A while ago I started working on a plugin for Muine that syncs your library with an iPod. I worked on it a bit more lately and it seems to be coming along, so I’m trying to get people to test it. You need this and this, to start.

Right now there is no HAL integration, as I’m having an incredibly difficult time figuring out the correct way to integrate with that stuff. What it will do, however, is mount/umount your iPod assuming it is setup correctly in fstab (correct device, ‘user’ option, etc). It defaults to /media/ipod for the mount point, but that is configurable through a gconf key (/apps/muine/ipod/mount_path).

I’ve been using it for the last few days with no serious problems. I do suggest you backup your iTunesDB file before giving it a shot, though, as corrupting that is the worst thing that can happen. You can find it at /media/ipod/iPod_Control/iTunes/iTunesDB. If you encounter problems, feel free to email me.

Update: You will need muine 0.8.3 or greater to use this plugin, as previous versions lack the necessary interface.

Another Update: I’ve checked ipod-sharp and muine-ipod into arch at http://www.snorp.net/bazaar.

A volunteer has packaged rcd/rug for fc3, and I have put the rpms here. Enjoy.

I didn’t want to be left out.

I just committed ipod-sharp to CVS, a library for manipulating iTunesDBs. It’s written entirely in C#. Currently you can use it to add/remove songs, and manipulate any existing playlists. There is also a cheesy little tool that lists the songs/playlists in a given iTunesDB.

I mostly wrote it to add iPod syncing to Muine. I have a patch which does this, but it needs a lot of work still. I haven’t yet totally worked out how the HAL integration will happen, for instance. For starters, I patched gnome-volume-manager to mount the appropriate partition when it sees an iPod and invoke ‘muine —ipod-sync ’. But that doesn’t cover unmounting. Also apparently you need to ‘eject’ the device for the iPod to put up the happy “ok to disconnect” screen.

You can get the code from the ‘ipod-sharp’ module in gnome CVS, or here. Hopefully I’ll get the Muine patch in a useable state soon.

From the beatiful sights of Milford Sound we went to the Circus Town, err Queenstown. It's packed with rollercoaster attractions like speedboats, bungee, tandem skydiving etc. But since I'm not much of an adrenalin person, we did the jetboat thing and continued north west, to the glaciers. We chose to climb the Fox glacier simply because it was cheaper, but visited Franz Josef the next day too.

From there we continued north to Punakaiki. I managed to get a few shots of a kiwi-like bird which turned out to be the weka. Even when the weather is playing games with you, New Zealand is really marvelous for giving you a number of fantastic scenic views. That place is simply heaven for nature photographers.

The farm we stayed at was really close to the nice Purakaunui falls. Met some photographers there and they obviously didn't think much of my "why carry a tripod when I can just stick the cam on a railing, eh?". The method works really well for the lazy bastards like myself though. Especially when I saw a poor fella carry around a big camera bag on the Tongariro crossing track. Yuck.

We visited a few places on the way, like the McLeans falls which I found more appealing than Purakanui which were listed as the most photographed one on the south island. Them tourist guides. The wind almost blew us away at the fossil forest at Curior Bay. It's not much exciting on the photos though. We stayed overnight in Te Anau, preparing for what became one of the highlights of our trip - Milford Sound.

Everybody was telling us we should expect a rain, since it almost always rains at Milford Sound. Well I guess we were lucky, since we had a lovely day from the early morning. The trip there alone was miraculous and we had to make a stop every few minutes. You'll be driving the same road back so you can stop at places you missed ;).

The boat trip was quite nice, but I enjoyed the time on the land more. We regret we didn't go on the 3 day track, but it's a weather gamble.

From Oamaru we went to Catlins park area, which we didn't plan initially, but turned out to be one of the nicest places we visited in New Zealand.

On the way, at a place they call Nugget Point, we met two blokes who were enjoying themselves driving two very fast radio controlled cars on the beach. I enjoyed shooting a lot pictures there. Some turned out quite nice, but the fun framing those fast beasts was even more fun than the result. I'm sure they had fun driving them too :)

When we saw a few seals at Nugget Point we thought we saw something. Later we managed to get a few feet from big sea lions at Surat Bay and later at Abel Tasman kayak close to the seals and have dolphins swim around us. Stuff like that happens in NZ about as commonly as cars get stolen in CZ.

Since it's about 5000 pictures and 13.3GB to go through, I'll be posting my New Zealand images in batches. This first batch covers the first three days of the trip with a single shot from the 38 hour flight ;). Czech republic is almost exactly on the other side of the globe and we had a lot of waiting between the flights (PRG>AMS>KUL>AUC>CHR).

We arrived in Christchurch after waiting for the last plane in Auckland. We totally looked like zombies there. I managed to leave all contact info for Glynn at home, so we wandered around Christchurch on our own. NZ towns look way more american than anything else I've seen. Wide roads, everything orthogonal. That's quite a contrast to the roads out in the open, where it's not uncommon for it to become dirt roads and back to "state highway" again. The highway only has one lane per direction though. And most of the bridges merge into one lane in both directions. Oh and we even went on a bridge that shared the line with a train. Very funky.

Of course driving on the wrong side of the road got me a honk honk at the very first crossing in Christchurch ;). I got used to it later on (driving on left, not the honking), but at one point we stopped at a nice place to make some pictures and when we got back on the road I said to Iva that it wasn't the safest place to park. And she replied with "Shouldn't you be driving left?". At the second I got back to the right lane a speeding toyota truck went past us just when we were going out of that curve. One second. Phew.

The weather in New Zealand was changing day to day, and later on even minute to minute. Overall it wasn't too bad, although the kiwis said this summer was very cold. I found it funny when a complete stranger approached us in New Plymouth, asked about where we come from and apologised for the weather ;) The people in NZ are the firendliest I've ever met.

We had some snow around lake Tekapo, yet the next day we got sunburnt on the Hooker valley track near Mt Coook village. It doesn't take long for a european to get burnt even when you try to avoid it.

There are two things I'd like to see implemented in the industrial engine. As it stands it is pretty much impossible to tell what entry widget has focus if you don't count the blinking of the cursor which depending on your settings can be pretty hard.

The other thing is rather cosmetic. I wouldn't mind giving more visual clue on what tab is currently selected by adding the selection tripe, similar to what XP does.

Oh and once Industrial is in gnome-themes, I'd love to see the sodipodi ruler bug squashed. Pwetty pwueese!

In the last few months, Tambet and I have been working on the successor to rcd called zmd (ZENworks Management Daemon). It is written in C#. I did not choose the name.

Things are going pretty well, and a lot of stuff is starting to work. We have an xmlrpc compatability layer for implementing the old rcd methods (just enough to make the old GUI work), and a remoting layer for the new clients. The xmlrpc stuff is pretty much complete, and you can use the old rug/red-carpet apps with it to install packages, etc. Also we’re writing a new ‘rug’ in C#. You can see it in action here. In that shot, it’s installing some stuff from the ‘funktronics’ aptrpm repository.

I don’t have any code to share yet, but hopefully that will happen soon.