Category Archives: Uncategorised

Javascript Mandelbrot Set Fractal Renderer

While at linux.conf.au earlier this year, I started hacking on a Mandelbrot Set fractal renderer implemented in JavaScript as a way to polish my JS skills.  In particular, I wanted to get to know the HTML5 Canvas and Worker APIs. The results turned out pretty well.  Click on the image below to try it out: [...]

Using Mozmill to Test Firefox Extensions

Recently I’ve been working on a Firefox extension, and needed a way to test the code.  While testing code is always important, it is particularly important for dynamic languages where code that hasn’t been run is more likely to be buggy. I had not experience in how to do this for Firefox extensions, so Eric suggested [...]

linux.conf.au 2011

I’ve just got through the first one and a half days of LCA2011 in Brisbane. The organisers have done a great job, especially considering the flooding they have had to deal with. Due to the venue change the accommodation I booked is no longer within walking distance of the conference, but the public transport is [...]

Bagels

I made some bagels last night.  It was my second time using the recipe, so things went pretty well.  The boiling process gives the crust an interesting chewy texture I haven’t seen with other bread recipes I’ve tried. I used this recipe (half wholemeal flour, half white), but made 12 slightly larger bagels rather than [...]

Launchpad code scanned by Ohloh

Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report.  There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right.  If you’re interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application [...]

Seeking in Transcoded Streams with Rygel

When looking at various UPnP media servers, one of the features I wanted was the ability to play back my music collection through my PlayStation 3.  The complicating factor is that most of my collection is encoded in Vorbis format, which is not yet supported by the PS3 (at this point, it doesn’t seem likely [...]

Watching iView with Rygel

One of the features of Rygel that I found most interesting was the external media server support.  It looked like an easy way to publish information on the network without implementing a full UPnP/DLNA media server (i.e. handling the UPnP multicast traffic, transcoding to a format that the remote system can handle, etc). As a [...]

More Rygel testing

In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel’s tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API.  It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying [...]

Ubuntu packages for Rygel

I promised Zeeshan that I’d have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so.  For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I’ve put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there [...]

django-openid-auth

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth.  This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications.  It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you’ve already used the code. [...]