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How to build the latest Tomahawk Player on Ubuntu 11.04

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:17:00 +0200

Tomahawk Player is a next generation music player. It features custom stations (building upon the beatuiful Echo Nest), a playlist importer, social connection to Twitter, Google Chat, and Jabber. Maybe most important of all: It's able to find and pull music from different sources like YouTube, last.fm, SoundCloud, Skreemr, Spotify, and more using the Playdar approach. Of course, it can also play songs from your local library. Make sure to check out the video if you like to know more.

First a word of warning: Tomahawk is still beta, version 0.1.0 is the most current release~~, but there's no PPA yet for Ubuntu systems~~. The instructions in the wiki are for Maverick and didn't work for me. That's why I thought I write a short tutorial on how to compile Tomahawk Player on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

Update: No need to build version 0.1.0 yourself anymore if you are on Ubuntu 11.04, because the PPA has been updated! Just add ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/tomahawk to your sources, update, and install. In more detail:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/tomahawk
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install tomahawk

Meet the dependencies

First of all, make sure you have all the dependencies installed. I am not 100% sure if the following list is complete because I might have already had some of the necessary libs on my system. Anyway:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake libtag1c2a libtag1-dev libqt4-dev libqt4-sql-sqlite \
    libphonon-dev libboost-dev zlib1g-dev libqjson-dev libz-dev \
    libqca2-dev pkg-config git-core phonon-backend-gstreamer

This should install all required packages. More experienced users could als try a different backend for phonon.

Furthermore, libechonest and Clucene are prerequesites for Tomahawk, so download the latest tarball from https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/libs/libechonest/ and extract it. Step into the new directory libechonest-* and run these commands:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Now, clone CLucene from their git repository and install it:

git clone git://clucene.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/clucene/clucene
cd clucene && mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Resolvers

Resolvers are small plugins to Tomahawk that enable the player to search and stream music from differen sources. There's already a collection of resolvers for a number of third-party services which can be used.

git clone https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk-resolvers.git

That's it for now, I show you how to enable various resolvers once we got the player up and running.

Optional Spotify support

If you live in a country where you have access to Spotify, you might want Tomahawk Player be able to stream music directly from this wonderful service. In order to do so, download the archive for your architecture from http://developer.spotify.com/en/libspotify/overview/ and extract it.

cd libspotify-*-linux*
sudo make install prefix=/usr/local

Now, cd into the tomahawk-resolvers directory that was created in the last step.

cd spotify
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

there should be an executable spotify_tomahawkresolver in the build directory. You can leave it there for the time being.

Build the actual player

Let's compile the Tomahawk Player itself alreaddy:

git clone https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk.git
cd tomahawk
git submodule init && git submodule update
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DINTERNAL_JREEN=ON -DINTERNAL_QTWEETLIB=ON ..
make

You can probably go and drink a cup of coffee because the process takes a while

After this has finished, it's time to run the player for the first time: ./tomahawk. You can set up the location of your local music collection, you can enter various accounts, and you can add resolvers. In order to do so from the Tomahawk settings dialog, klick and the add button, navigate into the respective directory beneath tomahawk-resolvers, and select the *.js/*.py/*.php file or the above-mentioned spotify_tomahawkresolver executable. Play around with your new player a little to get to know all of its features.

Enjoy the future of music listening today!

Update: According to domme's comment, libgnutls-dev libgloox-dev are not required anymore, so I removed them from the instructions.

Sudan Vote Monitor

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:15:36 +0100

I blogged about Sudan before, but neglected the country for quite a while (if only here in the blog), although many important things happened there over the course of the past months. Among them a nationwide election. I will not write about it here; if you're interested and want to read up on the topic, Wikipedia is a good starting point.

What I want to cover here is a project that I've been keeping tabs on for quite a while now: It's called Ushahidi - Swahili for "witness" - and is, actually, a non-profit software company based in Kenya. It's goal is to develop software for collaborative information collection and visualization. Initially, the platform was created after Kenya's 2007 presidential election when violence erupted all over the country. Ushahidi used a crowdsourcing approach to gather information about when and where violent acts were committed. People could send in information by email or text message, and thes reports were subsequently placed on a map. Watch the video for a general overview of what Ushahidi does:

What is the Ushahidi Platform? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Now, Ushahidi can be used for many different things, from tracking crisis events to mapping snowball fights. There are services like Crowdmap that make it possible to set up an Ushahidi instance within minutes, or Swiftriver to filter and manage realtime information from a variety of different channels. The project has become a veritable success story. And this is where I want to get back to events in Sudan. On January 9, 2011, Southern Sudan will hold a referendum on whether or not it will secede from Northern Sudan.

Many observers fear that there will be controversy about the results, media censorship, even the return of civil war after five years of relative calm. Sudan Vote Monitor, a project of the Sudan Institute for Research and Policy, will soon reopen and accept reports of violence and other incidents. In an announcement today, they provide reasons why one should report to Sudan Vote Monitor even though many other initiatives are monitoring the referendum, too: Easy accessibility, real time reports, and aggregation of information. Since the site was blocked in Sudan for a couple of days during this year's elections, it will be revealing to see if this will happen again in two weeks.

Everyone interested in the referendum in Southern Sudan should try to follow the reports on Sudan Vote Monitor and become a follower on Twitter.

Of course, other initiatives exist. The Enough Project by the (left-leaning) Center for American Progress aims to end genocide and crimes against humanity, especially in Sudan. Its most famous activist is arguably George Clooney. He also supports the idea of using satellite based surveillance to monitor troop movements in Southern Sudan during the referendum. According to an online article in TIME, the website www.satsentinel.org will go live tomorrow (though it really doesn't look like it because the domain is for sale right now for a little over 50 €) while the satellite will take up work on Thursday. Let's wait and see ...

Google releases OpenID demo store and mod_pagespeed

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 18:54:00 +0100

Google just released two interesting projects into the wild. One is an OpenID demo store with accompanying documentation, the other an open-source module for the Apache web server.

Google's OpenID demo store

Although OpenID has seemingly been adopted by all major players on the web (aside from Facebook, maybe), I wonder how often their users log in with their OpenID. Most smaller sites are afraid of the overhead of an OpenID implentation, or simply don't know how to do it. Now, Google set up a sample store that makes heavy use of OpenID. Equally important, it's supplemented by an extraordinary documentation. As Carsten correctly states, such a documentation was needed for quite some time. It will be interesting to see if any larger online shops jump on the bandwagon an implement OpenID for their businesses.

mod_pagespeed

According to Google, page loading times become increasingly important, not only for the customer experience, but also for the ranking in Google's search index. Performance hints and tools are abundant on the web, but Google goes even beyond those recommendations and released an extension for the popular Apache web server: mod_pagespeed. I installed it on my local box, but there are lots of options, and I haven't found the time yet to fiddle with them all. It seems that you can achieve most of the optimizations by optimizing your default Apache installation. However, mod_pagespeed might make configuration a lot easier. I guess, we'll have to wait and see.

The Evolution of the Geek

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:24:00 +0200

Just in case you always wanted to know how geeks became what they are today, click on the above image

Installing gitosis on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:33:00 +0200

This is supposed to be more like a reminder to myself, should I ever need to install gitosis on a server again. I carefully followed all the steps described here and here (German) on my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. But when it came to pushing my first project to the repository, git failed with ERROR:gitosis.serve.main:Repository read access denied

Turned out that none of the hooks in repositories/gitosis-admin.git/hooks/ was executable. A simple $ sudo chmod +x * solved the problem for me. Now, everything seems to be working fine.

FrOSCon 2010, Day 1

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:01:00 +0200

Jon 'Maddog' Hall

As I said before, I attended FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Software Conference, in Sankt Augustin on Saturday. It was my first time at FrOSCon, and I must say I instantly felt very much at home there. Great talks, friendly people, and a relaxed atmosphere: What more can you expect from a nerd conference?

h3>The Talks I Attended

Having to choose from about six to ten parallel talks was no easy task, but I found something interesting most of the time. The first session was held by Lorna Jane Mitchell. She told us how Open Source changed her career. She is actively participating in PHP projects, organizing PHP events, and generally trying to help where she can. Because of this she was presented with interesting career options in the past and will probably in the future, too. Well done!

Then I switched tracks and found myself in a talk about MySQL command line tools. We could have skipped the general shell introduction and should have moved fast forward to the various possibilities the mysql CLI offers. But still, I learned about some great commands like pager, if only in the last ten minutes of the presentation.

The award for most inspirational talk of the day goes to Jon "Maddog" Hall. He gave some great examples of how useful Open Source Software can be in developing countries. Access to information is the pivotal point in many cases, and OSS is a great, cheap and lasting way to achieve this. But you have to be careful if you wanted to achieve sustained success, because the local conditions may differ from what you know or expect. Let's see how Maddog's latest venture in Brazil, Project Cauã, evolves.

Later on, Michael Prokop talked about his experience managing OSS projects. If you want your software to be successful, it's not enough to write good code. Clever marketing, involvement of the community, distributed version control, bug reports, and even the name of the project play major roles on the road to success.

I spent more or less the second half of the day in the PHP room. The PHP track had been organized by the fine people of the PHPUG Dortmund. Manuel Pichler talked about software metrics and PHP Depend, Christian Weiske gave an introduction on the Semantic Web, especially on Microformats and RDFa, and Kore Nordmann introduced us to the Arbit project tracking tool and some of the features that are planned for future releases. Maybe, hopefully, we can have one of them at our local PHPUG in Mainz later this year, we'll see.

The Event In General

First of all, the location is perfect for an event this size. The modern lecture rooms had just the right size and all were equipped with projectors. A lot of software projects and companies, from KDE to Python to FreeWRT to Openstreetmap, set up their booths and presented their work there. I took a long look at KDE 4.5, for example, but still don't like it On the other hand, I will certainly take a closer look at the Skolelinux distribution because I'm currently installing software for an educational project.

The was plenty of coffee and Club Mate, of course, and the food in the refectory was okay, at least the vegetarian meal. I also bumped into quite a lot of people I know from earlier conferences, meet-ups, or Barcamps. The whole community aspect of FrOSCon is one of its major assets, I guess. Feels like a natural habitat to me - that's why I'll probably return next year. Well, in fact, I will return because I did not find Fachhochschule Sankt Augustin this time - must have been really, really blind.

So, thanks to all the people who helped to make FrOSCon a great event!

I will be at FrOSCon 2010

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:56:00 +0200

FrOSCon, the Free and Open Software Conference, will be held in the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin this weekend. It's already the 5th edition of this conference, but it will be my premiere as visitor. There are going to be many lectures and workshop revolving around open software. And there is a track especially for PHP that I'm particularly looking forward to.

One of the great things about FrOSCon is that it's not just a conference, but a lot more: A number of OSS project (Django, Arch Linux, OpenOffice, heck, even Perl) have there own rooms, and there is a superb program for kids of different ages. The youngsters can go geocaching and (open street) mapping, learn how to code games in Python, or make cool stop motion animations. If I was (or had) a kid, this would be so cool

Anyway, I will be at FrOSCon on Saturday, and maybe Sunday too. I haven't decided yet on which sessions to attend. But if you want to chat or have a cup of coffee, just say Hi or send a tweet to @mattsches. I'm really looking forward to meeting lots of interesting people and to learning wicked new stuff.

Portable Linux Apps

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:24:00 +0200

Back in the days when I was still a Windows user, portable apps where a good way of carrying current versions of my favorite tools with me on a USB stick. Now, this is also possible on most Linux variants with Portable Linux Apps.

There are already more than 50 apps you can put on your USB stick, just remember to make them executable. This is not only great if you want to run the application on any desktop, but it also comes in handy if you want to test out a nightly build without really installing it on your system. The latter remains stable, while the former hast got everything it needs to run contained in itself.

If you run into trouble there's a forum, too, where you can ask for help or request a new package - however there's not much happening there yet. But since everything is so dead easy, it should just work. At least on Ubuntu 10.04, OpenSUSE 11.2, and Fedora 12. You might want to use a LiveCD of one of these distributions if you're on a different system.

Generating Binaural Beats with Gnaural

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:14:00 +0200

A while ago, I wrote a short blog post on white noise and binaural beats over at my New Urban Music Blog (German). This peculiar aspect of psychoacoustics is pretty fascinating. Some people use techniques like this to better meditate or concentrate. There is an online white noise generation tool called Simply Noise, so you can get a basic idea of what it's all about.

There are many controversial, alleged uses for binaural beats. Some researchers report that they can influence brain waves and thus help to reduce anxiety. For an introduction on the topic, please read the Wikipedia entry. Binarual beats are also part of a presentation Mitch Altman gave at the 24C3 in Berlin three years ago.

The reason I'm telling all this is that I just found out about the existance of Gnaural, an open source binaural beat sound generator for Linux (and other OSs). Here is a tutorial on how to install it on 32bit Ubuntu systems. If you, like me, have a 64bit system, you might want to follow these instructions. Gnaural offers many options to tweak the generated sound to your preferences, making it easy to experiment with a wide range of differenct noises. Personally, I'm not convinced yet of the method's beneficial aspects, but it's an interesting field if you want to try out some lifehacking

New Layout!

nospam@example.com (Matthias Gutjahr) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:19:00 +0200

It's been a while since I tinkered with this little blog of mine. Today, I finally managed to update Serendipity to the most current version. And while waiting for the files to upload, I checked for new templates because a fresh look might do no harm. That's when I found out about Sagittarius-A, a very clean template that was ported to Serendipity not long ago. I fell in love (well, almost) with it instantly. And as usual, switching themes was hassle-free!

I will try to pay a little more attention to this blog in the future, blogging about a more diverse range of topics again, covering not only BarCamps and web stuff, but maybe something more personal, too. The World Cup 2010 will start in a couple of days, so why not share my thoughts on it here? I will keep up the peculiar German-English dichotomy, though, blogging about the more personal stuff in German and reserving English for web and technology related posts.

One more word to my readers: Don't expect everything to work perfect for the next couple of days. There seem to be some issues concerning some heavy modifications and the new layout. But it will smooth out soon over the next iterations. I will also try to implement a couple of new features if I find the time to. In the long run, I even plan to move this whole blog to a different server and even a different or second URL. I still own sperrobjekt.de (without the hyphen, that is) back from the old days. But I have to figure out how to publish that to Google first. Stay tuned!