Finally skip-free audio playback in Linux

Posted on September 7, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

Stumpled upon this story the other day. Finally a tool where you can actually decide which things get prioritized instead of the kernel relying on heuristiscs. I did a test with alsaplayer playing back using through jackd (very sensitive to not getting enough time slices). To stress the system I did a emerge sync together with a fetchmail process sucking down the days mail. I don’t really care if it takes 5 seconds longer to fetch my mail or if it takes 2 minutes long to emerge sync as long as I can be sure that my music doesn’t skip. And guess what? With DeskOpt you can :-)

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MMS 1.0.8.5 released

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

New release of the stable branch of MMS. As with all the other releases in the 1.0.8 series, the upgrade should be perfectly safe. No config changes has been made and the focus has been on fixing bugs instead of introducing them (aka. adding features :-) )

Download here

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Boost part 2

Posted on August 18, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

In the quest for improving the quality of the MMS code in 1.1.0 I’ve done several things, one of which was to convert all the source to the boost foreach statement. Since I liked the result of the foreach cleanup so much, I decided to see what other libraries could be of use. I quickly found the function and bind library which allowed me to remove the internal function pointers framework we have currently been using. While converted I was surprised to see how cleaner the code became. The bind function is truly easy to use and read and made it possible to remove several helper classes which only purpose was to capture state to create a uniform interface.

So instead of:

class FP
{
  std::list numbers;

  FP(std::list n)
    : numbers(n)
  {}

  call(int t)
  {
    int total;
    foreach (int i, numbers)
      total += i*t;
    return total;
  }
};

(I saved the part of actually creating the function pointer object). One gets:

call(int t, std::list numbers)
{
  int total;
  foreach (int i, numbers)
    total += i*t;
  return total;
}

boost::bind(&call, _1, list_of_numbers);

Voila. Now if only the wordpress code formatting didn’t suck so much ;-)

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The future of C++

Posted on August 17, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

Recently I’ve been looking a lot into boost and it’s really a great set of libraries. Although the syntax of some of the libraries could use a helping hand (assign library). Luckily I was watching a presentation by Bjarne Stroustrup on the next C++ standard and it appears that they will finally add a way to construct containers such as vectors with elements as construction time. I think it was called initializer lists and the syntax was the following:

      vector v {1,2,3}

So you can now initialize them just like regular arrays :-) Furthermore it appears that we’ll get threads and perhaps a common filesystem + network abstraction. Now if only they could be a little quicker at bringing forward these new standards ;-)

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Touch screen input in MMS 1.1.0

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

Really wanted to make navigating MMS on the nokia easier so I implemented mouse input which is luckily also what a touch screen is. Yay!

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bzr bundles

Posted on July 31, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

Stumbled upon this guide today for how to create better patches when the project in question is using bzr (such as MMS :) ).

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My Media System 1.1.0 alpha 2 released

Posted on July 29, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

New alpha release out. This new version fixes a bunch of bugs and adds support for submitting your listening pattern to last.fm and also adds a movie info library that will parse your movies and display stuff like the duration, resolution and so on. Upgrading is heavily recommended. More info here.

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It’s all the little things

Posted on July 27, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

Having been coding in c# for some time now, what is really nice about the language compared to c++ is the foreach statement. The syntax is really natural and easy to read:

     foreach (string s in strings)

Compare this to the standard c++ notation:

     for (vector::const_iterator i = strings.begin(),
             iend = strings.end(); i != iend; ++i)

So I decided there must be something easier and vague remembered that boost had something for this. And low and behold they had. So now instead of writing that horrible for line, one can just write:

     foreach (const string& s, strings)

It’s not quite as nice as i c# since one can’t have a pair on the leftside of the comma, so one needs to be using typedefs to fix that. And one must also remember the & as to not create unneeded copies of the string.

And the best part is that it’s written as a bunch of templates and macro’s so one can just include a header and of it goes. Doesn’t even have to change the Makefile :-)

I’ve converted the whole MMS 1.1.0 code base to the new syntax and it’s really so much easier to read. Especially because I tend to use better names for the loop variable than i :-)

Posted in My Media System, Programming | 2 Comments

CXFE 0.9.2 released

Posted on July 25, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

A long time ago, Rett D. Walters created a console frontend for Xine so that we could use that in MMS. I’ve since the last release created quite a few patches for it, and because Rett wasn’t actively maintaining it anymore I decided to roll all my patches into a new release:

http://people.iola.dk/anders/cxfe/

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mms 1.1.0 alpha 1 released

Posted on July 5, 2007 by Anders Rune Jensen

Finally, after god knows how many hours of development we have a version of 1.1.0 ready for a public consumption, albeit for now in the form of an alpha release.

Information about the release

What is new (lots of screenshots :) )

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