Source release under the GPL

I haven't mentioned this on my blog yet, but the source code for AiffInterchange and HfsBrowser is up on the Copland site. It has been up for a while, but I've only just thought of mentioning it here since I've been working heavily on HfsBrowser (and uploading my changes every night).

So yeah, go and hack around on the code, fix bugs, add features! You'll find the code on the wiki - for this project, it's more trouble than it's worth to use SVN (especially considering how unreliable Google Code really is).

I had a very annoying battle with wx - it tries to decode Unicode strings to put them into list boxes. This causes problems with Macintosh files which have special characters. Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to skip it is... hang on, I've just thought of a better way to test for this. Right now, with the code on Google Code, it runs extremely slowly since it concatenates each new item to the dirList box when getting a directory listing. There's no way to test if it will cause problems UNTIL you actually put it into the box! (not as far as I can tell, and I can't ask anyone on #python...). And you can't add one item, then add another item - it doesn't seem to work.

But yeah, I've just thought of a faster way. Concatenating is very slow. I should instead create an invisible listbox, and put item 1 in it, then replace it with item 2, etc. If one of them causes problems, delete it from the Python list like I currently do. At the end, dump the whole list into dirList. That should be quite a lot faster than concatenating to the list every single time. I'll try it tomorrow.

Check out the code! It's not pretty, it's not overly foolproof, but it works. As I mention on the Copland project frontpage, I expect that HfsBrowser will be the one part of the project that makes it to other distributions' repos, as a replacement for xHFS. A replacement was definately needed, as xHFS freezes when you try to mount a drive... or maybe it's just concatenating massive lists? :-P

EDIT: Also, check out the little video on Sal's blog. It really puts into perspective what Sal was talking to me about before Podcast #26.