Engwar

Alan has nicely put into words something I’ve been pondering for a couple of days now. GitHub is a place where forking a codebase is the norm. You fork a particular codebase, play around with it, add your modifications and if the master branch owner agrees and think your stuff is cool he can merge the changes. If he doesn’t agree, you could continue with your cool additions and can tell people to pull from you.

Compare this with a more traditional method of maintaining an open source project. Alan mentions SourceForce as an example. It’s not the only one. You have a central repository where a few people act as committers who can control what changes can go into its repo. GitHub on the other hand provides a new perspective. See the graph for Ruby on Rails for example. With a decentralized view like that you can quickly find out who meddles with the code and who are the people having a keen interest to contribute.

Amount of politics that’s going to be generated around the project is very limited compared with a centralized cvs/svn repo project. You can get rid of all those private mailing lists and just carry on with what matters most, after all code speaks on everyone’s behalf

Pulseaudio multicasting options are a very evil thing to enable inside a network. If I can remember the numbers correctly it was sending out around 250 MB of UDP packets every hour when you enable it. This makes the whole network unusable.

Please don’t try this at office.

LyricWiki is an excellent free service providing song lyrics. A la wikipedia for song lyrics. One cool feature is that the site uses nuSOAP to provide a web services interface for fetching lyrics. Wrote a small PHP class with the help of WSF/PHP which will give a simpler interface. Grab it here (make sure to rename it to .php).

Here’s a few method calls,

Getting song of the day should be easy. getSOTD() method returns an array, song title, artist and the lyrics. Let’s just fetch the song and display only the lyrics.

<?php
require 'lyricwiki.php';
 
$lw = new LyricWiki();
 
$song = $lw->getSOTD();
 
print $song['lyrics'];
?>

Ok, let’s try to fetch lyrics of a song you know,

<?php
require 'lyricwiki.php'
 
$lw = new LyricWiki();
 
# parameters: artist and the song title
print $lw->getSong('iron & wine', 'boy with a coin');
 
?>