Amarok is looking really good these days:

Hold on, that's not Amarok! It's Clementine, a Qt4 port of Amarok 1.4, aka "my dreams finally come true", aka "what Amarok 2 should've been". It's functional right now, not quite as fully-featured as Amarok 1.4, but all the major bits are there, and it's being actively developed.

Once again I am amazed at and eternally grateful for the number of choices of media players there are in Linux. It seems like I write a new blog entry every other week saying how great some media player is. The reality is that there really are tons of great options. And this is yet another.

But Amarok 1.4 was special. And I really hope Clementine succeeds.

Like a sad dumb dog who still hopefully visits the grave of his dear, departed master, every once in a while I try Amarok 2 again. Unfortunately, there has been no improvement in usability since the last dozen times I checked.

But have you seen Exaile lately? This is what the bleeding edge version looks like:

It's pretty nice. It's about as close as you can get to a stable, fully-functional Amarok 1.4-ish player nowadays.

Aside from looking good, Exaile is good at handling ID3 tags (a few Japanese tags that Amarok 2 displays as ????????, Exaile displays properly) and it's pretty fast to rescan my collection nowadays, which is nice. It does fairly sane grouping of multi-artist albums under "Various artists". It supports moodbar and song lyrics and cover art fetching and such, if that's the kind of thing you enjoy. It even splits the library display by the first letter of the artist names, just like Amarok 1.4 did, which is awesome.

I did have some problems installing the dependencies (python bindings for webkit?) for some of the plugins, but oh well. I figured it out.

Today I went so far as to install gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-control-center just so Exaile wouldn't look like crap. I use KDE4, and I haven't touched Gnome or any Gnome libs in a few years, so this is saying something.

Mark Kretschmann, an Amarok dev, recently wrote an article about the paradox of choice, in which he said (probably correctly) that being presented with too many options and too many choices end up paralyzing people and making them miserable.

Sorry, but the irony was overwhelming...

I really do believe there's a good program buried somewhere in that mess of controls, desperately wanting to be free.

I blathered on a bit about VMWare a while back, and lots of people recommended VirtualBox. I'm trying VirtualBox 3.1.2 with Windows 7 host and Linux guest, and it works surprisingly well. I've used it successfully to hack on a bunch of projects while I'm stuck on a Windows laptop (shudder).

Installing was essentially self-explanatory. I never read any docs, except when it came to installing those "Guest Addition" programs to allow better mouse-handling. And I had to look up how to go about sharing folders between host and guest. But the documentation was clear, I found a short description how to set up the share and then and a command to run to mount the host folder:

sudo mount -t vboxsf ShareName /mnt/mountpoint

I'm using Gnome in my guest, because I haven't used it in a long time and I was curious what'd changed. I'm amazed even Compiz works in the guest. I recall a time in the very recent past when my computer couldn't even handle Compiz natively, let alone in a virtual machine.

Perhaps the best part about VirtualBox compared to VMWare is that there is one product called "VirtualBox" and one download link that took me a matter of seconds to find. Fancy the thought.

In my ongoing quest for a good audio player (after becoming an Amarok exile and refugee) I settled on aTunes. aTunes is really good except for two quibbles...

One, it's a Java app (a Swing app as far as I can tell?) and the GUI is enormous and unresponsive and certain parts of it really behave strangely. Like clicking in text fields to focus them sometimes requires multiple clicks. It's just annoying enough to constantly throw me off.

The second problem is that it crashes all the time. Music keeps playing but the GUI disappears. pkill java has become necessary far too often lately.

So now I'm trying Exaile. It's very Amarok 1.4-like. I can overlook the fact that it's GTK because it's otherwise so nice. Best part, when asked if Exaile is going to go the way of Amarok 2, the dev has this to say:

Never ever ever ever ever ever.

I'm having a hard time coming up with any deficiencies in Exaile so far. Everything in the GUI is laid out nicely. No crashes yet.

One of these days I'll find an acceptable app... Most of these apps are good, but I'm too picky. I love how Linux lets me be picky. There is a wealth of options, and everything is free. I am spoiled.

VMware never ceases to confuse me. Not the program, which is a pretty good piece of software. Just the name of everything. Look at this list of VMware software; can you figure out what any of those things are via their names? The VMware official site is no less confusing.

Hilariously, all of these things seem to be named different things than a year or two ago when last I tried to install VMware. It seems this company, like many others, enjoys renaming everything at random, just to keep you on your toes.

I'm sort of tired of KDE4 crashing left and right and Plasma barfing all over me all day. So I decided to check out the current state of lightweight window managers.

Lo and behold, Fluxbox is still going strong. It was the first WM I used way back in 2000-something when I started using Linux full-time. Last time I tried, there were always weird compatibility problems with system tray icons and pagers working properly when running a mix of KDE and Gnome and other apps, but those seem to have cleared up nicely; I have yet to hit any snags. Here's a screenshot.

This took very minimal effort to install and set up. Maybe a couple hours total. I'm using ipager and conky. The wallpaper comes from the UniQ KDE theme. Vim and Emacs themes are my own.

The Fluxbox style is mydefcon_4 from tenr.de which is probably the largest and most thorough set of themes created by one person that I've witnessed. That fellow is motivated.

For all the bells and whistles of KDE4, what features did I actually use regularly?

1. A menu of apps
2. Taskbar + System tray + Clock
3. KWin's good window management.
4. Global keyboard shortcuts galore
5. One widget: current CPU/RAM/Network usage
6. Mouse/keyboard management, background-setting, etc.

Fluxbox gives me all but number 5, and Conky gives me that. Number 6 you can do with xset and feh and such.

And I like being motivated to use keyboard shortcuts for more things. I'm already halfway there. Maybe I can take the plunge eventually and try a tiling window manager. Not sure I've reached that level of nerditude yet though.

And now I can move and resize windows without my graphics card bursting into flames. Maybe when I can afford a few more cores worth of CPU I'll try KDE4 again. Honestly I think I have too much monitor real-estate for my ancient computer to handle smoothly in KDE4.

Not to knock KDE4; it's awesome and I'll probably go back someday. But everyone needs a break now and then.

Given my inability to use Amarok 1.4 and my lack of desire to use Amarok 2.0, I tried loads of music players and for now I've landed on aTunes.

It's not perfect. It's far from perfect. But it's the best of the bunch. These are the features I MUST HAVE for a media player and which aTunes possesses.

1. Last.fm integration. aTunes has probably the best integration I've seen in a player, without going over-the-top and stuffing a whole web browser into the app.
2. System tray icon, right-clickable with song controls in the menu.
3. Commandline interface.
4. Able to display CJK fonts. In Arch (or in Gentoo using the icedtea6-bin VM) CJK fonts are displayed as empty boxes, but in Gentoo using Sun JVM, it works fine.
5. Tag editing. aTunes has a pretty nice tag editor for single songs or multiple at once.
6. Amarok-like tree of albums/artists/genres/whatever I want. I want a single expandable and collapsable tree-list, not 3 panes I have to click between.
7. Equalizer.
8. Skins are nice; aTunes has these.
9. "Collection" support and folder-watching/auto-updating when I dump music into ~/music. aTunes does this very well. Scanned a few thousand files fairly quickly, and does updates very fast.
10. Amarok-1.4-like spreadsheetish playlist layout.
11. Lightweight build process. No gstreamer. aTunes provides Mplayer and Xine backends and has few to no other dependencies (besides Java). The Mplayer backend didn't work out very well for me, but Xine works beautifully.

It also has some other nice bonuses, like the elegant way it uses the Album Artist tag for albums with multiple artists, the interesting statistics and bar graphs it can produce from your song listening history, playlist tabs, and so on.

Things I dislike about aTunes... well it's a Java app, so it takes a decade to start up. It also has horrid fonts and the widgets are clunky. But it's responsive once it's running, and I don't care how it looks as much as how sane the layout is. Searching is also clunky. But these aren't show-stoppers.

Here's a list of other players I tried, and why I didn't use them.

Remember Amarok 1.4? Remember how awesome it was? Here's a screenshot just in case you don't remember.

Does it bring back fond memories of music and comfortable GUI interfaces? It does for me. Those were good times. Keep that picture in mind.

Let's play a game called "Can we make Amarok 2.2 look like Amarok 1.4"? I've heard this as a response to complaints about Amarok 2's GUI: You can make it look like Amarok 1.4 if you want.

So let's try. Ready? Here it is:

Does it look the same? Not really. Kind of close. That's as good as I could do though. There are no headers on the columns in the playlist, so you can't tell what half of those things mean. You can't resize the fields (like you could in 1.4). You can't sort them by a simple click of a header (like you could in 1.4); instead you have that strange breadcrumb thing up there. You can't add new fields by right-clicking and picking them from a menu (as you could in 1.4). Not as many songs fit in the playlist in 2.2, but it's pretty close.

Now, here's the good part. How do you get Amarok 2.2 to look this way? By doing THIS!

AAHHHHHHH! Too bad Halloween is gone, because I could use that dialog to scare children. The title of this blog post, DISBER GROGTH GROCKS, comes from the mangled and truncated labels in that horizontally-scrolling list of icons. Doesn't it sound like the deranged grunting of a once-proud beast, now fallen into ruin, stumbling zombie-like through the world, a mere shambles of its former self? I think so.

Once in a blue moon, I'll witness the behavior of an application that's so off-the-wall, bat-honking insane that I'm reduced to maniacal laughter. That's not an exaggeration; I literally gape at the computer screen and cackle like a madman, curling reflexively into a fetal position. This was one of those times.

It took me well over a half hour to drag and drop all of those controls into that window in the right order with dividers between them. Thank God for 1920x1200 monitors or the dialog wouldn't even have fit on the screen. (No, it's not resizable.)

Why a half hour? Because I also had to click every single one of those elements and set its width as a percentage using a slider in a sub-dialog. By default every field is an equal width, so that a field with a single digit in it has a mile of whitespace on either side, while song titles are displayed as "C...". And this dialog is the only way to fix it:

How did I come up with 25% there? Laborious trial-and-error. Amarok 2.2. takes what was a click-and-drag-to-resize operation in every other application ever written, and turns it into an algebra problem. Twelve fields I had to tweak, one by one. I was probably in and out of that dialog 3 or 4 dozen times.

(I'll spare you what happens when you resize the window in Amarok 2.2. Suffice it to say once you get it looking OK, never touch it again.)

Now, I'm no expert on GUI design. But I'm guessing there's a reason most applications don't do things this way. Columns of data with headers at the top are nice. They're kind of boring, but they're boring like a doorknob. You turn it and the door opens. There isn't much room (or need) for improvement. I don't want to have to solve a logic puzzle to get out of the bathroom every morning, and I don't want to play a video game of line-up-the-widgets and guess-the-percentages just to get a playlist to display some fields of information.

In Amarok 2.2 there's also no button for Repeat/Shuffle, and the Equalizer tells me it disabled itself because I don't have the right version of Phonon, and the collection list is very unresponsive (even expanding / collapsing an artist's albums lags), and there are no visualizations, and no themes, and the volume slider is hidden behind a button in the bottom-right there unlike Amarok 1.4's perfectly functional slider, and well you get the picture. But hey, you can browse Flickr in Amarok now. Finally!

Amarok 2.2 is what I'd now call "just barely usable", which is actually an improvement from previous versions, but that's not saying much. I've used it for over a month, only because 1.4 can no longer even scan a collection on my computer, Last.fm is broken, and I got a notice today that Gentoo is deprecating KDE3 entirely. Amarok 1.4 is the new XMMS; Qt3 is the new GTK1. Some people will cling to them, somehow barely keeping them running on their systems, until bitrot and neglect force them to fade away into history, whether there's a good replacement around or not.

I was a huge cheerleader for Amarok 1.4; it was a flagship KDE / Linux GUI app. Now I don't know what to say. Final grade, Amarok 2.2: D+. It avoided an F because I can get sound to come out of it, and it didn't erase my hard drive.

(Anyone out there reading this, if you port Amarok 1.4 to Qt4 intact, I will pay you. Seriously. I will pay you money.)

KMail is a pretty good app, except that it's slow as glacier. If I select a few thousand spam emails in KMail (4.3.2) sitting on my IMAP server, and I try to delete them, KMail laboriously iterates through them deleting them one at a time and updating the GUI after every deletion. I'd say it averages about 4 or 5 emails deleted per second. Yes, for a few thousand emails this adds up to 10-15 minutes of waiting.

I got tired of waiting, so I decided to try out Mutt for the first time. In Mutt apparently you can delete a folder full of emails by pressing D and then specifying ~s .* as the search pattern. Mutt deleted 8,000 spam emails for me instantaneously.

This is what I get when I ignore the collective wisdom of the Linux group-mind. I've long heard that Mutt is good but I never bothered trying it, because Thunderbird and KMail and friends were "good enough".

Complacency, my old nemesis. You have beaten me again. But I am now going to give Mutt a good try. Next on the list is zsh.

I woke up this morning to about 50 spam emails and some notifications from my host that my CPU usage was about 200% over the past four hours. Turns out spamd was going mental. Not sure what caused it but it seems to be working again after I restarted it.

One of the worst things about running your own mail server is spam. I don't much about how to do it properly. I have SpamAssassin running, I tweaked the settings and trained it well, and it works OK. Of 8,000 spams in the past week or two, I think only two made it through to my inbox. But I keep thinking there must be a better way.

For a while I tried greylisting. Greylisting means you pseudo-bounce every email you get, and force the mail server to resend it. Once it's resent, that server is added to a whitelist. The idea is that spam servers won't bother resending and genuine mail servers will.

I ran this way via Postgrey for a couple months. The good thing is that it works pretty much as advertised. I went from hundreds of spam emails per day, to fewer than a dozen. SpamAssassin caught all of those dozen and I never saw them. It was nice.

The problem with this, however, is twofold.

1. All mail from people you've never heard from before is delayed 5-10 minutes. This is very annoying in certain circumstances, e.g. registering for an account at a new message board or buying something from an online store you never used before. I'd rather like to see the receipt or user registration right away. So to get around this I had to go add them to a whitelist on the server every time, which was ridiculous.

2. Not all genuine mail servers bother resending after the temporary bounce, so you lose mail. You need only look in /etc/postgrey/whitelist_clients and see the enormous list of mail servers that Postgrey knows NOT to greylist, to be scared into never using Postgrey again. This includes yahoo.com, ebay.com, a bunch of airlines, and so on. The list goes back to 2005 and obviously is an incomplete list, since it only includes servers that people reported having problems with. I had to add gmail.com to it myself to avoid losing mail from my wife (domains that use large pools of mail servers will always be greylisted, it seems).

Losing mail is the reason I stopped using Postgrey. So I'm back to SpamAssassin alone and dealing with an occasional spam or two, while my spam inbox balloons.