Report from the field [Executive summary]:
Some things good, some things Very Very Bad.
/end
Important note : if you want to join the bluefunk hackers — yeah it’s we now! (details soon) — drop me an email. Project will probably be on sf.net when it’s nice enough.
Today theire have been some changes to gmail. One of note is that they now display the number of unread spam emails there are. I never really look in the spam mail folder, so all the messages in it are unread. Google deletes messages it’s marked as spam when they are thirty days old; thus the number of unread messages is pretty much the number of spam emails I recieve each month.
Tim Bray has a rather paranoia inducing piece on DRM. With DRM (digital rights management), however, I feel that a large dose of paranoia is justified. Most of the DRM that will appear in the near-future seems to be following the immature strategy of “we’re just going to make something up, uh, rather than actually sit down and think about it”. Very soon this will mean that if you don’t happen to want to run a piece of software, you can’t listen to your favourite new song. Spy-ware for songs, anyone?
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.