Yearly Archives: 2006

vMovieDB 0.1.4 released

New features
– Movie tag categorization.
– Show only movies from this (Year, genre);
– Movie Information Box enchantments and slight redesing.
– Movie Image Viewer enchantments.
– Movie list colums are rearanged to a new more intuitive way.
– Users manual accessible trought the application Help
menu and avalilabel online at http://vmoviedb.sf.net/?documentation.
– gConf schema file.

Translations:
– Bulgarian traslation is updated.

Bug fixes
– fixed bug where movies having spaces in their filenames
won’t play.
– fixed bug where movie genre is always set to “N/A”.
– fixed bug where movie rating is always set to maximum
when it isnt’t changed during the movie editing process.

Code Cleanups
– Improved database parsing code, now the application shoud
preform well with large databases.
– New export functions.
– Now rating widget use text_aa[state] property to
colorize the stars. Rating box shadows are removed and
ratting background color is set to mach current
GTK+ 2.x theme background color.
– a lot’s of small fixes and cleanups.

For compleate list of changes see the ChangeLog and the screenshots page.

iPod Nano and GNU/Linux

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Today my brother brought itself 1GB iPod Nano. It’s black, it’s thin and looks so cool.

I just love the smooth lines and the color, but I don’t like the software wich comes with the iPod. iTunes don’t like some songs and the software instalation is quite anoying because it require to supply some personal information (according to Apple, this information is only requied for better customer support but I’m paranoic ). So after some Windows XP testing I brougt the iPod home with the idea to test it on my Gentoo Linux system.

Thanks to the perfect combination (not so perfect I still have some troubles with keeping entryes in /etc/fstab for my floppy and CD-R/RW/DVD-R drive and using them at same time with Gnome Volume Manager) of DBUS + HAL + Gnome Volume Manager the iPod was detected just after pluging it and mounted for me.

Here is the output of tail -f /var/log/messages

Jul 9 15:45:54 localhost kernel: usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
Jul 9 15:45:54 localhost kernel: usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 2 choices
Jul 9 15:45:54 localhost kernel: scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Jul 9 15:45:55 localhost usb.agent[9864]: Keeping default configuration with /sys//devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/usb1/1-1
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: Vendor: Apple Model: iPod Rev: 1.62
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: SCSI device sda: 1999871 512-byte hdwr sectors (1024 MB)
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: sda: Write Protect is off
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: SCSI device sda: 1999871 512-byte hdwr sectors (1024 MB)
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: sda: Write Protect is off
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: sda: sda1 sda2
Jul 9 15:45:59 localhost kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda

After sucessfull detection and mount I was able to browse the iPod as an ordinary USB memory stick, but scince the device for some reason can’t read mp3-s withought renaming them (sonata arctica – 8th commandment.mp3 will become S8xxx.mp3) I searched my portage tree (emerge -S iPod) for software. The result was the application called GTKPod, after emerge -av gtkpod and several minutes for compilation and configuration (how to configure GTKPod will be the subject of other post) I was able to browse the iPod to upload and download songs or listen them directly from the device.

Click on the image to view the actual size.

GTKPod is cool application, but when I have time I will probably contact the author to discuss possible changes to the application GUI and if he/she allow me I will code them.

Final note: DO NOT FORGET TO UNMOUT THE DEVICE before disconect, or your iPod will become corrupted. And sorry for my bad English…

vMovieDB news

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After some hacking new features are added to vMovieDB. Except code cleanups and some minor fixes, the two most important new features are i18n (Internationalization) support and movie search.