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Looking for room to stay during June: I need a place to stay in Barcelona for the month of June. Posted a request on loquo.com, but if any Barcelonian gnomes knows of somewhere acceptable to rent for June please let me know. The reason for this need is that Ralph Giles of Xiph.org and Theora fame is coming to stay and I am giving up my place for him and his family. This also means that any Barcelona Linux users groups or similar should use this chance to get him to come and talk while he is here :)

USB soundcard continues

So I filed a bug report today against gnome media to try to see if we can figure out what needs doing. Since I managed to get the setup working nicely at home now the missing step is making it not only work, but work in a nice way for users.

Borked advogato

Seems some troubles at Advogato last week borked the XML output in my RSS feed again. This time I doubt its even fixable as there are no entry numbers even for me to access with xml-rpc to fix it. Will not even bother trying to mail Raph for help as my latest mails on such issues have all gone ignored. But for anyone wondering why I have 4 empty entries on Planet GStreamer this is the reason.

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.