Greg Auger • fluteflute

Last month my school entered – for the first time – the ESU schools mace debating competition. Kindly hosted by King Edward VI school we were supposed to be against Peter Symonds college opposing ‘This house believes that the Olympic Spirit has died’. Unfortunately Symonds had to withdraw, leaving us against a ’swing team’ from the hosts.

Nevertheless the evening was great fun, for both me and my teammate, it was our first attempt at debating. The other teams (St Swithun’s school, Portsmouth Grammar school, Winchester college and two from King Edwards) were all amazing debating cannabis legalisation and animal experimentation.

Long story cut short, much to our surprise, amongst privately educated sixth formers (our school is a state secondary), we received second place of the six teams! That means we are through to the second round this time to propose ‘This House would put free condom machines in all secondary schools regardless of their religious status’ with Lavant House girls opposing. A more challenging topic for us, but we don’t expect to be through to the next rounds, so there’s no pressure!

Frustratingly school has been canceled again tomorrow, thwarting our attempts to practise! Still its an enjoyable experience for the first time in my life, our area is very snow deprived.

I spent yesterday afternoon trying to write what seemed to be a fairly simple piece of code. I wanted to read the Name and Artist for every track in the Rhythmbox library and then write a new value to the Play Count field.

• My first approach involved XML parsing and editing, which allowed me to read the data, but I couldn’t see how to write it.
• My second approach came to me in a stroke of inspiration, write a Rhythmbox plugin which could use the built in controls. I failed miserably here too.

In both cases, I failed. I’m well aware this is mostly my fault, my patience when documentation reading quickly runs out. On the other hand the extensibility and APIs of free software is meant to be one of the biggest FOSS strengths. Unfortunately it’s not easy to get started. Far more ‘easy’ documentation, examples and tutorials are needed. Some sites like learningpython.com are really useful, but if we are to attract more programmers to open source easier tutorials and documenation are desperately needed.

Now, can anyone show me how to write my surely simple program? 

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Every object continues in a state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is acted on by a resultant external force.

From my Mechanics A2 Maths book that happens to be lying right next to me. No prizes for telling me who wrote that quote!

This news made me laugh. Microsoft are removing one of the hardest steps in the linux install process for new users!

Stuck with only one monitor, I discovered I can turn the monitor on its side to give me a vertical display! Very helpful for seeing more of documents, not so great for watching films.

The rest of my family happily plod on running Windows XP. It takes my brother a long time for his computer to be ready to be used after turning it on. It isn’t old hardware, so why? (This is after removing the useless applications that automatically start on boot.)

Why did I switch to Ubuntu in the first place? Simply because Windows was sluggish on a old(ish) Pentium 4, 512MB RAM machine (especially due to automatic update taking up 100% cpu). Ubuntu had no issues, running like it was on a top of the range machine. Speed is important to people.

Microsoft is realising this and Windows 7 will likely boot faster than we can at the moment. Not that open source isn’t improving, this is the kind of thing I find incredibly exciting about open source. Not to mention the five second startup recently achieved. A meanwhile environments like LXDE are perfect for older machines.

Faster linux, forced Microsoft to make Windows faster, which in turn is forcing open source to make everything even swifter. Don’t you just love competition!

iPlayer is brilliant. The flash widget works so much better than the other BBC windows media or realplayer streams – especially on linux.

My internet connection, whilst not being unbearably slow (anymore), grinds to a halt in the evenings or at weekends. The problem is this is usually when I want to watch a programme. If I want to watch a video at these times on YouTube I simply open a new tab with the video in, pause it and leave it until it has finished buffering the majority of the video. But iPlayer refuses to do this. Pausing it loads the next thirty seconds or so but then it just stops buffering meaning my YouTube technique won’t work. Furthermore, if I just want to go back to a bit I’ve already downloaded iPlayer insists on downloading it all again.

Of course Windows users can just download the programme and watch it later. There are workarounds involving get_iplayer and VLC, but personally I’d prefer for the BBC to improve what is currently a great service with a few faults.

Please BBC, make iPlayer usable for those of us with slower internet at certain times. Or shall I just blame Tiscali? Or BT?

Wikipedia may have a long list of open source hosting facilities but for me the choice in reality the choice is far smaller, between Launchpad, Sourceforge and Google Code. The reason? Time and time again I find projects hosted on these websites. They’re reliable and aren’t going to dissapear any time soon.

All three are themselves mostly proprietary software, although Launchpad has plans to open source within the next year. I am a great fan of Google products (although if there is an open source alternative it usually wins) using GMail, Google Reader and Google Search religously. On the other hand I am a great fan of Ubuntu and Canonical (even though I currently use Debian). As for Sourceforge, it seems to be used by such a large range of projects, even if Wikipedia brings up some worrying information about it’s forced proprietary license.

As far as the actual sites themselves go:

• Sourceforge does absolute everything you could wish for (now including wikis and forums) except perhaps bzr hosting. Perhaps my favourite feature is the ability to design your own webpages and have sourceforge host them. All this aside though, IMO Sourceforge is ugly, although I admit the recent(ish) redisign is a massive improvement.
• Google Code provides only the essentials: downloads, a basic wiki, bug tracker and then most importantly svn hosting. Of course forums/mailing lists are easily available through Google Groups, and calenders through Google Calender.
• Launchpad is very visually appealing and easy to use I find. It’s not perfect, lack of wiki support and other small issues exist, e.g. I would prefer for file downloads to be more prominently featured. It’s the only one here to support bzr (and forces bzr upon you) but that’s not really an issue for me as I use bzr anyway.

In conclusion: Sourceforge is ugly but does practically everything (but has that horrible license issue). Google Code is simple and clean for svn hosting. Launchpad also looks nice (although not so much as Google) and is under continual development, constantly improving.

So which will I use, as I can see strong justifications for all three? Probably Launchpad, simply because I’m familiar with it through Ubuntu (and Ubuland). It seems to me though that any major projects should have their own website, every project has different needs.

A month or so ago I started a music player project. It didn’t take me long to hit a rather major stumbling point. And that was the end of the project. Or at least until two days ago when I made the effort to Make it Work™. Since then everything seems to have just worked for me without much head scratching. That’s PyGTK (including Glade), GStreamer, SQLite, Mutagen, PyNotify, etc. And just to prove it, here’s my first screenshot (dedicated to the music I’ve been listening to whilst programming this weekend!).

But this is where the hard bit starts. Python may be easy, but good programming is hard. I have lots of dreams for how Glisten will eventually work (the picture is just me playing around with the libraries). The difficulty is being able to translate those ideas into a codebase that is organised and useful.