So I’m back in Denmark. It was very hot on that little island and it seems the heat has followed me all the way back. Anyway I have my first exam of this semester tomorrow so I haven’t been doing much else for the last couple of days than reading up on that material. I wanted to apply the no-X SDL patch (with some modifications) for mmsv2 but haven’t found the time yet. After the exam tomorrow I’ll probably get it done.
I just finished the wonderful book: A world without time by Palle Yourgrau. What I really liked about the book, other than introducing me to the work of Gödel, was the philosophical angle on the theory presented including on the relativity theory and quantum mechanics. An excellent review of the book.
I just finished reading Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society by James Boyle. It’s really an excellent book which brings up a lot of different subjects to shed more light and from new angles to the touchy subject of the property rights. The book is a bit heavy on legal terms but I managed to get through it 🙂
So I have been fixing 1.1.0 to try and get rid of enough bug so that people can actually start to test it. Currently I’m fixing the Movie plugin. I found a much better way to integrate movie playback (tv viewing) between mms and mplayer so that will be available soon. What is great about it is the tighter integration (no need to define keys for mplayer specifically, just use the mms ones) and much better performance than what was possible using the old approach (the code in current patch-118). Anyway I’ll publish it soon, it just needs a little more tweaking.
Found a list of crazy patents today. Some of them are really funny, such as the Religious Meditation Apparatus and Vehicle mounted toilet seat.
A lot of nice things has happened in the 1.0.7 branch of mmsv2. A new graphical audio mode has been implemented (screenshots) and today I finally got a chance to look into the kcachegrind tool which I mentioned in an earlier blog post. I found two major sources of performance degration and fixed them. Performance should be a lot better for image heavy stuff (pictures and graphical modes) and for large folders/playlists.
In other news Fredrik Wikström has implemented a plugin so that one can write python scripts for the next big release of mmsv2. This is really one of the coolest things anyone has contributed to mms and I’m really psyched to find out what things people will produce using it.
I’ve been watching quite a lot of movies lately and not to long ago I rated the 200th movie on imdb (yeah for nice round numbers :)). I really like imdb a lot. It’s very easy to find information about movies and the rating seems to be very fair (well at least most of the time :)). It is a lot better than what you find then looking at the cover of movie at the video store (How anyone can give Brothers Grimm 5/5 stars is really beyond my comprehension ;-)). Here you can see the ratings.
Seems my project proposal for porting mmsv2 to the ppc machine EFIKA got approved so they will be sending me one of the machines. Really looking forward to getting this device, it seems like a really nice low-powered computer.
Inspired by the profiling work on Abiword by Hubert Figuiere, I installed Kcachegrind to try and profile mmsv2. His two posts on his blog explains very well how to find and fix bottlenecks in an application. What I thought was really cool about Kcachegrind, compared to other profiling solutions I have tried, was the way it handled threads and C++ perfectly. Guess being a KDE project helps a lot in this area 🙂
I will be going to linuxforum this year. Alan Cox will be there to speak together with one of the authors of VDR. Really looking forward to it. If anyone wants to meet up please let me know by email.