I've been holding off on venting my frustration for the last couple of months now, but I've finally had it with Gamefly, the self-touting "#1 online video game rental service." It's really a shame that they choose to run their business in such a shoddy manor, because with no real competition around (except for maybe Blockbuster) they could easily be as big as Netflix. Yet, time and time again they prove to be 100% deserving of a ride on the FAIL boat.

Having been a long time customer of Netflix, I've come accustomed to a huge selection, extremely fast turn around time, and hassle free issue handling. Naturally, when I decided to try out Gamefly six months ago I took for granted that I would be receiving the same level of service. Holy shit was I in for a surprise!

First off, let's compare the rental plans. I'm currently signed up for the three DVD plan with Netflix for $16.99 and the single game rental plan with Gamefly for $15.95. Understandably, games cost three times as much as a DVD, so the cost was one thing I wasn't too concerned about. The queue system also seemed to be the same, so I went down my list of wanted games, ranked them accordingly and ended up with about ten games queued with some exploratory fillers at the bottom. From there everything started to go downhill FAST.

After waiting a couple of years for the right opportunity, I've been lucky enough to spend ten days in Belgrade, Serbia hanging out with a good friend and following the up and coming heavy metal band Draconic. Not only is this city extremely fun to hang out in, but the metal fans here are some of the friendliest and most hardcore group of people I've ever met. The first night I was already head banging and drinking beer with them only a few hours after getting off the plane. It's going to be an interesting week to say the least!

But moving on to the band... these guys rock HARD. Not only are they very tight and play like pros, but the amount of energy they bring to the show is impressive. Every song results in an all out explosion of sound from stage and is matched by the feedback from the audience. I expect great things to come of them in the near future. Their first major record From the Wrong Side of the Aperture is already available in Europe and is set to be released soon in North America as well. According to the bass player, Lazar Galic, the band already has a great deal of new material and is hoping to start work a new release soon.

Just a small update, the Songbird 1.1.2 Fedora RPMs are now available in the usual place. Fedora adoption is moving along and hopefully will happen in the near future. The main push behind the 1.1.2 release was a couple of bugs, including a top crasher that was identified after the 1.1.1 release. Updating is recommended, although you shouldn't see too much of a difference.

The last couple of weeks have seen some interesting bugs creep up in the Songbird 1.1.1 release. First we had the annoying gconf popup with bug 15432, and then everyone quickly noticed that songs would hang after a plays, which was noted in bug 15401. Well I'm happy to say that these bugs have now been squashed and you can go back to happily listening to your ridiculously huge library of mp3s... except that's only half true, and so begins my rant...

As we soon found out, the bugs actually were never present in Songbird. They are, in fact, a bi-product of the package (rpm) building. I collaborated with a few different package builders from Gentoo and SUSE when we quickly realized that the bugs weren't in official Songbird builds, but were in every Linux package build.

What's the problem you say? Sadly, it's the way Songbird is developed. You see, unlike many other open source project in the Linux world, Songbird is built much like a Windows app. Now, that could be because it started out as a Windows app to begin with, or just because that's the particular model that the developers choose to go with, but the fundamental issue is that Songbird acts as it's own universe instead of fitting into the various popular Linux models out there. Much like Windows apps, it is all inclusive and provides everything it needs.

Songbird 1.1.1 dropped a few days ago and I'm happy to report that the Fedora RPM's are also now finished and available. A lot of work went into this release and Songbird now boasts a much reduced cpu and memory footprint, embedded album art fetching, and watch folders!

Now that Fedora 10 has also been out for quite some time, I'm dropping Fedora 9 builds to save space and bandwidth. If anyone would like an F9 RPM feel free to grab the SRPM provided and respin it. As far as I know the two should build the same, however, Songbird is beginning the rely on newer and newer gstreamer code, so it's possible you might be missing already upstreamed patches if you do decided to go F9.

Also, one thing to note about the current 1.1.1 under Linux. Myself and others have been seeing two bugs in particular that are quite annoying. The first is a javascript error that show up soon after a first run:

SBAppInitialize:SBRegisterSongbirdProtocol()
TypeError: Components.classes['@mozilla.org/gnome-gconf-service;1'] is
undefined

The relevant bugzilla ticket can be found over at bug 15432.