…just another hippy blog

Two suns in the sunset

Originally uploaded by crayzy_ray.

Stupid technology!! It took me about 5 minutes to find my Doors CD with “The end” on it!
I want a 5 billion peanutbutterbytes drive under-your-skin-chip edition for my next birthday so I can find a song when my mind just won’t stop thinking about it!

PS: is GQView the only photo viewer on Linux that pre-loads the previous and the next images in the current directory?
And why does digikam’s ShowPhoto have 2 million filters and *NO* way to rename a file except for opening the file properties dialog? Am I supposed to use The Gimp to rename my files?!?!?

Ratts!! Are those such brilliant features that nobody else thought about?!? Please, somebody tell me why so many great open source projects lack in the most stupid but important features! Pleeeeeeeeeease!!!

Originally uploaded by Cyrius.

The first movida snapshot has been delayed for some days because I am currently working on some few features I want to be working in that release (at least to some extent).

The main feature is a new plugin system. The incoming snapshot should provide a sample plugin to import movies from the IMDb (and from other Internet sources sooner or later).

The plugin system only works with binary plugins (i.e. plain shared/dynamic libraries). IOW it’s platform dependant and you will need to build/download the plugins for your platform.

Embedding a perl/python/whateverelse interpreter would take away too much time and Qt 4.3’s QScript follows the ECMA script standard, thus making it not so interesting for our purposes (mainly because I want the scripting language to allow both file and network operations).

Nevertheless, the plugin system should allow me or other developers to write a plugin that adds scripting to movida, without changing the main application code.

Last but not least, I had to write a small (50LOC?) QLabel animator class because GIF support is optional in Qt and MNG’s are not supported by most image editors (specially on win32).

PS: I’m sorry but I didn’t update the SVN with the new plugin code yet

Lunar Eclipse
Originally uploaded by DarkFrame.

Ratts!! I have missed the eclipse!! The new Canon 400d I have ordered some days ago won’t arrive until monday or tuesday. And flickr is full of wonderful moon photos today
Well, this does not mean I would have been able to take such good shots, but I just feel I’m being late again on the big train of life (whatever this sentence means). RATTS!!

Now back to work. MSVC link errors and performance evaluation of parallel systems are waiting for me.

PS: my thanks go to the wonderful, reliable, fast and cheap italian postal service.

How Enterprise Software Is Designed
Originally uploaded by _mpd_.

You won’ believe it, but I managed to refactor the source code for Movida, finally, without (completely) loosing my mind.

The old code was quite a mess because I was doing lots of experiments with the new Qt 4 API.

It took me a few days but (except for some link time errors due to some problems in my msvc.net project file) te source code (or most of it) can now be read by another human being. This was quite important because I am going to put a snapshot on the website as soon as possible (another couple of days, I suppose).

Please cross your fingers and hope I won’t be wasting most of my time looking at Visual Studio’s wonderful crash reports. Ratts! I still need to install the latest SuSe on my desktop! It might sound pretty strange, but I was experiencing some problems when installing SuSe with a module of broken RAM

Here is a new work in progress screenshot of the new Smart View in Movida.

As you can see, a slider (this is just a test window, it’s not the final product!) allows to resize the tiles, still preserving the aspect ratio. Resizing is still slow (specially if you set a 5MB bitmap as movie poster) because the thumbnails are resized every time (if thumbnails of that size cannot be found in the cache) using QPixmap’s scale methods. And they ain’t the best ones.

The best would be to stretch the current thumbnail and to scale the full size image in the background, replacing the temporarily stretched pixmap.

And here comes a (buggy) animated screenshot of the new RatingLabel widget. A stand alone version has been uploaded to The OSDaB Project.