I bought an external Sound Blaster Audigy NX2 sound card recently to use with my laptop. Discovered it do everything apart from just working. Think I will spend some time over the coming weeks trying to file bug reports and talk with maintainers of various pieces of the puzzle to see if I can get this working correctly under Linux and GNOME.
The ideal experience would have been to plug in the USB soundcard to the laptop. Get a dialog popping up saying an external soundcard got connected and if I wanted my GNOME applications to use it for default sound output. When I later unplug the soundcard the default would go back to the builtin soundcard of the laptop.

What actually happened is this. Plugged in soundcard. Needed to run Fedora sound config to detect and configure it. Needed to manually edit the gconf key in gstreamer to use the external soundcard or manually configure XMMS to use it. Had no sound. Tried running the gst-mixer, crashed – googled and found others have same problem. Ran alsa-mixer and tried unmuting stuff. After some googling I found the right combination of muting/unmuting to get sound out. Sound now playing but highly distorted, maybe a driver bug or some volume setting that needs adjusting, needs further investigation :). Tried unplugging the USB soundcard, keyboard stopped working….

So I will spend some time figuring out what the problems are and filling bug reports around various places. I think this is a good example of where a non-coder can make a difference as these kind of issues demand that you have the hardware in question, the problem space relates to multiple modules and programs and as such you need to do some investigation and file bugs and work with maintainers across modules to make it work nicely. Filing a bug one place will at best solve a small part of the issue, but the thing here is to start at the bottom then work upwards towards the GUI. Already talked to David Zeuthen and it turns out soundcard detection comes with HAL 0.5 (which will ship with Fedora Core 4) I also bug in Red Hat bugzilla on the issue of borking my keyboard when uplugging USB and one against gnome-media in GNOME bugzilla on the issue of the mixer crashing with the soundcard (seems Ronald might have fixed that one already).

Back from vacation in the sunny hills of France. Nice to get away from the stress of daily life for a while. We had great weather all week and apart from the skiing I really enjoyed just sitting in the Sun relaxing and reading.

Was driving the car home from France part of the way. Came to the conclusion that driving at about 100 km/h when the fog is so thick that you just see 2-3 meters in front of the car is rather exhausting.

Now I need to get ajour again with getting stuff ready for the multimedia track at GUADEC, getting Nuvola updated with all the icons David sent me.

Ralph Giles put up his design ideas for embeding MNG images in Ogg files. Hopefully we will get this working before GUADEC. Our goal is to be able to overlay the camera capture of the speaker onto a PNG image embeded in the video stream taken directly from the desktop or office application. This should give you readable slides when watching the stream online instead of seeing the speaker and a blurry and unreadable projected slide on the wall behind him.

Some Brazilien developers are looking into RTP support in GStreamer and Flumotion. They are looking at using a library called ccRTP for this which is licensed under a GPL & exception license. The exception is basically making the GPL into the LGPL, or at least what we all believe about the LGPL. The reason fro this setup is explained in this information from GNU, it seems that LGPL C++ libraries could be interpreted to have demands on them similar to what you would expect from a GPL licensed library. I have no idea wether this interpretation is valid, but it strikes of one more example of how easy it is for us common people to assume stuff about how licensing works, then have the rug pulled out from under us when the lawyers get involved.

Hopefully we be able to sort Zeenix’s visa troubles out the coming week. Since we already bought the ticket it would be a shame to see that money just go down the drain.

So my money trouble are over for this time. Like all high-flyers I restructured my debt to sort things out. Also known as getting money from mom. Not very prestigious, but it works.

Also sorted out my flight tickets today, by rebooking my ticket back from London on Sunday to instead fly me to Grenoble, and bus from there to met up with the rest of the Fluendo crew for some skiing and snowboarding action.

Upgraded Cedega yesterday evening to try World of Warcraft in OpenGL mode. It made quite a difference with my fps increasing by about 20 on average.

Also thought about the Transgaming business model lately. Think the basic idea is sound, but it must be quite a pain to handle sometime. I mean having your customers pay to be able to vote on items they want fixed/changed is probably a quite hard balancing act between keeping customers happy, impossible vote winners/proposals and moving targets. To bad they didn’t manage to make it work within the context of the wine project.

Think I have been living a bit over my means the last few months (surround sound system probably biggest sin). Discovered today that I was 80 Euro in the red. Which isn’t big amount, but considering that its 7 days after salary day and I have some big expenses coming up it do feel a bit worrisome. Think I need to be a fiscally conservative for the next few months so that I have money again for summer. Or maybe my friends in Norway will manage to get the sailboat sold so I get some extra pocket change.

Going to London this weekend. Lots of nice stuff lined up both workwise and socially. (of course they also all mean more cash expenditure ;)

Thomas mailed me today telling me the sysadmin running the server where we both hosts our sites said that my sites where already above the expected traffic for hosted sites. Checked the stats and noticed I had 50 000 hits on linuxrising.org last month. Can’t understand why as there is nothing happening there, even my blog is just syndicated from other pages. Only guess I have is that maybe my pictures from Borneo, Australia and Africa are being linked to from some popular travel information site or something. Or maybe more people like looking at the GNOME screenshots I post from time to time than I thought. Or maybe my mom is getting psycho about me not living in Norway anymore :)

On the GStreamer side I am very happy to see the iTunes integration work being done. Noticed Ronald didn’t mention the name of the person who is doing it, so I guess that person don’t want to be named just yet, so I am not saying who it is either :) Thanks I guess is all I can say at this point.

JeffTV is quite cool, its very nice when you see other people take something you have been closely involved in the making of and doing fun stuff with it. Maybe Jeff will get a sponsorship for a show and can start going around to people with old computers, take them away, mod them, then return them to the original owners with a rad new look. Kinda like that car show on MTV :)

Have my youngest sister visiting this week, as she is taking a short break from student life in Rome. She will have to tend for herself the last two days however as I will be flying to Hamburg in the weekend to attend my stepgrandmothers 80th birthday.

So some of us are pitching in to pay for Zeeshan coming to GUADEC this year, which has its own little series of confusing bits to sort of. Called Turkish airlines today to order his ticket. Since my spanish is still at infant stages I called the London office of Turkish airlines. Don’t think they have many cases of a person in Barclona (a Norwegian even) calling the London office to order a flight for a person from Karachi to Stuttgart. The number of times she asked me to wait a bit (think she was running around the office asking for advice) was rather high. So in the end I think they figured out the steps needed for someone in Barcelona to pay the London office so that the Karachi office can hand out a ticket to another person. :)

GStreamer:

Weird bugs. So we have a weird bug currently. I have been using the UK Virgin Radio Ogg streams as testbeds for Totem supporting chained oggs properly. Well currently I have the strange problem that if I click on the links they work, but if I drag and drop the URL onto Totem it doesn’t work. Ronald is unable to reproduce, on his system the streams play when drag and dropped. So anyone reading this I would be happy if you could try drag and dropping one of these URLS onto totem and see if it plays, then report your success or failure to this bugzilla entry.

FOSDEM:

We went to FOSDEM and both Wim and Thomas did talks. The talks went well, but the conference was a bit wasted on me. Being rather sick the whole time I had little energy for anything above moving myself from one place to another. Felt a bit better on Sunday afternoon and Julien, Wingo and myself first took some beers with Alex and Pippin, with also Charles partaking in this first part, then went on for a nice meal and some good beer at a resturant Julian knew.

Fluendo:

With only me and Wingo in the office today we have finally been able to work uninterupted. On that note Wingo is really starting to kick ass and taking names in his Akido classes. Last week he beat up a nine year old girl at the akido club. He know feels ready to move on to beating up little boys.