SVU's blog

23 Jan 2007

Some while ago I asked
about plans of Nokia regarding giving away some N800
devices. They
came up with the Developer Device
Program – which is not exactly “give away” but very
close to it; EUR99 for the device worth $399 is a lot better
than just great bargain. And – HURRAY! – yesterday I got the
promotion code. The device is on its way to my door.

Big thanks to Fernando Herrera for putting my name into the
list, thanks to Nokia for not taking it out of the list,
thus recognizing my humble contribution to OSS.

12 Jan 2007

LEGO and Linux

I spent some time trying to make LabVIEW/Win32 shipped with
Mindstorm work under wine. Thanks to Daniel Skorka for some
insightful tips (in comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine). So,
finally LabVIEW started but … now full stop, they are
using special Windows device “LEGO MINDSTORM NXT” (they even
care to create special device class “LEGO Devices”!) – so
wine cannot help me after
this point, since wine does not handle windows device drivers.

Yes, I know there are more powerful tools (like NBC,
ICommand etc) – but I need some GUI-based IDE allowing to
program without text editing. LabVIEW is a really nice tool,
I must admit (and it seems to be based on the mozilla
codebase BTW)

I know NI ships LabVIEW/Linux but AFAIK there is no linux
driver for Mindstorm.

Sad…

08 Jan 2007

Nokia 800

.. looks really nifty. Does Nokia have plans to give away
some of them to the GNOME crowd (like they did with the previous
model)? If so – I am first in the waiting list:)

02 Jan 2007

gnome-applets 2.17.1 are out

Thanks, Davyd! 🙂

02 Jan 2007

GNOME

Recently I found out that there was no release (tarball/CVS
tag) of gnome-applets for 2.17.x series. Shocking news.
Taking that keyboard indicator in gnome-applets 2.16.x does
not work with gnome-settings-daemon in 2.17.x (sorry, I
really had to change DBus interface) – this leaves people
who want to try 2.17 with the only option – using
gnome-applets CVS HEAD (err, SVN Trunk I mean). Please,
let’s have gnome-applets 2.17.5 at least, huh?

01 Jan 2007

Happy New…

• … Year! To everyone and everybody!
• … GNOME version control
  server! I liked the idea to
  switch to Subversion from the very start (and may God save
  me from git for as long as possible). Lads who performed the
  whole conversion operation – you just rock, no kidding. I
  know there are still some things to polish – but overall I
  think GNOME witnessed something really great.

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.