Author Archives: James Henstridge

Sansa Fuze

24 March, 2009 – 7:21 pm

On my way back from Canada a few weeks ago, I picked up a SanDisk Sansa Fuze media player.  Overall, I like it.  It supports Vorbis and FLAC audio out of the box, has a decent amount of on board storage (8GB) and can be expanded with a MicroSDHC card.  It does use a proprietary [...]

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PulseAudio

25 February, 2009 – 9:24 pm

It seems to be a fashionable to blog about experiences with PulseAudio, I thought I’d join in. I’ve actually had some good experiences with PulseAudio, seeing some tangible benefits over the ALSA setup I was using before.  I’ve got a cheapish surround sound speaker set connected to my desktop.  While it gives pretty good sound [...]

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In Montreal

25 February, 2009 – 4:12 am

I’m in Montreal through to the end of next week.  The sub-zero temperatures are quite a change from Perth, where it got up to 39°C on the day I left. The last time I was here was for Ubuntu Below Zero, so it is interesting seeing the same city covered in snow.

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In Hobart

19 January, 2009 – 9:01 pm

Today was the first day of the mini-conferences that lead up to linux.conf.au later on this week.  I arrived yesterday after an eventful flight from Perth. I was originally meant to fly out to Melbourne on the red eye leaving on Friday at 11:35pm, but just before I checked in they announced that the flight [...]

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Getting “bzr send” to work with GMail

16 January, 2009 – 5:19 pm

One of the nice features of Bazaar is the ability to send a bundle of changes to someone via email.  If you use a supported mail client, it will even open the composer with the changes attached.  If your client isn’t supported, then it’ll let you compose a message in your editor and then send [...]

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Using Twisted Deferred objects with gio

6 January, 2009 – 9:18 am

The gio library provides both synchronous and asynchronous interfaces for performing IO.  Unfortunately, the two APIs require quite different programming styles, making it difficult to convert code written to the simpler synchronous API to the asynchronous one. For C programs this is unavoidable, but for Python we should be able to do better.  And if [...]

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Red Bull Air Race

3 November, 2008 – 3:42 pm

Yesterday, I went to see the finals of the Red Bull Air Race here in Perth.  This was my first time watching the event, since I was over seas at the times it was held the previous two years. The weather was good, and gave me a good opportunity to play with my camera a [...]

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Re: Continuing to Not Quite Get It at Google…

30 October, 2008 – 4:30 pm

David: taking a quick look at Google’s documentation, it sure looks like OpenID to me.  The main items of note are: It documents the use of OpenID 2.0′s directed identity mode.  Yes this is “a departure from the process outlined in OpenID 1.0″, but that could be considered true of all new features found in [...]

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Streaming Vorbis files from Ubuntu to a PS3

30 October, 2008 – 10:35 am

One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer.  Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis.  MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand. [...]

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Thoughts on OAuth

23 October, 2008 – 11:46 am

I’ve been playing with OAuth a bit lately. The OAuth specification fulfills a role that some people saw as a failing of OpenID: programmatic access to websites and authenticated web services. The expectation that OpenID would handle these cases seems a bit misguided since the two uses cases are quite different: OpenID is designed on [...]

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