Last.fm Is Becoming More Accurate

XMMS (the X MultiMedia System) was the first music player I used when I switched to RedHat. Its support for ProTracker via ModPlug was awesome, whilst MP3, Ogg Vorbis and even WMA worked (although the latter required a hard-to-find plugin RPM), but it now seems to be losing mindshare. The software was essentially declared finished quite a few years ago, and now bug fixes seem to be dwindling and it is even dropping out of some repositories. However, as we all know Free Software gives everyone the right to fork, and XMMS is well and truly forked!

XMMS begat Beep Media Player, and BMP begat BMPx and Audacious, both of which are doing fine. After just installing Audacious, and enabled its Last.fm plugin, I can now enhance the accuracy of my profile by submitting the Tracker and Video Game Music files I listen to. These were music to me from when I was 4 all of the way up to the Napster era (which was followed by the Kazaa era, the Kazaa-Lite era, the eMule era, the aMule era (when I switched to RedHat) and finally landing in the MLDonkey era, which is actually a superset of the previous :D ), thus I my Last.fm profile is incomplete without them.

UPDATE: Last.fm is being an Epic Fail and requiring some kind of structured metadata, no modules don't seem to be working :(

On Responsiveness

Modern computer systems are multitasking, multiprocessor, multiprocessing, multithreaded powerhouses. Why does an application's user interface become unresponsive when it is doing a task? This seems like a bad design decision on the part of the toolit makers. Programming in a toolkit like QT or GTK+ is already asynchronous, why doesn't the UI keep itself up to date?

For the record, AmigaOS gave its user interface a higher priority than the applications, so that if the user moved the mouse then no matter what the Amiga was doing it would stop and update the cursor position then carry on, the same for buttons being hovered over and depressed, etc. This makes a 20 year old machine *feel* more responsive than current state-of-the-art. My 2 year old laptop with a 2 month old desktop system makes me ANGRY at the scrollbars for not moving. That's just not on.

What I Find Cool

The Winter Gardens has a free Wifi access point with full Internet access. There are also two T-Mobile ones, but who gives a shit about their pay-per-use crapware anyway?



(Too bad they recommend Skype for free calls :( )