Entertainer Media Center

The Entertainer Project (www.entertainer-project.com) is going to be releasing version 0.1 in two weeks time on the 14th June. To test it prior to release (you’ll need bzr) get a console up and type in the following: bzr branch lp:entertainer Development website is over on launchpad (https://launchpad.net/entertainer/)

Alright, it's been a work in progress for more than two months now, off and on. I'm not a designer, and I finally decided to stop trying to force it. It's not the prettiest layout in the world, but I wanted to focus more on functionality anyway. ... [More] I had some trouble updating to the new version. The templates weren't the only thing to change, and Dreamhost is not very python friendly. It's fine, as I'll be getting a new host soon, but it was a headache that very easily could have been prevented. Among the big changes, the path to the feed has changed to http://theironlion.net/feeds/blog. I've set up an Apache redirect so Django will stop harassing me about the errors, but updating your feed reader will ensure that you don't get cut off when I decide to delete the redirect later on. It's late now, and I really need to get to bed. It feels good to be back and blogging again after spending so much time working with the tools I use to blog with... Here's a tip: Don't roll your own CMS if you don't have to. Update: I couldn't be bothered to test this on anything but Firefox 3, so if it's broken, drop me an email or something. There are a significant amount of features that didn't like python2.3 on dreamhost very much, and so they aren't being displayed currently. When I make the migration to a new host, I'll set them back up again. [Less]

Entertainer is at a coding crossroads. Lauri has done a great job of showing Entertainer as a viable (and beautiful) media center software. However, a portion of this code is more like prototype code than production code (probably since Lauri is fairly new to python like myself). Eventually, this code would become a big maintenance [...]

The May Entertainer sprint was this weekend. It was good push where some of the developers hadn't been going at full steam recently. After being featured on Linux.com, Entertainer saw another large surge of users. Coincidentally, we had also just ... [More] moved back to Launchpad. Michael Charclo, a new developer, was the star of the weekend. He got four branches merged to trunk, fixing three bugs that were generally a pain, and added some basic heuristics for Entertainer to discover movie files as TV episodes and catalog them accordingly. This is a rather big win for us, since we had been discussing ways of identifying a movie file as a TV episode, and many of the solutions just didn't seem to work. Michael's did, and I was happy to merge his branch. Matt and I worked on the new backend stuff. It's encouraging to see how close we are, but where the code stands now is the hardest part. It's the last 5% that will take the longest part of the time. Since we're using storm to assist us in making the code clearer and more modular, our life has become so much easier. However, Matt and I together made a significant amount of progress. Joshua got his branch merged in that makes the gnome tray icon usable again, and removed the backend dependency on X so that it can now run without the requirement of having a DISPLAY environment variable (previously, it imported gtk for the tray icon). Entertainer is planning it's 0.1 release for early June, so we'll be buckling down and getting a lot of the bugs taken care of and getting the code stable and ready to be deployed. [Less]

Entertainer Media Center is having a developer sprint from Saturday, May 17th to Sunday, May 18th.

When I first approached Lauri about working on Entertainer, he had released Entertainer on Launchpad. Not long after I started working on the project, Lauri had problems getting bazaar to work with Launchpad, and so we move to Google Code. We've ... [More] been there since then. However, recently, while working on the new backend-refactoring stuff, I found that svn was just too lacking in allowing me to merge in continuing development on trunk into my refactoring branch. It then got to the point where I dreaded the actual merging back into trunk. I think much of this was because I had been using distributed version control systems consistently in the work I was doing for my clients, and really enjoyed it. After chatting with the rest of the developers, we decided we should move to Launchpad. With the option of having vcs-imports, it was a good option, for many reasons. After all, the idea of Launchpad is to have all open source projects in one place anyway. So, the basis of this blog post is this: Entertainer can now be found at http://www.launchpad.net/entertainer. Mentoring is available to anyone who would like to contribute... [Less]

Yep, as every reader of blog already knows, it's here. It's smooth, beautiful and stable. I can recommend it to anyone who happens to like good looking and stable operating system. That would be those who don't like windows or any other "living on the edge" operating systems. read more

Yeah, that's right! I haven't been working on Entertainer for awhile. Why? Well, I guess the reason is my new screen that makes me use all my free time watching movies. I bought my very first video projector and have been enjoying it most of my free time. My new screen read more

I recently read a blog post about python-coverage. This is a module which works out how much of a python file has been used when a python file is run. One very helpful use it can be put to is that of working out how much of a project’s source code has been covered by unit [...]

I just finished reading Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development, and, while I enjoyed the examples in the first half of the book, I’m disappointed about the lack of discussion on dealing with “legacy” code. In my short amount of time using Test-Driven Development (TDD), I have seen that it can be a great, confidence building tool; and [...]