Playing With Sharp Objects

Added the ability to collapse and expand a single body in SVN revision 79. This can come in handy when you are viewing in collapsed mode and only want to peek at one article body.

I’ve been running Firefly Mediaserver 2.4 (formerly mt-daapd) and Twonky Musicserver 2.8 for some time now in my home to stream music from my single audio repository to iTunes and my Netgear MP101 players. This past week we picked up an XBox 360 and wanted to take advantage of its ability to stream music while playing games. Because of our simple setup, pumping all of our audio components through a single receiver, this hasn’t been possible in the past. Now we can.

While Twonky Musicserver was free for some time, Twonky decided after the 2.9.1 version that they would no longer offer a free version. Certain that I could find a free alternative, I decided to save the US$30 Twonky was charging and try my hand at the older free version. Having unsuccessfully scoured the net for the 2.9.1 version, which some say was able to work with the XBox 360’s UPNP capability, I gave up on it. Firefly Mediaserver does not do UPNP, so that was out, although I still need it for streaming mp3s to iTunes over an ssh pipe. I still wasn’t ready to part with my hard earned cash.

Googling for UPNP XBox 360, I came across two other servers that looked promising. gMediaServer threw a bunch of errors and would not compile, no matter what I tried. Geexbox uShare compiled from source, but would not show up on the XBox 360 screens when searching for computers with music.

Working from a tip at http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=473403 I finally found 360MediaServer, a Java based service that worked right off the bat. All you need to do is run it (./start) and connect to its configuration page at http://127.0.0.1:7000/configure and fill in the few required fields to customize it. Giving it a FriendlyName of “Oporto:1” (the :1 is required for it to appear as a Windows Media Connect source) and pointing it to the directory full of mp3s, I was immediately able to browse through all the music from my XBox 360. My only complaint is that I cannot pick songs by Genre from the 360, but at least I have the music going where I want it. It’s only at version 0.0.1 right now after having been released only 20 days ago, so given time this should flesh out nicely. Thanks tawsi!

If you’ve read the book, you’ll want to see the movie. In fact, you can see the first 24 minutes of the movie here to get a taste of the surreal feel they use to enhance the story. The innovative “animation” style has spawned a series of articles on how the movie was made and how you can make your own movie with the same look. More on A Scanner Darkly from the official Philip K Dick site.

Just added the ability to collapse all article bodies. I can see that after adding this it will be nice to expand individual articles when viewing in this mode.

Before collapse:

After collapse:

I’ve also merged the “flag all items and “unflag all items” links into a single “toggle flags” link, as well as reorganizing some of the content in the menu pane.
This is all in the frames view only at the moment.

Also recently added is the edit capability in panel view. Because of the way frames and panel view differ, some sort of detection has to be done to see if we were called from the framed or non-framed mode. This is another step towards merging the two modes. Some more reorg in that menu pane is probably in order, but there are other pressing wishliust items to tackle.

For those interested in helping to translate Monkeychow, grab the latest monkeychow/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po from SVN and translate to the language of your choice. To get your copy, pull the code down with the following command.

    svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow monkeychow

To start, I’ve already translated es_ES. As I mentioned before, I’d like to get a few more languages in before the next release. If you help translate I’ll keep you as a contact for any minor language updates, and you of course get credit for your work. If you want to volunteer, please email me.

The last remaining piece is the menu.php pane and panel-menu.html which will need to be combined so that I can internationalize it. This is part of the merging of the frames and non-frames views so that we have less code repetition, which is never a good thing. DRY!!

UPDATE: poedit is a nice tool for making the job of translating messages.po files easier. Runs on Windows and Linux.