Thomas Legg's Geek Blog

As promised here's the nightly snapshot of Songbird. Remember to copy or duplicate ~/Library/Application Support/Songbird2 to backup your old preferences in case you want to downgrade to the 1.4 version later.

Songbird_1.9.0a-0_macosx-ppc.dmg
md5 checksum for Songbird_1.9.0a-0_macosx-ppc.dmg
zipped set of base extensions for this version of Songbird

My apologies for going dark on Songbird PPC builds. I had to rehack the qtwrapper for gstreamer to make it work again and then I was having major failures with the move from the 1.9.0 to 1.9.2 xulrunner. But I've got a mostly working build up and running, which I'll release to the world shortly. I just have to zip up the extensions built for this version and load it up to the server.

I haven't gotten the Shoutcast Extension to actually play music, though it loads the station lists. I haven't had time to debug what's going on, but have noted that there have been issues with shoutcast from many of the open source audio players.

The upside of the nightly build is that the 1.9.2 builds just feel a lot faster to me. Of course I haven't tested these latest builds on other Macs, and I haven't been as careful about isolating my build tree, so there may be crashes on OS X 10.4.x or ones that don't have my pkgsrc builds. If it does crash for you, feel free to drop me an email with the crash report.

So after spending a few days in Taipei for Computex, I was quite astonished by the overwhelming use of young female sex appeal to attract the attention of predominantly male electronics buyers.

There were more than a few vendors that used booth babes and dance teams to attract attention under the guise of product demonstrations and PR spiels. And beyond the vendors, even the Computex organisers had the Computex sweeties swarming the show. I didn't end up voting for any of them, because I didn't think it was the proper use of the young women's talents and didn't seem very professional (though I have a feeling some of the guys at the show probably wish they had this sort of thing at the office).

Here's the official announcement of the winning Computex sweetie. (NTD 5000 ~= US$155) I walked by as they were taking that group photo at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately they did this right at the entrance to the floor at the back of TWTC Hall 1, which produced a major bottleneck while they were taking the photos. I do hope that Global Sources and the HK TDC don't bring this sort of thing to HK's electronics trade shows in the Spring or Fall.

So the Songbird project released a new version based on the 1.7 branch. That means I'll have to download that branch and do some testing of compatability between the trunk support libraries and the 1.7.x Songbird code before I can release a new PPC Songbird to the world.

I currently have a mostly working trunk build (1.9alpha), but it's really not quite ready for prime time due to some issues with importing songs in to the library. I also have to do some work on the gstreamer qtwrapper audio decoders. By default the code distributed by the songbird project just produces a nasty hiss for audio codecs that are passed to quicktime to be played (like mp3s).

So after the new server case, I wanted to toss in some more RAM. Unfortunately I discovered my cheap Lemel motherboard had mistakenly attached a DDR connector instead of a DDR2 connector to the motherboard. This meant there was no way to add the second stick of RAM. This meant that I was going to have to spring for a new motherboard.

While playing around with the Lemel motherboard, I discovered that my power supply was acting crazy and that my DVD burner had failed. So these got replaced as well. FreeBSD ports also migrated the default php5 from php 5.2.x to php 5.3.x, so there may be some hiccups from this as well.

Once I got the SATA cables connected to the right drives, the machine booted up perfectly in to multi-user mode and all of the services started without a hitch. At least at first glance everything is working okay. If anything isn't, feel free to drop me a comment.