Bashpodder/Castpodder replacement development thread

Hey drop us a line about the show. Feel free to ask questions, provide feedback and criticism, or just ramble on about anything your little heart desires.

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Tsuroerusu
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Post by Tsuroerusu » Mon Nov 27, 2006 7:15 am

Patrick wrote:So what are we calling this thing? I have a couple of suggestions:
Freepodder
Audiocatcher
Soundcatcher
Castcatcher
Castnet
[JOKE] How about GNU/Podder? [/JOKE]

Terrible joke, anyway, something that's cleaver and sexy at the same time would be cool. Is there some other word for "Juice" ?
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Post by Judland » Mon Nov 27, 2006 9:15 am

Patrick wrote:So what are we calling this thing? I have a couple of suggestions:
Freepodder
Audiocatcher
Soundcatcher
Castcatcher
Castnet
What about something with "character". Since it's all about catching or casting, how about a fishing related name?

Ahab - The whaling captain from the novel, Moby Dick.
Pequod - Ahab's whaling vessel.
Quint - The shark hunter in the novel/movie Jaws.
Proteus - (from Wikipedia) Old man of the Sea. From Proteus comes the adjective protean, with the general meaning of "versatile", "mutable", "capable of assuming many forms": "Protean" has positive connotations of flexibility, versatility and adaptability.

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Post by Tsuroerusu » Mon Nov 27, 2006 9:21 am

How about IcePodder?
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Post by Gomer_X » Mon Nov 27, 2006 10:30 am

Patrick wrote:So what are we calling this thing?
LincKosher? :lol:

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Post by Tsuroerusu » Mon Nov 27, 2006 11:23 am

Gomer_X wrote:
Patrick wrote:So what are we calling this thing?
LincKosher? :lol:
LOL, how about Dann0sher ? :lol:
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Post by Spankminister » Mon Nov 27, 2006 12:06 pm

Huh? Objects are instances of classes.
Yes, I phrased that badly. What I meant was that a class should be a noun that represents an abstract concept. For example, "Schedule," or "Feed." Methods of those classes should be verbs/actions, like "Feed.download()" or whatever. A telltale sign that your hierarchy is not really OO is when you have classes that are actions, since that's going more towards procedural code. e.g. instead of having a FeedParser class that gets instantiated with an argument, and has a .go() method that returns a useful value, the class should be Feed, and the method should be Feed.parse(). At least, that's what they're teaching in school these days. =)
So is there a CVS/SVN/darcs/whatever set up somewhere?
Yes, check earlier in this thread for it.
What should we call this/What about something with "character"
Dur? I thought we were going to call it FeedCatcher, is that no good? If not, the name should at least be somewhat indicative of what the app does. Also, I'd rather not put "pod" or "cast" in the title, since the uses of RSS feeds are outgrowing simple iPod syncing, not to mention that the internet radio show phenomenon predates the whole podcast movement. I don't especially care though, as long as people can figure out what it does and if they want it from the name.

I have no problem with names with "character" as long as there's sort of a mental connection people can make with the function. Names like Audacity for an audio program or FireStarter for a firewall program are fine. I often have trouble remembering the names of programs I even have installed because they make no sense or are entirely unrelated, so let's avoid names like "Fred" or "Gordon" or the Swahili word for internet =)

Personally, I like Feedcatcher, Ahab, or maybe some clever play on "Pod" since I'm fond of dolphins (and then we can use a dolphin silhouette or something as the icon/logo of the program).

At any rate, let's just pick something and move on, since there's plenty of actual work to be done. If you can't help with the actual code, please check out the latest source from svn, and install/run it and let us know if you encounter bugs (there are probably a lot). No matter how minor, and we can put it on the list of things to fix.

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Post by Patrick » Mon Nov 27, 2006 12:14 pm

Ok, I added a poll for the names. Please vote for your favorite.
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Post by Vogateer » Mon Nov 27, 2006 1:30 pm

Spankminister wrote:Yes, I phrased that badly. What I meant was that a class should be a noun that represents an abstract concept. For example, "Schedule," or "Feed." Methods of those classes should be verbs/actions, like "Feed.download()" or whatever.
That's the most cogent explanation I've seen so far. Thanks, man, I'll be using that when I try to refactor my own little scraper.

FeedCatcher sounds good to me, it's to the point, though it might be confused with a more basic RSS reader. Media Feed Catcher might be too long, though descriptive as well.

Looking at the code, didn't Linus say that if you use more than three levels of indentation, you're screwed and need to fix your program? It might not be that bad, but it does seem to have quite a bit of indentation going on. I'm not about to start attempting changes until I have at least a vague feel for the code.
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Spankminister
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Post by Spankminister » Mon Nov 27, 2006 1:51 pm

Looking at the code, didn't Linus say that if you use more than three levels of indentation, you're screwed and need to fix your program?
lol, I hadn't heard that, but it's certainly true (nesting control flow statements like ifs too deeply get really hard to understand-- best to transplant that stuff to its own function)

In the case of Python, however, indentation is part of syntax. From http://diveintopython.org/getting_to_kn ... _code.html:
Code blocks are defined by their indentation. By "code block", I mean functions, if statements, for loops, while loops, and so forth. Indenting starts a block and unindenting ends it. There are no explicit braces, brackets, or keywords. This means that whitespace is significant, and must be consistent.
I'm not yet sure what I think of that, but it does make it visually easy to tell where code blocks begin and end.

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Vogateer
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Post by Vogateer » Mon Nov 27, 2006 2:51 pm

Yeah, I really like Python's use of indentation for code blocks. It really helps me visualize what's going on. It "fits my brain" to quote that Python411 guy.

You know, I've read that with using C—or using other languages— that you are supposed to indent your code to make it readable, even though the language doesn't acknowledge this as a part of its syntax. But it is interesting that I didn't think to differentiate between Python and other languages in this regard. Funny that my mind is already associating Python with programming generically, even when in this case Linus was probably talking about C. Need to watch those little assumptions that creep up on me...

Just looking at my spaghetti code, when it starts to hit that fourth indentation level, it does start to feel like i should separate out part of the function. i imagine I'll incorporate Linus's little remark as another nice little rule of thumb.
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Spankminister
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Post by Spankminister » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:02 am

Uhh, when are we going to close the polls? I don't really care which one wins, but I already went ahead and made subdomains on my site for one of them ^^;; I can redo it, but I just want to know when we can say we know for sure.

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Post by Wally Balljacker » Tue Nov 28, 2006 12:11 am

I was thinking something related to dogs, since they are known to fetch things, which is what a podcatcher does. Maybe PodPooch, or PodHound?

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Post by Patrick » Tue Nov 28, 2006 5:51 am

Spankminister wrote:Uhh, when are we going to close the polls? I don't really care which one wins, but I already went ahead and made subdomains on my site for one of them ^^;; I can redo it, but I just want to know when we can say we know for sure.
Easy there. Lets leave it up for a couple of days. I'd like to see more than 4 votes either way.
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Post by Gomer_X » Tue Nov 28, 2006 8:46 am

I liked 'Ahab' until I remembered that King Ahab was a biblical king in Israel famous for doing evil for his entire 22 year reign. He brought prostitution, homosexuality and child sacrifice to Israel, and his wife Jezebel was thrown from a window as punishment for her idol worship, where her body was eaten by dogs.

Still, a pretty catchy name! :D

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Post by Spankminister » Tue Nov 28, 2006 10:42 am

Easy there. Lets leave it up for a couple of days. I'd like to see more than 4 votes either way.
Sure, I'll give it until, let's say, the end of Friday. In the meantime, I'll see if I can get my dreamhost hosting to play nicely with Bugzilla, and experiment with phpbb to make a discussion forum for the software itself. It may seem like I'm rushing, but I think it's important to establish some sort of web presence for the project beyond this discussion thread. I am interested to hear everyone's input for the name, but I don't think having a cool name needs to be a major project goal, and I don't want it to hold up actual progress. In the long run, for this project to get the kind of base that CastPodder had, it needs to attract developers and users (i.e. testers), and I want to get that started right away.

Besides, let's keep things in perspective; 4 votes isn't really a mandate :D If we were just to pick a winner right now, at most, two people would be offended, which probably wouldn't split the internet in half.

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