Corner of Seven

I wish to pose a question to the masses, particularly to other available software developers. Take this statement:

“The more screwed up the process, the longer you have a job.”

How does that make you feel? Does it bother or amuse you? Would you feel uncomfortable hearing it from a coworker? A boss? When does the statement cross the line, if ever? As a programmer, you strive to produce the best product possible. When is there a “good enough” point? If something is broken, but acceptable, is that ethically capable of being released? Is a project that has no (unit, acceptance, ui, etc.) testing capable of release?

Let me know in the comments.

(PS: wrote this post from my Motorola Droid, which I’m having an absolute blast with)

Not really an update of the software per se, just letting everyone know I haven’t forgotten about it. I have two computers at home; one desktop mainly purposed for gaming and general usage, the other is an older, low-powered notebook that I end up doing most of my development on. In the past few months, things have slowed down with rbeq because both of those systems have been outside of the GNOME environment. That’s right, I’ve moved to KDE4. I know quite a few people who find this odd, but it’s because of the new direction that GNOME is taking with G3.0, and I don’t necessarily want to be a part of it. I know some of those on the team, and I wish them the best, but the new changes, like Gnome Shell, frighten me off, like the initial releases of KDE4 did for me. I was a long time KDE3.5 user, and when they took the plunge, I got off of the boat. Things have been settling in nicely now at KDE4.3, which I’m running on Kubuntu 9.10.

That being said, I saw that someone was having trouble with the recent release of Ubuntu, and so I thought, as maintainer, I should, well, maintain. I’ve got Rhythmbox pulled down onto the laptop, and I’ll throw a couple of songs and the plugin on there, to see how everything behaves. Hopefully, there should be an update with some added functionality (saving and loading preferences was a big request) by the end of November.

Update: Today RBEQ 1.3 was released.  Find it on the google code page.

Yes, a month plus later than expected, RBEQ version 1.1 is out.

Updates since the last release:

• The window for the equalizer no longer wrests control away from Rhythmbox itself.  This makes it easier to change the EQ and play with volume and songs to get things working optimally.
• Added GConf hooks to allow persistent states for the equalizer between sessions.  Most requested feature from the previous release.
• Full base-code rewrite, much cleaner to work with and understand.

Next up, adding a load-save functionality to the EQ so that you can swap settings on the fly.

As always, the download is located here, and the install instructions are the same.

Download from http://rbeq.googlecode.com

Installation instructions:

• Open a terminal, and enter this:

tar -xvzf rbeq-1.3.tar.gz -C ~/.gnome2

• That’s it!  You’re set.

Hope that this release is as popular as the last.

Chris

UPDATE: The Rhythmbox EQ has been updated.  You can find it at  google code.

I’ve finally gotten to the point where my basic rhythmbox equalizer is up and running, so I figured I’d let the package sit here as an available download.  I’ll also link it to the rhythmbox devels, in hopes that it generates a bit more interest, and someone might come along and clean up and add to it more, in the true open source sense.

You can download the package here: Click Me!.

Installation instructions:

Uncompress this package using an archive utility (file-roller) to the ~/.gnome2 directory, or use the following command:

tar -xvzf rbeq-1.3.tar.gz -C ~/.gnome2

And that’s it!  Open rhythmbox, and go to “Edit -> Plugins” and select “Rhythmbox Equalizer.”

Screenshot (by request):

Screencap for the Rhythmbox EQ.

It feels good to finally have a project of my own out there to help the community.   Ciao!

Well, I’ve gotten myself a way to make money this year – I’m working on some research for one of my professors. We’re designing a knowledge base/data mining tool for HIV research, and we’ll be using a product called protege (http://protege.stanford.edu) to handle the similarities in the data and the operations on them. I’ve got a brief ontology ready up here, at This OWLDoc link. Let me know what you think.