I don't know why I do this. Eventually I get bored with it and just let it lie stagnant. Unmaintained. Ignored. I'm speaking about my website of course. Or what passes for it. As is hinted at by my banner it's a "Brand New Day". Comic book fans (Spider-Man comic book fans specifically) will recognize this as the tagline for the first story arc after the Spidey books were "rebooted". Think of it as a less convoluted version of Infinity Crisis, for Spidey, while still being an awesome read. I won't spoil things for those who don't know what I'm talking about yet, but if you used to be a Spidey fan, go find "One More Day". Enough about comic books, let's talk about programming.

The previous two weeks saw me attempting to get Amarok - the greatest audio player ever conceived - to run properly on OS X. This isn't just any old version of OS X either, it's the Leopard. Now just building on OS X would have been a chore, uh challenge I meant. Challenge. That's because Apple is notorious for "breaking things" with incremental updates of their operating systems. This translates to a ginormous clusterfsck of breakage being expected on a full upgrade to their latest and greatest. This didn't make it any less painfull sadly.

There were a few issues I had to work out before I could even get to the part where I tried to compile Amarok. The most infuriating hurdle was getting xine-lib to build (and hence install) cleanly. This was pretty much a blocker because without xine, no audio for me. Then there were silly instances where I was doing something wrong leading to things like no audio playback, even though xine was installed. In that particular instance I didn't compile xine with support for CoreAudio. Oops. After working those issues out, there were the inevitable architectural differences which necessitated ifdefing some code.

Because of all this, I ended up getting far too familiar with xine's (broken) ffmpeg based deinterlacing internals, Macport's build system, Leopard compilation quirks galore, x86 processors' lack of registers (address space?) and more stuff I'd just as soon forget. Google is awesome btw. If I could I'd have its babies.

Somehow all this got me conscripted into Amarok's promo team (yay!) and developer group (wtf?). I also accidentally, if not fortuitously ended up on the KDE/Mac team as well. IRC sure is a funny place. You happen to be there when a website's being made, next thing you know you're "on the team." ;-) Keep in mind that I started out just wanting to build Amarok; hoping that I'd get to play once it built. Such are the perils of open source however, always conspiring to suck you into its world of sharing, contributing back to the community and leaving software better off than it was when you began.

But hey, at least I have Amarok working now. Consequently I have decided to chronicle my Amarok 2.0 journey here and so the site lives again; albeit with minimal hosting capacity (provided free by my registrar!). No one knows you exist yet illogic-al.org, so you'll be A OK. I also began writing a comical recounting of my journey while hanging out in #rokymotion. It has been described by some, i.e. me, as an "epic tale of one man's quest as he searches for the reincarnated essence of the most perfect audio playback application he has ever known". I have deigned to bless you with the initial pièce de résistance. I give you "Amarok 2.0: The Epic Journey." I think it's funny. And no, it's not finished yet. Here endeth the first recording of my latest trip down open source lane. Let's see how long this lasts. In parting my i just say Thank you Apple. You've <edited for content>ed me, but you've <edited for content>ed me good.