Sugus » cries for help

The quest for a simple music player on mac OSX

Pedro Assuncao — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:11:41 +0000

I have to say this: looking for a simple music player for OSX is like searching for a needle in the middle of lots of big sticks; it should be easy, except the needle is under the carpet.

Nevertheless, between trying out iTunes, Songbird, and a few other options, i have always felt like there should be something, you know, simple and memory efficient. Don’t get me wrong, i love the interface on iTunes. And i do love what the guys at songbird are trying to accomplish. But the fact remains: I want a music player for OSX that does not freeze whenever i task-switch back to it. This happens on a 4GB ram macbook pro with both iTunes and Songbird!

So, a lot of google queries later, i came across Cog. It’s a very minimalistic music player that does one thing: it plays music. No multiple playlists, no plugins, no fuzz, it plays music. Period.

Time will tell if i’ll stick to it or miss something, but so far so good.

If anyone knows a better one, please let me know

The beginning of the Matrix? Chicken poo equals electricity.

Pedro Assuncao — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 10:12:36 +0000

Chicken matrix. Are we there yet? This article reports a new clean way of turning animal waste into electric power. What I understand from it? A new motivation for chicken farms not to go away any time soon.

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VLC for OSX developers needed

Pedro Assuncao — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:23:30 +0000

According to a post on their forums, there are currently 0 (zero) developers working on the OSX version of the popular video player VLC.

If you know someone with Cocoa skills that wants a good challenge, pass the message on.

Please do, I don’t want to lose my favorite video player of all times

Reddit developers, please fix this

Pedro Assuncao — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:26:50 +0000

I previously mentioned how dumb it was for someone to have to wait 10 minutes to be able to post a comment on a different thread on Reddit, but this latest discovery is just delicious.

Just tried to post a comment on a post where the submitter clearly forgot to add the link to the news article. Here’s what I got:

Am I the only one who thinks this is not really helpful to anyone? If any Reddit developer reads this, can you please fix it?

Thanks.

SWIFT transfers are monitored by US authorities (even European transfers)

Pedro Assuncao — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:37:03 +0000

I was really in shock when I went with my mother to the bank the other day: There was a small sheet of paper stating that bank transfers done via the SWIFT network are prone to have its details shared with US authorities. The network currently has two nodes working with the same data in almost real time, one in the Netherlands and one in the US, and the latter is – well – under US jurisdiction.

From the wikipedia:

Operations centers

SWIFT operates two data centers, one in the US and one in the Netherlands. These centers share information in near real-time. In case of a failure in one of the data centers, the other is able to handle the traffic of the complete network. Currently SWIFT is building a third data center in Switzerland, which is scheduled to start operating in the second half of 2009.^[4] Once this is completed, data from European SWIFT members will no longer be mirrored to the US data center. Also called Distributed Architecture will partition messaging into two zones, the European messaging zone and the Trans-Atlantic messaging zone.^[5] European Zone messages will be stored in the Netherlands and in a part of the Switzerland operating center, Trans-Atlantic Zone messages will be stored in the US and in a part of the Switzerland operating center that is segregated from the European Zone messages. Countries outside of Europe were by default allocated to the Trans-Atlantic Zone but could choose to have their messages stored in the European Zone.

Apparently there was a big fuss about this in 2006 and the SWIFT organization agreed to make changes to its server infrastructure so that the European transfer data would remain in Europe and not be accessible to the US government. I don’t know the current status of the subject but, according to that warning from the bank in Portugal, seems that the data is still shared and accessible. There was a vote for this information sharing to go forward in end of the July 2009 and it was supposed to be accepted, though I don’t know for sure the result.

Anyone with a financial background has more insight on this?

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Network library for games in Python

Pedro Assuncao — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:37:25 +0000

I have always loved games. Especially Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. I have even tried to develop a couple of them in the past, using several different technologies, the latest ones being Java and OpenGL. So, while finishing college, I wrote a 2D game engine, a networking library, a map editor, sprite editor, basically everything necessary to put in place the ability for players to enter a world, move around, and chat.

I recently decided to port all of that (2D game engine and all associated tools) from Java/Lwjgl to Python/Pygame/PyOpenGL and, in the process, try to come up with a simple 2D MMORPG (again!).

My problem is that the network library I had written was very primitive and, although it got the job done, I’m not sure I know enough python to make something that is both scalable and efficient. I recently came across this, at first sight interesting, library called PodSixNet (http://mccormick.cx/projects/PodSixNet). I am also aware of other libs out there, like pyraknet, and some others I found in the Pygame website (http://www.pygame.org/tags/network), but I was wondering if anyone has any experience with any of them and can recommend it.

I haven’t implemented comments on my blog yet, but feel free to drop me a tweet (http://twitter.com/nocivus).

Thanks.