Plugtrade Beta Coming Soon

Last time I mentioned that I was working on this website for a friend which would be entirely Open Sourced. Well it's approaching completion and we are expecting to have the beta up and running sometime around the end of December or the beginning of January. The license has been moved to the new GNU AGPLv3 (Affero General Public License) as well. The license is much more fitted towards web applications and removes the GNU GPL's application service provider loophole. Well I think the site is a great idea and look forward to seeing the beta myself and can't wait to start receiving community feedback on the project.

Stuffs in the Works

Recently one of my good buddies Matt (aka Matsta) referred me to another one of his friends who needed a web application built for his new website. After some negotiation, I had decided that I would build this application for him for free, so long as the source code to the application was Open Source. So here I am building this fairly large web application, and although I have had to stop working on most of my other projects, a lot has still come from this little endevour.

One of the biggest things (I think anyway) which has come from this is the massive improvements that I've made to the former MadBB API. It's really starting to turn into a robust framework so to speak. I have reformed pretty much everything in it, including making it entirely PHP 5 compliant. So now it uses custom exceptions to handle errors rather than printing that nasty error message it used to show. The developer or whoever is using it, now has the power to decide how an error is handled.

Secondly, as a result of me doing this huge favor him, he bought the domain madsoft.org for me, so I/we will finally have a website. And he also offered to make me a custom template/design to go on the website. So nothing but great things should be foreseen in the future, but let's hope for the best anyway.

gSourceEdit Alpha 2 on its way

Well I've finally started to get some where with gSE. I completely rewrote it from the ground up in python and got rid of glade. I also got a pretty nice plugin system and API going that will make it fairly easy to extend the program. But the point is, the next alpha is probably on its way soon. The current SVN builds all run fine. Although I am still waiting until I get around to adding some more missing features before I make an actual release. I've got an updated screen shot on the project page which can be found here. Check it out and send me some feedback if you'd like, just use the sourceforge contact page.

MadBB API Rewritten

I know I haven't been posting anything in a long while but I thought I might put this out there. A little while ago I had taken a look at the current MadBB API and easily saw that it was a complete mess. And if want people to be using this API later on for plugins or modules or whatever, then it desperately needed to be fixed now. So I had spent a few days changing everything and making the API easier to understand and use. As a result, I'd also improved a lot of things, including how MadBB handles variables in templates and how it renders templates and so forth. So whenever I get around to it, I will need to fix many of the current front end pages because of the changes to the API. So currently and for a month or so now, the SVN code did not work, so I'll be getting around to fixing that some time soon.

OpenParachute Siwtching to C++

This has been going on for about a month or so now and have just been lazy or something about mentioning it. But I have decided that, it would be in mine, as wel as others best interest if OpenParachute switched to C++. During the development process over the last few months, that the C library was becoming a bit cumbersome and was actually making it hard to use then easier. And of course, the OOP model makes more sense with game development. As a result though, OpenParachute 0.2 is going to be greatly delayed as this transition to C++ is taking a bit longer than I expected. I am currently in the debugging stage and the source tree has already been ported to C++.

MadBB Pre-Alpha v0.0.9

I'm glad to announce yet another development release. First off, I'd like to state that this is called a 'Private' Alpha because I am not releasing any packges for this release but all of the source is freely availible in the SVN code repository.

Almost all of the updates planned for this release have been achieved. They include:

• Completed/fully working user system
  
• Improved security
  
• Topic posting implemented
  

In the previous news release, I had mentioned a possible new theme/skin, and I believe that is still in the works.

Some things to expect for 0.0.10 would be:

• Completed posting support
  
• User system intergration
  
• Initial code base for ACP
  
• Additional UCP feature implementations
  
• Improved security
  
• Possible new theme

If you would like to help, please contact me at: admin [{ dot }] maddog39 [{ at }] gmail [{ dot }] com or via sourceforge, either way. Refer to project page via the link on the right for more information.

Some Updates

Sorry for not posting anything in a while, but progress has been quite slow. I am going to release OpenParachute 0.2 some time soon. I've added custom key binding support to sprites and I've also dropped the need for having a separate timer for sprites as well, this is now done automatically. I will also add some simple camera support before the release. I am still working on gSourceEdit but have run into some issues and not sure what to do with it at the moment, although its almost done. I thought up some ideas for it, such as having a really simple plugin interface and adding default support for subversion as well as make.

OpenParachute reaches v0.1 stable

So just to be honest, this happened about a week ago and I've been neglecting to post about it with interest in other things and being busy. So I have finally reached a point where the library is stable, its not very feature rich and it has some bugs, but it works. I posted source code archives in various formats on the libop's project page. Since then I've been working on some things on my ToDo list for libop which I posted a couple posts back. I was also able to get alpha blending (transparency) working on some objects, I used it on the sprite in the demo game and it works great, as you can see (thats a snapshot from 0.2 SVN). If you checkout the latest revision from SVN and compile it, you can check it out. Im also working on text rendering but its not quite working yet. Some other things I have planned for the next few releases are interactive menus and some OpenGL acceleration thrown into the mix. Im also still working on the audio and will be separating all audio functions and making them their own entity as well as adding some more functionality to the audio layer, like pause and stop, and maybe some transition effects, we'll see. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to email me or leave a comment.

Convert your music from mp3 to ogg

Well I've been wanting to convert all my music from mp3 to ogg and quickly found that there was no real easy way to do it. So I made a small command line utility to do exactly that. Because I really hate mp3 and proprietary formats because they are such a pain in the butt and in the US (as far as I know) they are illegal or so I thought. Well anyway, I was just reading reading the topic about how many songs you have in your library and I think everyone who replied to that topic had their entire library in mp3 and Im sure that alot of people would like to support the open format, if it were only easier.

So I called my utility am2o (auto mp3 to ogg) and its written in PHP (no it does NOT require a webserver what so ever, its a command line utility). I purposely wrote it in PHP to show people that PHP is just like any other scripting language and to debunk the misconception that its only for websites. It also wraps around ffmpeg to do the transcoding.

My personal need for it was to take all the music that I download from gnutella (frostwire/limewire/gtk-gnutella/etc) and convert it to ogg and put it in my music directory and when you download alot of mp3's you keep them in the same folder and when you rerun the command you dont want to re-transcode all of the music thats already transcoded, so it supports filename caching for each unique directory. You may optionally disable caching as well.

To run it you need the ffmpeg and php5-cli packages from the repository. You can get them from Synaptic, or by command line.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg php5-cli

The package itself is attached to this post. To install it just unpack the tarball then run:

cd am2o
sudo ./install.sh

Examples on how to use the program are included in the readme but heres one for a quickstart, its really easy.

am2o -i ./Shared -o ./Music

We use -c to enable filename caching (this flag is require, to disable use -c=no), and ./Shared is our input folder (where we will pull mp3's from) and ./Music is the output folder (where we put the transcoded ogg's).
NOTE: As of version 0.2, the -c flag is no longer required and will automatically default to yes if left out.

If you have a big music library that you are transcoding, and you have a multi or dual core CPU system, I dont recommend running multiple instances as this will probably cause it to clash if you are running it on the same directories. Maybe in the future, if people like this tool, I will add support for multiple ffmpeg instances to encode multiple files at a time.

I hope this tool inspires you to convert to and use ogg to support it as an open format.

[Edit]
I have released am2o v0.2 with support for lossless flac and flexible flags and arguments. You may use all flags/arguments in any order but you must use the -i and -o flags to specify input and output directories respectively. The default transcode format is ogg, if you would like to transcode to flac, you must use the '-f flac' flag. Refer the '-h' or the readme for more information.

For all Windows and Mac users, this program was designed to run on Linux/Unix (*BSD, Solaris, etc) systems. It will run on Windows and Mac as long as you have the PHP interpreter and ffmpeg installed, and it must be run from a command line.

Download am2o v0.1
Download am2o v0.2

Partially working parachute

Okay, so I've been screwing around trying to get my (2D only at the moment) game development framework called OpenParachute (libop) working. So being quite frustrated with "Segmentation fault (core dumped)," I went on the Ubuntu forums and asked for help and also tried out a awsome C/C++ development tool (exclusive to linux) called valgrind. With the combination of the two I was able to finally get a working development version of my library. I do have a screenshot of the "demo game" that comes with the source although input and sprite movement is broken at the moment but this does show some basic functionality working.

Some features I have planned for the future, leading up to a stable release:

• Alpha blending (transparency)
• Menu creation system
  
• Game saving and restoring
• Level creation and loading (maps)
  
• Possibly adding OpenAL support for 3D audio
• Multi-threading support (for dual core and multi-CPU computers)
• Adding a seperate library called libopgl which is entirely OpenGL accelerated and focuses at 3D graphics and games
• Possibly adding some OpenGL acceleration to the 2D library

The project is entirely open source and licensed under the GPL version 2 only, I have very strong feelings against version 3 that I will leave for a later time. The project is hosted on google code and can be found here along with the source code.

OOP-izing gSourceEdit

This week I've been away from home without a web development setup. So I decided that I'd work on gSE for a little bit. It's been needing a coding overhaul which included implementing it in full OOP (Object Oriented Programming, for those who don't know) as the current code base was becoming a tad bit difficult to manage. As a result, the fully OOP'd version should be in the repositories soon (which can be found on the gSE project page). I'm hoping this will help me iron out some more of the many bugs that it has at the moment and of course, make the code much easier to manage and more readable than it is currently.

Website?

Yes, I have been recently working a lot on getting the MadSoft website up and running so that I have a centralized place for all of my software projects and so forth. I don't want to release the website URL just yet but will as soon as it's a bit more complete. Its getting there, just need like another week or so and it should be stable enough for production use. However, I will release some details about it for anyone who would like to know.

It's going to run PHP5/PostgreSQL and its entirely written from scratch by me. It will have a membership sysem as well in addition to all the usual pages, like news, forums, projects, about, etc. Unfortunately I'm using this free template I found on the internet because I really suck at CSS and I really suck at templates/design(s). So if anyone is willing to make a template that would be awsome. But yeah, its going to be pretty limited as far as look go. I hope to use MadBB for the forum software, although not sure if the development tree will be even remotely usable by then, only time will tell. :)

Micro GTK+ media player

Well I havn't posted in little a while, but I do have some stuff cuing up for the future. I was bored and wanted to work on a GTK program while listening to one of my favorite linux podcasts (The Linux Link Tech Show) and decided to make a small multithreaded media player in C/GTK+ with an SDL backend for the audio playback and threading support. Apparently SDL_mixer has some issue with pausing that hasnt been sorted yet so the pause button probably wont work properly, as it didn't for me either.

You can download a tar-bzip2 package here. Obviously I use linux, so there is a linux-x86 binary in there along with the source code, as well as a Makefile. I don't use windows but I hear that you can compile GTK+ apps under windows, wouldn't know because I havn't really tried it. But to run under linux you just need the gtk+-2.0, libsdl-1.2, and libsdl-mixer libraries and if you want to compile it from source, you obviously need the development headers as well.

gSourceEdit Alpha is Ready

I've been working on a project to make a small, versatile, and light-weight programmers text editor for linux, because personally, they all (mostly) suck. I called this project/program gSourceEdit. Its written in PHP-GTK2 and I've completed it to a point now where its partially functional. There are screenshots on it's SourceForge.net project page and the source is available from the subversion repository. I need people to test it and submit bug fixes (if possible). Also note that some things are not implemented yet, so if something isn't doing anything, check your console for debug output.

Hello and Welcome

Well this is the first time that I've actually blogged in a really long time (since 2005 in fact). But I didn't really understand blogging that well then, so I hope to actually do something with this one. Besides covering MadSoft development I'm going to cover a lot of Linux for a few reasons: one being I use and love Linux and OSS (Open Source Software) ideals, two being that all my software is for Linux, and three all my software is open source.

For a little bit of background info, I run Ubuntu Dapper currently, and because of some hardware issues lately, I havn't upgraded yet. I have been using Linux for about 2 years now and havn't switched back to Windows since, since I just love everything about Linux and what it has to offer which proprietary solutions could never provide (well they could, but never would). Software that I'm currently working on would be; the Linux kernel (I'm not a developer yet though but readying my first patch), gSourceEdit (a small light-weight but flexible programmers editor written in PHP and GTK+), and MadBB which is a small, very light-weight Bulletin Board system written in PHP which is probably my primary project at the moment. I have many reasons for starting my personal programming projects (gSourceEdit and MadBB) because I know that they tend to be quite redundant projects as you see new ones popping up all the time, but thats a different discussion for a different day.