SVU's blog

14 Feb 2007

Ubuntu

Strongly disappointed by the
decision of Ubuntu board regarding
dropping of official support for PowerPC. If things progress
this way, in a couple of years I’ll have to install Gentoo :///

09 Feb 2007

Nokia N800

Hardware Easter Eggs are much more exotics things than
Software Easter Eggs. Nokia did it. N800 happened to have FM
radio inside. Yesterday Nokia provided the application
(well, the applet) which wonderfully utilizes that
capability. Really nice touch. May be, a week later someone
finds 3G hardware in this wonderful (like in “full of
wonders”) device?

26 Jan 2007

bugzilla.freedesktop.org

It seems fd.o’s bugzilla is broken. It neither sends mail
notifications nor allows putting attachments (“The file you
are attaching is empty”). Too sad:(

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…