Alex Hixon’s Blog

r5u870
We’re pushing out a release within the next week! 0.11.1 contains a whole heap of bugfixes, including a nasty syslog spamming one.

I’m also hoping to start adding proper support for 3 new webcams, with the help of some friendly folk in the community. Hopefully reverse-engineering it won’t be too difficult.

Also, if you use this driver and haven’t already, please sign yourself up to the mailing lists. I do love all bug reports, but it gets too much sometimes. There’s also a bug tracker, too!

Android
I’ve been doing a bit hacking with Android lately. It’s really quite a cool platform, and it’s good to see an open platform being integrated in some smart phones (not quite here yet, but still). I’ve been doing some hacking on a classLoader to work around the Dalvik virtual machine, which is quite interesting, really (as a VM). Most of the work has been going into making i-jetty work smoother (Jetty is a web server for Java, you should pimp it out; i-jetty is an embeeded version for Android, and both are opensource). I might blog properly about this later…

Banshee
1.0 is coming real soon; and it’s going to rock your world! 1.1 is probably going to be slightly more polished, and luckily, you shouldn’t have to wait long after 1.0 for some more wholesome Banshee-loving goodness.

I’ve already got a library watcher extension coded up, and myself and Will Farrington have been doing a bit of hacking on the Radio extension.

Bongo
I’ve pushed this back far enough, but I intend to get some decent work done on dragonfly-ng next weekend (sadly, I have real work this week/weekend). Alex has mentioned doing a server-bits only release, and then following up with the new client bits later on.

If you’re wondering what dragonfly-ng is, basically, I decided to stop the work I was doing on the brand new XHTML interface, and just re-use what we had already, aside from all the old Javascript. dragonfly-ng is completely client UI independent, in that you can easily slap on a different looking HTML/CSS frontend and just change the client definition file (which says what each element’s name is, etc) and away you go!

There’s only really a few things that need to be done before I think we should be relatively release-ready:

• Pagination! Looking at a single page of main is kinda boring.
• A composer view. A limited textarea would be sufficient for this release.
• Making sure that all our URLs are handled correctly and making sure it works against our current Dragonfly server and Crystal (half-completed).

I’ve also got a secret project underway, which I’ll be launching soon with a good mate of mine. Stay tuned!

Because having the stock standard USB VIDs and PIDs were annoying when trying to hookup a libusb filter driver under Windows, I decided to have a look around to see if it was at all possible change these values. After a bit of researching, here’s what you need to do (you’ll need to do this under Windows; I haven’t tried under Wine, but it’d probably be better to run underneath VMware):

1. Grab the D2XX driver setup executable from here, and install it. After you change the PID and VIDs and you wish to reprogram them again, you’ll need to make your own custom driver package; read about it in this document.
2. Now, we can program the EEPROM on the USB< -->Serial chip. Head over here to grab MProg. Install that, and open it up.
3. Click File->New and fill in the information in the main application panel as required. Device type is FT232R. Once you’re done, click on Device->Scan. The log panel should point out “Number Of Programmed Devices = 1″. If this is right, Device->Program should flash the EEPROM and put the new data on it. Then, quit MProg and re-connect the USB device.

Apparently, there’s also a version of the EEPROM programmer for FreeBSD. I haven’t actually tested this, since the above steps worked fine for me, but if you’re under Linux, it might useful to give it a go/modify it where necessary.

Happy hacking. =)

Well, I figured I might as well put to good use the Arduino board board I purchased about a month back.

Being such an original person that I am, I’ve decided to come up with another Arduino monome clone. I intend to build a nice 8×8 button surface; the size is good because it means I’m not buying zillions of dollars worth of components - only 64, not 144 (on a 12×12 board) as I had originally planned, heh - and because it’s not too large, so you can grab it nicely with your hands and muck around. This’ll probably end up very similar to the OcTinct in way of end-result.

I’ve ordered most of the parts I’ll be using; that is, 9x 8-channel multiplexers for reading the buttons (yes, cheaper than 3x 16-channel multiplexers), 50 RGB LEDs (these were cheapies for $10 off eBay, probably not the best quality, considering the price and that they’re getting shipped from some random place in Hong Kong, but hey), 100 diodes to prevent key press information flowing back into our matrix; and four 4×4 button pads and breakout boards from SparkFun. I’ve yet to purchase the extra LEDs, mainly because I’m not sure about the quality of the ones I’ve already ordered, and the demuxers to feed the color data to the LEDs with. I’ll probably end up wiring up a single row of LEDs to test first, then go buy it out once I work out how I’m going to feed the data; remember, we have 3 channels of information with the LEDs (red, green and blue) rather than just one if we were going with the single colour ones, so that makes things a bit more annoying. I’ll probably just by more demuxers and handle the yucky stuff in the firmware.

I’m going to make it compatible with the same protocol used by the original monomes. At the least, this means it’s possible to use the same applications and (hopefully) some of the software used for the Monomes. I’ll probably extend it a bit by adding a few extra functions to the protocol, and manually modify applications (like snake) so that things come up in different colours.

I’ll probably pop an accelerometer on by default, and feed that to the software via the same way the Monome does it - keep in mind that the accelerometer hack is an aux input on that. I’d also looove to have direct MIDI out on the box, so you don’t need to lug around a laptop to do gigs. Need to figure out a way to map each key to a different note dynamically without a computer, though.

Any thoughts on a name, some sort of enclosing, or some other awesome features?

Edit: fixed up linkage.

Looks like somebody tripped and fell over a cable in semi-slumber, the datacenter monkey at acpi.info broke something, or whatever. The site ‘acpi.info’ that contains all the ACPI specification documents and misc. information isn’t resolving

I’ve uploaded the mess that is the ACPI Specification to my website for the moment. Spending half an hour trying to get the darned PDF out of their slow servers (which isn’t really their fault; probably just temporary load or something) isn’t particularly fun, I can assure you.

Anyway, here’s the 624 page monster: http://mediati.org/temp/ACPIspec30a.pdf

Feel free to link to it while the official site is dead. Seriously though, who ever wrote this thing should be shot. It reads like an adult version of Pirates of the Carribean.

Speaking of datacenter monkeys, I’m finally changing everything over to the other machine, so, blog will be down but everything should remain up (except maybe if I fsck the DNS entries, again).

Was this really worth blogging, you might be asking, dear reader? Probably not.

Now, I’ll be honest. I haven’t bought much legitimate music lately, except for a couple albums I bought a few years back. I *would* buy LPs if I had a player that worked… But yes, shock, horror. I am a freeloader, to be fair.

Well, seeing as there was a multitude of songs that weren’t available on most P2P networks, I decided, hell, let’s at least have a look around and see if I could get songs elsewhere. Amazon’s MP3 downloads aren’t available in Australia, and iTunes is, well.. evil in so many different ways.

So, after looking around, I discovered Beatport (no, this isn’t one of those paid plugs, they’re just pretty cool). They provide a really large range of electronic music (incl. house, club, electro). The user interface is really nice, but it’s a bit annoying that they only provide Flash. But you can quickly go from song to song, artist to artist, finding songs you wouldn’t normally otherwise hear. It also provides 2-3 minute previews of songs (low quality of course). You can pay using PayPal or via credit card directly. What I did find annoying was that the songs are reasonably high priced to what I was expecting (something like from $1.49 for most tracks to $2.49 for newer ones), and that some tracks aren’t always available even though they’re in the catalogue, and some popular tracks they just don’t seem to have. Otherwise, I’ve been reasonably happy.

You can choose output formats of 320 Kbps CBR MP3, 192 Kbps VBR MP4 and 1141 Kbps WAV. They charge a WAV handling fee so that’s semi-lame, though, I can understand why.

If anybody has suggestions as to other similar websites, please comment and point me there. Also, anybody else used Beatport? What did you think of it?

Just touched down in Melbourne, and have checked into the hotel.
Internet’s pretty expensive, so I guess I’ll have to limit myself to freeloading off the internet at the conference. Hopefully might be able to do some hacking offline.

On a related note, I think Silvia Pfeiffer was on my plane. Hello there if you were! =)

Edit: John kindly pointed out Silvia had been in Melbourne for the last week or so. For some reason my retarded brain wrote Silvia’s name instead of Mary Gardiner. Obviously, I need to get my head checked.

Pushed out a new release of r5u870 last night. Woohoo! Few cool changes in this release:

• Includes recode-fw.scm. Very useful tool to extract the firmware blobs from your device driver, if your device isn’t supported. Instructions on how to use are on the wiki.
• Giant code merge from new modular usbcam library, posted by Sam to LKML back in May 2007.
• Support for the 05ca 183b, 05ca 1837 and 05ca 1839 UVC cameras! Sweetness! The HP Pavilion’s 1812 camera is currently experimental, though, I’d love folks to give it a go.
• Updated ChangeLog entries! What, you mean I wasted half an hour of my life?!

If you notice any bugs, don’t be afraid to email me (check the wiki for FAQs first, though). For those who already emailed me about stuff from previous releases, please upgrade, give it a go, and then email me back your status. I haven’t forgotten, I’ve just been very busy.

In other news, I’ve also managed to get the equalizer code for Banshee merged into trunk, so I’m pretty stoked about that. Style changes and all that have been sorted. Works lovely with both the older-gen equalizer element, and the current one in CVS. The element is currently in gst-plugins-bad, though, it’s moving to -good before the next release.

The new Banshee’s going to be sweet, I tell you!

Also managed to code up a pretty cool IRC log search script for Bongo. You can check (Jonny: not Czech it out here. Looks a bit ugly, yes, but it sure does the job damn fine.

Well, I think that’s enough for now. Microsoft are at our LUG meeting this afternoon for a Q&A session. Hopefully we get some nice flames going, though, the committee has asked us not to. Though, cmon, we’re a loud bunch - someone can’t resist, I’m sure!

Gah, and I have to pack tomorrow, too. I hate packing.

… to a Banshee near you:

Fetched 36.4kB in 1s (22.4kB/s)
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room

Woops!

Well, the video told me to. Funny, yet so true.