Exaile development has been very active in the past few weeks. We are working very hard to make our August goal. As well as picking up mathbr as a developer, we've had quite a few contributors adding/fixing a lot of things. If you're like me, this screenshot makes you drool (click on it to get a larger view):

Don't worry, we're still here, and still hard at work. I thought I would give an update since it's been quite a while since the last one.

After beating Enigmo in the iPhone, I was eager for more. I'm a sucker for these type of games. I downloaded the demo of the Windows version of Enigmo 2, and, to my delight, it works great out of the box in Wine! It's got tons more doodads and etc than the iPhone version, so I'd say it's a perfect upgrade path if you like that game.

Go to "Settings", "Messages" and set "Repeat Alert" to "Off". Enough said.

So, work got me a Sony PRS-700 for being awesome, which is awesome, so here are my thoughts so far.

I got an email from Amazon today saying that they were changing some things in their API. Aside from changing the name of the services from "Amazon Web Service" to "Product Advertising API", by August 15th, they are requiring that users of the API send the previously optional HMAC signature when authenticating. What does this mean to you?

That's right, it's been one year as of today.

Since I upgraded to Jaunty, I had been seriously irritated with their decision to change the way updates are handled.

Yeah, you may have noticed that I've been working on the blog lately. Poor openclue.org got flooded with already posted RSS feeds again. This happens all to often. Sorry guys.

One of my friends on IRC just pointed this out to me. Go to ESPN.com, and press the following key combination:

Following up on an earlier article, I'm providing a link to the Mac OS X installation instructions that Lasse Riis has written up for us on our wiki.

Following the tradition of retarded naming schemes, Jaunty Jackalope was released today...

In just the last month or so, there have been a few people in the #exaile channel on freenode asking if Exaile works in OS X. I honestly didn't know.

Today there was an article on Digg (read it here) that sent me down memory lane. Despite it's title, "10 of the Ugliest Personal Computers Ever Made", it's actually just a collection of pictures from old computers, like the IBM ICS. Reading through the comments of this post, someone mentioned the TRS-80. I remembered that my first computer was a Tandy. I started searching the tubes for a picture of it, because it definitely didn't look like the TRS-80.

So yesterday, I started working on putting together a 16 drive storage machine that will serve as a temporary backup for the holidays. The machine in question has a 3ware SATA RAID controller, which in turn has a configuration utility which I used to set up a few volumes. Once the configuration was complete, I saved it, and exited. At this point, the controller had to clear the drives of data, and because all 16 drives are 1.5TB drives, it was taking forever. I started this process in the morning, and by the time I left, it was only at around 45% complete.

At work, I use git. For Exaile I use bzr. I like them both quite a bit. At work, we use Gitosis to manage our repositories and I have to say, it's pretty damn cool. Nothing quite like this exists for bzr, so I ported Gitosis to bzr and called it Bazitis. The launchpad project page can be found here. Here are the instructions on how to use Bazitis:

What do I have to do to find a graphic artist in the OSS community? Where do projects like Gnome, KDE, etc find these people? In the few projects I've worked on, there's been no shortage of people that are willing to submit a few lines of code in a patch, or actually become a developer on the project by submitting more than a few lines, but graphic artists are few and far between. In Exaile's history, there have been 2 or 3 people that have submitted art, but only a few pieces. The rest of the art is derived from these few pieces; put together by other users and contributed as a set. I've looked for artists, and found some, and even offered to pay others, but it's hard to get anyone to follow through.

If you're following me on Twitter, you'll know that recently installed Windows Vista so that I could stream Netflix to my Xbox 360. That venture didn't quite work out, apparently Microsoft is working with Netflix and the new Xbox update due on November 19th will have built in Netflix support. Updates to the Netflix interface have caused the vmcNetflix extender for Vista Media Player to stop working. So really, I never needed to install Vista in the first place.

This week we've worked on the following:

This week I've been focusing on album art support. It was actually Aren's idea that, from the beginning, we should create pluggable interfaces for things like dynamic playlists, album art, lyrics, devices, and etc. This means that album art support wouldn't be hard coded to one place like Amazon, but anyone could add a plugin to support album art from anywhere. Currently, there are three album art plugins: local search, which checks local directories for image names like 'cover.jpg' and etc., Amazon, and Last.FM. The idea is that each plugin will be searched in order until something is found. Also Aren's idea: the order that each plugin is searched should be user definable...