metz·log

Running Trac on Nginx with Phusion Passenger

2012-01-06T00:00:00+01:00

I'm currently investigating ways to replace Apache httpd with Nginx on srcbox.net. One of the services that runs on the webserver is Trac for hosting a wiki-based website and bug tracking for software projects. Because I'm already using Phusion Passenger for hosting Ruby on Rails projects, I decided to also give it a try to host WSGI applications together with Nginx.

Please note that this post is quite similar to the one written by Graham Edgecombe about the same subject. I found a few things missing and notable so I decided to do my own little writeup on what I had to do to get things working.

Trac Setup

As the actual Trac setup is already present on my server and I just wanted to replicate a similar setup in my testing VM, I setup Trac like this:

Installed package trac, I used version 0.12.x which is available via Debian Backports
Added a system user that owns all trac project files and is used to run the WSGI webserver processes:
```
adduser --system --home /var/lib/trac --group --disabled-password --disabled-login trac
```
Initialized a trac environment below trac home:
```
trac-admin /var/lib/trac/project initenv
```

Deployed the webserver files using:

trac-admin /var/lib/trac/project deploy /var/www/trac/

Added symlinks to make Phusion Passenger accept Trac as a WSGI application:

ln -s /var/www/trac/htdocs /var/www/trac/public
ln -s /var/www/trac/cgi-bin/trac.wsgi /var/www/trac/passenger_wsgi.py

Installing Nginx

Nginx installation is quite a bit of work if you're used to a single aptitude install package, all features/modules have to be enabled/added at build-time which means rebuilding Nginx if you want to use Phusion Passenger. Because I plan to move authentication to a central place soon I also added Nginx HTTP Auth PAM to the mix. Furthermore I'm also tinkering with the idea to give owncloud a spin so WebDAV support is probably helpful too.

The installation basically went like this (rough steps, this is not a place for step-by-step tutorials):

Downloaded latest stable Nginx release
Downloaded latest ngx_http_auth_pam_module release
Unpacked both in a convenient place
Installed Phusion Passenger via rubygems (I used ruby and gem from ruby1.9.1 in Debian Squeeze)
Ran passenger-install-nginx-module
Chose 2. No: I want to customize my Nginx installation.
Told the installer where to find unpacked Nginx sources
Added additional configure arguments. For Auth PAM and optionally needed WebDAV support I used:
```
--add-module=/path/to/unpacked/ngx_http_auth_pam_module --with-http_dav_module
```
Grabbed an Espresso until the build was finished (didn't really take long)

On Debian it's probably helpful to install a fake webserver package to satisfy dependencies for other packages that depend on http-server. I used equivs to generate myself an nginx-dummy package.

Configuring Nginx

For starting up Nginx I simply grabbed the init-script from the Debian source package of nginx, , put it into /etc/init.d/, adapted the paths to my Nginx install in /opt/nginx and installed it in the default runlevels using insserv nginx.

Adding a virtual host to Nginx that serves Ruby on Rails or a WSGI application is usually very easy, for Trac however a tiny bit more care had to be taken...

Pitfall 1: HTTP Auth

With Trac there's one catch: HTTP Authentication. It took me quite some time to find out why HTTP-Auth worked fine according to the Nginx access.log but Trac still thought I wasn't logged in: Nginx needs to forward the user name to the WSGI application. For Phusion Passenger this can be done using the following line:

passenger_set_cgi_param REMOTE_USER $remote_user;

Pitfall 2: Location Blocks

Nginx uses location blocks for different behavior depending on the url. For Trac the /login path should trigger HTTP authentication. Together with Phusion Passenger all I got after successful login however was a simple "404 Not Found" page.

It turned out that for location blocks one has to enable Phusion Passenger again, a prior passenger_enabled on; line in the parent block does not apply to the inner location block.

Final Nginx Config

The complete host configuration for my test setup that contains all needed things to avoid the above pitfalls looks like this:

server {
    listen                  80;
    server_name             trac.domain.lan;
    root                    /var/www/trac/public;
    passenger_enabled       on;
    # Forward HTTP-Auth user to WSGI
    passenger_set_cgi_param REMOTE_USER $remote_user;

    location /login {
        auth_pam                "Trac on domain.lan - Restricted Access";
        # Use the same PAM service as dovecot for now
        auth_pam_service_name   "dovecot";
        # Reenable Passenger to get a redirect after login instead of a 404
        passenger_enabled       on;
        # Forward HTTP-Auth user to WSGI
        passenger_set_cgi_param REMOTE_USER $remote_user;
    }
}

What next?

This setup is probably still far from complete. Most notable things that I did not setup or test yet include:

Paths for a manual Nginx install do not obey the FHS at all, logs and temporary files end up on the wrong partition which is a bad idea security wise.
Log rotation is missing. I can probably grab parts from the Debian Nginx package again.
Serve multiple projects/environments with the above webserver setup
Replace the rather ugly HTTP Authentication with Trac Account Manager plugin
Use TLS and enforce login to happen encrypted only

Of course Trac is by far not the only web-application, I'm probably going to document a few other things I have installed as part of my new Nginx test installation :)

TV reloaded with HDHomerun

2011-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

After about two years of complete TV absence both due to technical reasons (TV socket in wrong room on the other side of my flat) as well as the quality of the programme (ads, fake reality shows, lack of real movies), I nevertheless decided to get myself a network-enabled TV-tuner. Being network-enabled was both an easy way to get around the need for new cabling as well as making TV available to all the machines scattered throughout the rooms.

Hardware

The most interesting device I found and also ordered is a HDHomerun HDHR3-EU from SiliconDust, a small black box with coax input for TV (DVB-C or DVB-T), the usual 5V power-supply and an ethernet port. It contains two tuners so two channels can be watched and/or recorded in parallel.

The good thing about HDHomerun devices is, that they work with a broad range of software. They are also fairly well documented and SiliconDust even has created a library and a cross-platform commandline tool to configure their devices. In fact, the software is even available in Debian Squeeze (hdhomerun-config and libhdhomerun).

Getting the device running network-wise was only a matter of plugging things together. It automatically grabbed an IP-address via DHCP and the hdhomerun-config tool could immediately find the device.

Software

At first I was mostly interested in getting the box working with EyeTV 3 which I used together with my FireDTV in the past. A first channel-scan however did not find a single channel. After some cable unplugging, checking again with trusty FireDTV and attempts to manually set a frequency on one of the tuners I found two settings that were quite important for my DVB-C setup:

$ hdhomerun_config DEVICEID set /sys/dvbc_modulation \
    "a8qam256-9600 a8qam64-6900 a8qam128-6900"
$ hdhomerun_config DEVICEID set /tuner0/channelmap eu-cable
$ hdhomerun_config DEVICEID set /tuner1/channelmap eu-cable

The first command sets the DVB-C modulations used when autotuning on a certain frequency. Unfortunately the current HDHR3 firmware (20111025) seems to have an off-by-one bug that drops the last modulation in the list and I only tried setting the two needed values at first. After adding the unneeded QAM128 value at the end I had all modulations set that I needed. According to the very helpful support-folks at #hdhomerun on FreeNode this should already be fixed in the next firmware release.

The other two lines set the range of channels used when doing a full channel-scan. This might be unneeded for software that has its own list of "interesting" frequencies but at least for scanning with the commandline tool this has a huge impact on the frequency-range that gets scanned.

As I later found out, most of this would have propably been set by the first run of the HDHomerun Config GUI which I did not install on my Mac, d'oh.

First Impressions

So far I'm pretty happy with my current TV setup. Watching TV while recording something else works fine and so does EPG, plus I even found some new HD channels since I last had TV at home. The initial setup was a bit tricky but the extensive documentation as well as the geek-friendly support channel (IRC) pretty much make up for all the tinkering. Also I now have a new network-enabled toy to play with so depending on my free-time maybe I can whip up some helpful software for these devices (GKrellM HDHomerun status plugin anyone?).

GKrellM, GIO and Event Loops

2011-11-07T00:00:00+01:00

While maintaining GKrellM for Windows I have found several things in the code that I wanted to improve. Apart from the Preferences Dialog which needs quite a bit of cleanup, the biggest offender both in terms of portability as well as readability is the socket code.

Currently, the socket handling in gkrellm and gkrellmd is really low-level, it uses plain socket API, i.e. raw calls to accept(), send(), select() etc. GLib and GIO in particular have support for abstracting most of this away. They also feature asynchronous versions of most of the blocking system-calls around socket handling which is a good thing especially for GUI-applications.

So I started to get this into GKrellM...

Starting with an event loop

I began porting with gkrellmd first because this is presumably the simpler case. The biggest change needed for gkrellmd was to make it use a GLib mainloop instead of its own event loop, that one was limited to socket events.

The old loop looked a bit like the following, the complete version is available at server/main.c in git.

while (1) {
    /* Block until at least one filedescriptor needs attention or
       maximum wait time was reached */
    result = select(max_fd + 1, &test_fds, NULL, NULL, &tv);

    /* Iterate over filedescriptors and check for activity */
    for (fd = 0; fd <= max_fd; ++fd) {
        if ( is_server_fd ) {
            /* activity on listening socket */
            client_fd = accept(...);
            /* host lookup, reverse lookup etc. */
        } else {
            /* activity on client socket, try reading */
            ioctl( fd, FIONREAD, &nbytes );
            gkrellmd_client_read( fd, nbytes );
        }
    }

    /* Update krells, send updated data to clients */
    gkrellmd_update_monitors();
}

This loop works remarkably well most of the time, but it has a few shortcomings:

updating monitors has to wait for all socket-work to finish
hostname lookups while accepting new clients block the whole loop until they finish or a system-dependent timeout is reached
errors of ioctl() are not checked for (also nbytes is never initialized, oops)
the time that select() waits also defines the update frequency for the monitors

Especially the possible blocking while accepting a new client may affect monitor update timing and keep already connected clients from receiving updates. This is usually not a big problem if clients are on the same network and name lookup for the network is working reliable but that doesn't mean things can never go wrong.

The GLib way of creating, running and deleting an event loop that already updates gkrellm monitors regularly looks like this:

g_timeout_add(1000 / _GK.update_HZ, gkrellmd_update_monitors, NULL);
gk_main_loop = g_main_loop_new(NULL, FALSE);
g_main_loop_run(gk_main_loop);
g_main_loop_unref(gk_main_loop);

Of course this does not yet have all the features of the old gkrellmd event loop but I'll tackle that in my next post about me diving into socket-communication using GIO.

Blog Reboot

2011-09-10T00:00:00+02:00

After quite some hiatus (more than two years according to my last post) I decided to give this site a facelift and actually start some "real" blogging, meaning more frequent posting even in the absence of new software releases.

The Why

Main reason for getting this site back on track is that I finally started having some real free time again (weekends that actually deserve being called "weekends" instead of "extended workdays") and a refreshed interested to get back into Open Source development.

Visiting this years Desktop Summit in Berlin was quite inspiring with all the interesting talks and projects. Especially the mixture of both Gnome and KDE people was quite cool. Having a look at both camps shows that there's similar problems on both sides (where's the desktop heading towards with so many new mobile gadgets, keeping or dropping cross-platform support) as well as (continued) plans to integrate both desktop "worlds". The most interesting project in terms of integration for me right now is pk11-kit: GKrellM could benefit from good key/trust management once it gets TLS connection support (stay tuned, I'll definetely come back to this topic).

The What

So what is to be expected here in the future? For a start, the projects formerly hosted here will stay as a static archive. Although all projects are unmaintained by now and I don't think anybody still uses software like Floodcast, there still might be some interest in getting the source code and maybe reusing parts of it.

For the future, I plan to post more about what I'm working on or wasting my time with. This includes for instance code snippets for interesting problems or chronically undocumented APIs (yes, I'm looking at you GLib). As I'm also some sort of admin for quite a few systems, I'll also "document" my endeavours of software I haven't worked with before (possible first candidates include Nginx, Unbound and NSD).

GKrellM 2.3.2 for Windows & new project home

2009-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Originally intended to be released shortly after the gkrellm-2.3.2 release (released 2008-10-04), I stumbled across some bugs here and there so in the end it took much longer.

Most important changes after the gkrellm-2.3.2 release:

Wait up to 10 seconds for a running SpeedFan that has not detected its sensors yet
Fix plugin calls that have a variable number of arguments
Unify search-paths for plugins and themes in both gkrellm and gkrellmd on win32
Fix file operations (i.e. config load/save) on non-ascii locales
Fix transmit bytes for network interfaces
fix taskbar-entry being visible with gtk+ 2.14.4 by setting the toolwindow window-type using standard gtk-functions

Furthermore GKrellMd is now an NT-service allowing remote-monitoring on servers that nobody is logged on to (plus it does not crash every second minute, one of the most reported things since I released 2.3.0).

The installer also changed quite a bit and now always installs the GTK+ runtime. If you don't want that you can still use the ZIP though. Installing gkrellmd only is now supported as well (plus it doesn't install all the gui stuff). Due to the massive changes in the installer I recommend to uninstall any older GKrellM version before installing the new one.

Please have a look at the new version which is now available at srcbox.net. The old GKrellM pages on this site will go away soon so please update any bookmarks you might have.

GKrellMd as a service

2008-02-07T00:00:00+01:00

As some of you might know, Windows has something similar to daemons, its so called "services". Lately I have been able to find some free time and managed to make a true Windows service out of gkrellmd. Running gkrellmd as a service instead of as a simple application has quite some benefits:

No need to login in order to start gkrellmd (very important for monitoring servers!)
You cannot accidentally quit gkrellmd by right clicking its (now non-existent) tray icon anymore
Running as a service ensures having admin rights (needed for monitoring)

Because debugging services can be a bit complicated, I added a new commandline switch that will allow running gkrellmd.exe inside a standard console window. That way users can still track down problems easily.

On a sidenote, Gtk+ 2.12.6 has fixed Bug #503326 which means I can finally release gkrellm and gkrellmd after some more cleanups.

GKrellM 2.3.1 in the works

2007-12-16T00:00:00+01:00

I'm currently updating my build system and will look into some of the bugs that I found in the last release. I also spotted a few problems with the new release (mainly clock/calendar formatting) so it will take some more time before I can release something usable. Even though university currently keeps me busy (gotta hold a speech at dec. 21th, still busy with the slides for that) I hope to give you 2.3.1 as a xmas present :)

Update: Unfortunately GTK+ 2.12.3 crashes GKrellM 2.3.1 when changing the clock/calendar format, this will probably delay the release (no christmas present, sorry).

Second Update: I found Gtk+ Bug#503326 to be the cause for the crash. I'm not yet sure if I should just ship Gtk+ 2.10.x as done before, wait for this bug to get fixed or use Gtk+ 2.12.1 which is said to not exhibit this crash.

TagLib for Windows (2007-08-06 Snapshot)

2007-08-06T00:00:00+02:00

As many bugfixes have been committed to the TagLib repository in july, I decided to update the snapshot for Windows.

Note: I removed the last snapshot and will do so for any future snapshot, only releases will stay online for a longer time.

GKrellM 2.3.0 for Windows released

2007-07-31T00:00:00+02:00

Today I built and packaged GKrellM 2.3.0 for Windows. It is available both in form of a handy installer as well as plain Zip-File. As this is the first release made by me I'm very interested in any kind of feedback , even if it's just as short as "it works" :)

More information about GKrellM for Windows can be found on srcbox.net. General information about GKrellM is available at gkrellm.net. New versions and bugfixes will be announced on this page and on the GKrellM mailinglist.

Finally GKrellM is back on Windows and available for everybody :)

Development on a Mac

2007-06-23T00:00:00+02:00

Today I installed Eclipse 3.3RC4 and CDT 4.0RC3 in the hope that it wouldn't be as dog slow as Eclipse had been on the MacBook I lent from university few weeks ago. Fortunately trying it out again was a huge success. Code completion works like a charm, as does the rest I tested so far.

My testing project was QLineControl which even made its way into a universal binary now (i.e. it will run on PowerPC-based machines running OS X as well).

Next is getting Qt 4.3 copied into the application-bundle so one can install QLineControl as easy as usual: drag it into the Applications folder and be done. Furthermore I plan to make QLineControl feel a bit more mac-like, right now it feels a bit weird compared to most other apps. For instance it shouldn't quit just because you happened to close its mainwindow.

New Laptop

2007-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

Finally made a decision and got myself a white 2.0 GHz MacBook with 2GB memory. So far I'm pretty happy with it, except for some weird glitches:

Kyocera printer drivers decided to install into a directory with no execute permissions (except for root) so I couldn't select my printer model
DVD-Player refused to see any of my DVDs. Fixing permissions fortunately made the problem go away. I guess Apple added the "fix file permissions" feature in their harddisk tool for a reason.

Next thing is installing XCode, Qt 4.3 and some recent Eclipse 3.3 build so I can code on the road again :)

TagLib for Windows snapshot

2007-06-07T00:00:00+02:00

Today I updated the TagLib port to Windows (see Downloads) , based on latest TagLib sources (taken from svn). Furthermore I remove all old binaries and snapshots as they were too outdated and/or unmaintained by me.

Most important change: the MSVC build is gone. This is because I decided to stop using MSVC, mainly due to its unclear runtime-library license (read: I didn't even find a license and shipping them with your own software is said to be illegal, something I will not risk). Furthermore it's way easier for me if I only have to struggle with one compiler at a time.

About Ports, Apples and more

2007-05-18T00:00:00+02:00

Yes, I'm still alive, unfortunately university is occupying most of my time right now. Nevertheless I managed to update this site to Wordpress 2.2 and managed to make it look somewhat right, even on broken browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer)

On the porting side I just managed to fix the swap-display in GKrellM on Windows. So far the values were just bad guesswork and started to look completely wrong after I installed 3gb memory. Eventually I'll put up a zip so people can test GKrellM on Windows before 2.0.11 is out.

QLineControl also had some progress, most notably I managed to compile it on Mac OS X thanks to the MacBook I got for testing purposes (have to bring it back to university next week). This of course brings me to the next topic: what kind of laptop to buy this time (my old one died last year). So far bets are on for:

Getting a Mac would allow me to develop and port applications for OS X but this would also imply more work because of yet another OS. Quite a complex decision IMO (plus I dislike the white MacBook case).

Porting Fun

2006-11-06T00:00:00+01:00

The last few weeks I finally managed to do some coding at home again (currently busy with my internship that ends in january), most of it is porting unix apps to windows though ;)

I managed to compile GKrellM on windows and right now I'm busy cleaning out remaining bugs in order to have well-working binaries out when 2.2.11 sees the light. More on this later.

With the release of Qt 4.2 I also came back to QLineControl and I'm currently preparing for 0.2 release. Unfortunately I still didn't release KLCC and right now I'm uncertain if anybody actually still needs it (if you do, tell me).

Finally I'm also motivated to work on KDE 4 again, I'll probably give the Phonon API a new try.

Thesis finished!

2006-08-29T00:00:00+02:00

Today I did the oral part of my bachelor thesis and received an overall grade of 13.5 out of 15 points for my thesis. Except me to be back to real-life in a few days.

Busy & What's coming up next

2006-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

I'm currently busy finishing my bachelor thesis, it's hopefully over on june 30th ;)

For july I have probably planned more than what I actually have time for, I'll try it anyway:

Add cmake support and win32 patches to taglib, most of this is already done but needs testing
Dive into the Phonon API
Port Noatun3 ("make-it-snow" branch) to kdelibs4_snapshot and use Phonon as the only backend
Last KLCC release
~~Sync systray code with PSI repository~~ (Qt 4.2 will have QSystemTrayIcon)
Eventually some real life stuff

Debian repository fixed

2006-04-02T00:00:00+02:00

Apparently it was a bad idea to update the directory structure inside the repository without properly recreating the list of packages and sources. As that is fixed now, you can continue downloading.

Another update: For whatever reason apt-cacher did not like Packages and Sources files being gzipped, therefore I now also uploaded bzip2-compressed and uncompressed files so all versions of apt and apt-cacher should be happy.

Semester break over

2006-03-09T00:00:00+01:00

Lectures are starting next week so the fun is over (already).

Most of my free-time went into working, I went to a few parties on weekends and had to take a break last week because I caught a rather nasty flu which lasted until sunday.

On the coding side of life there was way less action than planned. I didn't look into KDE4 and didn't write a single line of code for Noatun3 either.

I started a small OpenGL-based Pong game with a friend of mine but there's nothing fancy to look at yet, maybe later this year, in case we don't loose motivation, opengl is not the funniest API on earth.

Trayicon code for Qt4

2006-02-13T00:00:00+01:00

Today I cleaned up the code and uploaded a little bit of code others might find useful too, a trayicon class for Qt4. It works on Windows, Linux (X11) and Mac OS X (didn't test OS X though). It's a port of the trayicon code from Psi, I didn't change anything except for making it work with Qt4.

If you think this might be fun to try out then download trayicon.tar.bz2.

Semester break started

2006-02-03T00:00:00+01:00

And another semester is over. Now I've got about four weeks that I'll mostly spend with coding, partying and, unfortunately, working.

Most interesting projects for my "holidays" will probably be qmediacatalog (not released yet), qlinecontrol and maybe Noatun3 if I get a working debian package of qt-copy and compile kdelibs (man, I hate to waste time on compiling these days).

FlexPlaylist 0.4.9 and QLineControl 0.1 released

2006-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

Time to announce QLineControl 0.1 officially as I uploaded both the sourcecode and windows-binaries now (Debian packages have been available for some days already).

I also did a (last?) release of FlexPlaylist, 0.4.9 changes were

FIX: Use a more natural order when adding folders recursively (go into subfolders before adding files from the current folder)
Use standard icons for player controls in statusbar
Draw player controls in statusbar using drawing functions provided by the currently selected KDE-/QT-style.
FIX: More reliable detection of the playlist-windows being visible
Add a simple configure check for Noatun headers and abort if they were not found
Add debian packaging

For Noatun 3 I'm still a bit uncertain about which way to go. I can either stick to playlist files like in FlexPlaylist or improve further on SimplePlaylist which uses sqlite as its data-storage.

New year, new look

2006-01-22T00:00:00+01:00

After a looong time of silence I decided to give this site a new look (and a new backend).

Most important for visitors should be the updated project pages and the project which I'm currently working on (QLineControl). I will also try and post more often than I did before (WordPress should make that a little bit easier).

Time for some ice(cream)

2005-07-01T00:00:00+02:00

As it's getting too quiet in here I'm going to do a small status report what I'm working on or why I'm not working at all:

MediaControl: just added mpd-supported to it, many thanks go to William Robinson for all the work he put into this patch
FlexPlaylist: is more or less dead, the code was getting to chaotic and I broke my port to Noatun3 without having a backup
SimplePlaylist: I started writing a new playlist from scratch featuring a sqlite-backend, it will hopefully be part of Noatun3
Floodcast: put on ice until I have finished the Engine-API for Noatun3 so I can port it over as well
Noatun3: a mostly rewritten Noatun version scheduled for KDE 4, it's in kde subversion-repository, as is simpleplaylist

Apart from that I'm currently busy with writing university exams and, after that, start a "Praktikum", no holidays for me in 2005.

At least the weather is fine over here so I'll stop writing stuff and get me some icecream now.

ping

2005-03-28T00:00:00+02:00

Yes, I'm still alive. I'm currently redoing some parts of this site, no huge changes though. And in case you don't like the blue look I also added a greenish one (note: the banner at the top needs an overhaul, that'll come later).

On the software side of life I'm currently working on a new project. A first screenshot is available in the Screenshots Section.

Ears Wide Open - Floodcast 0.0.12

2004-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

And another one, changes this time:

turn on/off floodcast from its control-panel
new option: automatically reconnect on shoutcast connection errors
Shoutcast compatible title-streaming in standalone-mode (yes, finally people can see what track you are rocking to)
status-window now also for forward-mode
on-demand retrieval of listener-stats in forward-mode (not automated due to bandwidth considerations)
removed kdDebug statement that kept floodcast from compiling on KDE 3.2.x

Don't wait until tomorrow, go and grab your copy of floodcast-0.0.12.tar.bz2 today.

Releases flooding in - Floodcast 0.0.11

2004-08-17T00:00:00+02:00

Changes this time:

support for CBR/ABR/VBR mp3 encoding. You can choose whatever you like (note: CBR is still the most common setting for streaming to shoutcast-servers)
add Brazilian translation, thanks to Rogerio Pereira
add (incomplete) German translation
reintegrate status-window for standalone server, it was left out so far to ease restructuring
fix hostname lookups in status-window
update connection times in status-window every 10 seconds and not only once a minute

Just visit the Downloads Section.

Floodcast 0.0.10

2004-08-15T00:00:00+02:00

Coding again and proudly presenting another master-piece of weird software, changes this time:

abort streaming after 3 failed send calls, this might help for buggy connections
use QTimer for syncing with shoutcast server instead of blocking noatun all the time
allow streaming with a fixed track-name instead of using tags from noatun
buffer encoded mp3 data before sending it in order to avoid dropouts, not sure if this helps much

Go grab it at the Downloads Section.

Updated site layout and contents

2004-07-21T00:00:00+02:00

Bye bye <table>, hello <div> and CSS. Except for a few places this page is a table-free-zone now. Due to Internet Exploder not handling display:table-cell at all I still had to make the main layout a table (otherwise IE users would see the menubar below the main-contents).

Other things include:

font-sizes and margins more eye-friendly
Links section was cleaned up a bit, the least I want to have is dead links.
more full-size screenshots in Projects section
~~New hardware specs added to My System section~~

Over the next few days I'll iron out remaining quirks and check how much of this homebrew mess validates with W3 specs.

Projects left over

2004-07-12T00:00:00+02:00

Ok, my exams are over now and I can do more on all the stuff I'm working on. Currently I plan to put effort into:

KLCC, fix as many bugs as possible and do a (KDE 3.2 only) release
FlexPlaylist, maybe the long awaited 0.5 (but with no translations due to lack of help)
Floodcast 0.1.0 - Including a history for shoutcast servers you streamed to
kdelirc - Not a project of mine but rather unmaintained and urging one or two important features

The following projects are abandoned by me now: KNetLoad (there's another port of it and the only plus mine has is being a kicker-applet). Kopete (I'm using Licq again, Kopete was wasting more time than anything else and still the outcome was incredible low).

Now where are the news?

2004-07-04T00:00:00+02:00

Due to the exams I have to write and learn for there's nothing new up here but in about two weeks that will change.

As a sidenote: I'm now maintaining KLCC, a very nice KDE client for linecontrol.

Fix: Floodcast 0.0.9b

2004-05-15T00:00:00+02:00

Floodcast 0.0.9b is out. It fixes a grave bug that can hang your whole X11-session when you get disconnected from the server unexpectedly (caused by a flood of duplicated messageboxes). Now you just get one messagebox and get disconnected immediately (sidenote: autoreconnect is planned for a later release).

Please get ~~floodcast-0.0.9b.tar.bz2~~ instead of the plain 0.0.9 prerelease, thanks.

Floodcast 0.0.9

2004-05-08T00:00:00+02:00

Floodcast 0.0.9 is out. It's a streaming plugin for Noatun that allows:

Running a very simple standalone server on the machine Noatun is running on
Forwarding whatever sound is currently played in Noatun to some ShoutCast/IceCast server

Streaming to an Icecast-server is untested so far. Also only mp3-streaming through lame is supported right now but eventually I will add support for ogg vorbis too.

Important: This plugin needs libshout so make sure you have it installed.

Still here

2004-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

Sorry for the extreme lack of updates, unfortunately Flexplaylist 0.5.0 is not out yet. Things I worked on in the meantime:

FlexPlaylist 0.5.0 of course, finally added support for translations, if you want to translate FlexPlaylist just mail me
Noatun, added support for reading shoutcast stream titles, it will appear in KDE 3.3 and I have an unreleased patch for KDE 3.2
Floodcast, it's back. I got my hands on the last Floodcast code and made it working with current Noatun versions plus I added support for forwarding. This is by far the most comfortable shoutcast-plugin I've seen (compared to the ones for XMMS)
Kopete, after a longer break I'm finally back at it too. Work so far includes some API fscking in libkopete and incorporating a cool RTF patch into OSCAR. Now you can finally see the ugly fonts and colors your friends use
MediaControl, no news due to the stuff mentioned before, I plan to make some more things configurable and move at least Noatun to a DCOP-signal API so mediacontrol does not poll Noatun but instead gets informed about changes

Btw, I hope to release most of the above projects soon (except for Kopete of course, which has a time-schedule of its own).

Flexplaylist 0.4.8, hopefully the last 0.5 prerelease

2003-12-25T00:00:00+01:00

And another prerelease before 0.5 is out.

Changes:

Added action to go to currently played song (handy for large lists)
Massive speedup on clearing playlist (don't update statusbar for every removed file)
Lots of code cleanups (less debug output, less old commented code and unused methods)
Temporary messages in statusbar for loading/saving playlists
Don't add files to playlist that can't be played by Noatun (needed for adding whole directories)
Greatly improved filters for fileselectors, now allows to filter for certain playlist formats

Go get flexplaylist-0.4.8.tar.bz2.