Ok, so after some mail activity Benoit created a patch which displays ‘writeable memory’ in the GUI, which gives a better approximation of actual usage compared to the older numbers. Waldo Bastien pointed me to a blog entry from Lubos Lunak about a tool called exmap which displays something its calls ‘effective memory’ which Lubos thinks is a relativly decent value for describing how much memory an application actually use. I made a screenshot showing both the patched gnome system monitor and exmap displaying the memory usage of the clock applet. If those numbers are to believed the clock applet uses somewhere between 3 and 6 MB of memory, which might seem a bit on the high side. (but lets remember that the ‘clock applet’ is not just a clock, its a calendering application integrating with evolution data server giving you an overview of your monthly meetings etc.).

Anecdotaly exmap is the first app I ever used outside the Mandrake admin tools which use the perl-GTK2 bindings to write its GUI. Maybe there still is some hope for Perl :)

Not sure panel-applets are a good/easy testcase for memory measurement, so I looked at X-Chat using these new numbers too, exmap reports effective memory usage of 3.6 MB, g-s-m reports writeable memory at 8MB and resident memory of 11.6MB (resident memory number seemed to be the ‘old’ number people tended to be using when discussing memory usage).

So as I have blogged about at an earlier point in time I have a Sound Blaster Audigy NX2 USB soundcard which I bought for the specific purpose of being able to play movies on my laptop with surround sound.

Even though I did google about it beforehand I managed to fool myself into believing this card was actually fully supported under Linux, which it isn’t. The S/PDIF output is not supported at all in fact, due to missing documentation from Creative Labs. Which is really sad, Creative Labs where among the first of the major hardware vendors to hire someone to work on linux support, and if they now don’t even provide proper hardware docs anymore then that is a sad development. Do anyone know if they still have a linux driver developer on their payroll? Anyway, I tried mailing the contact person listed on the opensource.creativelabs.com website about the docs, hopefully I get a positive reply.

Anyway as I also talked about before the state of USB soundcard handling under linux is not a beautiful chapter in itself, even when just using it in stereo mode with Totem/Xine it reverted back to the internal soundcard just after the DVD menu for some reason. And since I had lost the .asoundrc file I wrote the first time I tried I spent about as much time this time too finding out exactly what to put in it. Most entries I googled out said stuff like ‘here is what my .asoundrc file looks like, not sure what it exactly does, but it works for me’…..

I fear that as the Fluendo DVD player comes closer we end up having to fix up parts of the lower stack a bit to overcome the pains like this.

Anyway, Tired of the whole problem I bought a 60 Euro DVD player yesterday. Was able to watch Hidalgo yesterday using it on my widescreen lcd tv usinig s-video and connecting to my surround system using a optical cable. Neato! Now I only need to figure out how to disable to region checking on the system.

It is a well known fact that Pirates and Parrots go together. It is kinda like wizards and cats. But how many historical pirates did actually have a parrot? A good question you might say, and one we might never find the true answer too. Yarr!

As the planning for GNOME 2.14 starts we need to gear up in the GStreamer community too. As we want to switch GNOME 2.14 over to using GStreamer 0.10 there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Releasing 0.10.0 being maybe the biggest one :)

We are pursuing an agressive schedule now and 0.10 should be out sometime November, so that part should be ok.

As for other tasks there are of course the obvious things like porting Totem, Rhythmbox, Sound Juicer and gnome-media over to the new version of GStreamer. But maybe this switch is also a good time to finally get rid of the direct esound dependence in GNOME.

Always been a lot of discussion on what would be needed to ditch the esound dependency, but sample caching and sound mixing seems to be the core issues. We have been talking for a long time of implementing a simple local only sound mixer/sample caching system with GStreamer and than add an abstraction layer on top which will use that system if the underlaying output doesn’t support it for you. So if you use esound it will not use it, or if you use dmix with alsa it will only use the sample cachinh part. Problem of course have always been that those who volunteered to take the tasks of doing this on ended up to busy or got dragged into other more urgent things.

Anyway this is definetly the time to start thinking of what needs doing and who will do what. Don’t want to start switching GNOME over 2 weeks before the release of 2.14 :)

Norwegian politics

Not everyone agreeded with my previous post about the Norwegian election. Especially my comment on the vote numbers seemed to hit some tender spots. As some people pointed out, if you add the votes of one of the parties which didn’t get elected to parliament then the figures look differently, but then again if you are going to start adding the votes of the non-represented parties then you can’t stop at one, instead you would need to add up the votes of all the unrepresented parties and assign the to your block of choice (haven’t bothered doing so myself to check what the results then would be).

The fact remains that among the parties represented in parliament you have now a majority in terms of representatives which got fewer votes than people who are the minority in terms of representatives. This is due to two factors, the primary being method for allocating representatives, using Lagües allocation which favour the biggest party. This I have actually little problem with as it do have some good effects, like strenghtening the parliamentary support of any election winner and through that easing governance (although Norways solution is to weak to have a real impact in that regard, unlike for instance the Brittish election system). The other reason and which is the thing which I strongly dislike is the the part which discriminates against central areas like Oslo, treating votes there like secondary citizens whose votes are worth much less than for instance the votes of people in northern Norway.

The justifications for this system looks to me to be made up mostly to defend status quo as it serves the interest of the majority of parliament fine even it if degrades the majority of the electorate. Cause if the arguments used where genuine then Norway would opt to move towards a two chamber system like the US where one chamber is based on population numbers and one chamber is based on geographic units. Such a system gives both fair representation to all and safeguards the interests of the less populated areas. While the current system just gives the less populated areas undue power. And before someone points it out, I am aware that Norway in theory have a two chamber system.

So back to my post from yesterday, my complaint about the vote numbers where mostly based on the frustration with the Norwegian electorate inability to go forward instead of backwards. As it could very well be that even if you remove the geographical discrimination from the Norwegian election system, the Lagües model could still have wielded the a similar outcome (to much work to actually calculate it to find out).

Would be interesting to do a poll over how many GNOME hackers have actually managed to get hold of the Amulet of Yendor in netHack. I am not one of them, but I am sure there are some out there :)

Rhythmbox magic

Charles Schmidt checked his DAAP work into Rhythmbox CVS today. This means that if you update to it you should be able to share music between Rhythmbox and iTunes clients on your LAN. Sweet stuff :)
I do have it running now, but since I am the only one in my LAN with it there was a limited amount of sharing. I did however succesfully have my user run RB pick up the sharing of my root run RB :). screenshot provided as proof

Seems Citroën agrees with me that Giger style theming is a necesity.

Crazy frog downloads.

I put up two versions of the crazy frog image for download here one 1280×1024 for desktop background use. And a bigger 640×480 version of the one I posted in my previous blog.

This logo made by me could have won the GNOME 2.12 splash screen contest, at least it got the full endorsement of Luis. Unfortunatly due to a technical glitch another image will end up in the actual release, due to some silly rule about actually winning the contest.

So am using Epiphany currently, the GNOME intergrated browser. So I decided to try drag&dropping an image from the browser into the Gimp.
Well it works as Gimp accepts the drop, but it turns out that since the Gimp in their brilliance don’t use gnome-vfs they didn’t have anything able to retrieve the image..great… So I decided to try EOG and gThumb instead, well it turns out these use gnome-vfs, at least EOG does, but they don’t accept the drop…..AAARGH, sometimes I want to scream!

Been trying to use NetworkManager over the last year is it is theoreticaly a very nice solution. Unfortunatly it do have a lot of weird issues too. Today I filed this bug against it since it seems unable to let me get dns access to local machines. That combined with my older bug which I only see at home where it stops resolving random DNS entries. And there is of course the more cosmetic bug about how it should use the global keys before giving up connecting to a server. Hopefully with it being on the way into both Novell and Gentoo more eyeballs will help iron out the final issues.

Continued my fight against my USB Sound card and starting to make some positive progress. Turns out the crasher bug of GNOME Mixer was solved by Ronald before the 2.10 release. Problem is that it doesn’t really let me adjust whats needed out of the box. Turns out I can adjust this through the preferences menu, but I think it should display inteligent sliders right away. I guess this would need to be handled through HAL someway and with some soundcard profiles.

Also discovered that the way to make Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2 NX play sound without distortion is to have ALSA resample my sound to 48000 instead of the default 44100. Some .asoundrc plunking solved that. Once again something which I guess we need to get HAL to take care of.

Another bug I found is that if you unplug the soundcard, the plug it back in, it seems its adress changes. Which means your settings aimed at card number 2 doesn’t work anymore as your card is now number 3.

Multimedia track

So there will be a multimedia summit at GUADEC in Stuttgart this year. Managed to pull together a rather nice team of speakers for the Multimedia track with topics such as Theora/Xiph, Dirac, Annodex, Flumotion and GStreamer. Hopefully a lot of people outside the traditional GNOME camp will be interested in coming to parttake in this track.

I put together a small presentation of the talks. Anyone reading this and have a interest in Multimedia should check out the program and hopefully decide to come.

The call from bellow

Wim and Wingo have both been looking into trying to fix stuff in glib as our new extensive testsuite for GStreamer 0.9 is showing some bottlenecks and problems. The fixes are aimed at more threadsafety and higher performance mostly. Think they have some nice things cooked up and if they manage to get them all done and merged upstream it will mean a nice performance boost for not only GStreamer, but also for anything else using glib, including of course GNOME.

We need more people

We are looking to hire 1-2 more people at Fluendo. We are at this point mainly looking for Python hackers to work on our streaming server and the services around the streaming server. So if you are a python hacker and are willing to move to Barcelona (or are already living there) to join the coolest company in the Open Source world make sure to mail Thomas (at fluendo.com) or mail me and I forward it to Thomas. Strong general python experience is of course the most important, but specific knowledge of twisted, gstreamer, streaming technologies and/or pygtk and so on doesnt harm your application of course :)