Moved Blog to WordPress.com

I know that my blog has been pretty quite the past few months (I’ve been super-busy!) but kubasik.net was never really meant to host the traffic this blog was generating, so to make things easier on all 6 of you who read it, I have moved the blog to WordPress.com. There are still redirects at Kubasik.net/blog as best as it can, but let me know if you are finding dead links!

Port of Mirage to Windows

So, while I’m at work, I tend to have some sort of music going on in the background, since I don’t have my whole personal library available (at least, not yet), I’ve become a member of the streaming radio revolution. The obvious choices (for personalized stations, and music you actually want to listen too) are Pandora and Last.fm. I’ve really grown to like both services (although I have a slight preference for last.fm at the moment) the main issue for me is that I have 5,000 songs sitting on my hard drive, all artists I like, so why can’t I get the same awesome intelligent matching among those tracks?

Mirage is an implementation of a Masters thesis on music analysis, the proof of concept code was written in C# (under mono) and targeted at Linux, specifically the Banshee music player. When at home, I love Banshee, I’ve done my fair share of development work on it, and always have a fresh svn checkout of it to see whats new. However, work is on a Windows machine, and I want this cool nifty awesomeness their as well. As a result, I have embarked upon a port of the Mirage library, as well as the creation of an iTunes plugin to make this code useful

Since I figured some other people might be interested in this I made a project at Google Code.  There’s not much their yet, just some clumsy stabs at working with Visual Studio (I’m using the 2008 Beta 2… its ‘free’ as in Beer). Anyways, I’ve jotted down some erratic thoughts as to possible goals/design choices.

The current installer should run fine if you have iTunes installed, and parse mp3 and aac files fine. (sorry 32 bit only at the moment) However, I really need to do some more investigation before I’ll know if I’m passing the right data into the library.

Anyways, its cool and all kinds of fun to start using COM If anyone has experience with windows ports and wants to lend a hand or some advice, its all more than welcome.

Technorati Tags: c#, music analysis, smart playlist, iTunes, last.fm , pandora, mono, mirage

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Beagle Ubuntu Package Update

Technorati Tags: beagle, gnome, mono, ubuntu, gutsy, deb, bzr, bazaar, launchpad

With everything that has been swarming all over my plate lately, I haven’t had a chance to really keep on top of the Beagle packages in Ubuntu, and as a result, they are currently pretty crappy. I have a branch (meant to be feisty-updates, but I was in a hurry, and didn’t feel like branching), with a building deb configuration for Gutsy. I hope to have binaries/sources available for testing later this week.

The branch is hosted here:

https://code.launchpad.net/~kkubasik/beagle/feisty-update

Just do the following to try and build:

 

   1:  bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kkubasik/beagle/feisty-update

   2:  cd feisty-update

   3:  sudo apt-get build-dep beagle

   4:  bzr builddeb -w --split

It’s Been A While

A recent e-mail mentioning my Blog made me realize just how long its been since I’ve posted anything. This is just me saying that I’m sorry! I’ve been busy (duh) but didn’t really realize how much of my old development work was being sidelined until I finally started to catch up on my dev e-mails (4236 unread and counting….) So if I haven’t responded to something in the past month, I promise, I’m getting there. In addition, I just realized how horribly outdated local revisions/patches/branches become when you leave them unmerged/unattended for a month, so I have some real fun coming trying to get some of my cool metadata stuff in Beagle/Dashboard working against the current trunk.

Hopefully I’ll be back in a day or two with an awesome list of everything I accomplished/caught up on. However, its entirely possible that all I will be able to say is that I read and responded to my e-mail =/.

Switching to Yahoo Publishers Network

I decided to give the Yahoo Publishers Network Beta a try, I never really make much money from ads, but it will be nice to have something to compare Adsense to.

So feel free to play around with the new ads, and my new analytics system (sorry if its slow!).

Ubuntu – That About Sums it Up.

Its been an awesome week, its done justice to the last 6 months of blood tears and sweat that were poured into the great release that is Feisty Fawn.

A few things I wanted to mention, but first off, I should say Hi! My Ubuntu Membership was just approved, and I wanted to give a shout out and say hello to all those I haven’t met yet. Second, I wanted to do a little introduction, but given the general excitement, I figured I would link to my wiki and launchpad page, where most of you can get an idea of what I do, and where I can help. I’m always looking for new ways to get involved in the community, and if your working on something that you think I could help with, drop me an e-mail or find me on the IRC, and theres a good chance I’ll be all over it . That said I look forward to all the great releases down the road.

Just a few minutes ago I figured I would help the Ubuntu servers as best I could by seeding all the i386 iso’s, at the moment, there are close to 4000 seeds. I couldn’t ask the Ubuntu community for anything more, I downloaded the whole thing in close to 2 minutes, and am seeding now. Seeing as the bittorrent community needed no help, I decided that I would host the most popular iso on my site to help as best I can. (I thought about trying a full mirror, but this late, I figured it would do more harm then good, if I’m wrong, let me know!)

Here are the links, I know they aren’t for the main mirror site, but if you read my blog or one of the planet’s I’m on, and are thinking of grabbing the iso, consider using this link. If it doesn’t work, it means I could only be so generous, and I was going way over the 2TB limit this month, but I don’t think I’m that popular.

http://kubasik.net/files/ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso

http://kubasik.net/files/ubuntu-7.04-server-i386.iso

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, feisty

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More Cool Dashboard Stuff

Alright, before I get to the cool stuff, first things first, with current metadata system thriving,  and at Beagle’s current speed, if someone really wants to start to stabilize up the Dashboard API a little more, and start to make this something less abstract, IM,Call, Mail (either one), or even just show up in Cleveland, and I’d  be more than willing to help get Dashboard moving again.

Anyways, now that I’ve had another 2 minute excursion into the realm of getting Dashboard and its Banshee plugin building/working again, I have a quick 10 second screencast of dashboard being awesome.

http://qub333.googlepages.com/dashboard-banshee-plugin.ogg

The other cool technology that I really want to get integrated with Dashboard (or even Beagle) is the Open Natural Language Parser. In all honesty, there’s no  way to describe how awesome it is until you see it in action.

http://qub333.googlepages.com/opennlp-sharp.ogg

Sorry I’m too lazy to convert and all that jazz,  this is an impulse post that’s preventing work from getting done, so if someone wants to convert them, just let me know, I’ll host if you need.

Big Board and Dashboard

So there’s been a lot of talk about a cool concept program coming out of the blur of Mugshot. While the exact goals of the project do seems a little more Web 2.0, the basic UI layout and goals seems to be remote services for something like Dashboard. Dashboard was the precursor to Beagle, (initially designed as an indexing and storage backed for Dashboard) and is basically a meta-clue processing center which brings up information relevant to whatever your are doing. The initial screenshots are extraordinarily old, but last summer during SoC, a complete redesign and recode took place, which is what can currently be found in the Google Code repo. While Dashboard is missing a lot of polish, I would recommend taking a look at its clue processing system, as its really quire ingenious, and the dream of every Beagle developer to eventually have to time to make it a real working solution again.

Anyways, I know its not the exact same, but its probably worth at lest a few minutes of playing time.

Php Troubles

Sorry for the downtime this afternoon, had some php problems, luckily, sorting them out seemed to fix some other underlying issue, and the site is far more responsive. I hope no planets or readers got spammed in my attempts to fix everything!

Swiftfox, why are’t we good nerds anymore?

So the past few weeks have seen me getting more and more frustrated with the performance lockups in Feisty. As a developer who’s been running it for several months now, I can say I’m very tolerant and never upset, just try my best to help, mostly by just finding my own solution. So cruft and buildup is inevitable, lots of random libraries compiled out of the packaging system to get something working last minute, and I know my kernel is a wreck, as its seen more than a few major upgrades. However, when I started to read benchmarks where Feisty was taking a significant beating in startup times, I started to get concerned. I agree with the reasoning that dropping the heavily optimized kernels was a good idea, I had stopped using them a bit before, due to my own stability problems.

Anyways, this prompted me to make good use of my 500 GB external drive, and I am backing up everything as I speak, then doing an all-out optimization of my system with no regards to consequence (just for some numbers/fun ) and then installing the beta fresh (on a LVM’ed hard drive). I hope to have something of a comprehensive optimization guide for Ubuntu after this, but whats most likely going to happen is I get ansey for the new Feisty and LVM

However, as I started my quest for a meaner and leaner Gnome/Ubuntu harmony, I trudged through the debates on prelinks, preloads, and readaheads (do what you will, nothing fantastic either way for me). But the first thing that truly changed my day to day desktop experience and in an incredibly positive way was Swiftfox. Its nothing revolutionary in terms of ideas, its just done well. Swiftfox really isn’t even a separate distribution of Firefox, its almost the exact same code, just with highly optimized releases for each processor. My initial thoughts were that it was going to be worthless, and maybe for your processor, it is, but with the Core Duo, its a world of difference. At first I assumed it was placebo, or something else I had done, but when my benchmarks showed no real differences anywhere else, Swiftfox outpaced Firefox, by a lot.

Just for fun, I have a few links below for rough web rendering performance benchmarks, make of them what you will, but let me say, drop your composting manager first, both beryl and compiz hated me when I tried, its too many rapid refreshes.

http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time

http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed.php

http://www.24fun.com/downloadcenter/benchjs/benchjs.html

Feel free to share your times, either way, I’m interested to know if this was a ‘My Firefox was so messed up’ or if Swiftfox is truly that awesome nerd inside that drives the speed of software.

Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, swiftfox, ubuntu, gnome, linux, optimize, speed

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New Theme, OpenID, and Sorry if I Spammed

Hey, so the 10 of you that actually visit my blog and don’t read it through a planet, you may have noticed me having some fun today. I decided that my blog was going to support OpenID, despite my hosting provider not having the needed math libraries, so my apologies if logins aren’t as speedy as you would like. However, dependencies and the like were not the hard part of the process at all, the OpenID WordPress Plugin doesn’t really integrate into the site unless your running Kubrik or a derivative.

Luckily, there’s an easy enough solution, the OpenID API is pretty easy, and it didn’t take much to get everything (including Comments, and logging in via that link!) more or less running smoothly. On that note, don’t hesitate to nag, I hope its something people actually want to use. Its in that spirit that I have this little poll, no obligation, I was just thinking about pushing for Gnome to consider the MoinMoin plugin on live.gnome.org.

Ajax Polls and Planets do not like each other! Please participate in the poll here.

My last fun tidbit for the evening is actually really useful, if anyone runs a WordPress blog, they know that its not the fastest or lightest thing in the world. But, most likely they have heard of wp-cache2, and have reached a comfortable compromise. One thing that really sucks about wp-cache2, is you can’t compress pages and use it, which means were missing out on the biggest web speedup there is. I realized this evening that you can totally utilize php’s native compression, and completely bypass the issue. If you add the following to your .htacces in the wordpress folder, your looking at a significant speedup, at least, I noticed one.

php_flag zlib.output_compression on
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 2

I believe the compression levels are 1-5, but don’t quote me, I’m using 2 for the moment, and I’m happy, I might do some more tweaking later though.

Planet Beagle Random Icon Link Thinger

Hey, So I felt like giving Planet Beagle some random-junk-on-the-side-of-my-blog love, so this little guy was created, make of him what you will, but know I’m no artist. However, a small problem, we have no SVG’s or any other source-type format of the new Beagle Logo, we still ship the old one in our tarball, if someone knows where one is, I’d like to do some general random art/junk creation.

So yeah, I know its a little big, feel free to do whatever, but I completely didn’t think about the whole saving as a small raster, can’t edit much thing… so just know I’m sorry, and feel free to improve or recreate as you see fit.

Code to use on your own page:

<a href="http://planetbeagle.org" title="Planet Beagle" target="_blank"><img src="http://kubasik.net/photos/beagle-planet.png" title="Planet Beagle" alt="Planet Beagle" />
</a>

p.s. If anyone knows what these are actually called, I would totally benefit from knowing there real name.

Mirrors are Awesome

Ok, so as many of you know, I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and generally like to lend a helping hand wherever its appropriate when working on/with Ubuntu. With the latest release of herd-5, I realized the Feisty release is not far away. I happen to have a hosting plan with quite a bit of bandwidth that isn’t really used for much beyond this blog and a few of my own packages/sources. So, to lend as best a hand as I can for release time, I have decided to host an iso release mirror.

The actual mirror url is here.

I encourage anyone who is going to be downloading Feisty iso’s to try and use mirrors like mine (generally extremely low usage) to help us keep the master servers alive on release day. I expect my mirror will have the images within 35-45 minutes of release (if not before, maybe there’s some awesome way for those of us planning on mirroring to grab releases before the craze starts).

technorati tags:linux, ubuntu, mirror

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General Beagle Busyness

Hey, so I’ve been pretty busy (again! *Shock* ) with school and haven’t had a ton of hacking time as of late. I’ve learned this means definatly pick jobs that don’t require a lot of follow up or that someone else is waiting on.

Anyways, I had some beagle-fun last night and was somewhat productive.

1. I started a Launchpad Team and Branch to maintain our Ubuntu beagle packages. I think the trick here is going to be paying closer attention to Debian, as both an upstream developer and a 2nd tier packager, I always think I’m going to be on top of the Debian packaging solution/patches, but rarely ever am. So anyways, I’m hoping to parallel/stalk what they do so we can avoid more nasty merges right after Upstream Version Freezes are instated.
2. Documentation! A long while back I started to fill out the automatically generated Monodocs for Beagles public API. While they’re still nowhere near done (API Docs are a royal pain to write, you feel so redundant), I have started to pick that up again, so should you want to write some bindings for BeagleClient, start working on Dashboard again, or even start another search interface, at some point and time, there should be some quasi-complete API coverage in addition to the Beagle Wiki.
   1. And just so everyone knows, its easy to help out! if you have monodoc installed, you have everything you need! There is another bzr branch just for the BeagleClient docs. If I made you a member of the “Beagle Packers” team, you can commit straight to the branch, just let me know you did and I’ll update it on my server. As for the actual editing, it couldn’t be easier:

monodoc –edit ./path/to/docs/dir/ and your editing!

p.s. More Documentation news, I updated my libbeagle docs that are online too.

Technorati Tags: linux, gnome, mono, beagle, documentation,

Beagle 0.2.16 Packages for Ubuntu Edgy

Ok, Ubuntu Edgy ships Beagle 0.2.9, that sucks.

Beagle 0.2.16 is way better, so here are packages, add them, they are better.

deb http://beagle-project.org/files/ubuntu/edgy/ ./
or
deb http://kubasik.net/ubuntu/edgy ./

Ok, in all seriousness, I gave these a quick test on a virtual machine, but make no promises, so please try them out, as they should make your Ubuntu and Beagle experiences significantly better!