Michael Facquet - Desktop and Web Applications Developer

[Updated] The Winamp first digital FM radios package

2005-11-23T18:10:42Z

Update: the RadiosFR plug-in in version 0.3 is now available as part of the french translation patch. Fully functional, it features 37 radios in partnership. This new software product once again meets a huge success, with 125,000 people who used RadiosFR just for the day of yesterday! If you're interrested in a french-speaking radio package, claim your copy today!

Besides, it can be noticed that:
requirements, including optional extras, have been met at 100%;
not a single glitch has been reported so far, although the plug-in is run on hundreds of thousands different environments;
delivery occured less than half-way of the expected deadline, which is quite rare in the software development industry!

WinampFR.com, the #1 foreign Winamp communauty, hired me a couple of weeks ago to work on a pretty exciting project (and I'm not saying “exciting” only because I'll get paid for a change!).

This project consists of creating what is to be the very first FM radios package available for Winamp, involving special partnerships with all the major players in the radio area. Offering a very modern and attractive user interface, Winamp users will be soon able to select and listen to their favourite station and enjoy digital quality benefits.

Currently, here are the technical requirements I've been told:
Winamp general plug-in;
Accessibility through Winamp's menus;
Separate window (not within the library therefore);
Custom listview with informations & logo;
Contextual menus;
Embeded browser;
XML database;
PNG with transparency, layer and interpolation support for logos;
Everything skinned as if it was a native Winamp's window;
And a couple of extra details...

And here is what you get when you hire me, and give me this kind of requirements:

FM Radios in modern mode

FM Radios in the good old classic mode

I'm supposed to deliver this software program for February 1st 2006.

Given I've already written over 80% of the thing, including what are probably the trickiest parts, it should probably be released within the very next weeks.

According to the agreement's terms I sealed with WinampFR.com, this plug-in may not be distributed on my website, but exclusively part of the WinampFR's French translation patch.

Stay tuned!

Site update : new look

2005-09-05T07:13:35Z

As regular readers may have noticed, facquet.com got a fresh new look this september.

This new look is probably a lot less innovative than the previous one, as it is typical to what's made nowadays in terms of web designs.

This is a fixed width layout optimised for 800px resolutions and higher, which is not without reminding what is often seen in weblogs. Graphics are clearly XPished (the green hill is probably not unrelated to this feeling...), with a colour palette build upon a paler version of the good old RGB (Red-Green-Blue).

Regarding fonts, the default one is Trebuchet MS, a font designed for easy on screen reading, shipped with Microsoft's products (Windows, Office, IE, Web-font-pack) for enough years that most people now have it installed. Others switched back to the classical Arial-like family.

Except for the front page, the layout hasn't changed too much from the previous design.

And, most importantly, the design is still 100% tableless, in true semantic XHTML strict. I haven't checked mechanical validity yet though, but there shouldn't be any unfixable glitch.

With XHTML and true tableless CSS, accessibility is close to excellent. This site used to pass the WAI "double-A" conformance; as I increased the level of embeded descriptions, this can only be better. However, I'm afraid reaching the AAA isn't for tomorrow due to a requisite incompatible with the use of a CMS engine, mine being already tuned to give its best in this area.

Last thing, this new set of templates is the occasion for me to experiment with "non-obstructive" DHTML. You'll see a brand new animated menu, as well as dynamic tooltips. These are designed not to break the XHTML DOM, nor to prevent navigability with browsers without or disabled javascript. It's been tested on all major browsers (IE win, Mozilla/FireFox, Opera), but I fear of results with aged non-standard browsers.

For the posterity, here is what facquet.com used to look in the previous twelve months:

Previous look of facquet.com

Winamp FLAC input plug-in updated to v1.1.2a - Windows 98 testers wanted

2005-03-30T21:21:37Z

Time has elapsed since the release of FLAC 1.1.2, and whereas my FLAC encoder was quickly updated, the "unofficial Winamp input plug-in with media library support" was still waiting for its update. This release time should happen soon, as long as I will be receiving feedback in the next days :wink:

As a reminder, this "unofficial FLAC plug-in" is a patched version of the Winamp plug-in from the original FLAC project, with added support for the Winamp's library, mass-tagging and Advanced Title Formatting. I originally made it to provide tagging support to my own FLAC encoder, and finally many users took the chance to see bugs here for a long time fixed!

There are currently three versions abroad:
v1.1.1 which is official v1.1.1 + experimental library support
v1.1.2 which if official v1.1.2 + experimental library support
v1.1.2a, in beta-testing, which is official v1.1.2 + new library support + various bugs fixes

Although I successfully ran my own tests under XP and 98SE, it would be great if some of you could play with the FLAC input plug-in v1.1.2a, and report me back what's working and what's not. I'm interested in:
both success and horror stories
both 2000/XP and 98/ME series users

Actually the major improvement with this a version is about Windows 98 support. This also provides additional bug fixes and minor updates. Complete changelog is available at the appropriate section of this website.

Info Box now showing proper tags under Windows 98

I hope this will be the final word about the Windows 98 issues I've been reported *and* Winamp 5 style meta-data handling.

FLAC encoder updated to 1.1.2

2005-02-07T04:44:57Z

Josh Coalson, the official FLAC project leader and original author of the FLAC codec, has unexpectedly released a minor update of the FLAC reference library on the 5th of february.

Although according to him there's no major change requiring to upgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2, I've decided to offer an upgrade for my Winamp encoder reflecting the changes. Obviously, I told you in a previous news item there was a very minor bug in the encoder which was to be fixed in an incoming version... so I'm using the pretext of a new FLAC version to update the whole package.

The changelog for the Winamp FLAC encoder is:
upgraded to libFlac 1.1.2, implying some speed enhancements in compression levels 0, 1 and 2
fixed bug preventing from ripping the same CD track twice (I told you before this wasn't a bug everybody would see!)

The good news about the FLAC in-progress-work is that we might see an encoder using integer-only instructions soon. For people not familiar with integer vs float CPU instructions, just understand that dealing with integer numbers is really faster than dealing with float numbers. Currently most of the encoding process can be turned into integer-only computing, and I hope the remaining part will have its own integer version soon :smile:.

The bad news is that Josh doesn't seem to care much more than that about the Winamp input plug-in. This one didn't receive any update, and thus stills not working properly with Winamp 5, whereas the tags are completely broken under Windows 98/ME OSes. Contrariwise, the XMMS plug-in (XMMS is a Winamp clone for Unix/BSD/Linux) did receive some updates. That actually means I'll have to continue maintaining my own forked version of the Winamp FLAC input plug-in for now. Worst, some strategic code I was using for the Winamp 5 interface has been pulled out of the source tree :crying: I'll try to update the input plug-in to 1.1.2, however I can't promise to fix the Windows 98/ME issue.

Counters going to hit round numbers

2005-01-28T05:41:34Z

Or how to fill up a news item with nothing fresh :biggrin: Let's enumerate the latest pieces of software I made recently available to you.

Ogg-Vorbis Encoder v1.1

There were just about 25,000 downloads in two weeks, and obviously I consider it as being a great success.

This shows there are many users interested in free formats, and who don't trust commercial lies such as mp3pro or Wma supposed "CD quality"... Ogg-Vorbis is definitely the best lossy format around, and I'm just happy to help a little pushing it up.

Actually I hadn't been reported any issue with this encoder, whereas I received seven 5 stars (on 5) reviews on winamp.com.

FLAC Encoder v1.0

This one is going to hit 20,000 downloads, after only one month. I'm not surprised it is not as popular as the Ogg-Vorbis encoder, because the codec is not as promoted as Ogg-Vorbis, and anyway it generates quite large files which clearly doesn't target the "average user".

However some are enjoying it, notably classical music listeners, and yet I'm happy to have brought a free lossless format to Winamp.

I've been rated 4 stars out of 5. Actually I've been reported a very minor misbehaviour about it, but so unimportant that I won't release a new version unless the codec gets updates, or some other majors bugs are discovered.

FLAC input Plug-in v1.1.1

It's close to 12,000 downloads, in one month too. I'm quite afraid of the fact that it has about half downloads compared to the FLAC encoder. Given this input plug-in is absolutely necessary to properly tag encoded files... seems like at least 8,000 of you will create untagged FLAC files.

Anyway this plug-in was a fork of the official one, so I didn't do that much work on it. It stills has been rated 4.5 out of 5 at winamp.com, with rather positive reviews.

At the other hand, I've been reported severe issues about it on Windows 98/ME systems: it seems this plug-in simply prevents Winamp from loading. I've been investigating this matter days ago, and it now loads correctly, but there are still some issues about tagging... which happen to be inherited from the official code I've been based on. Until I get the final word on this, the package won't be updated. Thus it doesn't work on Windows 98 for now, and may or may not work in the future. Sorry about that.

Here it is for today folks. I hope the next news items will be more consistent than this one (shouldn't be too hard!). I don't care that much about downloads counters :rolleyes:, I was only feeling this website needed a small update!

New year, new encoder

2005-01-17T00:58:33Z

Hope 2005 will be a good year for all of you :-)

Except that my calendar has been incremented by 1, there was another update of this website. Yes I admit, I released another Winamp encoder (I should really calm down on this subject!).

After my Christmas encoder, targetting the free lossless codec FLAC, I worked on a new year encoder for the popular Ogg-Vorbis format. I won't copy & paste my propaganda page here, which is not written yet anyway, just say this is the format. Totally free, open-source, best possible quality, damned fast, and even some portable devices begin to support it. It has all the parameters to replace mp3s, and at least to be the right choice for your music collection on PC!

My Ogg-Vorbis CD ripping encoder artwork

I remember how exited I was when Vorbis 1.0 was released in mid-2002: as a matter of fact I ripped all my CDs with it, as it sounded so promising to me. Almost three years later it has turned awesome, fixing its early days defaults. To the date of today, if competition between audio codecs was all about technical qualities, I'm pretty sure we won't even talk about something else than Vorbis. But unfortunatly some millions of $$ are changing the deal...

Back to the encoder. It is basically based on the latest 1.1 Vorbis, and perfectly integrated for use with the Winamp 5 built-in CD ripper.

The option gives a slider to set the quality setting. If this doesn't speak to you, then you're a potential reader of my user guide page!

Some may see there is an "experimental" release of the encoder. In short this is a faster version, with better tunings on low quality settings. But this is experimental, so use it at your own risk ;-)

I'd like to apologize for users unable to download the encoder from the Winamp website. I'm not to blame here, the Winamp.com submission system has been almost broken for months. Actually one reviewer has been kind enough to valid my plug-in several times, but with no much luck. Hope this will be fixed soon, although nobody knows if the Winamp.com web team stills alive.

WAP users welcome

2004-12-21T00:05:40Z

At least my lecturer didn't spend a year teaching us WML for nothing. The one who convinced us that VRML was the future of Internet, and Perl CGIs just about to revolutionize the possibilities of the web :o) Well, at least one of his students made use of his lecture, lecture which was running... not six years ago, but six months ago :-|

Thus I worked a little on a WAP version of this website. If you haven't read the sarcasm of the previous paragraph, no I'm not a WAP believer :-D Let's say I was curious about it, and since I'm not a mobile user, the best way to know more about it was to made a WAP website. At least this allowed me to write the most ironical news item: the only personal webpage accessible by WAP made by a webmaster who never owned a mobile. Uh uh!

Unfortunatly mobile terminals aren't optimal for webpages. So basically the WAP access is a simplified copy of this website, but with fewer links per page, and pages cut into bunches of cards. I heard some newer phones sometimes understand xHTML strict pages, like the ones on this website, but anyway shorter and optimised pages are certainly better ;-)

Facquet.com viewed on a (pretty old) WAP device

Phone addicts will certainly see on this picture that this is not the latest model (six lines of characters in black&white...), but I can say this is usuable on such devices. Newer large colour screens should be even more readable.

WAP users may connect to this website using the usual http://www.facquet.com or http://facquet.com address. Mobile terminals will be automatically detected and served WML pages.

So the good news is that you can now damage your eyes by reading my idiocies for £1 per minute on a ridiculously narrow 2 inches large screen. Isn't technology beautiful?

Winamp goes lossless

2004-12-20T22:50:30Z

Some of you may know that I'm currently looking for the right company, for the right job. Until such event occurs, that also means that I have some “free time”. Well, let's say that for a hard-worker like me this doesn't mean watching stupid programs on TV, I don't own any TV set anyway, but this means that I'm using this free time to do all the things I said once “I'll do it when I'll have the time”.

So during this time I re-opened some old projects, finalising them, correcting long-term bugs. I'm also working on this website, and believe me this is a lot of work!! Also as I have always done by the past I'm reading the IT actuality, but also studying a lot of computer science articles, tutorials and many more... That also means many test programs... and sometimes the need to do something standing like a final product: although I'm comfortable with theory, I also enjoy when sometimes it turns into something concrete.

And here we are, yet another Winamp plug-in! I chose an encoder because it was supposed to be a short project, not eating more than a couple of days: as a matter of fact I made it in two days.

So the plug-in is an encoder to rip CDs tracks to the FLAC file format, everything by using Winamp. FLAC is a popular lossless compressed format (exact copies of CD tracks, contrary to Mp3 or AAC), free, not patended, and very popular (even supported by some hardware devices).

My FLAC CD ripping encoder artwork

That was the first time I was working on a strictly audio related plug-in, and in fact that wasn't as complicated as I was afraid! I must congratulate the FLAC project for the high quality of their work: the project is very well documentated (but could be improved nevertheless), so that I was able to write my encoder in a decent time... but that was without counting on the famous Nullsoft renown about documenting stuffs! Usually they are just kind enough to unbind a raw header file of Winamp public APIs. I was astonished to see that there didn't exist any third-party encoder for Winamp, but with retreat, it's just that Nullsoft hadn't provided the required materials. Anyhow I lost a good amount of time reverse-engineering the interface. That's now done, and I could certainly by now write another encoder in a couple of hours! I may anyway write something on this subject soon, to save time of interrested developers.

Options for the FLAC encoder

So the encoder is now ready to ship, kindly tested by Winamp forum's members. After having exploited my C and Win32 skills, I wrote some pages for this website to detail further the encoder and its options, feel free to have a try!

At the same time I made some updates on the official FLAC input plug-in. Additionally to fixing some old subsisting bugs, I added the long awaited full support for the new Winamp 5 media library. I've been told there was an attempt of read-only support once, but which didn't last for long for whatever reasons. One short day of work later, and this is all done. Combined with my encoder, it makes the preferred, and only, lossless format to be used with Winamp 5. In one word, Winamp goes lossless...

Eleven years ago, a programmer was borning

2004-11-10T18:07:26Z

That doesn't make me younger, but yes, this is the eleventh anniversary of my programming life!

That was in late 1993, in the middle of nowhere (actually this was the french north-west country-side :-p ), that my natural curiosity had brought me to open the application manual. In front of my so-cool Amstrad 6128 computer (maybe my interrest for England comes from here :o) ) , I typed in what should become my HelloWorld to the computing planet. As far as I remember, it was a couple of lines like that (sorry folks, strings are in French: I hadn't started to learn English yet ;-) ):

Ready. 10 INPUT "Quel est ton nom? ",$A 20 PRINT "Bonjour"+$A 30 END Ready.

Followed by the magical command that changed the development of my life:

Ready. RUN Quel est ton nom? michael Bonjour michael Ready.

At this point, a passion was born. At this point, I knew what I'll be doing the next ten years. And obviously that's where I'm now!

Thenceforth this first, ummm, program done, I taught myself to program using the Locomotive Basic until 1997. At this date I got my first PC, and moved to QuickBasic and then Visual Basic. This epoch were also my first steps to Internet, with my first website in 1999 (HTML/Php3/DBase), as well as the first try with GNU/Linux. In parallele, I oriented my studies to IT, thus Scientific courses at this stage.

Interresting things happened in 2000, where armed of my Baccalauréat pass, I switched to serious things with the DUT analyst-programmer training at the university. In 2002 I was amongst their very best graduates, and moved to England to push further my studies. This ended this year with my BSc graduation, and am finally desesperately looking to earn money from my passion :crying: !

Ten years of development means many projects, in many areas. This also means study of a hundred things. And well, even today I still learn new fields of interrest! From a Pacman clone under MS-Dos, to advanced interpreters, without forgetting utilities, Java music applications, dynamic websites or Winamp plug-ins. Well, these years were really cool. I look forward the future will be as great.

Website [re-]opened!

2004-09-08T16:30:05Z

First website published five years ago, last one in 2002: I've been two years without running a public website! That's far too long, so I decided to open one again :-p. Here it is, my very own website!

For those of you who don't have the pleasure to know me, I've been running several websites in the past years. Amongst them:
www.gutenberg.online.fr (personal website)
www.gutenberg-software.com / www.gutsoft.com (parceling of my software programs)
www.guitarama.net / www.guitartabs.online.fr (free archive of guitar tabs)
www.rammsteinfr.com (Rammstein band fans site)

I'm also moderately known for my commitment in the Winamp communauty, throw the BurningCD plug-in for Winamp 2 (many hundreds thousands downloads). This was for several years the only free burning solution under MS-Windows, and was very appreciated for its fine integration within the Winamp media player. Four years later, AOL (owner of Winamp), finally decided to give Winamp burning capabilities.

These two last years, I've been working towards my graduation in computing. In parallele to academic projects and studies, I released a couple of new Winamp plug-ins (Cover Art, gUSB, alternative WMA input plug-in, etc.). Oh, and I assured a lot of support in French Winamp forums too!

The most amazing thing is the traffic I still get in my not-totally-down old websites, although there is no more than ten pages and that I didn't make any update in so many months! For the single month of august 2004, there were something like 13,100 hits, for about 7GB of comsumed bandwidth :-o. Not too bad for an old personal webpage!

This present website was conscientiously realised, using state-of-the-art technologies on both client ans server sides. This means high respect of current web standards and accessibility requirements on client-side (although users of the 6-years-old Internet Explorer got workarounds code injected to decently view the pages), and powered by the mature SPIP CMS (Content Management System), which relies itself on the successful LAMP quadruplet (Linux / Apache / MySQL / Php). The server is hosted in Paris, in one of the biggest hosting room, with three national peerings (FreeIX, Sfinx and Parix), and two major international carriers (Telia and Opentransit).

Apart from working on this website, I'm also designing the second version of my plug-in gUSB. And the most important thing: I'm currently available for hire! So if you are a recruter, you can get some information about my profile on this website: don't hesitate to get in touch with me if you think I could do something for you. I'm currently based in Manchester-UK, but movable if needed.