/me is looking for roommate during Akademy from 3rd to 12th July.

Or if someone is willing to sleep on the street with me, feel free to call me brother!

The new Amarok scripting interface only supports Qt script. But with the help of Qt Bindings, you can ultimate the scripting usage. Here’s a simple example of using .ui files in a script.

From My ScreenShot

A clip from my encoding fixer script, you can grab the full version from amarok/playground/src/script/encoding_fixer/:

Importer.loadQtBinding( “qt.core” );
Importer.loadQtBinding( “qt.gui” );
Importer.loadQtBinding( “qt.uitools” ); //load the qt binding

function readConfiguration()
{
if ( Amarok.Script.readConfig( “simple_Chinese”, “false” ) == “false” )
mainWindow.children()[1].children()[1].checked = false; //uncheck the checkbox
else
mainWindow.children()[1].children()[1].checked = true; //check the checkbox
}

function onConfigure()
{
mainWindow.show();
}

var UIloader = new QUiLoader( this );
var uifile = new QFile ( Amarok.Info.scriptPath() + “/main.ui” );
uifile.open( QIODevice.ReadOnly );
mainWindow = UIloader.load( uifile, this); //load the ui file
uifile.close();

readConfiguration();
mainWindow.children()[0].accepted.connect( saveConfiguration ); //when OK button is clicked
mainWindow.children()[0].rejected.connect( readConfiguration ); //call the function when Cancel button is clicked

Amarok.Window.addSettingsMenu( “configencoding”, “Encoding Fixer Settings…” ); //add the configuration menu
Amarok.Window.SettingsMenu.configencoding.triggered.connect( onConfigure ); //add a signal

Heads up! Amarok 2.0 is about to release.
I will be really happy to see more scripts ready on kde-apps.org. And I am impressed that there are 10+ scripts out there already even before the release of our RC version.

The mp3 tag encoding is always a problem for the non-latin language users. And the problem will remain for Amarok 2.0.0 final. I feel sorry but we have to postpone the fix till the next release. Anyway, I’d like to show you what is our approach now to this issue and what’s the plan for next.

1. There is an encoding detector from mozilla implemented in Amarok. And the detector code is also in KDE 4.2 trunk now. The detector can detect the encoding from a string. Since there’s not much information from the track meta data, the confidence of the result cannot be very high. From my own experience, I got 70%-80% of the correctness from my collection scan.

2. We’ve tried to use the detector on every type of the tracks, and most people complained on that case. So I limited the functionality for MP3 tag id3v1 only. The assumption is, all id3v2 tags were encoded in UTF-8 and all id3v1 tags were encoded in non-UTF-8.

3. So the 70%-80% correctness is for all non-UTF-8 tracks, but the detector some of the time cannot even detect if it is a UTF-8 string. so the correctness can drop to 50% for some cases, which is not acceptable!

Since Amarok is in feature freeze, I’d add functions to solve this issue someday…

Here is the plan:

1. We really do need to find a way to improve the accuracy of the detector. I’ll look into the code to see if there’s a way.

2. Tracks with the same artist or album should be put together to increase the string length

2. System locale should count. It could provide some clue.

3. Filenames should count. You can tell the title of a track from its filename for most of the cases.

4. I am writing a script, which compare the decoded result with the online search engines.

Sometime I just feel the work is not worth it, since there are not many non-latin language users out there. But how can we attract more mid-east and Asian users without fixing the encoding issues, can’t we?

But hell, mp3 tag encoding is not a KDE bug anyway…

We agreed to increase our efforts on promoting KDE in China as we always do agree that KDE rocks. And we also do aware of the project’s lack of exposure in Chinese market. We need change.

We finally made several decisions on 15th Nov.

1. www.kdecn.org will be used not only for KDE China’s index page, but we will startup a brunch of new modules, like the Chinese wiki, forum, planet, and probably the Chinese version of the dot. ( I’ve explained why we need a server within mainland China instead of using the European servers. The current one is in Beijing, so it might be a bit slow for those visitors outside China. )

2. We are setting up a promotion team lead by Freeflying ( Hou Zhengpeng ), responsible for arranging meetings, doing promotion events in colleges, and managing all promotion related stuffs. nihui is responsible for the KDE China news writing and reviewing.

3. Development team will be set up to group the potential developers to involve in KDE development. The team is currently lead by me, peterzl ( ZHOU Lei ).

4. l10n/i18n team will be lead by Lie_Ex. Responsible for translation, including the KDE programs, some news and webpages.

5. The three team leaders will propose their working plans, and the KDE China community council will be formed some time in the future.

It is a great move that we actually made things happened here, and I guess a bright future is ahead. I really like to give thanks to those who are contributing. Like Qi Liang, yuanjiayj, Funda Wang, and many more people that behand the scene.

First of all, I am giving some figures which the Chinese government wants the world to know:

1. China has the most internet users (253 million) (hey, there are 1.3 billion people in China)
2. China has the most broadband users (214 million)
3. China has the most cc-TLD domain names (.cn) (12.18 million)
4. China’s internet penetration rate continues to grow (19% now)
8. Not only Beijing and Shanghai, but China has Tier II & Tier III cities (93 cities have more than 1 million population)

They are convincing, aren’t they? These facts make the Chinese IT market really attractive to everyone. But before entering the market, there are something more you need to understand, and probably you won’t.

1. Chinese loves QQ and forums
77.2% of the Chinese people uses instant messengers(40% in the States), and QQ is leading the market with 77% market share. QQ has 342 million active user accounts, 42 million peak concurrent users, 26.1 million paying internet subscribers and 13.4 million paying mobile subscribers.

63% of the Chinese uses emails and 69% uses search engines(92% and 89% in the States)

People love forums and forum like websites. The idea of wiki and twitter are too new. The internet is a toy for Chinese people instead of a tool. The big IT companies makes entertainment contents and online games, which in my opinion, should be changed!

2. The Great Firewall and CERNET

The great firewall is a censorship and surveillance project. Not only some political contents are banned, but websites like sourceforge, wikipedia, flickr, github, feedburner and etc. are all banned from time to time. Flickr and wikipedia(non political content) are free to visit now, sourceforge was removed from the blacklist during the Olympics(was blocked again the day before yesterday), but github is recently blocked. The firewall’s behavier is very hard to predict. It blocked several of my friend’s blog on livespace(just technical blogs), and as I mentioned before, it blocks sites without any reason. YouTube, part of google.com can be in the blacklist at any time! Don’t ask me why, who knows!

Every public site needs to get an approval. You need to provide your personal info to the government in order to run the web(and even if you just want to buy a virtual space for wordpress). And if you want to run a forum, a 24 hour emergency phone call number is needed, thus they can ask you to delete any post at anytime…

OK, we would like to have a Chinese KDE forum since Chinese regards forums and instant messengers as the most important things. Why wouldn’t we run it outside China?

There are only two backbones in China, one in Shanghai and one in Beijing. The infrastructure quality inside China is good. I can get 250KB/s downstream rate in Shanghai, but the speed can be terrible if I want to connect to the servers outside China(1KB/s-10KB/s). The high school and university students use CERNET.  The speed within CERNET is around 1M/s-10M/s but the speed is unacceptable to outside China(<1KB/s?). Some university have only the local network connection in default, and you need to pay for the connection outside China. It is not special, and this is the case in Peking University, the best one in China. You can find any free movies, free musics and software copies within CERNET. Copyright? ah…

Things can be changed, and it is changing. We have many students using and developing free software. The situation in China is not hopeless. Many people use proxies to avoid censorship. That is why we’d like to have a forum and website of KDE for the Chinese people, and the server must be within China.

The government is not fighting with the free software communities. They just have no idea what free software is. We are making efforts here to spread the idea and motivate the people. And we need support.

Reference: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/china-ten-things-you-should-know-about-an-online-superpower