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Archive for July, 2005


Posted on July 25, 2005 - by jono

So much stuff

Headed to OpenTech in London on Saturday with Sooz, and met up with Aq there. After spending an extortionate amount of money on travel (train, cabs) and eating the most hideous bacon sandwich ever constructed, we finally made it into the event. It was good to finally meet Danny O’Brien and Dave Green, and it was also cool to see other people again such as Josette from O’Reilly, three guys from EuroFoo and some new people.

Been working on the new incarnation of the site and it is getting sweeter. I have not hacked on it quite so much this weekend as I have tried to have a break. In the last week or so I have been feeling a little burned out. I am one of these people who tends to get bored when sat around doing nothing, so I am always on the go. As an example, last week while Sooz was down in London at the BBC training, each evening I was doing something – Mon: Jamming on music with Emelye, Tue: same again, Wed: LUG meet, Thurs: Karate and Sooz back, Fri: a bit of rest and then OpenTech on Sat. This and working busy days can sap your energy.

Anyway, I did manage to get round to mixing and releasing a new tune – it is called Inside. This one is dedicated to all those who lost their lives in the bombings in London a few weeks back. I played acoustic guitar on it and Emelye (who is now Emelye Evans, not Emelye Penfold) lent her usual high standard of Cello playing. I am pretty pleased with it. Finally, for those who like to hear the more wackier side of music, I discovered Banger can actually sing. So, I lowered the mic stand down to his level, plugged the pooch in and recorded The Banger Beat.

The other day I wrote an article entitled Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required, and it seems to have sparked some feverish discussed. It was picked up on OSNews, GNOME Footnotes, LinuxToday and most interestingly, on the the Linux Audio User mailing list under the Poor Schmuck! thread. The reaction from the piece seems generally mixed, with those disagreeing with my view typically being existing people who do audio stuff on Linux. I am always keen to explore things further and possibly be proved wrong, so I joined up on linux-audio-user and posted a new thread. Currently it has over 35 responses with a whole range of points. The linux-audio-user community have been great and seem very eager to discuss the subject and feedback in a frank and objective way. This is going to be one mighty chin-wag. :D

Finally, it seems the discussion about GTK 2.8 going into GNOME 2.12 is getting more and more interesting. Miguel, great sport that he is for Filthy Gamble on LUGRadio is convinced it is a bad idea. The basic gist is that GTK 2.8 includes support for Cairo, and this dependency for GNOME 2.12 has recently been confirmed on d-d-l. This has caused some debate about whether the new release could cause stability issues for GNOME, and Miguel also has some concerns over how he feels the developers have moved away from the timetable. Personally, I think it makes sense to head towards 2.8 – 2.6 would be largely unmaintained after the release of GNOME 2.12, and there has been weeks of rigorous testing. I can however, see Miguel’s point. As a late observer to the subject (hence no comment on the mailing list) it does seem that there was plenty of time for an objection, and GTK 2.8 was always in the release plan. What will be awesome is that with GTK 2.8 a dependency in GNOME 2.12, this means we should now start seeing Cairo based applications rolling in. :)

Three days till What The Hack…


Posted on July 20, 2005 - by jono

Talks

Been busy as usual. :D

The hacking on my new site is going pretty well, but I am only really allocating time for it at weekends. I tend to spend Saturday night from about 1.30am until I pass out hacking on stuff. The new site is getting there, despite the usual wrangling with CSS. I need to invent a magic box where I can think of a design and it will happen without having Uber-Zeldman skills.

I recently finished an article for the O’Reilly Network about PiTiVi and GStreamer. In it I interviewed Edward Hervey (author of PiTiVi and Ronald Bultje (general GStreamer and video hacker). Both seem pretty happy with the article and it is submitted and awaiting publication. Fingers crossed, this article will help clarify some issues in where video production on Linux is going. I know Edward is busily hacking on the infrastructure behind PiTiVi (porting gnonlin and gst-python to GStreamer 0.9). He also told me that Wim Taymens (scarily talented hacker) has optimised the seeking code is GStreamer even further. This is pretty important as the seeking in 0.8 and below seem rather crufty. All good stuff.

I went down to London last week to do a talk at an IBM seminar. I headed down the evening before to have a few bevvies with the IBMers, and they are a really sound bunch. Got back to the Hilton at around 2am, hit the sack and then headed out at around 8am. The seminar was well run and there were an army of A/V monkeys on site to capture the show. Around 170 people seemed to fill the main room and the talks were also streamed in the exhibition room where another 30 or so people mingled. My talk was about how Open Source came to be and where it is heading in the future. The talk has quite a strong theme of understanding people – this software is essentially socially driven, and if you understand the people, you understand the software. Anyway, the talk seemed to go fairly well and I hope to hook up with the IBM guys at some point soon. Slides comes soon also.

In the last few evenings I have been recording some tunes with Emelye (resident cello player lass). We have been working on one song in particular, and I have also recorded an acoustic guitar piece. The new mic is really having an effect with these acoustic stringed instruments. The dynamic range of an acoustic guitar or cello is far greater than that of a heavily distorted guitar. Distorted guitars are slightly easier to handle in some ways due to their more compressed range, but more complex in other areas. The result so far have been pretty decent and I hope to get something online fairly soon.

Next week, the Ging, the Suit and I head over to What The Hack for four days of beer, hacking and tents. I will be taking my video camera to document the events, and fingers crossed it will be edited in PiTiVi sometime soon. :P


Posted on July 11, 2005 - by jono

Events

Fun weekend. Met up with friends on Saturday night, and I also met up with the band on Sunday. We have had some time off due to an injury with our drummer Jon. We are all looking forward to getting back into it. In addition to this I spent some time on Saturday working on a new tune, and I am quite pleased with it. It needs a guitar solo adding and then it should be complete. On Saturday night I also spent a few hours hacking on a new incarnation of this site. It is going to take a while to do, but it will be better. Much better.

Today I headed over to Reddich for a meeting. This meeting was with a very interesting organisation who are moving over to SugarCRM running on a Linux server. They are very interested in Open Source, and I think they will make a fantastic case study. More news when I can reveal it.

On Wednesday night I head down to London. IBM are putting me up in the Hilton and we are heading out for some drinks and a curry on the evening. The day after (Thursday 14th July 2005) I will speaking at an IBM Linux Migration Seminar at The Meridien Piccadilly Hotel in London. My talk is at 10.40am for around 30 minutes. I will be talking about how Open Source has become a force in the IT industry and how Open Source has matured in different directions. The event looks like it is going to be pretty well attended.

In other event news, I will be speaking at the UK UNIX User Group Conference in Swansea. My talk is all about LUGRadio, how it happened, and why on earth we continue to punish our listeners with it. Both events are on the Events page.

LUGRadio recording tonight. Should be fun. :D


Posted on July 8, 2005 - by jono

Multimedia

I am not going to talk about London – the bastards responsible want the attention. My sympathies are with the victims and my hatred are with the responsible.

Well, the LUGRadio: Live and Unrestrained video is finally released. Go grab a torrent. Getting this thing encoded and working on all systems has been a real pain. The final result is an xvid video and is around 280MB. Christian was wondering why more videos released by Open Source people are not released as oggs. In our case, there were simply no tools available to do this. My first shot at creating a theora file was by running a gstreamer pipeline:

gst-launch-0.8 oggmux name=m ! filesink location=file.ogg { filesrc location=lrl2005.mpg ! decodebin name=d d. ! audioconvert ! rawvorbisenc ! queue max-size-time=5000000000 max-size-bytes=25000000 max-size-buffers=0 ! m. d. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! queue max-size-time=5000000000 max-size-bytes=25000000 max-size-buffers=0 ! m. }

Today while trying to encode, Christian DCCed me a script he wrote to do this, but there were some problems with the audio not syncing with the video. I don’t know if this is a problem with the player or the codec.

The thing I don’t get about codecs is why on earth they vary so much. My naive view of codecs was that you encode something as MPEG2 and it would work on any system that purports to support MPEG2. I had vastly different results on two different Linux boxes and a Windows machine. This is crazy. Encoding is a real black art – you need to know about strange little tools, and few of the well known tools seem to do the job.

I agree with Christian in that PiTiVi (with its spanky new website) has a real opportunity to change this. PiTiVi is currently being ported to GStreamer 0.9 and 0.9 seems to rock a lot harder than 0.8. It is all looking really promising for Open Source multimedia. Fingers crossed, by September we will not only have a promising video editor, but we will also have a further stress tested GStreamer framework suitable for multimedia creation applications.


Posted on July 6, 2005 - by jono

Mucho goodo

First things first. Software patents have been thrown out. This sounds pretty final as Dave Neary points out. This is fantastic, utterly, utterly fantastic. Tonight happens to be a LUG meeting, and we are all going to celebrate – Kat is even baking a cake.

Last night I knocked up a quick article on my O’Reilly Blog called Plugging in the web. It talks about the chronic lack of integration between between different web applications. The article also talks about how the Open Source desktop has been ploughing through these challenges.

Elliot has demonstrated his god like programming prowess and has created a Python script to suck the ID3 tags out of files and sort the files into Artist/Album Name directories. This is really handy and he needs to be knighted immediately. Thanks Elliot. :)

Oh, and this gem arrived today:


Posted on July 4, 2005 - by jono

Yo

Hacked some more on the shopping cart – small look and feel fixes. The problem with projects such as this is that they can turn into a life dominating project. I have another five projects to write, so that best not happen. :P

Today I worked on an IBM presentation for an event I am speaking at in a week and a half. I will provide more details on this soon. I am also speaking at the UKUUG conference in Swansea – more details on that are forthcoming too.

Today I bought one of these babies:

This is an AKG C 2000 B condenser microphone. I have been hankering after a decent vocal mic for a while, and never got round to putting the order in. I chose this one after doing a bit of research and it is a quality bit of kit for recording vocals, amps and acoustic instruments. When this gem is in my studio it will be getting screamed at on a regular basis.

Congratulations to my other half Sooz who started work at the BBC today. She sent me a mail from her new bbc.co.uk address. She is travelling to Birmingham with me every day, so when she is driving, I get an extra half an hour sleep in the morning. :)

Go grab Episode 19 while its hot. Speaking of LUGRadio, the videos from LUGRadio Live 2005 are still in production. I am having a nightmare of a time battling with codecs to get them working on all platforms. The world will be a brighter place when Pitivi, Theora, Direc and HAL/DBUS handle firewire devices.


Posted on July 3, 2005 - by jono

History lesson

Spent some time hacking a shopping cart that I wrote about a year ago into a usable state for the book. This involved the usual process of converting all the crufty old crap that was the peak of knowledge back then into all the new stuff I have learned since. Hacking really is an evolution of not only skills but also mindset. I consider myself a fairly competent PHP developer, but reading old code always makes you realise how important it is to stay near the edge of your game. Become complacent and the world passes you by. This process of cutting the weeds out and planting fresh code has been both interesting and inspiring. It is pleasant to see your progress in a year.

This evening I had a trip down memory lane while fiddling with Google. One of the great things with the modern Internet is that you cab dig up some old memories if you want to. Ladies and Gentlemen, for your enjoyment, here is a short history of a Bacon who got started on the web:

I think thats enough digging through the net. :P


Posted on July 1, 2005 - by jono

Desktop bits

I am knackered. this week has been a long and tough one, mostly due to a lack of sleep since last Thursday. Despite walking around like a zombie, I managed to get lots done and its been a productive week. Luckily, things are starting to settle down now a bit at work. I have tied up much of the assists that I have been working on, and as my diary opens up, I can get on with things that I have neglected for the last few weeks.

It is good to see more work going into the desktop. Aside from Zack’s work on X eye candy, Bastien is also looking at easing sound card use at the Project Utopia stack level. This is exactly the kind of stuff I would like to see going into the desktop. It is still a royal pain in the arse to configure sound cards. The problem is not just in getting the card working, but cards such as the Delta 44’s and 66’s include special control panels that are invaluable. Fingers crossed, the GStreamer work, HAL/DBUS and other components are making multimedia easier to deal with. That, and the increasing maturity of Theora and Vorbis should give a decent stack.

Edward is hacking away at getting gst-python 0.9 ready and today committed changes to make 0.8 and 0.9 parallel installable. When he has completed ports of gst-python and gnonlin to 0.9, time can then be spent on hacking Pitivi into a release. I started work on a patch that Edward is going to merge when the porting is complete, and I am looking forward to writing some future patches. I really see so much potential in Pitivi, I really do.

I am also looking forward to seeing the new Hula interface that the gasman has been hacking on. It is due any time now, and Alex Hudson is working to be ready to provide some Ubuntu packages when it is ready. Here at OpenAdvantage we deal with stacks of people for whom Hula will be a godsend. There are some other thoughts knocking around in my mind regarding these systems and I plan on writing some of this up soon.