Took someone's (darn, already scrolled off the end of the
recent diary entries) advice and changed the libao API for
the third time. The change was trivial, and the result is
much cleaner. Thanks.
Finally figured out the ALSA problem. By default the
driver operates in non-blocking mode. The program would
decode the next block before the first one had finished
playing and would overwrite the currently playing block
with the next block. Hence the neat (though frustrating
effect) of listening to Brickhouse at 33% faster speed. I
fixed that and wrote some buffering code to pack the data
coming in (which can be in chunks of whatever size) into
32k blocks and send the completed blocks to the ALSA
driver. Sounds good.
I've decided to wait on submitting this code until
Kenneth
gets back. Monty mentioned a little while ago that he
would no longer mess with that branch (after accidentally
stepping on Kenneth during a commit frenzy). In the
meantime, I'm going to see if I can scrounge up an IRIX
account on some friend's box to test (at least the
compilation of) libao on IRIX. Same goes for Solaris,
though I don't know if our school's Solaris boxes have the
sound header files. If neither of these seem feasible,
I'll go figure out how to do Win32 code instead. :)
Also hacked on a patch I found to let ht://Dig work
with
SSL. The patch was for 3.1.4, but would not cleanly apply
to 3.1.5. I've never hacked a diff directly, though I must
say it is not as hard as it looks.
ralsina: Ack. Slashdot has cured me of my
desire to
participate (or watch) the license flamewars. I must say
that the GPL == non-free debate is one of the stranger ones
I've heard of. I guess my take is that every license
except the public domain is "non-free" to a certain extent,
just like anarchy is the only truly "free" form of
government. Of course, being "free" isn't one's only
motivation in such things, so the issue is how much freedom
should be traded in for other things we want. That's the
real debate in my mind, and the rest is just playing games
with semantics.
jmg: Careful with the CD-RW. I've had problems
reading them in most CD drives (unless they are also CD
Burners). I imagine newer drives have no problems, but you
may be stuck in front of an older box.