Today, when I crashed some program on my linux box I remembered the old days with that well-known operating system and I also recall the following lines of Bodo Wartke’s song PCdenzfall:

Neulich mal im Traum packte mich das nackte Grauen,
ich hab' geträumt, Microsoft würde Flugzeuge bauen.

Free English translation:

Recently in a dream I was seized by the naked dread,
I've dreamt Microsoft would build airplanes flying over my head.

In contrast to Bodo Wartke I’m not supporting the opinion that Bill Gates would wrongly deserve so much money. It’s about the consumer to buy software. And people have choices such as Linux and dotProject.

If you do not see this page as follows, then you have perhaps chosen the wrong, non-standards compliant browser:
There is indeed a working alternative.

After not having used a MC operating system since years I was recently forced to reinstall an XP sibling from 2003 and iteratively updating it.

The accustomed approach from GNU/Linux such as Debian/Ubuntu is starting synaptic or another package manager/update tool, clicking ‘go’: The latest updates download and install automatically – me leaning back having a Martini Bianco. A regular security update is normally accomplished within minutes.

The manual and complicated process of the MC OS took more than a day and involved so many user-interaction, more than twenty restarts, a lot of time waiting at the update website etc. The most interesting thing about the update process has been that the downloaded updates have not been the latest releases but instead needed patches for the patches of the patches. Even worse, it didn’t promote the Service pack 2 at all which btw was (apart from the fact that one needs to know about its existence first) hard to find.

In short: How can people voluntarily waste so much valuable life time?

At the moment there is an ongoing consolidation of the dotProject framework. A number of contributors have decided to establish a forked project fitting their needs diverging from ours. Whilst I think that this is a reasonable and congruous decision – and wish them success – I’m a little bit unhappy about the drop of nice people. The old and new core developers will continue to considerably rework the dotProject framework on the road to the upcoming 3.0 release. This comes along with a number of necessary and important infrastructure changes. I look forward to a better dotProject!

Once upon a time, I’ve been asked
“Greg, which console command would convert track filenames of the type INTERPRET_Trackname.mp3 to Interpret – Trackname.mp3 ?”

I’ve answered with a simple python script that can be found down below. It could be easily enhanced to gather data from existing id3 tags:


#! /usr/bin/env python

import sys
import os.path
import re


def visit(arg, dirname, names):
for name in names:
sn = os.path.splitext(name)
if sn[1][1:] == 'mp3':
oldName = os.path.join(dirname, name)
p = re.compile('_')
s = p.split(name)
if len(s) > 1 and s[0].isupper():
newName = os.path.join(dirname, s[0].capitalize() + ' - ' + s[1])
os.rename(oldName, newName)
print 'File "' + oldName + '" renamed to "' + newName + '".'


if len(sys.argv) > 1:
path = sys.argv[1]
else:
path = '.'

os.path.walk(path, visit, 0)

With that amount of code one wouldn’t even have collected the filenames in C.

I currently receive a considerable number of [upstream] patches for dotProject or related fields. Unfortunately some of these important contributions cannot (at least not easily) be adopted because theyare built against outdated files or not reflecting the core product’s purposes or targets or are inconsistent with present code.
I am really willing to add your contributions, but I have one entreaty: It is always a good idea discussing the aimed changes with the responsible developers in advance. I’ll be happy to give you the necessary hints, advices and guide you through the contribution process. Thank you very much for your comprehension.