Older blog entries for ensonic (starting at number 43)

moving into my own appartment in finland

Its now my first weekend in my own appartment here. Still quite messy. Its amazing how much stuff I have. Internet was easy to get in Finland. The rest isn't that easy. First I seem to need an adapter for the water connector of my washing machine. Next problem is that its not so easy to mount the lamps on the ceiling. Don't know what the ceiling consists of, but I can't drill holes in there. Also need to figure if they have DIY store in Finnland at all, haven't spotted one so far.

I really hope that I can soon get back to do some hacking on OS projects.

hardware

Recently I brought a bunch of hardware extensions for my laptop. First item is a Transcend PCMCIA card, that provides two UBS2.0 ports. My laptop has only two USB1.1 ports and using USB2.0 for the external harddisk would be nice. I also run out free ports (mouse, cardreader, harddisk, webcam, ...). The card worked out of the box. unfortunately USB2.0 or more precisely the ehci-hcd.ko gives problems. Sometimes it works, but most of the time the whole system locks up.

Second item was a Logitec Quickcam. Unfortunately there seems to be only a video4linux driver and none for v4l2. But at least the cam works.

Third is a USB headset, which I use for VoIP. It provides an own soundcard. Now after some experiements (and also patches to gstreamer) I seem to be able to use it in all applications.

Finally I found a way to copy music to my phone (N70). When connecting the phone via USB it unfortunately not appears as a drive. But I can use the RS-MMC card in the N 770 too and this shows the card as a drive under linux.

buzztard

Last month I did some work on the GUI. I felt adventurous and tried to push the GtkTreeview to its limmit. Of couse it doesn't work at the first try. But the outcome is this patch. Comments welcome (especially at the naming :) ).

The pattern-editor has now very basic editing capabillities. Nothing very comfortable, but he, its a start.

Besides the gst-buzztard module is growing. Welcome two new additions: a nice echo delay and a stereo panorama/balance plugin. And the first gstreamer soft-synth (besides audiotestsrc) becomes more capable too. It has now real envelopes and a multi-mode filter. If someone feels like doing some softsynth development, I wouldn't mind concentrating on the core (hint, hint).

gstreamer
Wow! Aren't we hard workers - 60 commits in 8 hours. Can there be bugs left at all? C'mon buddies. Another such day and they're gone too.

Okay, truth is we've all been collection patches, due to some length freeze. But now its over and cvs is ours again :)

buzztard

This time I have a good excuse for beeing late again. A new job, a new country ... But what happend in the project?

Due to never ending sync problems with the adder, I've scratched the idea of doing mute/solo/bypass by dynamically altering the pipeline connections. Now I simply add volume elements and mute them :) voila, that works. Also found out that basetransform elements should be able to operate in a pass-through mode. This doesn't works for me yet. Need to investigate more.

On the GUI side I've added the playline to the pattern view too. As I've splitted the treeview into 2 views the drawing is not very snchronized - one can see that the line is two lines.

I've also extended the sequence view to have more extensive headings. It now shows mute(solo/bypass buttons in there as well. Problem: I can't click the buttons inside the treeview header :(.

Challenges everywhere :)

Hitting the icy shores

I've survived the first week in the north. Everything worked nicely. Found my way from the ferry to my temporary new home in helsinki - Thanks to zeenix for letting me live in his flat! This is how it looks like just 50m from where I live now:

I never lived at the sea, so I like it. I am curious how it will be in summer.

Most of the paperwork has been done, so things will slowly return to normal.

Buzztard

Uhhm, late news this time again. This month we had the LinuxTag and the CeBIT, so I've been away a lot.

I've used the time to do some more planning aleast. Still CVS has seen many commits. The major change is that we are now moving all the song-file-io into a serialisation interface. Before we had a big ugly block of code that generated or parsed the native xml-fileformat. Problem is that changes needed to be made in object and in the io-code. Now its in the same class.Even better we can (hopefully) use it for cut/copy/paste and undo/redo.

Waffel and me spend some time on project reorganisation. First we now have Changelogs. They are updated by the prep-changelog.pl script and commits are done using DSs cicl. Next we have two new developer mailing lists: buzztard-cvs and buzztard-cvs-verbose for cvs commit messages.

Next month will be a bit rough - waffel will work for one month in cuba and I move to finland to start to work for Nokia.

GGZ Gaming Zone Project

Meet some people from the GGZ project. Its a platform for client-server online gaming.

The project looks for a new GNOME maintainer . The GNOME front-ends are ported to gtk-2 but that's all that has been done. So if you look for a new project and this sounds cool to you, your help is wanted.

LinuxTag in Chemnitz/Germany

This weekend was the LinuxTag event in Chemnitz/Germany. Its the 2nd largest meeting in Germany and well known for not beeing overly comercialized :)

We participated by doing the gnome booth, showing the brand new gnome 2.14 to visitors. Additionally I gave a talk about "GNOME and GStreamer" (slides as pdf). Even though the talk was a bit late and on sunday, there were many listeners. A good sign for growing interest in GNOME, me thinks.

Many germans use KDE as this was pre-chosen by distributions like suse. Thus the talks started often like:

Well, I usualy use KDE, but what exactly is the different to GNOME?

Hard question for someone who basicly uses GNOME all the time. So we introduced them out out beloved desktop and generally they liked it. For many its the clean & slick look that makes it. Yay!

more -Werror

I aggree so totally with thomas. One thing some people seem not to notice is that a compiler error means that the compile cant understand your source-code anymore and a compiler warning means the compiler is unsure what code to produce from the source.

Thus it is better to fix the error to precisely guide the compiler. As a nice side effect making the code more explicit helps other developers too :)