rullzer

I have been playing the idea to control my PC with a WiiMote for some time now. But this week I decided to actually write it.

It is a very simple program using bluez for the bluetooth connection with the WiiMote (which we need, obviously) and XTestFakeKeyEvent. This has as a side effect that it will only work with X running. But that should not be a problem since well. Who would want to control his terminal with a WiiMote?

The very very basics is done. The D-Pad on the WiiMote generates up/down/left/right-keyevents. I just need to find a use full meaning for the other buttons. But maybe a control file in which the user can specify all is a better solution.

Currently it is not published on-line (yet) since I need to clean the code a little.

I am aware some other programs can do what I want but after checking out the sources they just seem to complex. I want it all simple, clean and small..

Sander and I are thinking about adding last.fm support to QtMPC. This since the interface for requesting album covers, artist/album info is so much easier then the amazon-api.

For this we found a nice library: libmaia. Beside a small bug I found (which reminds me I have to report it upstream). This works very well. I browsed a little trough the source and it is pure Qt so it won’t limit the platforms QtMPC can run on.

Now of course last.fm support does not limit us to retrieving album covers. We can also submit the played songs to last.fm so the users can keep scrobbling. Now the only thing I could not figure out if submitting played songs can also be done trough XML-RPC? Is there anyone with experience in this are that can tell me if it is possible?

Other than this we are waiting for MPD 0.14, which will include idle (event) support, before go coding like crazy on QtMPC again. This since events will require a change in QtMPC. Good change which will allow QtMPC to have much less wake ups. Which is generally a good thing.

Of course we still do bug fixes.

This weekend I spend getting the srtm data (thanks NASA) into postgres to use it. To do that I used Sjors way to do that which is with python. I got it to work in no time on my Gentoo-amd64-dev-box. That was Saturday.

Now Sunday I spend all day trying to get it to work on the dutch openstreetmap server. Which was quite a bigger challenge. Since well on CentOS 5 not all packages were correct. So I ended up compiling a lot myself, this however is pain in the ass if it turn out you have to compile almost all dependencies yourself to.

But it works! Check it on altitude.openstreetmap.nl. There you won’t find much but check the wiki page for more info on how to get data out of it. We only host the srtm data for the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. This since the data is quite large and well, I am not the only one using the server.

But back to the title. YOURS is an OpenStreetMap routing service. Which is kick-ass by the way. YOURS supports the altitude data and give the altitude profile of your route. Right now only a plot of the altitude is shown but I guess we get some nice stats soon!

Now for a little problem YOURS does not work really well when using Konqueror. I tried to figure out why but I’m not really a java script expert. So if you are and have some free time. Please find the problem

Now for another project idea of mine (probably around Christmas): porting Sjors python implementation to C. This since well. I love C.

Yesterday Sander and I released a new version of QtMPC (0.4.1).

However when thinking about some of the features we would like to have in QtMPC we once again got annoyed by the MPD protocol. One of the main issues we had was that it is not event based, or even publish-subscribe. You have to ask for every little detail you want. This is a choice and it is true that this way you do not get unwanted messages thus generate unwanted network traffic.

But we feel that some sort of event based protocol will do a better job here. Lets say in the default nothing is send as well. That way mobile clients can still control the player without receiving anything unwanted. Or just subscribe to events related to playback. This way mobile clients are still supported but again. They do not have to request the status ever x seconds. They just get a message once had changed.

For full blown clients event bases is also a positive thing. For example the reaction time. When adding a new song. Right now this has to be noted by the client when requesting the version of the playlist. A simple message from the server saying playlist current newsong …….. (or something like that) could be send right after the song is actually added. It just makes things easier.

Another thing that kind of bother us that there was no inotify support. This would be great however. Lets say you have a music server running on your server. And add some new music to the collection. It would be best of course if it would find the new music. Add it to the database and notify the clients of a change in the music library.

Now we have not written any code yet. But we are thinking about it. For the music playback part we are planing to use gstreamer. Since well it already supports a lot of audio formats. And why reinvent the wheel right?

I’m pretty sure you all know what I’m talking about. When you are at some site and you fill in a form. Doesn’t matter what is is for. And you submit (everything you entered is OK) and a warning box pops up telling me that everything is send.

First of all why is this a Warning? I mean I know I pressed Send. And besides that if it is a waring they should provide me with contact information on how to get my submission removed.

Now apart from the warning box it could be a message telling me everything is inserted into the database. Let say they have some java script in the background that does that and once everything is inserted it gives the warning (still a warning is wrong but OK). However I checked the source of the site and guess what? All the button does is generate the pop-up after which the stuff is submitted.

Now I’m wondering why people do this? It does not look good, since it is a wrong pop-up box. It does not speed up the process. It is wasting my time. Which in general I do not like.

I really like bash.org. However there is no RSS feed available for the latest quotes. This makes me sad. However after a 15 minute php session (which was more than enough php for me) it is working.

Checkout my bash.org rss feed. It updates every 15 minutes. Enjoy

It has been long since my last post. Too long. I won’t fill you up on all the things I have done. Or maybe I will in other posts. But today I want to talk about openstreetmap.

As you might (or might not) know openstreetmap aims to provide a free (as in speech) map of the world. You can help by adding or editing the map. This is what I have been doing the last couple of months. Mostly fixing roads or adding new cycleways. Now of course cycling is good exercise. And it feels good to contribute to a free world map. However the real kick is seeing your changes of your work!

This can be seen on the main website. However that is only updated once a week. There are several other tile servers that serve a part of the map. These servers are generally updated more often. However when you use a tile server you are can’t change the rendering. So how great would it be to create your own rendering?

Check out my wiki entry. Of course it is a wiki so add all improvement you can think of.

When browsing trough my photo’s I found this great picture of a collegue of mine He’s cute right

We got a little bored yesterday after work. And destiny wanted me to find this huge bucket with smurfs. And well one thing led to another.

for more check out the album

Now that is biking