ALSA support in GNOME Volume Control: yes, it’s there! I finally pushed myself into installing the ultimate evil onto my computer ([*] yes, that’s ALSA), and (helped by Jan Schmidt) added some related stuff to the ALSA plugin to get GNOME Volume Control to recognize it correctly. Now everyone can sleep peacefully again, gone’s all regressions.

Did I mention that it looks horrible? See screenshot. Ohwell, we’re in UI freeze, I’ll rewrite the GNOME Volume Control in GNOME-2.8. :).

[*] ALSA’s indeed the ultimate evil [**].
– it hides POSIX using something hideous called alsalib.
– it actually forces the use of this hideous thing by not documenting it’s kernel API and putting kernel driver bug workarounds into alsalib.
– it does assert()s on errors (how about nicely reporting an error back to the application so it can notify the user? How about standard errno? See GNOME bugzilla #134007).
– It “transparently” does software conversion. This is cool, except that it shouldn’t be the default. Unfortunately, the default device enables software conversion (default = plughw:0), thereby stimulating lousy application development.
– I feel like trolling.

[**] Next to terrorism, of course… See below.

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Serious things: what can I say about Madrid? Nothing, I guess… Can I cry? No; this is beyond anything I can grasp… I’m currently in New York and visited Ground Zero last week. Why do people do this?