klog

Fresh from the success of their recent release, Ghosts, which Bronwyn has been playing non-stop since our CD arrived (and for weeks before using the MP3s downloaded from the Interweb), Nine Inch Nails has released a new album and gone even further.

Yes, this album is totally free for you to download. All they ask is that you sign up for it via their site. However, as the album is licensed via Creative Commons Non-Commercial, it is also legal for you to download via bittorrent if you prefer.

The album is available in MP3, M4A, FLAC and even 24/96 WAV (for freaks that want a 1.2GB album taking up space).

NIN are recommending that people take the album and produce remixes from it. (That site doesn’t work well in Firefox in Linux btw - fix it, please - remember I bought a ticket for your concert in the RDS way back in ‘96? Go on Trent, be a pal!)

As for the sound, I think it’s more accessible than Year Zero (although I think over time, I will prefer Year Zero) on a first listen. There is the usual layered approach to the music, where textured “landscapes” are drawn up. Interestingly, in some tracks, the layers appear to be deliberately off-time from each other (Echoplex, for example).

…doesn’t work properly (at least on my laptop, using a GeForce 7000M). the reason for this is that Fedora 9 uses the latest version of xorg and NVidia’s driver does not yet work with it (3D is not fully working).

To get stuff at least minimally working, you need to downgrade your xorg RPMs to the Fedora 8 versions.

Unfortunately, KDE4 appears to require fully working GLX in order to display the kicker (or whatever the hell they’re calling it now), so my KDE is slightly crippled at the moment. A pity, really, as KDE4 is beautiful and almost as usable as 3.5 was.

For those that don’t know, KFM (Kae’s File Manager) is an application which allows a user to edit/move/delete files online. With some plugins, you can even view videos, listen to your music files, etc.

There are a number of interesting improvements in 1.3.

The configuration methods have been improved. To set up your new KFM, simply copy configuration.dist.php to configuration.php, remove the bits you won’t be changing, and edit what’s left. As an example, here is my entire configuration.php:

<?php
$kfm_db_type = 'sqlitepdo';
$kfm_userfiles_address = '/home/kae/websites/kfm/1.3/files';
$kfm_userfiles_output = '/get.php';

Plugins!

The point of plugins is to enable actions for various file types. We have plugins for the default actions such as image resize, editing text with codepress, etc. You can download new plugins from here to supplement the default ones (I recommend jwplayer and malsup_media_player) - just unzip them in your /plugins/ directory and refresh your KFM.

The most important part about plugins is that they are easy to write. You don’t need to understand all of KFM to write your own plugin. Just copy an existing plugin that’s similar to what you want to do, and then edit it until it’s like what you wanted.

Another important part is that it helps to keep the size of KFM’s core down. We are aware that KFM is “bloating”, and are trying to keep an eye on that while still increasing its capabilities.

The list-view has been improved, along with a vast number of other things.

We have more new languages - Swedish (thanks to Aram Mäkivierikko), Persian (thanks to Ghassem Tofighi) and Hungarian (thanks to Ujj-Mészáros István).

There is a new strings translator on the way in 1.4, along with a new method of submitting translations. I’ve learned a lot in the last few months and feel I can do this better so I’m rewriting the translation methods. I’ll announce more as it becomes more complete.

A lot of work went into allowing KFM to be templated. This is not quite mature yet, so I won’t say too much about it, but it is now possible to design KFM the way you want it. If you have a design you’d like KFM to fit into, please contact me so I can help out. Documentation will come soon.

To download KFM 1.3, get the tar bzip (840k) or the zip (1M).

Please report any bugs to the usual place.