So Jorge bribed me with the possibility of a bounty for completing iPod support in rhythmbox, the music application we both use. It took me a few hours to get productive, mostly because I had to learn enough about arch, the source control versioning system that the rhythmbox developers use, to check out and create my own working source tree. Then I realized my iPod was HFS+ formatted, so I had to recompile my kernel to add support for that file system, so I could copy off the boot sector and reformat the drive with fat.

I’m still learning what all glib has to offer, so this was a good place to jump in. I managed to load a custom popup menu based on the source (in this case, the iPod). I also almost have it reading the actual name of the iPod, instead of just calling it “iPod”.

I know I’m not the only one hacking on the rhythmbox code to add iPod support and features. I’m still not used to this arch system, but from what I’ve read merging changes is fairly seamless. I figure I’ll follow the rhythmbox-devel mailing list and quietly hack away at my own little tree until I have it working reasonably well. I’m sure I can get Jorge and a few other of the #linux guys to test things out for me.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, which means another day off of work for me. Four days in a row. I sure needed the time away from the office. The last two weeks at work have been stressful. It was nice to forget about that for a few days and work on my own stuff.