…just another hippy blog

Tempi Moderni / Modern Times
Originally uploaded by hippy.dream.

Ladies and gentlemen and smizmars,

I’m sorry but I’m too f-in’ busy and tired to update the blog or to work on Movida or finish the new Movida website I had started two months ago *___*

I am currently working on a cross platform implementation of the Office 2007 “Ribbon UI” using Trolltech’s Qt framework.

I suppose I will start working again on Movida this summer. I really need to finish the Internet import wizard before I can publish a preview release.

I think it makes no sense without it as I would never want to fill all the fields by hand. At least not the first time I create my movie collection in Movida.

Bye bye and thanks for all the fish.

No, Movida is not dead.

It’s just me being lazy and busy. Mainly lazy.

There is a new lame animated screenshot for the IMDb import wizard,

After a first attempt to use libxml’s HTML parser I switched back to plain pattern matching. The main problem is that HTML text nodes can contain other nodes and it’s quite hard (read p.i.t.a.) to reconstruct the text,

Take this example from the IMDb search resuts:

<li><a href=”URL”>Amores de Kafka, Los</a> (1988)<br>aka <em>”The Loves of Kafka”</em> - USA</li>

Retrieving that “aka The Loves of Kafka - USA” ain’t that easy if you have a regular XML tree.
And you would end up making the whole parsing process slower.

Now I’ll need to write some code to actually parse a movie page and find someone do provide me with better artwork for the wizard

I have been playing around with the new QWizard class in Qt 4.3 and it’s a pretty useful piece of code
As you can see from the screenshot, it’s being used to create a standard movie import wizard for Movida. Plugins (like the IMDb & co. import wizard I’m working on) will be able to use this widget for their own import routines, providing a consistent user interface between different import plugins.

The SVN doesn’t contain the updated code yet because of some bugs that need to be fixed.

The current version of QWizard (Qt 4.3.0 beta snapshots) is quite flexible even though there is no (easy) way to handle pages that need to do some long processing. I was trying to either disable the back button or ask the user for confirmation when the query is being sent to the Internet but there is no way to do this.

A suggestion has been sent to the guys at Trolltech and I hope they find it interesting enough to add this feature before the final 4.3 release.

Two suns in the sunset
Originally uploaded by crayzy_ray.

Stupid technology!! It took me about 5 minutes to find my Doors CD with “The end” on it!
I want a 5 billion peanutbutterbytes drive under-your-skin-chip edition for my next birthday so I can find a song when my mind just won’t stop thinking about it!

PS: is GQView the only photo viewer on Linux that pre-loads the previous and the next images in the current directory?
And why does digikam’s ShowPhoto have 2 million filters and *NO* way to rename a file except for opening the file properties dialog? Am I supposed to use The Gimp to rename my files?!?!?

Ratts!! Are those such brilliant features that nobody else thought about?!? Please, somebody tell me why so many great open source projects lack in the most stupid but important features! Pleeeeeeeeeease!!!

Originally uploaded by Cyrius.

The first movida snapshot has been delayed for some days because I am currently working on some few features I want to be working in that release (at least to some extent).

The main feature is a new plugin system. The incoming snapshot should provide a sample plugin to import movies from the IMDb (and from other Internet sources sooner or later).

The plugin system only works with binary plugins (i.e. plain shared/dynamic libraries). IOW it’s platform dependant and you will need to build/download the plugins for your platform.

Embedding a perl/python/whateverelse interpreter would take away too much time and Qt 4.3’s QScript follows the ECMA script standard, thus making it not so interesting for our purposes (mainly because I want the scripting language to allow both file and network operations).

Nevertheless, the plugin system should allow me or other developers to write a plugin that adds scripting to movida, without changing the main application code.

Last but not least, I had to write a small (50LOC?) QLabel animator class because GIF support is optional in Qt and MNG’s are not supported by most image editors (specially on win32).

PS: I’m sorry but I didn’t update the SVN with the new plugin code yet