Until today. Well, technically yesterday night. Whatever.

Yesterday, I had the wonderful experience of meeting a fantastic group of gentlemen called MadRailers.  These are not angry train workers, but a Madion, WI based group of software developers with an interest in the Ruby on Rails framework.

Through their discussions (dubbed “lightning talks”, based on the nature of the size of the presentations), I was able to pick up on some valuable pieces of the rails environment: some things I had already heard about, but got to see them in use, some things were new to me, and made things easier, which is every developers dream.

A discussion on proper testing techniques with Cucumber spawned a rigorous discussion on the correct use of the tool, and how the tests should be best written. One side had that the tests should test one logical piece of the feature, while the other side believed that the tests should be written in a way to show the full flow of the feature, from beginning to end. I would tend to agree with the first argument; if your tests aren’t clearly defining something to test, then they aren’t going to be very helpful if they break, and you’ll spend your time hunting down the error that caused all your tests to fail, instead of having one test tell you the error, and fixing the problem.

Another discussion was from a newer member to the community (relatively – as it was my first meeting, everyone had been there longer than I had) about why he found rails, and what he enjoyed most about it. These types of presentations can be more helpful than they set out to be: I found out about RVM, which is supposedly an indispensable tool (I’ll have to look into picking it up), and based off of a discussion generated from the presentation, I was able to see Haml in action. I had heard of Haml previously, but hadn’t had the chance to use it; now I really want to.

One of the later discussions focused on a rails plugin called active_scaffold, and a javascript library called Top Up. These were both new to me, active_scaffold greatly simplifies the amount of work needed to get a fast, decent looking data presentation available to make sure that all of your information works together correctly, and Top Up allows you to create modal windows as a container for virtually anything: text, html, swf, and even avi.

Overall, I think my greatest gain from the night isn’t a technical one, it is one of attitude.  From the level of organization that was provided, to the way that the conversation easily flowed between presenter and audience, and to the level of interest shown in the technologies presented, it showed to me that there really are more people like me. Living in Dubuque has some benefits, but the drawbacks are present as well; I never would have had the chance to do something like I did last night in Madison around home.  Some people were surprised at the fact that I would drive over an hour to come to a program like this; I think it was completely worth the trip (even through the weather, which was somewhat less than cooperative). Things that I’ve striven for and missed at work, like automated testing, simplification, and comfort with a product are things that these guys have at their disposal; it shows that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and there’s something to aim for.  After talking with some of the members, it looks as though they had been in similar situations before, so it looks like there is hope for me yet.

If they end up reading this, thanks for a wonderful evening, guys.

Note: This project is still in progress. Please travel to the Google Code Project for more.

Just when you thought it was safe…

1.4 of the RBEQ, the Rhythmbox Equalizer, is out and ready for download. The big change here is a switch from storing presets in a flat file to using the GStreamer Preset system. As always, downloads are at RBEQ Google Code.

A big thanks to Stefan Kost, who left this gem of a comment on the 1.3 release posting:

Any reason, you are not using the presets shipped with the gstreamer plugin?
Look at /usr/share/gstreamer-0.10/presets/GstIirEqualizer10Bands.prs and the GstPreset interface.
Users can install own presets to $HOME/.gstreamer-0.10/presets/

Since I didn’t know anything about them, after looking at the aforementioned docs, I’ve gotten things so that they use the GStreamer Preset interface, and it is more well-behaved.

Also a big thanks to Hicham HAOUARI, whose awesome work has gotten RBEQ into Fedora! That’s awesome; I was nearly flabbergasted when I saw that. Thank you for the support!

Comments and bug issues are always welcome; please let me know what you find while using it.

The previous statement isn’t much of a surprise in this day in age, but I think I should qualify what I mean.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with the software internals of my new phone.

The Motorola Droid has been quite the versatile little device.  I’ve thrown nearly all I can think of at the thing, and it handles it smoothly and without issue.  In the past 4 weeks, I’ve rooted, flashed, reflashed (I’m indecisive), cleared, recovered, flashed again, and customized to my heart’s content. Currently, it looks like this:

That’s right… Shiny.

There’s a fantastic community of people who create and contribute to these modifications over at alldroid.org, particularly in the forums.  I’ve met some good people out there, who really know what they’re doing.

I recently dual-booted my desktop, so I could get back in and do some fun playing around.  Unfortunately, I chose a 64-bit operating system, and they’re not supported for the android source tree and utilities. (A poor excuse, I want to see what I can do to fix that.) So I’ve been debating the past couple days, whether or not to clear my new install, and put on Ubuntu 32-bit edition when it comes out, so that I can tear into the source and help contribute to the site.  Most likely I’ll wait until 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) comes out; I’ve loved what I’ve seen and played around with so far, so it’ll be good to get in there and play around with my phone’s internals.

One of the big requests on the alldroid forums is the ability to hot-swap phone ROMS without the need for a full reboot.  I think I have an idea on how to accomplish that.  In the same way that the Xen environment handles virtualization, we need to create a custom kernel that handles virtual ROM running. There would obviously be a performance hit, but with people overclocking their droids to 800MHz up to 1.3 GHz, I don’t think there would be much complaining.  Basically, we need to let the ROM handle hardware switching from one ROM to the next, and let the internals provide the rom connection.

Just having ideas.  Others include a complete revamp of the Web, and a new OS.  I’ll get to those at another time.

Other phone screenshots:

“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)

Note: This project is still in progress. Please travel to the Google Code Project for more.

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.

Note: This project is still in progress. Please travel to the Google Code Project for more.

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

Note: This project is still in progress. Please travel to the Google Code Project for more.

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!