All about QFlicks

Hi people , this post is all about a project which I started roughly a month ago by the name of “QFlicks”. It was named so because the graphics library I chose to use is the popular Ot and the  application is a movie collection cataloger which scans the disk for media files and gets film informations (duration, plot, cover ,rating ,poster cover , casts  etc) from the popular Amazon’s http://imdb.com or the Internet Movie Database . It also allows the user to filter his possessions based on movie titles,genre,ratings  , seen or unseen etc.

The later versions of the software will witness subtitle downloader extention and many more.

Here are the basic features which I plan to inmplement in version 1.0

• Scanning user-chosen directories to find media files (films in a first time)

Status : Done

How : Used a recursive OS walk algorithm to extract movies from all folders , sub-folders , sub-sub folders etc.

• Extracting film titles from file names (tough one if files are not properly named)

Status: Done

How: Using Neural Network algorithms and and basic Regular Expression.

• Create a list of these names in a database get films information (duration, plot, poster cover , rating , casts etc) from imdb

Status : Done

How: Used a library named IMDBPy as imdb.com does not provide and API (Another example of Amazon’s miserness). The database used is MySQL which experienced developers feel is a wrong choice for desktop.

• display films list and information of the selected one

Status: Done

• basic settings handling

Status: More or less done until someone comes out with bugs

• Filtering based on genre , title ,rating seen or unseen etc.

Status: Not Done

To Do: Learn multiple substring search in SQL ( SQL sucks , I hate it)

• Clean and simple gui

Status : The Gui is simple but not clean and hangs as I have not implemented the Multi-threading

To Do : Learn Multi-threading and make the network call fuctions run in separate threads in the background and also need to implement customized Progress Bars for UI

Plugins (towards upper versions):

• subtitle downloader
• playlist manager
• automatic new files inclusion (directory survey)
• music album and video series handling

Tools Used:

• Python as the Programming Language
• Qt as Graphics Library
• QtDesigner for the Gui
• SVN as versioning program
• MySQL as database software
• IMDBPy as the library
• GPLv3 licence

Here is the screen-shot of my Work :

The sourceforge Link for the project is :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/qflicks/

Get the source from the Repository :

svn co https://qflicks.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qflicks qflicks

Current OS Support :

Gnu/Linux with Qt >= 4.5 and MySQL >= 5.0

Newbies who don’t know how to use SVN or are facing problems with code can mail me at

mailto: abhii.cse.nitdgp@gmail.com

The project is likely to see its first release on 24th of August 2009

OpenSolaris 2008.11 Mini-Book

The Getting Started with OpenSOlaris 2008.11 mini-books were recently released. They are available in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

You might notice that there is a difference between the content of these books. They are composed by three different documents, and only the ones in English, Simplified Chinese and Japanese have them all. All other languages have only one document.

The books have a pretty basic approach, so they are aimed at people who doesn’t have much experience with the OS. This makes them perfect to be indicated during basic courses and presentations.

It seems that the 2008.11 version of these mini-books will be available only in the digital format.

Download:

OpenSOlaris 2008.11 mini-book (English)

I love my College

Durgapur in presently one of the hottest cities in the country crossing mercury levels of over 45 every day . Very difficult for students to carry on their exam preparations under intense heat waves . All this is happening but the library goers like me are not even slightly affected . Why So ? Because we have an Air Conditioned Reading Room in our institute’s Central Library providing just the kind of respite the students are looking for and avoiding getting roasted in the hostel oven . I really love some aspects of my College , infact many of them and the Library is on top of everything . I love my College and I love my Library .

Talk on Glassfish and J2EE

For a long time I was due for a Technical Session in my college . The month of February was jam-packed with helluva lots of fests and events and that was the sole reason that I did’nt wanted to squeeze my demo in between all the different fests and events . Web being my expertise , so a Talk on Glassfish and J2EE was looking the most feasible option for me as I did not had much time to prepare for the talk. 

Further trouble came when I found that the  date later went on to clash with the Mukti treat . When I publicised about the talk on the mailing lists and groups people told me that I was a block (dumb) as I scheduled the talk on the same evening as the Mukti treat . But I went on through my initial plans as I felt that work always comes above and over anything  and everything in life.

It was class test times for most of the students so the gathering was as expected limited with just about 25 people sitting I went on to start the talk . The talk was attended by students of Computer Science and  IT  1st, 2nd and 3rd year. It’s great to see a diverse audience, shows you really are reaching out to everyone, and for me the success of this talk meant a lot of confidence to do future talks in this semester. I wanted everything to be perfect. From the past week, I had been observing some of our faculty lecturers carefully, trying to understand the art of holding the interest of your audience throughout the lecture, how some lectures turn out to be boring, while others keep you glued to the teacher. We all know we hate slide reading, we hate too much theory, bookish language.. but there’s a lot more to it. Body language, being friendly and casual, relating your audience and yourself with the topic, visualization of ideas, giving examples, case studies and most importantly, involving your audience, making it interactive and not just one-way traffic. 

My audience for the first time in the college properly understood what the term Web Server really means and also got the abtract concept of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technology . 

I had already made up my mind that this particular session will witness a much better demonstration as compared to the last demo which was somewhat very uninteresting . So I demonstrated them about how to make a real world bloger application using the popular JRuby-on-Rails and that too using Netbeans IDE which which made the whole thing very very easy and fast .

I also showed them use of Servlets and JavaBeans with respect to Http Session States.It was not a long session unlike the last one as I had to attend the Mukti treat and also my audience had some tests the following week . So I wrapped up the Session in an hour . A pretty nice experience again . Now I really consider myself really grateful to GOD for making me do all these things . Now I really feel more confident presenting knowledge and information in front of public.

 

No more waiting …… Its time to move on …….

Hi friends , I am really sorry as it is no masala news or its nothing to do with a heart-break or something of that sort , its me moving on to just another blog . My previous blog at Sun Blogs which had become pretty much established and also got some recognition at Sun internal portals and aggregators has for some weird reasons not allowing me to log in. I waited patiently for a long time with no posts (becoz I was pretty obsessive about it), lots of service desk raised and closed during this period but nothing helped me.

So now  I think that’s enough and  its time to move on to another one and here it is. This is my first post to my new blog and looking forward to be very active in future .

Oracle acquires Sun and me being the Campus Ambassador of Sun at NITD campus has lots of questions to answer and also to prove that Open Source evangelism of Sun products in the college will not die . The next session will see lots of Talks and demos conducted in the college.

I am coming and I am coming very HARD !