That means one thing: Summer is finally here!

That also means that in less than 10 days I’m flying to Gran Canaria, along with many other Igalians, for the Desktop Summit. We have a few talks there this year, I’ll give two: an introduction to the new Hildon 2.2 and a Git workshop (this one at the Spanish GUADEC).

I’ve already been to Gran Canaria once some years ago, and I keep very good memories of that trip. The island is not very big and has some amazing landscapes, specially in the central part. The Maspalomas Dunes in the south are worth a visit too (a trip is being arranged by the organisation, see here, and hurry up if you’re interested), although that part of the island is full of hotels and I didn’t find it particularly beautiful.

I was in Las Palmas for less than a day and I remember it as a nice city. I think it’s going to be a great place for the Summit. I’m looking forward to seeing many people that I haven’t seen for a long time, and I hope that grouping together the GNOME and KDE teams in the same place for such an important event bears fruit sooner or later.

See you in Gran Canaria!

So here is Vagalume with support for Libre.fm:

(this is not ready yet, but expect a new release in a few days/weeks)

For Hildon we now have a development mailing list where you can talk to us, make suggestions, contribute, complain or simply follow the progress of this project.

I’d like to thank Nokia for having taken yet another step towards openness, and of course all the people who have been supporting Maemo, using it, spreading it, developing for it and reporting bugs.

Let’s make Maemo 5 a success!

I already talked about this change in my previous post and I think that I don’t have much more to add.

For those of you who are going to keep using Last.fm: I updated Vagalume yesterday and it’s already using the new API. I’ll try to test it more thoroughly during these days and release a new version soon.

I’m also interested in adding support for other compatible alternatives such as Libre.fm.

The most obvious one is that from now on users will have to pay a monthly fee of €3.00 to continue using their radio stations (except in Germany, the USA and the UK, where the service will remain free).

This is sad news for all Last.fm users (and music lovers in general) as it appears to be a consequence of the licensing agreements that Last.fm has with labels and the royalties they have to pay on streaming music (this article from last month gives some details on this).

Besides this, a post in one of the Last.fm forums adds a couple of things:

1. The old API to stream music will disappear in a few weeks. Unless I’m missing something, that implies that all clients (official and third party) will stop working, and upgrading them is required to continue using the service.
2. Streaming music to mobile phones will not be permitted (a comment in the same thread explains that this restriction applies only to phones, so Nokia tablets are not affected).

The new API and its details haven’t been published yet, and I don’t know how this could affect open source clients.

My plans are to continue using Last.fm (since I still think it’s a great service) and to keep working on Vagalume, but right now the future is uncertain so we’ll have to wait for a few weeks to see how all this ends up.

Update 25 Mar 2009 18:16:03 +0100: Rob Taylor asked about open source clients and the answer is that Open source apps can apply for an API key at the moment, and that won’t change.

Update 28 Mar 2009 16:57:16 +0100: It had already been said in the initial post, but another comment in the same thread confirms that you need a subscriber account to be able to use third-party clients, even if you’re in the UK, US or Germany.

A few years ago, after some attacks against SHA-1 were published, Linus explained that the security model of Git doesn’t depend on the hashes being cryptographically secure (although he said that it was a bonus and also mentioned a few possible problems).

There was an interesting thread in the Git mailing list about this topic: Starting to think about sha-256?.

Here are our guitar heroes Edu and Claudio:

Besides all of this, I’ve also found a bit of time to play with my tablet. I’ve just ported Fuse, the Free Unix Spectrum Emulator (unrelated to this FUSE, btw) to Maemo.

Fuse is one of the best Spectrum emulators I’ve ever used (definitely my favourite one for Unix), and also one of the few released as free software. It supports all standard models (16K/48K/128K/+2/+2A/+3) and some Russian clones too. It can load most file formats, has good sound support, joystick emulation, … well, better go to the project page to see all features ;-)

The port still has a few rough edges, but it’s perfectly functional for everyday use.

Here is a screenshot of Fuse running Head Over Heels on Maemo:

Fuse is available in Maemo extras. For more information go here.

On another note, Vagalume development is progressing slowly, but there are some news: we have Vagalume packages for Intel MIDs based on RedFlag Midinux. Go here to get them.

These years have been an amazing experience to us. We’ve tried to do our best in our work and I honestly think that the results haven’t been bad, but I’m sure that the best is yet to come. Thanks to everyone who supported us during all this time.

On another note, we’ve just arrived from Berlin. The city is lovely and while OSiM was good, I have to say that Maemo Summit was really great (look how happy we are in the photo, courtesy of Daniel Gentleman).

Congratulations to all the people that made it possible, including of course the c-base crew for maintaining such an unique place. I’m looking forward to repeating the experience next year. I’ll try to blog a bit about it soon. But now I need to rest !

In this world of broadband internet access, when we talk about music the concept of owning a record is losing its meaning, as anyone with a decent connection can easily download all the music that they want, but that doesn’t mean much: in the past a guy with hundreds of records at home was certainly a music lover. Nowadays any teenager with a DSL connection can easily have the same amount of songs in a few days or weeks and yet have much less interest in music.

Besides this, an increasing number of artists are uploading their songs to websites such as MySpace, Last.fm, iLike and others. So in many cases you don’t even have to download mp3 files to your computer in order to listen to new records from your favourite artists. You don’t have to own a record to be passionate about it.

If you don’t need to store in your computer your e-mail, your photos, your documents and your videos, does this mean that you don’t need to have your favourite records either? This is not the case right now, and I obviously don’t know what’s the future going to be like, but it certainly seems that things are moving in that direction.

In the case of Last.fm (and outside of the UK, US and Germany, see the previous link) there are lots of records that can be already streamed for free. Such is the case of the great Swedish label Labrador, which have their (almost) complete catalogue available in Last.fm.

Many other artists ranging from the less popular ones (Tarántula, 6PM, Menomena) to the best sellers (Nine inch nails) can be listened on demand for free. There is a group in Last.fm dedicated to this kind of records. While you won’t see many free albums from mainstream artists, the selection is by no means restricted to unknown amateur bands with no record contract. Many well-known independent artists (those who play in the most popular music festivals and appear regularly on specialised magazines) have free albums available (examples here, here and here, and also the aforementioned Labrador label).

Vagalume 0.7 is out

For all the things explained above, it’s very useful to be able to keep a list of all your favourite music that is available on demand. That’s why the new Vagalume 0.7 introduces a new feature that I had already talked about during Guadec: bookmarks.

With the bookmark manager you can have a list of Last.fm radio URLs (those starting with lastfm://). This includes all of your favourite radios (your best friends’ libraries, your preferred tags, etc.), and also all the free music available in Last.fm. I like to think about it as the equivalent of the music library in Rhythmbox and other programs. To add free albums to your library you just need their lastfm:// address. It used to be available in each album’s page. However after the Last.fm site update it’s no longer there. They are working on it. Meanwhile, there are workarounds (see here and here).

Vagalume’s bookmark manager is still very simple, but I think that it is “good enough” ^TM to get started and to get the idea. It’ll be improved in future releases.

Another interesting feature in Vagalume 0.7 is that the desktop version has finally D-BUS support. Thanks to the vagalumectl script that is provided with the package, you can now control Vagalume (play, stop, skip, change radios, love tracks, etc.) from a remote host using SSH, for example.

The multimedia keys in some keyboards are supported as well. We have also added Latvian and French translations, and fixed some annoying bugs (activity in our bug tracker is increasing, thank you reporters!).

Last but not least, support for the Moblin platform has been enhanced. We have some binary packages now in case you want to try them out.

Regarding the MS Windows version, it’s still experimental. Vagalume 0.7 for Windows is not ready yet, but we’ll try to release some packages soon.

As usual, go to the Vagalume page for details on how to get it.

Going back to Germany

On another note, I’ll be flying again to Berlin in a couple of weeks, this time for OSiM World and the Maemo Summit. There’s going to be a lot of people there so it’ll be a great opportunity to meet known faces again :)

It’s also a good chance to see Vagalume running in a device other than a Nokia Internet Tablet: during OSiM World I’ll be showcasing the Moblin port in one of Intel’s MIDs.

See you in Berlin !