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Ubuntu sound

This evening I downloaded the asterisk @ home vmware file. You just run it in your free vmware player (not opensource (yet)), point your nice firefox to the admin module and install the extra features, setup your extensions, conference rooms and off you go! Its much easier than setting it up on a xen debian, no editing in config files. You’ld prolly still want to know how his works but this asterisk @ home project has really made setting up a voip server easy!!

So I wanted to connect my ekiga to the voip but because I was already running skype I got problems with my sound. The friendly folks over at #ekiga on gimpnet point me to this wiki entry. Now I did create the .asoundrc file but when I moved it to another file everything still kept working. I rather suspect that you only have to modify the ekiga in and output, so setting them to default should have done the trick. I found out that I actually have to move the file otherwise the multisound doesn’t work!

I wanted to try the sounds together, so I wanted to fire up xmms, but hmm that’s so old school, right?! Well I’m pro-mono and I know Aaron is doing one hell of a job at the banshee project. As I understand it, it will be the first opensource (gnome)application that can ship with the mp3 codec build in. They didn’t use the one of the gpl version and therefor they could ship it. What really caught my eye was the speed at witch in loads the mp3z from my harddisk. When I clicked the same folder in rythmbox the app didn’t react, banshee show a nice progressbar and I could still move the window. I don’t know why, but it seems that the sound quality between xmms and banshee is also totally different. Banshee sounds much purer, don’t know if that souds normal, I’ve asked it on the channel but haven’t got any answers yet. The guys over at novell are realling going fast, they have produced some really amazing appz in a very short period of time (banshee,beagle,f-spot,… and diva is coming, WOOT!!) I’m a happy (mono) camper!!
The guys over at #mono doubted that this was actually possible, but hey I konw what I’m hearing.

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Web standards can save your business money

As I blogged earlier, I’m reading kernel development. Now for a day job, I’m creating a web application using some java frameworks. As view layer jsp was chosen. Now I had to start from the existing application, so I cleaned the html using dreamweaver and put all the display in 1 CSS file.

Now my project is going live on monday and I’ve tested all the functionality and everything should be okay. So I started reading designing with webstandards. I’ve already read +100 pages in it. It’s really a good book and reads very nicely. I recommend it to everybody who does web development. The author made a very nice point. He was explaining the fact that if you use webstandards, you split your design in to html/xml/xhtlm and CSS. Because your html/xml/xhtml is only content and no layout it gets much smaller thus less bandwith has to be used. Your css is mostly cached by the browser so this doesn’t get send on every visit. Big deal well actually yes. Imagine you have a site that gets 100.000 request a day. You prolly have a contract with your ISP for X Gig of traffic, now imagine every page would be 80 k, that would result in 7,812 Gig of transfer okay that’s not that much but imagine your google and you would have to pay for transfer (I doubt they have to). The get millions and millions requests a day. If you could decrease your page size to 40 k. You would have half the transfer. So instead of 200 Gig you would have 100 Gig. Now that suddenly is a lot and could save your company a big sum of money.

Another good point he made was ‘ffcourse compliance and portability. If you’re using webstandards, chances are your site isn’t that bad on portable devices, screenscrapers,… So imagine in the future your boss wants to have his site available from a smart phone or pda. If you wrote your web tier web standards compliant it should work out of the box. By work I mean, all the functionality should be available. Another investment saved.

And yet another point (this time I heared in on a podcast) if you use web standards, your site should be accessible to blind people. A thing I never really thought off. But those people to use computers. Just imagine if a blind person should go to a site thats fully done in flash, its utterly useless to him. I’m not sure, but I suppose a site that has a lot of markup and isn’t a valid xhtml isn’t going to look good on his interpreter (don’t know the exact word, sorry). On the same issue they also explained that AJAX is nice, but again for the blind people it renders a page useless. I haven’t looked into this yet, it could be that the AJAX triggers and results do get displayed to the user, so I’m not going discuss it, but it surelly makes you reflect your decisions when designing a website

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Kernel development

As I already mentioned a couple of times, I’m reading up on the kernel development book of R. Love. In the past I didn’t spend that much time at looking into the kernel itself. Okay I knew there were great enhancements and stuff like that. But Now I’ve finished the part about, memory allocation for user space, IO, Process scheduler and a couple of others. I have to say (again) that It has opened my eyes. I feel like taking the blue pill 😀

When I was reading up on the IO, more precise the elevator design. For those of you who may not now this design, its quite simple. Because IO is one of the slowest parts from an application the kernel has an good design for handling seeks. If a process requests data from one sector the hard disks arm will go to that position and read it. Now another process could get a timeslice and request another read somewhere totally different. Instead of moving the arm again, it waits for a couple of seconds (as I understand, the kernel doesn’t really issue the request, but maybe I’m wrong here). If there comes another request for more data, it I’ll first handle that request and then handle the next requests. I do have to admit then there are parts where my common C knowledge isn’t sufficient, but I also ordered a book for C programming. After I’ve finished it, I’ll start my other book of kernel development and then prolly reread roberts book.

So I’ve you really want be blazed of your feet read it. This book is also perfect for the programmers/admins in your department who think they know everything. Give them this book and then do a pop quiz on them, we’ll see who laughs last 😀

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http://www.podzinger.com/ –> google for podcasts

Yesterday evening I was watching the latest episode of hak5. They had an interview with the guys from podzinger. Podzinger is actually a nice concept, its an online search engine for vidcasts en podcasts. From what I understood they parse podcasts and vidcasts trough an speech recognition soft that afterwards indexes the cast.

I found software enginering radio using it. That podcast seems like the idea I had in mind, so after work downloading and burning it to cd. Nice radio in the car during my comute to work 🙂

I hope some of my readers will find it as usefull as I do.

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Nice mysql review

Tweakers has a nice article on opteron vs xeon, single core vs dual core and what I find most interesting mysql 4 against mysql 5. The results are really amazing if you ask me!! A user of mysql just has to read this, really I mean it read it. Surely if you’re wondering if mysql can compete with an oracle, or you think your business should be running Oracle. Just ask yourself the question if you’re really gonna do +1000 queries a second.

Happy reading 🙂

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First sip conversation on my asterisk box

Yesterday evening pvanhoof was so friendly to join me in a friendly voip session. We used my asterisk setup in a xen environment. First we had some problems with connecting and after some small audio issues everything worked. We were both using Ekiga, I also tried xten lite but the audio wasn’t that clear maybe after some tweaking it would have worked. But my preference goes out to Ekiga because its opensource and the maintainer is belgium. The little patriot in me 😀

Pvanhoof also found out why I got those strange errors when I used lsmod and everything that had something todo with kernel modules. My thougts were that it was a xen problem, after pvanhoof searched a bit he found on kerneltrap that the problem was the package module-init-tools it wasn’t installed. So now that’s fixed 2. Still have to install the ztdummy module but it seems you have to compile this from source, so now I’m looking for the 2.6.12.6-xenU kernel headers. So this weekend will become a googling eastern for me 😀

If you would like to give my asterisk box a go, just ping me and I’ll be happy to setup an extension for you! And if I get the meetme up and running I’ll start a conference call with all the extensions 😀

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Asterisk

I’ve been very busy lately, but fortunately the soccer season has come to an end and I’ve got some more time.

Well I’ve managed to get an asterisk server up and running in our xen machine. Almost that is, person 2 person and mailbox are working but I’ve got a problem with the conference setup. I always get that darn Zaptel error, that in combination with running a xen vm and therefor a custom kernel isn’t what I’ld call a ideal setup, but I’ll manage. 😀

If there are people out there who have already done such a setup, give me call out what you did to fix it. If there are people reading this who have done this and connected the asterisk pbx with a real phone line (for Belgium) provided by a third party (packetnet or something) please leave a note, I’m looking into the available providers for this kind of service. I haven’t found that many I must say and all extra information would be great. On the other hand, I could also connect an ordinay pstn (at my home) to a local asterisk setup and all problems would be gone :), hmmm, neah, try to fix the xen setup.

I’ll keep you posted how its going.

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opensource movie released

As mentioned over at tweakers, the first fully opensource movie has been released. With opensource we mean, it is released under the creative commons license and it is created using opensource tools (mainly blender). I ordered my copy already, so go over there and support opensource software 🙂
If you still have time, read up on the history of blender, its actually a nice story about the power of a community.

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Software patents kinda suck

Today in the car I had a funny thought, justed wanted to share it with the world 🙂

I was listening to an old javaposse podcast, they were talking about creative’s patent and how they were going after apple with thei r Ipod.
Now okay, I know software pantents can be good in some situations, but it’s really getting out of hand in the US.
I was thinking about how pantents would effect other sectors.

Just imagine it, patents in soccer or basketball or any other sport. I would just destroy it. You wanted to fool you opponent with a trick and you just happend to use a trick somebody had pattented, you were into a lot of trouble. Every game would be analysed and all the good players would have to give up all of their money because the used a lot of tricks they had seen on tv when they were a child.

Okay, I know I’m being stupid and silly, but hey just look at what everybody’s doing with the patents at the moment. Its really getting out of hand if you ask me. I really wonder how all of this is going to end.

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audio vs video

A couple a days ago I was talking to freax about doing a vidcast. why, well it sounded great but also because I want to give something back to the community. I had the idea of doing a podcast about programming, not the things you see on most of the show but actually going rather deep into it.
Some of the ideas about subjects I head were ie doing a podcast on hibernate, so not just telling you what it is but showing you in an IDE an example and building a real world example I would be using on my own website/intranet.
Another Idea was to build an application using a Service Oriented Architecture. And then show some of the benefits that came from doing it this way.
I wanted freax to join and tell his stories about using design patterns in C. Showing some of the neat tricks he used in his day to day work.

While I was explaining this to him, he told me someone had asked him to write a book about design patterns in C. Now a book sounds great, and looks good on your CV, but then I told him, imagine Robert Love had not written his book on kernel programming, but made an iptv show on it. Okay it would have taken several hours but you can do so much more with visual things and movement than static content.

Today I read werners blog, he had a nice comparison chart in there of how much you learn from several mediums. Now in this chart audio/video are the same, but for me that’s certainly not true. My mind more easily stores visual information than audio information.

I’m still thinking about doing such an iptv show, but haven’t got the details figured out yet. I think the release time would be every month or so. But If I start this I want to have a schedule planned out for at least 10 episodes. I’m still thinking about good subjects. Java,Mono and C are already in there, but what precise subject I haven’t figured out yet.