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Vorig jaar was een kalm jaar voor de VTK-WVS (VTK-Werkgroep Vrije Software), maar dit jaar zouden we er terug goed willen invliegen. Daarom organiseren we een openingsvergadering (affiche: PDF, ODG) op donderdag 26 oktober om 20u in VTK-Rood.

Ben jij zo iemand die liever een PDF dan een Word-document in z'n mailbox krijgt? Ben je al een doorwinterde kernel-hacker of heb je net je eerste stapjes gezet in de wondere wereld van GNU/Linux en dergelijke? Liever Firefox dan Internet Explorer? Kom dan zeker af!

Voor wie de VTK-WVS nog niet kent, wij staan in voor:

• Het promoten van open-source software en vrije standaarden aan de faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen en daarbuiten. (Bvb. Firefox, OpenOffice.org en Thunderbird in de pc-klassen.)
• Introductiesessies (LaTeX, Linux ...)
• Ondersteuning van nieuwe gebruikers, opstellen van UGent-specifieke documentatie. (Bvb. het VTK LaTeX en Linux forum, en de WVS wiki.)
• En nog veel meer...

Afspraak dus op de openingsvergadering van dit academiejaar, donderdag 26 oktober om 20u in VTK Rood.

Just a quick post to shed some attention on Songbird, a music player that's built on the same base as Firefox and claims to 'Play the web'. I came across a link to this screencast last week and decided to give it a try. Some screenshots:

The default skin


Surfing, using the alternative skin


The Mini-Player

The verdict: Songbird misses some basic features to become my number one music player:

• It lacks a system tray icon.
• It can't play non-ascii song names/tags (i.e. Laïs)

De Gentse boekentoren is genomineerd voor de Monumentenstrijd van een! Slechts de helft van de 30 genomineerde monumenten zal doorgaan naar de tweede ronde: de 15 monumenten die het meeste stemmen krijgen. Spread the news dus, en stem! (Meteen de reden waarom ik dit op Planet UGent wil krijgen :-p ).

Voor de fanatici: In de downloads sectie van monumentenstrijd.be vind je het nodige promotiemateriaal.

A few days ago Ikke was experimenting with FUSE. I had read about FUSE on Planet Gnome, but I never really looked into its possibilities. It seems though that FUSE could provide a solution for the first problem I mentioned at the end of my previous post. Writing a FUSE filesystem doensn't seem to be all that hard, and there are Python bindings too! (mmmm, Python :-p )

But the more I think about this, and the more I discuss it with Ikke, the more I'm convinced that this 'magic' directory should do a lot more than just move files. It should also allow me to browse my files in some set-based way. That brings us to the FCO's, or First Class Objects: a user should be able to browse his/her FCO's (and their attributes). When he/she wants to listen to music of artist Foo, he/she just browses to ~/Music/Artist/Foo/. (This example is based on the functionality of TagsFs.) Equally, when our user wants to open a file that belongs to a Project he/she is working on (Projects are FCO's), he/she browses to ~/Projects/Bar/. When the 'Bar' Project has a Subproject called 'Barbar', our user just browses to ~/Projects/Bar/Subprojects/Barbar/. (I'm assuming here that Project has a 'Subprojects' attribute.)

Not only should our user be able to find his/her files through this interface, it should also work the other way around: when a file is dropped into ~/Projects/Bar/ it should appear there each time that directory is opened. To implement this kind of behaviour, a database of FCO's should be updated each time files are being handled in these 'magic' directories. The files themselves could be moved into a seperate (hidden?) directory where they can be easily retrieved when needed. Ikke has some great ideas about how this could work.

But what if our user wants to group some files together that don't have any relation that can be expressed with an FCO? Answer: tags. There should be an extra 'magic' directory ~/Tags/ that allows the user to browse using tags. ~/Tags/Fun/ would contain all fun files, ~/Tags/Vacation/ should return all files with a 'Vacation' tag. Now let's say that our user wants to view all files that are fun, and have something to do with vacation. A possible path could be ~/Tags/Fun/Vacation/ or ~/Tags/Vacation/Fun/. The problem with these paths is that only interections between the tag-sets are possible. Unions and complements should be possible too...

This could be solved by adding special keywords to the path: 'and', 'or' and 'not'. The path for an intersection would then be: ~/Tags/Fun/and/Vacation/. Files that are fun, but do not have anything to do with vacation would be in ~/Tags/Fun/and/not/Vacation/. And files that are fun or are vacation-related would be in ~/Tags/Fun/or/Vacation/.

I hope I'll find some time to implement tiny parts of this in the near future. If I get something interesting working, I'll post it here. :-)