Monitor Calibration Tool 0.1.1
I finally got around to looking at Bastien's patch to make the black point screen disappear on a click, without having to resort to killing the process. Cool!
Instead of merely applying the patch (bah!) I looked at it, understood it, and then removed half of it. It appears to work for me, and even closes on mouse clicks too, so it seems good enough to me. However, if some of this removed code turns out to be useful rest assured I'll release 0.1.2.
Download location: monitor-calibration-0.1.1.tar.gz
Random Unrelated Note: the tabloid-sized Independent is a damn fine idea, and could only be improved by stapling the spine. I am keeping my copy of the first issue in case this ever becomes a legendary milestone -- I just missed owning the famous Gillian Anderson FHM, and that was worth 50 quid two weeks after it came out.
No News Is Good News
For people out there who are not running Sound Juicer from CVS (boring fools), I'll provide a little update.
- The album artist on multiple-artist CDs is handled correctly at last. I finally ripped a CD which was tagged correctly in MusicBrainz!
- I've added error handling support, so if the pipeline has a problem you'll actually know about it.
- I've also made patches for GStreamer, so the cdparanoia element actually reports errors.
- Frederic Crozat has fixed various problems when cancelling the rip, and fixed drive detection with using devfs.
- Bastien Nocera has been quite so far, only adding a dialog for when the cdparanoia element can't be found. :) However, I think he cracked MPEG encoding crashing bug today, so that is good.
I also plan on getting the threaded MusicBrainz lookup sorted in the next few days. Now that the code base is working fine with signalled metadata testing the threaded signal emision should be trivial.
SPARC, Python, Jamboree
What a fun day. Played with Jamboree for a minute, which passes our medium-sized music archive test (7gig of music over NFS). It indexed the lot in a minute, where with Rhythmbox builds I generally did it in pieces, or over lunch. Send a massive list of requests to Johan, and am looking forward to the new RhythmDB work Colin Walters' has done, to compare.
Python is fun. I'd forgotten a lot of it but in my mission to write a tool to compare trees of supposedly identical Java interfaces, I've ended up with a hash of hashes, where some of the elements in the sub-hashes are actually lists of hashes. The children in this chaotic data structure are function prototypes, and I have a feeling these will be classes soon.
I interrupt your reading pleasure for this side note: my train home and the current time of dusk is perfectly suited to lovely going-home sunsets. Tonight is another lovely one, but it will never beat last Wednesday's deep orange through to purple clouds, reflected in the lake at Broxbourne. Resuming normal programming.
Also got to play with our Debian/SPARC box again. At some point in the past 64-bit gcc started to work, but after some testing it turned out that something was up. gcc -o test test.c produced a 64-bit binary, but ./test said it wasn't a valid binary. After a quick chat with Ben Collins, it turns out that the kernel needs updating: the userspace tools detect that I can run 64-bit processes, but the kernel is was 32-bit only. A quick update and reboot later, and I'm running 64-bit "Hello, World!". What an overkill. Still have the problem that gcc builds 64-bit by default, whereas g++ builds 32-bit...
Bastards
The annoying baspeople-of-questionable-parentage
signal controllers at Liverpool Street station have taken to playing Music
Chairs with us, saying a train will arrive on platform 2 until about a
minute before it is due to leave, when it then turns up on platform 5. Cue a
rush-hour train-load of people charging between platforms.
Hell hath no fury as a woman scorn. Or a commuter whose minidisc player decides to stop playing mid-track.
Life
This coming weekend Vicky and myself are off to see one of her aunts get married, this obviously calls for smart clothes. Of which I own little. My casual wear (jeans/cords/combats with t-shirt/casual shirt/jumper) is the same as my work wear (did I mention I love my office?), so I had to buy some new trousers/shirt/tie. I'll skip past huge amounts of dull trouser shopping and just say that I've gone for black trousers and a dark red shirt/tie combo, nothing too radical but quite cool.
Vicky, however, is something else. Damn. Cream flowing skirt from Monsoon, with either a blank sparkly top (Monsoon again) or a woolen jumper, and black pointy shoes. She looks terrific. :-)
Had a John/Allen/Dave around for a few drinks Friday night, which soon turned into pizza with 5 bottles of wine, or maybe 6. I can't quite remember. I must have been a little drunk: I said to John that going out and cycling together though the woods in the winter would be a good idea when blatantly it would be a) dirty b) tiring and c) exhausting. Not to mention d) knackering. Damn you, red wine, DAMN YOU.
Despair
Sometimes I give up with humanity, I really do.
I've been seeing too many stories like this one recently. The executive summary is some fool goes on an extreme diet (Atkins this time), and they start feeling weak, tired, dehydrated, whatever. Whereas normal people would consider, say, eating or drinking something, these people carry on starving themself until they can't even get out of a bath.
JESUS PEOPLE. You'd think the Atkin's diet was destroying brain cells instead of fat cells. GET A GRIP.
Broadband
Last Monday was The Big Day for broadband to finally reach us... but it didn't. I spent most of Monday swearing at dodgy phone lines, cheap modems, Microsoft, drivers which don't work, upgrades which break everything, and talking dogs in adverts.
A BT engineer was called out Thursday, who remarked at what a great line I have, and how broken the modem is. Oh well, at least I hadn't paid for it yet. Sitting above me now is a brand-new all-singing all-dancing wifi ADSL router, which should allow surfing whilst on the toilet. Oh this will be fun...
Yaaawn
It's early and for the first time since last Friday I'm sitting on the train going to work, as again I've been ill. But first, All About Heather Nova.
The Heather Nova gig last Friday was excellent. The Union Chapel is a lovely building, everyone sits on the pews, there is a stained glass window behind the artist, and a nice bar to the side (which I presume wasn't part of the original design). We turned up too late to meet Edd in the pub, so once I'd met Vicky we sat down, only for Edd to sit down in his seat directly in front of me a minute later... The support band, Grand Drive, were very good, three men, each with an acoustic guitar. They were plugging the CDs they were selling at the back, which we totally forgot to buy but is on order from Amazon. Then Heather Nova came onto the stage, which had been decorated with fairy lights and was wonderfully lit. Her, the lighting, and the stained glass window behind looked stunning. No wonder there was a large video camera at the back, this is an excellent venue to record the Storm DVD at.
The band for this tour is quite cut-down, Heather on vocals, a drummer, a bassist (either double bass or a normal bass guitar), and the most amusing band member on keyboards and backing vocals. He was really enjoying playing, started by swaying to the music but as the songs get going he shuts his eyes, grins madly and leans right over the keys. This 4 piece band is best suited for Storm, but were good enough to perform most songs very well. The acoustics were also perfect, everything was audible, the bass was strong but not drowning out anything, and we could hear every single instrument. It was very easy to listen too, after being aurally attacked by sound engineers at the Brixton Academy.
The next day, Saturday, Vicky went off shopping for a wedding dress. She tried many on, didn't like all of any of them, so has gained lots of knowledge for next time. That evening, we met with her mum and planned some of the wedding, went through our ideas, etc. I sneezed now and again, felt a little cold, and we went home. Sunday was far more interesting, that evening I started shivering whilst burning up and had developed an all-over rash.
Because of this I didn't feel up to the office commute until Thursday, but a BT engineer was going to turn up Thursday to fix my ADSL, so I worked from home then... I'm becoming quite a rare site in the office recently! Maybe I can do an entire week next week.
Devil's Pie "David Blaine has smelly socks" 0.3.1
Devil's Pie (everyone favourite window manipulation tool) 0.3.1 is out. Finally. Again. Changes are:
- Don't crash when a window role is null in various places (Rob Mayoff)
- Don't crash on unknown properties (RM)
- Being very slow at applying patches (me)
Downloads are in the usual place, a tarball is here.
God's Secret Formula
So I've borrowed this book called God's Secret Formula by Dr. Peter Plichta. It claims to be an amazing piece of work proving that prime numbers are the fundamental basis of the universe, that the number 19 links everything, etc etc. Most amusing.
I'd probably be less skeptical about the book if I hadn't been noticing serious errors in the book all day. He is claiming that without the moon there would be no tides (the sun effects the tides too); that the number of days in an average pregnancy and the difference between 0° Celsius and absolute zero are the same, 273 (Celsius is an arbitrary scale); and that 361 is "nearly" 360. The man is a nutcase.
Sadly Googling for his name produces hundred of fanboy sites, but no critical analysis of his work. Anyone know of any links? I'd like to see how many more incorrect statements he has claimed as "truth".
A Common Bug
Will everyone who is about to file a bug with Sound Juicer about how it crashes when its has extracted a song please compare their bug report with this one. If its the same bug, please don't file it again. Bastien has been very good with marking these bugs as duplicates, and I'm sure he is getting bored now.
Everytime you file a duplicate bug, God kills a kitten.
Please, think of the kittens.
Sound Juicer 0.5.3
Sound Juicer "Mr. Nitpicky? Mr. Patch Machine more like" 0.5.3 is out -- download the tarball here. Debian packages ready now, before the Mandrake ones for once!
What's New:
- Encode the total number of tracks on the album in the metadata (Bastien Nocera)
- Rewrite MusicBrainz lookup so that metadata is returned in a signal.
- Actually set the device to use when extracting (BN, but I don't think he knew it)
- Don't warn when there is no CD in the drive on startup (BN)
- Poll for a CD, instead of relying on the Reread button (BN)
- Exit when no CD drives are detected
- Don't crash when editing track names when lookup failed (Mike Hearn)
- Add filename tags for lowercased forms of the title/artist/etc. (BN)
- Warn when GStreamer plugins are not available (BN)
- Never use mpegaudio plugin, as it is MPEG2 and sucks (BN)
- Only display track listing for a audio CD (BN)
- .desktop file specified Bugzilla information
- Eject works on FreeBSD
Monitor Calibration Tool 0.1
GammaarRRr! has grown up and become very sensible. New name, new release, same version number.
monitor-calibration-tool allows you to set the gamma and black point of your monitor. It does not save the settings at the moment, but it will soon. Note that if you hit the Black Point button you'll have to alt-tab to a terminal and kill the process manually... I couldn't get the keyboard grab to work. Sorry about this, but because of this bug alone I'm not installing a .desktop file.
Download location: monitor-calibration-0.1.tar.gz
Hacking Update
I rewrote my nautilus-cd-burner patch last night, hopefully Bastien can help me fix the growisofs code which I deleted, and Alex won't find too many problems with it. Once this is in I can work on the UI for Rhythmbox CD writing.
My patches to Sound Juicer to make the metadata lookup async are looking good too, a small cleanup and they're done. I owe Bastien a beer for making Sound Juicer his pet project for 10 minute hacks, and fixing a serious number of bugs for me. Great work that man.
Mark Finlay has been talking about scanning software for GNOME. I'm interested in coding some of this up, as I have a scanner under my desk which only needs a suitable cable (I really must scrape together the money for this). My £0.02 on this topic:
- Abstract scan types make perfect sense for the basic UI, such as "Web Quality", "Printable" etc.
- Then have an Advanced button (well, disclosure widget), with resolution, brightness, contrast, etc sliders.
- I can't decide where rotate/mirror etc should go though. Probably in the main UI.
- I was also thinking of eye candy when selecting regions: fade (desaturate and lighten) any areas which are not going to be scanned.
Trains, Backs, Gigs and Fairies
Continuing the finest British tradition of complaining, I must moan about the trains. Occasional signal problems I can deal with, but one signal failure on the way to work Monday, another one on the way back, and yet another Tuesday morning is just taking the piss, really. The conspiracy theorist in me notices how all of this is occurring just as the new signalling equipment has been installed and will be turned on next month -- there is nothing like a train service which is much better than usual to make the public think it was all worth it...
Off to see Heather Nova on Friday, the new album was out yesterday but I didn't know in time to get to the shops. Hopefully I'll get it today so I can at least bounce along to the songs. The venue looks stunning: it's an old church in Islington called the Union Chapel.. Hopefully I'll be there in time to meet Edd and have a pint first.
The back is much better now -- I'm still taking ibuprofen every morning as I wake up with a very stiff neck, but that is far better than not being able to move. At last that is over with.
Finally I saw another fairy on the tube today. I'm glad they are still around, they bring an air of excitement and mystery to London. For 99.9% of the people in the world who have no idea what I'm on about, this is the closest I can get to a link about them.
