If you ever looked for song lyrics online, you know how most lyrics sites are. Plenty of ads, popups, silly scrolling flash gadgets, bad punctuation, and no easy way to send in corrections. Why not apply to lyrics the same community-driven editing model that has made Wikipedia so successful?

LyricWiki.org has done exactly that, and more. They have provided an API, making it easy for media players to query the database and fetch the lyrics for a specific song. To get an idea of this project’s success, check out these stats. At the time of this writing, LyricWiki is the fifth largest MediaWiki in existence, and the largest wiki that is not a Wikipedia or Wiktionary. What an inspiring example of a community built around the ideals of improving content and making information available. What could go wrong?

Well, how about this. Who owns the copyright on song lyrics? Right, the artist who wrote them. And who represents the artist? Right, a record company. And what do record companies do to nice sites like LyricWiki?

The following message appeared in the lyrics applet of my beloved Amarok earlier this week:

Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions from some of the major music publishers we can no longer return lyrics through the LyricWiki API (where this application gets some or all of its lyrics).

My first thought when seeing that was, “Huh?! It used to work yesterday.” Apparently, less than 24 hours have passed between the announcement that developers need to change their applications, and the moment the LyricWiki API actually stopped working for retrieving lyrics. In a way, this is a good thing. I hope a lot of users put the pieces together and figured out who is really to blame.

Now let’s see how Amarok handled the situation. Within 12 hours, the bug report had a patch. In the next two hours, the patch was tested, and a glitch was found and fixed. The next day (still less than 24 hours from the time the bug was reported), the patch was pushed to Git. As an Amarok user observing this process from outside, I thought the turnaround time was pretty darn good!

Unfortunately, getting this fix to the users was not as quick and painless. Since lyrics fetching is done in a script, there is no need to recompile Amarok. Furthermore, we have KNewStuff for installing and updating scripts (among other things). So we are just a step away from allowing users to fix the lyrics problem using Amarok’s Script Manager. Why not take it?

(Besides the fact that the script is not on kde-apps, another minor issue is that it only works for Amarok 2.1.1 and trunk. Because of this, the script needs modifications to work with Amarok 2.1, which is still shipped by Kubuntu. But nothing that can’t be fixed in code in 5 minutes.)

Congrats to the Amarok team for being so close to greatness! Amarok was one of the apps that switched me towards KDE in my early days with Linux (the other one was K3B). So I’m glad to see it rocking even harder today.

Now let me return to LyricWiki for a minute. Can someone enlighten me as to why the music publishers would impose such a restriction on them? If I were an artist and you came asking for my lyrics, I would gladly give them to you and thank you for listening to my stuff. I’ve heard of people selling music, but… selling lyrics?!

I hope that as technology makes recording and distribution cheaper, more artists will take matters into their own hands and release their stuff independently.

PS. If you are reading this on Planet KDE and wondering who I am, Hi! I am doing a GSoC project in Akonadi / KMail, mentored by Thomas McGuire. I may provide an update about that later, if the mood strikes.

Got a laptop with an Intel GMA? Is Alt+Tab slower than you would like? Does Plasma take forever to move or resize an applet? Maybe you didn’t think it could get better?

Try playing with the options in xorg.conf. This is a good starting place.

In my case lspci shows ‘Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42]‘, and putting

Option  “AccelMethod”   “UXA”

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf has improved things significantly. UXA acceleration has been disabled by default in Ubuntu because it caused problems for some people, but in my case enabling it has made everything snappier, and also gotten rid of the drawing artifacts I used to see.

It also caused suspend to stop working (assert in X upon waking), but a recent fix to xserver-xorg-video-intel takes care of that. Distros might have released an update by now, but if you’re using Kubuntu and can’t wait, you can grab the packages from this ppa.

Snappy plasma, working suspend, happy user.

Update: Here is a post with another trick, using the -graphicssystem raster option of Qt programs. It makes switching tabs in Konsole faster, and it does wonders for long lines in Kate!

Sorry about the mess I currently made of this blog. I updated the Code section (aka. Magic) and had to create a separate post for every config file that was listed there. The news here is:

• I’ve become maintainer of the KCharSelect widget/utility app in KDE. I haven’t done much besides bragging yet, but I have some bug fixes (before 4.1) and features in mind.
• With a little luck (and a lot of free time if I find it), I will begin porting Filelight to KDE 4.

In other weakly related news:

• Theme change. Opinions?
• Blogroll updated. Forget common sense.
• I won’t be home until Monday. I’m going to make an ass of myself again in front of the unbeatable Romanian contestants at the .Campion final round
• I’ve been pondering whether I should finally get my own domain + paid hosting soon. I decided that it’s not yet the time, since except for a few gotchas (can only upload certain file types, can’t change CSS), I’ve been really happy with the WordPress.com service.

Now, if this post is not random, than I don’t know what is!

Finally,

after a complete redesign,

and a complete code rewrite,

released under a full moon,

feature-complete and usable,

[drum roll],

[fireworks],

Konvert2Ogg 0.2 is here.

(updated) Home page
SourceForge.net project page
KDE-Apps.org page

I am especially thrilled about what I’ve learned while developing this project:

• How to implement a factory in C++, so that when I want to add a new class, I don’t need to add references to it all over the place.
• As a bonus, make that factory a singleton ;)
• Lots of things about Qt, KDE, and even svn, XHTML and CSS, that I could only learn hands-on. (too many to list)
• I even fixed some bugs / made some improvements to kdelibs while working on K2O!
• Probably a bunch of other stuff I am forgetting right now.

Although the program now works and does what I want, this is no way the end of the journey. There are many more cool things in the can :D

In other completely random news:

• School’s out for a week!
• Konvert2Ogg, the KDE project I’m working on, has a new mission statement and code and GUI design. I am especially satisfied with the way the singleton / object factory (as taught by Alexandrescu) has turned out. With the factory and the base classes in place, adding support for Oggenc took only a few minutes.
  
  Wait for version 0.2 sometime in the next few weeks.

Speed writing means dumping the contents of your brain as fast as you can without stopping to think or check grammar. The small program I wrote today pretends to help you do it by launching a full-screen window to cover all distractions. It also keeps track of time for you and counts how many lines, words, and letters you’ve written. Here’s the source code (rename to .tar.bz2).

It uses the KDE4 libs, and the preposterous colors are the result of my experimenting with Qt style sheets.

PS. Bonus points if you find a way to crash it! (I know there is at least one)

Almost a week has passed and I’m still silent. No time? No inspiration? No will?

School is boring like usual. We’re not feeling the full weight of it yet, not until the exams start. Still, spending the first half of the day away from my PC makes me think of how much time I’ve wasted this summer… This year more attention is given to SATs and college applications than to school itself. Teachers had better be understanding or else…

Thankfully, audio-books make the days significantly less monotone.

I’ve been hacking around in KDE, Konsole mostly. So far I helped implement a couple of features which I’m awfully proud of:

• Double-clicking a tab lets you rename it;
• Double-clicking the empty space on the tab bar opens a new terminal session;
• From the menu you can now open Konqueror at the directory you’re currently at.

but I’m still floating around through the files and classes like a clueless wanderer…

So, risking to sound like Abby Normal again, let me just say: ‘later.

What is life without debugging?… :roll:

Getting to know the GNU Debugger can give you lots of power and speed. Unfortunately if you’re working on a big project such as KDE, using it is not always pleasant.

By default, GDB loads the “symbols” from the libraries used by the debugged application. If it wouldn’t do that, it couldn’t tell you the names of classes / functions / variables. When your application uses Qt however, these libraries are huge and can easily eat up 512MB of RAM in debugging symbols. That means that if you don’t have a lot of memory, each time you’ll run your app in the debugger, your machine will start to whirr and thrash. Swap space will be used and performance will go down dramatically.

Fortunately there’s a way around this problem. Robert Knight of Konsole fame shared this on the kde-devel mailing list. The trick is to tell GDB not to load the symbols automatically before telling it to run your application.

set auto-solib-add off

This means that your backtraces will be full of ???s. Notice which libraries your program calls and load them manually with a command like

shar QtGui

This will load all libraries containing QtGui in their names. Don’t try shar Qt as it will load the entire Qt, which we were trying to avoid in the first place.

After loading a library manually, issue the backtrace (bt) command again, notice and load the next library, and so on until you have a full call stack. Now check your memory usage. Relieved? ;)

Many times, however, you may want to attach GDB to an already running process. When you do this (using gdb app-name app-PID), GDB doesn’t give you a chance to stop it from loading the symbols. One way around this is to add the

set auto-solib-add off

line to your ~/.gdbinit file. That means GDB will never load symbols by default. You can return to the old behavior by issuing set auto-solib-add on at any time.

Konvert2Ogg is a KDE4 project I have started this month, and today is the big 0.1 day ;) It converts MP3s to Ogg Vorbis, effectively replacing the old command-line tool with a nice GUI.

Here’s the big shiny link:
http://konvert2ogg.sourceforge.net/

I’ve been pleasantly impressed with the service SourceForge offers open source projects for free: hosting, space for downloads, shell access and even svn!

Here are some quick steps to install Krazy, the KDE static analysis tool (code checker in more accessible language) on your local machine:

1. sudo aptitude install libtie-ixhash-perl libhtml-parser-perl libfile-find-rule-perl

   These are the Perl dependencies of Krazy. It won’t install without them.

2. Download the code in a new directory:
   

   svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/ebn/krazy/

3. Change into the directory and start the installation. You may choose the directory Krazy should be installed to, the default is /usr/local/Krazy/. I chose a location in my home directory: ~/krazy/
   

   cd krazy
   ./install.sh ~/krazy/

4. To make your environment aware of where the scripts are, adjust your path (in ~/.bashrc):
   

   PATH=/home/exit/kde4-devel/krazy/bin:$PATH

   Make sure you indicated the right directory.

5. That’s it! Log-out, log-in to update the PATH and type krazy --list. You should get a list of checks that are available.

Now, to check a single source file, type krazy filename. To check a whole bunch of them, use krazyall. Enjoy 8)