Urrrrgggh

Why am I so tired? Last night I went to bed around 10:30, and this morning I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I've been like this since last Thursday or so, and I hope it stops. Maybe I'm getting a cold, just really slowly.

More linkage: Why Comic Sans , politicians being grown-up as usual , don't remind anyone this happened , no comment , and after the Face Of Sun, we finally have the Face of Imendio (well, the face of half of Imendio)

14:47 Wednesday, 29 Oct 2003 [#] [life] (0 comments)

Random Linkage

Too tired to blog. Making feeble attempt anyway.

Some random linkage:

12:30 Wednesday, 29 Oct 2003 [#] [life] (0 comments)

Sound Juicer "Si!" 0.5.6

Sound Juicer "Si!" 0.5.6 is out -- download the tarball here. Debian packages in the upload queue already.

11:32 Monday, 27 Oct 2003 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (4 comments)

What's new, pussycat...

Here I am, sitting on the train, again, trying to think about finally using the status bar in Sound Juicer. But I'm tired and I hurt: my back is disagreeing with sitting down after just having got up, and a few days ago I managed to bruise the tendons in my right hand. Oh joy.

Yesterday I totally rewrote sj-extracting., the cause of many bugs in Sound Juicer. I'll test and commit it today (after resisting the urge to commit without testing last night), and will then do a new release, which will truly rule, of course.

A few days ago Helix released the first beta of their media player. I have fond memories of Bastien building their SDK on this iBook, muttering away, before cursing and taking his iBook to the Helix stand to poke them about the latest stupidity he found. There were plans to try and get Helix to use Totem as a front end for their player, as it has a pluggable backend (currently it can use Xine or GStreamer) and a totally sweet interface, but they didn't in the end. Turns out they've written a poor Totem clone, really. Totem doesn't have to start [image] worrying [image] yet [image].

In Debian news, we've managed to get GNOME 2.2 into testing and GNOME 2.4 into unstable, a feat which only took a week. Many thanks to Sebastien Bacher who did most of the initial work!

09:16 Friday, 24 Oct 2003 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

New Amplifier

Yesterday I got my new Cambridge Audio A500 amplifier plugged in, wired up, and pumping. I even bought it some chunky speaker cable as a "welcome to your new home" present... It seems a lot happier than my old NADs, which had too much power for the size of my room (they volume has never gone above 1/3) and lead to some of the detail being lost. Oh, and they were broken too. Anyone who still wants my old NADs (1000 pre-amp, 2100 power-amp), mail me, for £30 they are yours.

I'm going to miss saying "look at the size of my NADs".

08:39 Friday, 24 Oct 2003 [#] [life] (2 comments)

New Amplifier

I just won an auction on eBay for a replacement amplifier, a Cambridge Audio A500. Somebody tried to outbid me just as the auction closed (2 seconds before to be exact), but this has happened to me in the past (a month ago for the same amp), so 30 seconds before the auction closed I upped my bid too, safe in the knowledge that if nobody tried to sneak in I wouldn't pay more, but if someone did I'd probably bounce past their bit.

It worked as the bidding history shows, and I should be getting the amp Monday. So, anyone want a good condition NAD pre-amp and a slightly broken NAD power amp? The power amp should be trivial to fix if you know how to.

In other news I'm feeling slightly dizzy whilst sitting down, and have a horrible feeling I'm about to start developing the 'orrible viral infection Vicky is just getting over... or maybe its the ill people around me on the way to work.

14:59 Thursday, 16 Oct 2003 [#] [life] (1 comments)

Debugging Sucks

I hate debugging. I hate debugging memory leaks more. I really hate debugging memory leaks when Valgrind won't work.

Today I finally had a poke at the memory leak in gnome-cups-icon in Debian. This isn't a little memory leak, its 20 bytes or so every few seconds, which soon adds up to a 600M process when left running overnight. As Valgrind just refused to play along with Bonobo, I had to resort to more hacky measures: 

#include <stdlib.h>
static void
print_usage(void)
{
        char buf[256];
        sprintf(buf, "grep VmRSS /proc/%d/status", getpid());
        system(buf);
}

static char *
get_default (void)
{
        ...
        print_usage();
        default_dest = cupsGetDest (NULL, NULL, num_dests, dests);
        print_usage ();
        ...

Urrrgh. In the end I traced the leak to cupsFreeDests() not actually freeing any memory, which sucks.

15:26 Tuesday, 14 Oct 2003 [#] [computers] (2 comments)

Hey gang,

Let's all have a group hug and confess our sins!

15:18 Tuesday, 14 Oct 2003 [#] [life] (0 comments)

Honourable Regiment?

So a friend of mine wants to join the Territorial Army, specifically the Honourable Artillery Company. This makes me wonder, is there an Unhonourable Artillery Company? Are they the people who shell hospitals and refugee camps?

14:59 Monday, 13 Oct 2003 [#] [life] (0 comments)

Dive Into Python

Before I forget again, last night I made Debian packages for Dive Into Python. They won't go into Sid just yet, as it is under the GFDL and there are some, well, issues there. For now, packages are available in my repository.

09:59 Friday, 10 Oct 2003 [#] [computers] (0 comments)

Same Old Same Old

Dear Intel,
Please make the Intel Pentium 4 sane.
Love, Ross.

Intel Pentium 4's are weird. I do a pretty-much null change (from looking at the assembler a jump table was re-ordered) and performance on the P4 is 30% better, but the same binaries on a P3 have the expected identical performance. I then optimised away some redundant code (again, looking at the assembler shows many instances of large chunks removed) and the program actually slows down. This is starting to make optimising for speed not a Fun Game. At least the ever-handy Meld is showing its worth again, quickly and easily displaying the differences in two assembler files.

monitor-calibration-tool is going well, I've rewritten most of it and the crack is slowly being removed. Hopefully I'll be able to get another release out next week, which will be the first release to be useful (unless you are really weird and want to calibrate your screen for gamma 1.0)

Finally, it appears that IBM don't want my Java Reflection article, the corporate gits. I blame SCO for this, I'm not sure how but I think blaming SCO is a positive action here. If my second choice doesn't want to pay for it, then an absolutely fabulous article (if I do say so myself) will be online here next week or so.

08:39 Friday, 10 Oct 2003 [#] [computers] (1 comments)

Long Time No Update

Well, I've been busy. Last weekend we went to a wedding (second attempt for the bridge and groom, they had previously divorced), and this week I've been attempting to nurse an ill Vicky whilst being kept working hard at work.

I've also had to stop myself from screaming "Oh My God!" in the street when I remember that California elected the Terminator as governor. This is a disturbing sign, American politics is turning into a soap opera, where the most exciting and colourful characters win. Governor Academy or Presidential Idol anyone?

Our last Amazon purchase (it is amazing how ingrained "Amazon" has become, in just a few years. I remember the days when Amazon only sold books...) was the new Dido album and Damien Rice's O. Dido's new album sounds like Dido's old album to me, but I'm not her greatest fan (pleasant background music, nothing more). O however, is great fun: starts with acoustic guitars and vocals, wanders into a serious acoustic jamming session and finishes with Silent Night in a hidden track.

I also finished reading the last of Ken McCloud's Star Fraction series (for want of a better name), The Sky Road. Yet again a great book, switching between two eras (2040 and more like 2400), set in Scotland, with social-political debate, mainly socialism/communism/capitalism. I think I'd describe it as thinking-man's sci-fi.

And before I forget, Peter Plichta is still an arse.

08:29 Friday, 10 Oct 2003 [#] [life] (0 comments)

Sound Juicer "Mailman Day" 0.5.5

Sound Juicer "Mailman Day" 0.5.5 is out -- download the tarball here. Debian packages ready now.

16:15 Wednesday, 01 Oct 2003 [#] [computers/sound-juicer] (3 comments)