I’ve been exceptionally busy over the past month finishing off a lot of things before I start at Warwick University including training my replacement at my job in Leicester, finishing off most of the work on the Alpha Sales and Stock Database System for the 6 clients which are currently using the software, and other odds and ends as they came up.

As a result I haven’t been able been able to work as much on the volunteer based projects I’ve involved in such as BlenderArt, the Blender Challenges (www.blenderchallenge.com), the Entertainer Media Center etc. I’m hoping that once I’ve settled into a routine at Warwick I’ll be able to fit those back into my schedule.

My first day at Warwick was yesterday and it went well. I sorted out Computer Logins, got my Eee on the network, joined the gym and the climbing club (the indoor climbing area is impressive!), worked out where the important buildings are and continued the work I’ve been doing on a CAF + LAG player.

I still have some things todo, such as getting an annual pass for the car park, which I have to do today. I’ve got some more music recorded as well which I’ll be uploading to this blog and last.fm sometime soon.

Entertainer 0.3 was released yesterday, here’s a link to the announcement.

I did a presentation today at Warwick University titled “Open Source Development on the Entertainer Media Center”.

It went well and there were plenty of questions about the project afterwards. The presentation was created in OpenOffice and you can download the file here .

I’ve just finished the final mock exam for the courses I’m currently revising for. I have two exams on Friday, both of them are three hours long, with a break of one and a half hours in between.

Revision is going well at the moment and I think I’ll get my target results. The one thing I’m worried about is how my hand is going to respond to six hours of almost non-stop hand writing.

As I use email and messenging as my main form of non-verbal communication I don’t physically write that much normally, so my revision has been as much about getting my hand writing legible as it has about studying the course!

In other news Entertainer 0.2 is very much on the horizon, hopefully we’ll see it released before the end of the next sprint over this coming weekend.

I’ll be going now to type my notes out…

The Entertainer Media Center is featured in the 2008 FLOSS Media Center State of the Art report.
You can download the report from here

We are in the top 10 “most prominent FLOSS projects” for media center which is a really good result for such a young project.

I’ve been working on implementing translation support for the Entertainer Media Center over the last couple of weeks and it finally got merged into the main source code branch today. YAY!

The translation work will be done through launchpad’s translation web interface once rockstar gets it set up at http://translations.launchpad.net/entertainer

Unfortunately I won’t be able to help much with the actual translation work because I don’t actually speak anything but English and a little Spanish and Swahili.

Hakuna Matata and Adios!

Entertainer reached the 0.1 milestone yesterday. Download page here.

The Entertainer Project (www.entertainer-project.com) is going to be releasing version 0.1 in two weeks time on the 14th June.

To test it prior to release (you’ll need bzr) get a console up and type in the following:
bzr branch lp:entertainer
Development website is over on launchpad (https://launchpad.net/entertainer/)

I recently read a blog post about python-coverage. This is a module which works out how much of a python file has been used when a python file is run.

One very helpful use it can be put to is that of working out how much of a project’s source code has been covered by unit tests and I decided to try this for the Entertainer Media Center project.

What follows is how I installed and used python-coverage to work out how much of the Entertainer Source code is actually tested when all our unittests are run. I relied upon this webpage and the command line help available from python-coverage.

We had a coding sprint for entertainer this weekend, among the things completed were:

• Lots of progress on the new ORM
• Weather and WeatherForecasts have been written and interface with the Yahoo Weather website. Locations for weather forecasts can be edited in the configuration manager and the weather button on the main menu can be hidden. We still have the Weather Screen to create.
• Eject CD button has been added, however it is disabled by default in content.conf
• Code Line Counter tool has been added
• More work has been done on resolution independance of widgets
• New tab widgets
• Video Clips menu now works
• Documentation has been updated and expanded
• Lots of work on the googlecode issues

Overall, it has been a great sprint with a lot of progress being made by all the developers.

Hopefully we will be able to get the Weather Screen completed soon to finish off the development of that area for the 0.1 milestone.