There is no doubt that we need patent-unencumbered standards for web codecs (or as much as is possible given the dismal patent ecology today), and while much giddy anticipation followed Google/On2′s release of VP8 into the open, I don’t believe it ever made sense to expect the codec landscape to change drastically in the short timespan everyone expected. There’s a lot of the hardware and software out there that needs to change (see any SoCs with VP8 support yet?), not to mention the interests of the MPEG-LA mafconsortium.

I love Firefox, both as a product and what it means for an open web (for those of you that know me, this might be hard to believe given all my ranting, but it’s true!). I’m glad Mozilla chose to live to fight another day rather than go out in a blaze of glory and (or a flicker of irrelevance).

p.s.: these are my views and do not necessarily represent those of my employer

p.p.s.: Alessandro’s been doing some great work to get the GStreamer multimedia backend going again (this makes so much more sense than going the NIH route!)

Lennart pointed to another blog post about actually putting PulseAudio’s power-saving capabilities to use on your system. The latter provides a hack-ish way to increase buffering in PulseAudio to the maximum possible, reducing the number of wakeups. I’m going to talk about that a bit.

Summarising the basic idea, we want music players to decode a large chunk of data and give it to PA so that we can then fill up ALSA’s hardware buffer, sleep till it’s almost completely consumed, fill it again, sleep, repeat. More details in this post from Lennart.

The native GNOME audio/video players don’t talk to PulseAudio directly — they use GStreamer, which has a pulsesink element that actually talks to PulseAudio. We could configure things so that we send a large amount (say 2 seconds’ worth) to PulseAudio, sleep, and then wake up periodically to push out more. Now in the audio player (say Rhythmbox), the user hits next, prev, or pause. We need to effect this change immediately, even though we’ve already sent out 2 seconds of data (it would suck if you hit pause and the actual pause happened 2 seconds later, wouldn’t it?). PulseAudio already solves because it can internally “rewind” the buffer and overwrite it if required. GStreamer can and does take advantage of this by sending pause and other control messages out of band from the data.

This all works well for relatively simple GStreamer pipelines. However, if you want to do something more complicated, like Rhythmbox’ crossfading backend, things start to break. PulseAudio doesn’t offer an API to do fades, and since we don’t do rewinds in GStreamer, we need to apply effects such as fades with a latency equal to the amount of buffering we’re asking PulseAudio to do. This makes for unhappy users.

Well, all is not as bleak as it seems. There was some discussion on the PA mailing list, and the need for a proper fade API (really, a generic effects API) is clear. There have even been attempts to solve this in GStreamer.

But you want to save 0.5 W of power now! Okay, if you’re not using the Rhythmbox crossfading backend (or are okay with disabling it), this will make Rhythmbox, Banshee, pre-3.0 Totem (and really any GNOMEy player that uses gconfaudiosink, which will soon be replaced by gsettingsaudiosink, I guess), you can run this on the command line:

gconftool-2 --type string \
    --set /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/musicaudiosink \
    "pulsesink latency-time=100000 buffer-time=2000000"

On my machine, this brings down the number of wakeups per second because of alsa-sink to ~2.7 (corresponding nicely to the ~350ms of hardware buffer that I have). With Totem 3.0, this may or may not work, depending on whether your distribution gives gconfaudiosink a higher rank than pulseaudiosink.

This is clearly just a stop-gap till we can get things done the Right Way™ at the system level, so really, if things break, you get to keep the pieces. If you need to, you can undo this change by running the same command without the latency-time=… and buffer-time=… bits. That said, if something does break, do leave a comment below so I can add it to the list of things that we need to test the final solution with.

And if you haven’t already, emerge ferringb‘s awesome confcache for caching the autoconf stuff.

Does anybody know a good place to get high-quality CS GATE practise papers?

Hope to have an AMD64 box in less than a month.

An interesting thing to note — tags – gotta love ‘em. But most people just create random tags based on content. I try to keep a limited number and organize them instead. It’s a little painful too keep track of previous tags (unless you’re using del.icio.us, which gives you a list of existing tags (tangent — their Firefox plugins sucks. It’s too obtrusive. The existing one on MozDev r0x0xr5.)). Anyway, the point is that I see tags being used rather haphazardly, rather than to provide organizational metadata. Or maybe I’m just an order freak.

Reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Got me thinking about my “everything is random” theory. Which now officially explains The State of Things. Assume that everything that happens is truly random. Thus basic things happen with equal probability. Good Things, as we know, are created by a combination of many factors. Even if a few of these are not in place, you have a Bad Thing. Given the first assumption, all events are equally likely. Thus, the probability of a Good Thing existing is the product of the probability of occurrence of all individual contributing events. Since each of these is less than 1 (considerably so, by observation), the product is going to be far less than 1. The probability of Bad Things happening, is just 1 – P(Good Thing). Corollary — it is the nature of the Universe for just about everything to suck. And there’s nothing you can do about it, even if you knew how.

There. Aren’t you happier, now that you know?

Need to update my book list with all the new bookses.

Yes, yes, I know it’s an old article – I’m just caatching up with my reading ever so slowly now.

In other news, life goes on. Work is work. Play is … hardly. Scaled a mountain a few weeks back. Okay, so it had steps, and it was called Tirumalai, but it was painful and unnecessary. We live in masochistic times – it was fun.

More to come later.

One of the ideas is that when you open the File->Open dialog box in an application, you get a search tool rather than a file browser. The Gnome folks were also talking about this a while back on the Beagle mailing list. But what do we do about saving files? There’s too much data for sorting to be effective – think about how much e-mail you get, and how many files you have to work with, if you work with a computer for more than an hour each day. Chances are that it’s a whole bunch of data.

So have you ever used del.icio.us? Or any other system that basically lets you “tag” the item your storing/saving/publishing? This should be a viable solution for the files on your hard-disk too. The File->Save dialog would basically ask you for a file name, automatically extract metadata such as the file type, author, source, etc. and also give you an interface to tag the file. Once the system has been in use for a while, you’ll have a bunch of common tags. Just pick the tags you want to apply, and you’re done. Of course, this requires a huge amount of dependence on your desktop environment alone – bye bye command line. Something to be thought about – a number of solutions are possible. A real live example of this is the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox. It officially replaced my Firefox bookmarks manager a few months ago.

Exciting times ahead for the desktop world.

Assumption – you’re using a USB DSL modem provided by Airtel which contains the Conexant Accessrunner chip. Mine says Beetel 100CX on the outside.

• The driver isn’t in the kernel yet, so you need to get the tarball from http://accessrunner.sourceforge.net.
• Decompress this into the kernel source directory (the incomplete tree in /usr/src/kernels/2.6.xx-xx-xx (from the kernel-devel package) will do).
• [Thanks to Arun (yet another one!) for pointing out that this is missing] Enable the modules for these drivers as instructed in the “Configuring kernel build” section here.
• In the top-level kernel directory, do a make M=drivers/usb/atm. Copy cxacru.ko and usbatm.ko to /lib/modules/2.6.xx-xx-xx/drivers/usb/atm.
• Extract the firmware from the Windows drivers as described in http://accessrunner.sourceforge.net/firmware.shtml (I got the utils directory from CVS, did a make and then ran it on the [WINDOWS_DIR]\system32\drivers\CnxEtU.sys
• Copy the extracted firmware to /lib/firmware/cxacru-fw.bin
• That’s the driver setup – when you plug in the USB modem, hotplug should pick up the correct kernel moduel and firmware. Any issues, run dmesg.
• Use the Network config GUI to set up a new xDSL connection using some ethX device or the other. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-[name_of_connection] and remove the ETH= line. Add 3 lines: LINUX_PLUGIN=pppoatm.so VPI=1 VCI=32 Note that the VPI and VCI settings might vary for you. These work for Airtel in Gurgaon and Chennai, apparently.
• That’s about it – you can fire off the connection using /sbin/ifup [connection_name] and down using /sbin/ifdown [connection_name]. Or use the GUI. The Modem Lights Applet doesn’t work with this yet.
• Pay me a consultation fee. *Wink*

Too lazy to fix typos. Off to gloat to myself now. :)

Okay, maybe I’m wrong and it’s just an error. That is my hope, at any rate.

I do not believe the GNOME Bangalore body is managing to organise an actual community around GNOME-users/devs, but around NOSIP interns. I’m open to correction, if anyone knows better.