Present Perfect

So obviously, blog-wise I fell off the face of the earth for close to two months.

The immediate reason is some personal stuff happening to me that I needed to bounce back from (well, ok, I lied - it's not stuff, it's just one tiny little thing.)

As a result I haven't done much hacking at all, beside a few fruitful morituri hack sessions.

As a consequence, I don't have much useful to report, but I am going to slowly get back to some hacking. My Lego Mindstorms are already with me here in Barcelona so I am going to get started on that CD ripping robot Any Day Now.

I'll get more specific about what non-hacking stuff I've been up to recently after the fallout of the personal stuff, but for now I'll just mention I've been hugely enjoying getting back to playing basketball over the last year. A while ago Farid taught me a nice layup trick, and yesterday I had Pepe film it:

I haven't pulled that one off correctly during a game though!

Oh wait, I lied. Yesterday I got a proof of achievement of something hacker-related: my Spanish diploma in Twisted!

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I need to buy me a wall to hang that on, it's just too cool! And the back lists all skills achieved, in Spanish. Check this out:

"El manejo de errores robusto con diferidos". I'm sure that official had a field day translating deferred into Spanish.

Life! I'm back to eating you, one bite at a time. Make sure you're ready for me.

So obviously, blog-wise I fell off the face of the earth for close to two months. The immediate reason is some personal stuff happening to me that I needed to...

Googling isn't helping me much with this question. Pretty soon I'm going to want to buy a video card that can output Full HD HDMI video with audio integrated, all from Linux. This card should be noiseless, so fanless. Do cards like that exist yet ?

Googling isn't helping me much with this question. Pretty soon I'm going to want to buy a video card that can output Full HD HDMI video with audio integrated, all...

For personal reasons, I haven't been blogging lately, but lights are starting to prick through the clouds.

The past week however was a very interesting week in multimedialand as I'm sure most of you already know. In a nutshell, Google bought On2, a codec company (responsible for VP3, the seed for Theora, and VP6, used in Flash). Then they released VP8, their latest codec, as an open source codec.

Read all of the other posts for the nitty gritty about patent issues, code and codec quality. But it was amazing to see the community active, patches show up everywhere for programs, and rallying to make open source do what it does best.

Meanwhile, back at the farm (our little streaming company), a bunch of our hackers got excited too and executed on the match made in heaven. Zaheer's blog has all the details, and yesterday all I did was check out a bunch of code and run this simple Flumotion launch line:


PYTHONPATH=`pwd` FLU_DEBUG=4 bin/flumotion-launch videotest-producer ! vp8-encoder ! webm-muxer ! http-streamer


And it Just Worked in the WebM Firefox build.

The part I like best about this ? I didn't have to do a single thing, or say a single thing, or ask a single thing, to get our guys excited and hacking and delivering. Just as well, because again for personal reasons, I wouldn't have had much time or energy to help them out.

It makes me proud to be a CTO of this company. A big thanks to Zaheer, Andoni, and Xavier, and anyone else I may have missed because I wasn't paying attention.

For personal reasons, I haven't been blogging lately, but lights are starting to prick through the clouds. The past week however was a very interesting week in multimedialand as I'm...

For some unfathomable reason it's been a rather productive two weeks of short ##morituri hacking sessions.

I was wondering why I wasn't getting any feedback or trac tickets, until I found out that a) I had five month old patches lying around in my trac and b) I forgot to configure the ticket mails properly.

That, spurred with actual bug reports from blizzard who seems to have ripped 600 CD's with this piece of code already (more than me, in any case), kept me going towards a new release.

So, this new release adds, among other things:

• 'rip image encode' to encode a lossless image to a lossy one (vorbis, mp3, ...)
• tagging tracks with MusicBrainz id's
• 'rip image retag' to apply up-to-date musicbrainz info (including id's) to existing rips. I did this one specifically for Chris when he found out none of his rips had the MusicBrainz id's and I felt guilty.
• added an auto-generated man page.
• Generate a complete list of known drive offsets to try with 'rip offset find' based on the AccurateRip database.
• improved the basic Task code I wrote for abstracting asynchronous operations that can be hooked into a GLib mainloop or Twisted reactor. Exception information is now more useful.

A bunch of bugs were fixed too, and I especially want to thank Peter Oliver who provided me with three patches that I sadly overlooked. I hope he comes back.

In any case, enjoy the code and start ripping!

As for the next release, I've already started on ripping the data track (which ended up being easier than I thought, using dd and wrapping it in a Task parsing the output). However, I haven't yet been able to write a full image back to a CD, for various reasons. First of all, the .cue files I generate have multiple FILE statements, which doesn't seem to be supported by wodim, and only recently was added to cdrecord. Second, actually writing the data track so far has given me only errors.

It has been possible to rewrite the .iso file into one that can be mounted, and I might have to actually do the writing of discs by first decoding to a single file then writing from that. We'll see.

On the other hand, with tag reading and writing tasks now written, I might start using those in a separate application to finally start managing my music across my different machines.

For some unfathomable reason it's been a rather productive two weeks of short ##morituri hacking sessions. I was wondering why I wasn't getting any feedback or trac tickets, until I...

Yeah baby!

Here was my script for the day:


while true; do urlwatch | grep NEW && gst-launch playbin uri=file:///home/thomas/The\ National\ -\ Afraid\ of\ Everyone.mp3; TZ=EST date; sleep 15; done


The script was watching a page on the website of the Royal Albert Hall in London where some additional tickets were supposed to go on sale for The National on May 6th. If it detected changes it was supposed to play the latest new track from the album they're about to release...

For some strange reason, urlwatch actually failed to notify me, but luckily I was doing some regular refreshes as well, and now I have two tickets. After two completely botched up ticket sales originally, this time the tickets went on sale more or less at the right time, with few people knowing about it, increasing my chances of actually getting them.

Finally I have something to look forward to... Now to find someone who wants to go too.

Yeah baby! Here was my script for the day: while true; do urlwatch | grep NEW && gst-launch playbin uri=file:///home/thomas/The\ National\ -\ Afraid\ of\ Everyone.mp3; TZ=EST date; sleep 15; done...