A new stable release of MMS is out. This is a bugfix release and so 15 bugs have been fixed and no new features implemented. Upgrading is recommended.

I bumped into this documentary (Good Copy Bad Copy) about copyright yesterday. The documentary is made by 3 danish guys and is really interesting in that it tells the story about copyright from the view of countries in four different continents (USA, Russia, Nigeria and Brazil). In case you havn’t read the wonderful inspiring books by Lawrence Lessig this video is an excellent introduction and will only steal away one single hour of your life :)

Found this crazy piece of software tonight. It’s a clone of guitar hero as far as I understand. Open source (written in python(g)) and seems to work on all major OS’s. The game is really entertaining but also extremely hard on my fragile coding hands after a few hours :)

Sometimes nice tools just come dumping down from the sky and PowerTOP is the latest of such programs. The Linux kernel 2.6.21 has become tickless which means that instead of waking up at specific intervals it will just sleep until it needs to do something next. This clearly has the potential to save quite a lot of power, but only if it really can sleep longer than it otherwise would have. Intel has created a tool, PowerTOP, to test which programs causes the kernel to wake up. And thanks to the power of free software they have also been able to fix quite a lot of the programs people use a lot. So tonight I decided that I would run MMS and see how it performed. I installed the new kernel and the tool on my laptop and was ready to test. Initially the kernel was waking up between 60-80 times a second but after starting MMS it quickly rose to 1000! Something was definitely wrong. After a long debug session I finally found the cause of this massive spike in kernel wakeups: SDL. For some reason SDL was initialized using SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_TIMER). This small SDL_INIT_TIMER flag caused SDL to start a thread which just slept for 10ms, woke up, just to sleep for 10ms again over and over again… ...

I got MMS running on the nokia 770 today. Ok so maybe I cheated a little and it was running on my server and I was just using VNC to connect to it. Anyway it’s working great for music playback :) Edit: Added instruction on how to get this working Edit2: Better input method First one must start a VNC server: Xvnc :1 +render -dpms -s 0 -geometry 800x480 -depth 24 -rfbport 5900 -PasswordFile ~/.vnc/passwd ...

My Media System has been featured in the German magazine heise this month. The article is categorized under Praxis and has a funny image on the first page of a penguin on a stage :) Can’t wait to pick up my copy tomorrow. Edit: Add the pengiun :)

I found this interesting video today. It’s basicly just Anders Hejlsberg, Herb Sutter, Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman sitting around a table discussing future and current trends of programming languages. It touches a lot of exciting subject such as concurrency and the .Net’s ability to mix several programming languages. It was very relieving that a lot of what was taught in courses at the university where I studied is now reaching mainstream languages :)

Clever hacks of the month: zeroconf bazaar notifications about programs using xmltv

I was creating some patches for tracker today from a rather large amount of local changes which was nicely filtered together. Some source files had several independent changes that I wanted to extract and submit as a single patches instead of one big megapatch. So I looked around and found out that the OO guys have created a script to do exactly that. It takes as input a regular expression (the script is created in perl so one gets the nice regular expressions from perl) and a diff and spits out a clean diff + the rest of the changes.

So I’ve been known to rant about bzr before. I got a new machine recently and it came to my attention that it quite a pain to keep two local bazaar branches in sync. So I thought I would have a look at the new breed of revision control systems: git and bzr. My first preference was git, mainly because of what I said in my rant post. So I installed it and got my arch repository imported. I then tried to see how it handled merging of two branches. To be fair the branches have diverted quite a lot but the change was extremely simple: two identical po files where one of them has been updated. It completely fall flat on its face and I had to manually merge the changes. It also failed to find a merge point between the two revisions so I had to cherry pick changes by hand. After some more testing I tried to merge my local repo to the mms mirror using ftp. Sadly ftp is not supported so that was kind of the last drop that made me think twice about trying out bzr. ...