Older blog entries for zeenix (starting at number 151)

Thanks to dobey as well

Just writing this blog entry to make my gratitude to dobey for putting my hackergotchie on planet.gnome.org, very public. :)

Syndicated 2007-11-26 22:50:00 (Updated 2007-11-26 22:56:34) from zeenix

Thanks Murray

I couldn't have said it better. What made me really pissed is his lying tactics. I once mentioned on the gnome foundation ml about me waiting for his replies for more than an year (literally) and I got a quick reply from him telling me that he has sent me replies. I believed him (after all he is the director of gnome foundation), assuming that his mails must have ended up in spam folder for some reason but all of a sudden my spam filter started see his mails as not spam. After a little conversation, he promised to put my hackergotchie on the planet and after that I started to receive complete silence from him again. I send him reminders from time to time but I never got any response (it's been 2.5 months now). I am sure, he'll tell me that he has been sending me responses if he reads this blog entry or if I make it an issue on the gnome foundation ml again but I see no reason to believe his word anymore.

P.S. If the 'reply-to' header of an email only contains the addresses of the receivers only, I won't blame my spam filter to treat the email as spam. :) I notified Jeff about this and this was his reply:

>>P.S can you please set the correct reply-to header in your emails.

My client does what it's told to do.

Syndicated 2007-11-26 20:45:00 (Updated 2007-11-26 21:30:51) from zeenix

In search for Bertrand Russell

In search for Bertrand Russell on video.google.com, I found two video clips that I wouldn't have expected, one is a clip from an old bollywood movie where the hero is given an opportunity to conduct an interview with Russell and another is video of the song 'Jihad' by Singing Fools. The former is a bit surprising but I didn't quite catch the jihad song and it's connection with Russell. Also
I knew that americans were supporting Jihad in the 80's but didn't know they were so loude and active in that.

Syndicated 2007-11-23 13:52:00 (Updated 2007-11-23 13:53:46) from zeenix

clutter-gst

After I was informed about the existence of ClutterGstVideoSink, I quickly modified my super-video application to make it use that. But as soon as i did that, i stopped getting even the static image. After careful analysis for days, I figured that I was supposed to call gst_bus_add_signal_watch() on the pipeline bus since ClutterGstVideoSink uses messages on the bus combined with signal handlers to render the frames in the application thread. This is obviously a 'dirty' hack; a hack because gst elements are supposed to do all the media processing in the pipeline thread, dirty because gst bus is not meant for media transport.

After this realization, I had been working on it from time to time. First I tried to make the actual rendering happen in the gst pipeline thread by using the clutter's thread safety primitives and that worked quite nicely in the end except for one minor problem: The call to clutters rendering thread blocks if it happens after the clutter main loop has been exited and that is exactly when you set the pipeline to NULL state. If anyone have any clue on how to solve this problem, do let me know. In the meanwhile, I have made the hack non-dirty (or should I say, less dirty) by replacing 1. pipeline bus usage with an internal async queue and 2. bus signal handlers with idle functions (read g_idle_add()). This one was way easier to implement and it worked without any problems with all the test applications I have. I've submitted the patches upstream via a bug. If you are interested, please try them out and report your observations to the bug.

UPDATE: Just tried the 'rendering in the pipeline thread' changes again and now I remember that there is another critical problem with that: the whole application hangs (both app and gst pipeline) when I seek and/or play and pause very quickly. :(

Syndicated 2007-11-23 13:50:00 (Updated 2007-11-23 16:52:33) from zeenix

Playing video on ClutterTexture

I thought this would be an easy task and should be doable in a weekend but seems I wasn't completely correct in my assumption. What I did was to try to modify the super-oh example application to make it render frames from videotestsrc element of gstreamer, instead of the OH logo (no offense OH guys). For some reason the animation stops after I render the first frame. All I get is a static image like this:



My hunch is that I am just missing something small here so if anyone have a clue, please let me know. Here is the source.

I know that using fakesink's handoff signal isn't the recommended way to do this but I'll concider writing a cluttersink after I get this simple app. working.


UPDATE: I've been informed about the existance of ClutterGstVideoTexture and ClutterGstVideoSink by Emmanuele and Ross. Looking at the sources, I think I'll need to hack on it to support YUV (if it's available). That shouldn't be a problem but I would also want to try to implement this trick to bring hope to poor ATI grahics card users like me.

Syndicated 2007-11-12 10:17:00 (Updated 2007-11-12 14:04:19) from zeenix

From 28M to 2.7M

As some of you already know, I've been working on a simple AV-specific control-point as part of gupnp-tools. While at it, I've been trying to keep the UPnP AV parts as separate and generic as possible so that they could be move to a separate library later on. One of the first things that everyone wanted to create a nice wrapper for is the ugly DIDL-Lite. Jorn tried his best to convince me and others to not create a GObject for representing each DIDL-Lite object but I didn't listen and ended-up writing a very resource hungry API. To see what i mean, please look at memory usage of gupnp-av-cp after populating it's treeview with the content hierarchy exported by coherence:



I was quite sure that most of this 28M is taken by xmlDoc and I was right. Now that I have got rid of xmlDoc usage and replaced the gobjects with an API to deal with xmlNodes, here is how the memory usage looks like:




For people who are curious on how this simple AV control-point would look like, here is a screenshot:



One reason why the development of GUPnP might seem much slower compared to that of other UPnP projects out there is that we (especially Jorn) are trying our best to provide a nice and simple API while making sure that no part of the project is resource hungry as we are targeting embedded systems where saving bytes is more impotant than providing lots of features. Jorn already have a plan and some half-baked code for the handling of DIDL-Lite xml and contents on the server-side (ContentDirectory implementation) without wasting lots of memory and CPU.

Syndicated 2007-10-28 22:51:00 (Updated 2007-10-28 23:10:47) from zeenix

I give-up!

Finally! I found a person who claims that Mango Lassi and Milk-shake taste different to him: Daf. So I see no choice but to change my claim to:

Mango-Lassi is the name of a typical 'western' drink that consists of two extremely delicious items: Lassi and Mango. However, the drink is completely unknown to people who are born and raised in a particular town in the south-eastern part of Sindh which is famous for it's production of Mangoes and a particular Lassi shop all around Pakistan. IMHO, those people should not be blamed for their ignorance since they are quite far from the western world to know about such new inventions.

Syndicated 2007-10-16 21:22:00 (Updated 2007-10-16 21:37:48) from zeenix

Mango Lassi Icon

Yes! Lennart it's no doubt a nice icon for a Mango milk-shake. :)

Syndicated 2007-10-15 20:25:00 (Updated 2007-10-15 20:26:49) from zeenix

My first LEGO rover

For some reason, I am unable to connect the mindstorm IDE to communicate with the mindstorm using bluetooth so I use USB for downloading my programs to NXT. Didn't get a lot of time to play with it but the first thing I would want to build is a rover that move in a straight line but turns left (or right) if something comes in front of it (already done) unless if it's a red ball in front of it and pick it up instead and keep going.

Syndicated 2007-10-15 20:20:00 (Updated 2007-10-16 14:25:26) from zeenix

Mango and Lassi, two separate objects

There is no such thing as Mango Lassi. There is Lassi and then there is Mango, both very delicious but separate objects and both lose their taste as soon as you combine them. Unfortunately, many Indian/Nepalese restaurants in europe are spreading the wrong message just to simply their task of selling both on the same ignorant (of Indian cuisine) customer. I was already annoyed enough by the Waiter bringing me a Mango Lassi each time I order a Lassi in Nepalese restaurant and now I'll be seeing (maybe also using) a nice free software project by the same name. :(

Syndicated 2007-10-09 22:03:00 (Updated 2007-10-09 22:04:01) from zeenix