaner and more understandable.

‘He’s just sleeping, I kept telling myself’ a report from a Guardian journalist who was on the scene when two US helicopters opened fire on a crowd of civillians standing around a burnt out humvee last Sunday. Definitely worth reading; pretty powerful stuff.

I just arrived home from the PJ Harvey gig here in Bristol village. Really, really good, in my extremely great and lauded[*] opinion. She was in fine form and seemed to be really enjoying the gig herself, something that I always think is great. After all, if you’re tired of gigging, why gig? To me the whole point is to enjoy yourself, especially playing music; if it’s a chore then go back to the studio and make up some more great songs =)

I’ve made a few improvements to the UI of bluefunk. You can see them in the new screenshot to your right.

The control buttons now have images as I worked out how to do it. In Gtk this is a little long winded, again because of the flexibility of the toolkit. You can basically put anything you like onto a button. This means that you have to build the image/label combination yourself, put it into another widget — because the button can only have one widget inside it — and then tell the button to display that widget. A little non-intuitive to say the least!