SVU's blog

26 Dec 2006

Streaming media

In order to watch Russian TV over the internet, I am
connecting to one streaming provider which (unfortunately)
broadcasts as RTSP/UDP (well, there is also RTSP/TCP and
RTSP/HTTP but they are unusable – constant buffering is all
I see). So… I found out that neither VLC nor mplayer can
deal with it.

VLC (as far as I can see in the sources) can only work with
RTSP/TCP (I sure filed a ticket in their support system,
let’s see how long it will take to respond).

Mplayer (using live555.com library) supports RTSP/UDP (seems
so), but cannot handle the format X-ASF-PF (which is MS
format, with all fairness).

Gstreamer … “RTSP streams cannot be played yet” – that’s
what I got from totem..

I have to boot to XP in order to use Media Player. Sad sad…

21 Dec 2006

Re: Military usage of FOSS

My recent posting regarding the subject brought a lot of
attention from p.g.o. Since advogato does not allow
commenting, I created special English-only
post in my (otherwise Russian) blog, so everyone is very
welcome to express their opinion down there.

PS And thanks to the people who already took time to
comment my idea in their blogs

20 Dec 2006

Military usage of FOSS

Today, my RSS reader brought me the news about some US
military satellite with Linux on board. Which once again
raised in me one essential moral question: whether the
ethics of FOSS approves this area of usage.

What I’d love to see (and use in my code) is some optional
standard extension to GPL (other OSS licenses?) which would
explicitly forbid any usage in military organizations
(including military R&D). Any (FSF) lawyers around?

18 Dec 2006

GNOME

I wish all the luck to the people converting GNOME to
Subversion! CVS is really too 90-ish…;) BTW, as maintainer
of two virtual modules (libkbdraw/libgswitchit) I can advise
that these modules could be safely dropped from g-a and
g-c-c – if Subversion is not going to be used for support of
GNOME 2.14 and earlier. Otherwise, I’m afraid, they’ll have
to made svn:external or smth… (Sorry, I am not subscribed
to gnome-hackers maillist, so I can just hope some person of
the transition team reads this).

Wine + LEGO’s LabView

Yesterday spent some time trying to make LEGO Mindstorm’s
software work in Wine/Ubuntu. Well, Wine has
definitely made a great progress in configurability, since
last time I tried it. But unfortunately I could not make it
yet – for some reason wine could not load fantom.dll
(Invalid ELF header???). I’ll keep on trying…

SIP

It seems, voipcheap.com has some issues. Noone could call me
through NAT when I used voipcheap.com account. Once I
switched to sipnet.ru account – everything just works. Or is
it just a combination of ekiga/voipcheap.com (with
x-lite/win32 even voipcheap.com account works ok)? Or just
ekiga?…;)

In a word, SIP is still not mature enough for people behind
firewalls. I would not wholeheartedly recommend it to the
people who want something working out of the box, in every
situation.

13 Dec 2006

Rants about SIP

Deep in fight with SIP, using voipcheap.com service. Tried
ekiga/gaim/linphone/wengo (no x-lite for linux/ppc is
available). Among other things, found that no OSS SIP client
really supports presence, in my environment (well, at least
the way voipcheap understands it). Talked to Ekiga lads on
IRC – they are planning to introduce it next year (I sure
will pray for them).
Unfortunately, I am behind NAT which seems to really
complicate matters (yes, Skype folks got this thing right!).
For some reason even STUN with stun.ekiga.net does not help
– people still cannot call me (while I can call them, and I
can also call from one LAN machine to another). The last
idea to check – installing milkfish on my wrt54g and
using it as the outbound proxy. We’ll see…

10 Dec 2006

udev

I found the
blog posting containing udev rule for the palm pilot (in my
case – Handsping Visor Deluxe).

On my system, ttyUSB0 is taken by usb-to-serial converter,
so I had to change the rule to KERNEL=”ttyUSB[2468]” – which
is not nice. Then, after some discussion in livejournal and
looking at output of udevinfo, I found the difference:

<    SYSFS{dev}=="188:0"
---
>    SYSFS{dev}=="188:1"

So, the right rule is:

BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="Handspring*",
SYSFS{dev}=="*:1", KERNEL=="ttyUSB[123456789]", SYMLINK+="pilot"

07 Dec 2006

rant

People are complaining about inability to run Flash on
x86-64. HA! HA! At least they have some hacks to try! What
about running Flash on PPC? I would like to watch YouTube
and play with other Flash toys on Ubuntu/PPC…

06 Dec 2006

jEdit, SQL plugin

After… about year and half(?), I finally managed to pull
myself together and make a release of SQL plugin for jEdit.
The real reason for it was some functionality I needed for
my full-time work: simple and rudimentary DDL and DML
generation.

GNOME

Finally, GNOME 2.17.3 is going to have updated g-a and g-c-c
(and g-ss BTW) which all depend on libgnomekdb. My mailbox
is eager to get loads of bug reports…

Misc

It seems half of p.g.o is now employed by Nokia – and I am
nearly getting envious:) It is a bit pity Nokia does not
have an office in Cork (and for some reason I do not think
they would be interested in me working remotely:).
Seriously, 2nd city in Ireland is not exactly overloaded by
companies developing OSS. I have always wondered why…