Entertainer

OK, its been a couple of days since the 0.1 release of entertainer and I purposely didn't blog about it until now.

0.1 is a major milestone for the entertainer project. It may seem such an insignificant number but 0.1 signifies the projects intentions. It shows that we have a piece of software that we are happy to show the rest of the world. We know it's a little ugly in parts, hell, even we are a little repulsed by parts of it but we know that with time and effort a swan can be made of this ugly duckling.

The development towards a 0.1 release of Entertainer is hotting up. Lots of bugs are being squished and final touches are being applied.

One of these final touches for me what adding a weather forecasting module. The first phase of this implementation was completed nearly two weeks ago. Last night saw the graphics being added. Below you can see what it looks like now.

I finally had a couple of spare hours to devote to the entertainer project over the past couple of days and things have begun to move forward. One of the features/bugs that was assigned to me was to investigate why the weather code failed the unit tests and also look at how the gui element could be implemented. Well, I managed to do both.

To to cut a long story short, no.

Well, maybe that's a little harsh but according to this well written and informative web page learning the python programming language takes 10 minutes. I for one didn't manage to get to the end of the document in 10 minutes but maybe that's because I'm just a slow reader. Why do I bring this up? Well, I've been learning python.

I'm a programmer by trade so learning another programming language is usually straight-forward; takes a little time but doesn't pose too many problems. So as python seems to be an essential language to know I set about learning it.

Python is renowned for being a language that can easily be picked up. It is strongly typed although not statically typed (see the wikipedia entry for python) and is loved by may for its rapid prototyping. Many of the projects that I'm interested in use python and my Linux distribution of choice, Ubuntu, uses it extensively so it was only natural that if I wanted to contribute back to these projects I had better get learning.

So within an hour I was up and running writing code, albeit simple stuff. Within a couple of days I was pretty confident with it and today, not long after picking up the language, I have my own branch of the excellent media center application Entertainer in Launchpad and my first rather large patch has been submitted to the mailing list.

So my conclusion is that no, python can't be learnt in 10 minutes but it can be learnt quickly. Contributing to open source projects needn't bring with it a long and step learning curve. A few spare days and a desire to improve software that you are interested in is all it takes.

Go on, fix something today!

A pretty exciting project that I've been looking at lately is Entertainer. From the website:

"Entertainer aims to be a simple and easy-to-use media center solution for Gnome and XFce desktop environments. Entertainer is written completely in Python using object-oriented programming paradigm. It uses GStreamer multimedia framework for multimedia playback. User Interface is implemented with Clutter UI-library, which allows sleek OpenGL animated user interfaces. Entertainer also uses other great projects like SQLite, pyIMDBb and iNotify."

I found it so exciting, I went and joined the development team. I look forward to helping out in the next sprint.