/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.

I went to Beijing last weekend for the three-days GNOME Asia event. I was there not only for promoting KDE, but also to promote open source concept in mainland China.
Open source communities in mainland China are not as active as the European communities, neither GNOME nor KDE has a very good growing environment there. I’d rather regard it as an open source in general event in mainland China instead of a GNOME Asia summit.

Around 300 attenders went to the talks and BoFs, about 90% of them were local Chinese. There were employees from SUN, Novel, Nokia, Motorola, Redhat, and some Chinese local companies. There were students and opensource community members, and most of them were using open source operating systems. Although there are half of the talks and BoFs were introducing pure open source concept, histories and current situations, it is rather understandable that Asia people, especially mainland Chinese need this kind of education. As I introduced the scripting concept in Plasma and Amarok, there were also speakers focused on development and improvement of the current projects. About 30% of the speeches related to GNOME applications. ( the schedule is here: http://www.gnome.asia/en/schedule/ )

When talking about GNOME, many KDE guys may regard it slow and ugly, but I still enjoyed sharing ideas and different perspectives with the GNOME developers. KDE and GNOME are not really competing with each other. We learn from each other, and we fight for freedom together, especially now in China.

Freeflying and I talked about we would probably hold KDE Asia or KDE Asia Pacific some time appropriate in the future. We would learn from the failure and successful experience from GNOME Asia community and we should introduce the beauty of KDE to the Asia users definitely.

I found the “western developers” or the “far east users” actually didn’t communicate well, I will write more English blogs for the KDE guys to introduce the situation in Asia as I wrote many Chinese blogs to promote KDE. I’d like to share my point of view from the perspective of a local Chinese KDE developer.

Here are some photos token by the volunteers during the two-days-event, and token by me for the last day Beijing trip.

Booth area with people

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Firefox and Sun in the booth area

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Talks in a small conference room

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

The conference rooms were awesome. And from the European standard, you cannot imagine how cheap they cost.

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Stormy Peters in her talk

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

Kate was promoting Maemo ( hey guys, n810s )

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

I was promoting KDE, HAHA.

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing

One day trip in Beijing

From GNOME Asia 2008, Beijing