Alex Hixon’s Blog

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.

… mushroom, mushroom!

Some 1up mushrooms for you. SVG sources are available here.

… 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.

I just noticed that the song Do It 2 Nite’s chorus is a sample from SOS Band’s Take Your Time (Do It Right).
However, there’s literally no attempt to make the sample any different from the other. All they did was speed it up a bit, increase the bass and add a highhat, and add some effects. Lame!

The fact that they got the credit for coming with a bouncy house track is even worse - the sample is basically the entire chorus. Appalling.
Almost like Daft Punk’s Digital Love, though, I’d have to admit, at least they only used a few seconds of audio, rather than the whole damn chorus. Their Harder Better Faster Stronger use of Coca Cola Baby was pretty darn hard to beat, though; I think they’ve redeemed themselves.

Sorry, none for you, Rockefeller.

Attention those coming to LCA!

I’m considering having a BoF (Birds of a Feather) conference during the conference relating to Bongo and stuff. I’m asking here because, well, I honestly have no idea how many are going to come. If I don’t have enough numbers, there’s probably not all that much point in putting up a request for the room. Also, if you’d like to come, if you could optionally give me an idea of when you’d like the BoF to be held (ie which sessions), so that you don’t miss out on your favorite talks!

To quote the programme:

This year we have a dedicated Birds of a Feather room that is available during the main conference (Wednesday to Friday). More information on running or attending a BoF session will be available when the conference opens.

I guess I could always generalise it, and possibly get a few other speakers involved. I might email this idea to chat/mel8ourne list.

Also, if you want to catch me at LCA, PM/email me. Mobile number is 0401215248.

Good to see the Banshee crew push out a new release from the 0.13 series. Few minor improvements which make things a bit nicer, but generally Banshee ‘trunk’ is going to be the big one.

The new Last.fm playlist source is absolutely smashing. Cheers to Gabriel Burt for that. Last.fm the way it was meant to be.

Yes, it’s that damn good. Why else would I bother to blog?

I will be traveling away to the null void for about a week until the 9th of January. You probably won’t be able to contact me during this time, since I won’t have ‘net access or anything; if you email me, it’ll stay in the backlog of mail and spam until I get back. Or, if you have my number, you could call me.

TTFN.