The world has seen a significant amount of complaining about NVidia cards (the 8600 has had it’s fair share of whippings).
However, I’ve come to a great realisation:
with my exceptionally slow nvidia card I can see absolutely every draw that occurs on the screen. Great for debugging paint events, and no need to export QT_FLUSH_PAINT=1.
All you devs should go out and get one 
My last couple of weeks has been spent focusing on getting cover art back up to scratch in Amarok 2. Cover art really adds a lot of spice and colour into the UI of the application, especially now that we are showing the artwork in the collection browser, context view and playlist. For those of you who are supremely organised, the collection scanner will now trawl through directories and try to pick up images it thinks are relevant to the songs which are being scanned. Embedded artwork is not implemented currently but it is certainly on the todo list.
Most of the relevant actions can now be executed for artwork: fetching from amazon, setting a custom image, removal and full size display. Music lovers with non English songs can now rejoice because we’ve also fixed some problems fetching artwork for album/artists that have accented characters, which Amazon seemed to have problems with. Another cool feature that we’ve experimented with is automatic cover fetching if there is an album with no artwork. Keep in mind that this is entirely tentative, as we are not sure that the false-positive rate from Amazon is low enough to justify polluting your database with random covers (although this will improve with our recent fix to non English tags). Maybe we’ll keep it, maybe we won’t, but it certainly is a cool feature which I’m loving at the moment - I am really lazy and hate having to explicitly fetch a cover, even though artwork is great to have.
In other news, I did some more work migrating statistics from Amarok 1.4 databases to the new and improved A2 schema. Here you can see how the play count, score and first/last played date for this track. Migration of lyrics and actual cover art isn’t yet implemented but that, like everything else is also on the cards.
Oh - one more thing:
My tickets are finalised, see you in Belgium in August!
What: Autopano (registered version @ 99 euro)
Verdict: totally awesome.
Pros:
- Very fast, reliable stitching of images together
- Excellent colour and exposure correction, even if you don’t lock your exposures
- Supports HDR imaging! Create panoramas out of raw format files and then use tone mapping software like Qtpfsgui
- Excellent barrel distortion compensation on wide angled shots
- Qt4! (and cross platform)
Cons:
- It’s not free software 
- Expensive
- User interface could use some work
Example:
Panorama created out of 8 individual raw images, then tone-mapped with Qtpfsgui. I can’t get a larger version because Qtpfsgui runs out of memory - the resultant panoramic raw image is over 130MB!
The Google-AU blog reports that Google is going to be holding another one of it’s brain busting adventures soon. The post is ended with the following text/clue:
Arrrrrrrr you ready? Onward to the first puzzle, matey! And good luck!
aHR0cDovL3RyZWFzdXJlaHVudC5hcHBzcG90LmNvbS8=
Soon :). 1210550400
Warning: links below contain spoilers.
Shouldn’t take long to figure out. The 10 digits of the final number is a dead giveaway that it’s a unix timestamp, and maps to a particular time. That’s soon.
The seemingly random string is a base64 encoding of a particular website.
I’d just like to wish everyone a hearty and happy star wars day.
May the fourth be with you!
Icon credit: everaldo
