I’ve been working on some FM radio support in Rhythmbox in my spare time. Below is screenshot
At the moment, the basic tuning and mute/unmute works fine with my DSB-R100. I don’t have any UI for adding/removing stations at the moment though, so it is necessary to edit ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to add them.
I upgraded to Feisty about a month or so ago, and it has been a nice improvement so far. One regression I noticed though was that my USB FM radio tuner had stopped working (or at least, Gnomeradio could no longer tune it).
It turns out that some time between the kernel release found in Edgy and the one found in Feisty, the dsbr100 driver had been upgraded from the Video4Linux 1 API to Video4Linux 2. Now the driver nominally supports the V4L1 ioctls through the v4l1_compat, but it doesn’t seem to implement enough V4L2 ioctls to make it usable (the VIDIOCGAUDIO ioctl fails).
To work around this, I ported the tuner code in Gnomeradio over to V4L2. The patch can be found attached to bug 429005. I don’t know if this patch will go in as is though, since it only works for drivers supporting V4L2. Perhaps it’d be worth supporting both APIs, using V4L2 if both are supported.
Today we unveiled the Launchpad 1.0 User Interface, which has been in private beta for the last few months. As well as the improved visual appearance, there are a number of new features such as the ability to add your own branding to Launchpad pages associated with your project (for example, Ubuntu’s pages).
As mentioned in the press release, we’ve got two new high profile projects using us for bug tracking: The Zope 3 Project and The Silva Content Management System. As part of their migration, we imported all their old bug reports (for Zope 3, and for Silva). This was done using the same import process that we used for the SchoolTool import. Getting this process documented so that other projects can more easily switch to Launchpad is still on my todo list.
As Launchpad is a user of Zope 3 technology, it is great being able to provide the bug tracking infrastructure for the project. It should also make it easier to collaborate on bugs that affect both Launchpad and Zope.
Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn’t been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125).
One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database. So other places that might need updating include:
All the above rules time zone databases are based on the same source time zone information, but need to be updated individually and in different ways.
In a way, this is similar to the zlib security problems from a few years back: the same problem duplicated in many packages and needing to be fixed over and over again. Perhaps the solution is the same too: get rid of the duplication so that in future only one package needs updating.
As a start, I put together a patch to pytz so that it uses the same format binary time zone files as found in /usr/share/zoneinfo (bug 71227). This still means it has its own time zone database, but it goes a long way towards being able to share the system time zone database. It’d be nice if the other applications and libraries with their own databases could make similar changes.
For people using Windows, there is an update from Microsoft. Apparently you need to install one update now, and then a second update next year — I guess Windows doesn’t support multiple transition rules like Linux does. The page also lists a number of applications that will malfunction and not know about the daylight saving shift, so I guess that they have similar issues of some applications ignoring the system time zone database.
I arrived in San Francisco today for the Canonical company conference. Seems like a nice place, and not too cold 🙂. So far I’ve just gone for a walk along Fisherman’s Wharf for a few hours. There look
On the plane trip, I had a chance to see Last Train to Freo, which I didn’t get round to seeing in the cinemas. Definitely worth watching.