Officially, Blurb supports Booksmart only on Windows and Mac, however it is a generic Java application, and as such can easily be ran on Linux – with some finagling. You could try and run it through wine, but the layer of emulated Windows on top of the Java makes for an annoyingly sluggish experience. To make it easier for others, I’ve created a little script that will automatically download, convert, and install Booksmart in Linux.

[stextbox id="info"]Note: While, the following instructions are Ubuntu specific, a determined other-distro user could replace the apt calls in the script with calls to the appropriate package management tool.[/stextbox]

[stextbox id="download" big="true"]
Blurb Booksmart Installer
Author: Ramblurr, version: 0.2, updated: December 12, 2009,
Requires Java Version 1.6 or higher, Ubuntu Linux.[download id="1"][/stextbox]

Setting up the Location

After downloading the package, open up a terminal, and then extract the contents of the tarball.

tar zxf Blurb_Booksmart_Installer-0.2.tar.gz

Change to the directory where you want booksmart installed, and copy install.sh to that location.

Example:
cd /home/username/bin/
cp /path/to/Blurb_Booksmart_Installer/install.sh .

Run the Installer

With the terminal still open to the location where you want booksmart installed, execute the install script. Don’t forget to give it executable permissions first.

chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

It will download all the necessary files to install booksmart 2.5.1. The process might take awhile on a slow internet connection.

Edit the launcher script

Once the script has finished executing, Booksmart should be installed in the current directory. You’ll need to edit the launcher script, so it knows where Booksmart is. The launcher script is booksmart.sh in the tarball.

Open it in an editor and edit the second line to point to the directory you created in step slash booksmart.

Example: BOOKSMART_PATH=/home/username/bin/booksmart

You can put this launcher script anywhere and use it to start bookmark. Don’t forget to give it executable permissions.

By default, Booksmart saves its data in $HOME/My Documents if you don’t like this you can change it by opening Booksmart and running File > Change Data Location.

Booksmart running in Kubuntu

Before coming over I was told (by T-mobile) that my phone absolutely would not work, because the G1 only works with the “google network” that T-Mobile has exclusive access to. Without this “google network”, I was told, my phone wouldn’t turn on and was essentially a paper weight (exact words). Yeah right.

I convinced the customer service representative to give me my unlock code (which you are entitled to after 90 days of service), and told her I didn’t want the outrageous international plan (15$/megabyte). Note: it takes 1 or 2 days for the unlock code request to be processed and emailed to you.

Getting my G1 working in Egypt was quite simple. I bought a prepaid sim card from one of the Vodafone shops you’ll find on every street (literally) for 45 L.E. (approx. $6) and a 100 L.E. (approx $17) card for 100 minutes.

After putting the simcard in and powering up the phone, I was greeted with an unlock dialog into which I entered the T-Mobile unlock code. Poof! Instant cellular access. 3G service was slightly more complicated. You have to add a new APN in the mobile network settings.

Instructions for adding the Vodafone Egypt APN

1. Open Settings > Wireless Controls > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names
2. Click Menu > Add APN
3. Enter the following information
   Name: Vodafone Internet
   APN: internet.vodafone.net
   User: internet
   Pass: internet
   APN type: default
4. Leave every other field at the default setting
5. Reboot the phone
6. Enjoy 3G service

My hands are cramping from writing this post on the tiny keyboard. Pardon any spelling/grammar mistakes. My hands are done.

Not only does the application bring the full power of last.fm radio to the Android platform, but it also demonstrates the power of open source development in a commercial setting. When last.fm expressed interest around late November in developing an android application to be featured in the Marketplace, Google responded with an enthusiastic thumbs up but included a deadline of mid-January. A month and a half is an incredibly short turnaround time for a fully featured mobile application.

Last.fm contacted several 3rd-party developers who had already began work on their own last.fm android clients, and suggested that we work together and pool our resources. You can take a peek at the results below. I am proud of our product after such a short development cycle, even though there exist several outstanding bugs at launch time. We already have a slew of bug-fixes and feature additions in the tubes for another release.

Keep an eye out for posts announcing the opening of the site where the source code can be found, as well as bugs and feature requests submitted. Due to licensing issues the source code repository and issue tracker will be delayed several days.

(click for full image)

I’d write more, but the ocean is calling and I still need to get a Pina Colada. But before I go, check out some photos from the past couple days.

I couldn’t have been more mistaken. NPR’s API is no small potatoes. Just take a look at the comprehensive Query Generator to get an inkling of the types of complex queries you can create. Looking at the Query Generator also sheds some light on the content you can retrieve using the API. The API’s main page says the API exposes the entire NPR archive of content starting from the launch of the NPR website in 1995. Just how big is this archive? Over 250,000 stories including text, images, video, and audio!

This quote from the article announcing the API caught my eye immediately:

There were quite a few questions that we addressed when developing the API, but one thing that was not really in question was the need to open as much of our content as possible.¹

This isn’t the first open media API. BBC was the first to offer a public open access API, however BBC’s API is restricted to the content from the past 7-days. Seven days! That’s nothing compared to the (approx.) 4748 days – and counting – that NPR’s API offers. NPR and the BBC are two large companies leading the technological shift towards open and free information.

But that’s only half the story.

After discovering this fantastic API I had to do something with it, and the new service architecture in Amarok 2 provided the perfect platform to build a NPR mashup. That was several months ago, and at the time the scripting API in Amarok was still being flesh out (Thanks to Peter). On Monday I noticed the BBC scriptable service Nikolaj had created for Amarok 2. I happened to have several hours of free time, so I cooked up a similar service for NPR:

You can get it at kde-apps or via the “Get More Scripts” button in Amarok 2′s Script Manager.

There is definitely room for improvement and in fact here are a few things I plan to do with it:

• Display more than 20 stories under a category
• Sort content by date
• Support searching
• Display the full articles, with images, in the context view

Major props and thanks go out to the entire NPR technical team and all the contributors who made API a reality.

1. NPR API is Live on NPR.org

That deserves a post unto itself, but I wanted to share a solution an annoying issue regarding switching from Verizon to T-Mobile. Before I got the G1 I had a LG-VX9800 (yes, ancient, I know) with around 200 contacts. Obviously one of the first things I wanted to do when I got my G1 was transfer all my contacts from the LG to the G1. There are several ways to do this

1. Go to a Verizon store and pay $10 for data backup
2. Buy a USB Cable for the LG-VX9800, and use bitpim
3. Manually copy (type) your contacts into the G1/Gmail
4. Use my method

There was no way I was going to pay $10 for what should be a simple “Export,” so #1 was crossed out. I’m impatient and didn’t want to wait for a cable to be delivered and neither did I want to pay the money for one. There goes #2. I didn’t even consider #3; I just listed it for completeness sake.

That leaves my somewhat difficult and unreliable method. Basically, what I do is use Verizon’s “Backup Assistant” tool to send my contacts to Verizon’s website. Then I save the source of the “Print Contacts” page – because there is no export feature. With a little ruby I parse the file into Gmail’s CSV format and import the file via the Gmail contacts page.

Here’s a quick howto.

• On your Verizon phone go to “Get Going -> Get a New App -> Backup Assistant” and install it for $1.50 a month.
• Follow the prompts and backup your contacts.
• Go to the Verizon backup website and sign in.
• View your contacts and click the “Print Contacts” link. Save the source of this page to a file
• Download this script and run it against the saved html file. Save the output in “contacts.csv”
• Go to the Contacts page in Gmail and select Import, and upload “contacts.csv” Note: I suggest using the “add these imported contacts to” a new group feature. Because you will likely have to merge and cleanup the imported contacts.
• Import and Enjoy

IMPORTANT: My script only grabs the following information from the Verizon contact list: Name, Email, Work Phone, Mobile Phone, and Home Phone.

So, lets see… last time I posted I was en route to Akademy 2008 (the KDE developers conference). That was July 30th, now, a month and a half later I am back from Europe (which was amazing), GSoC is over (sad), and class has started (jury’s still out).

Current Status of the MP3tunes Amarok Service

The Good (Works)

• Browsing & Streaming
• Querymaker is as functional as possible with the current API
• Manual Downloading from MP3tunes to Local Collection
• Manual Uploading from any Collection to MP3tunes

The Bad (Doesn’t work)

• AutoSync – 80%- The code is there, however there are problems with the daemon not receiving signals from the MP3tunes’ servers
• MP3tunes playlists support – 0%- Never got started on this

The Ugly

There is one large issue I am still wrestling with. The details of the issue are complicated, but essentially it deals with the way Amarok handles remote tracks in playlists across sessions. Generally, remote tracks’ metadata isn’t cached by Amarok for use between multiple sessions. So, if you add an mp3tunes track to a playlist in Amarok, then restart Amarok and try to play that playlist the mp3tunes track is blank. Now, there exists a method for retrieving that metadata, however it was originally implemented synchronously. When you are retrieving metadata for any significant number of tracks (10+) synchronously, and each one of those retreivals is an HTTP Get request you end up blocking the GUI thread. At Akademy I hacked a way to do this asynchronously, but it is a really nasty hack. I’ve got code on my computer that implements this feature correctly, but it has the nasty habit of crashing Amarok every so often.

Between classes, marching band, homework, and other responsibilities I’m working on getting this ironed out and committed. Hopefully this will happen before the 2.0 release, because right now using MP3tunes in Amarok across sessions is slow and annoying.

• clothes
• 2 laptops
• 1 Target desk (retail $50)
• assorted books
• 1 blow-up air mattress

Fast forward through seven hours of me hurtling down the interstate at not-so-safe velocities, and here I am, pardoning my recent idleness as my flight to Paris boards at gate D32. Not accomplishing much over the past several weeks suddenly doesn’t seem so bad: I’m going to Europe! There is a week long hack-a-thon at Akademy; I’ll catch up then.

A bientôt!

For the past week I’ve been banging my head against the wall of glib, QtEventLoop, and QThreads. I have quite a headache to say the least, but yesterday thanks to my mentor and Ian, both Amarok developers, my head actually broke through that wall. Literally. GLIB, and Qt are kowtowing at my feet swearing oaths of fealty. They have promised to work together and let me get back to doing fun things, like code new features.

Total Commits: 84 Weekly Commits: 36

Past 7 Days

Starting these posts with “It was another busy week..” is starting to get boring; I’ll cook up something more exciting for next week.

In case you missed it, in the past seven days history has been made. I’ll let that stand in as the bulk of my weekly report, but a few worthwhile things have occurred since then that deserve a mention.

Remote Track Upload – You can now sideload tracks to your MP3tunes collection from remote sources in Amarok. What the heck is sideload and what remote sources you ask? Sideload is a feature of the MP3tunes API that allows for server-to-server transfers. This means you can give your Locker a URL to a track, and it will automatically be downloaded into your Locker. Currently Amarok sports three services with remote collections that are sideloadable to MP3tunes: Ampache, Magnatune, and Jamendo. This method of transferring is generally very fast, because the transfer bypasses your slow internet connection.

Upload Progress Bar – When you upload (or sideload) tracks to MP3tunes there is now a simple status bar to let you know how far along in the process you are.

Non-Supported Track Filtering – This one is simple: If you try and upload a file-type that MP3tunes doesn’t support, Amarok will tell you and stop that track from being transferred.

Upcoming 7 Days

• Work on allowing MP3tunes tracks to persist after a restart.
• Flesh out the synchronization system: what it’s going to do, and how it’s going to do it.
• Design any UI widgets needed for the syncing system

The first one will be simple, in fact I plan to code it up after writing this report. These second and third tasks, however, signify that I’m moving into the last stage of the project. According to my original proposal I am ahead by a week, so I’ll be using this week as extra time to plan and get a jump-start on the synchronization framework.