March 2005 Archives

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March 25, 2005

Current work

Well for now I have given up on integrating the mozilla plugin in a clean way into our contrib system on OSX. M-audio have sent me a Sonica Theather USB device. I have been rewriting the OS X Coreaudio plugin we have now, to work better with the large number of devices out there in the world. I'm using an Audio Output Unit for HAL devices for analog output now, which will hopefully improve VLCs functionality.
There are some other great things coming to VLC very soon (such as sounds and images, OSD menu, Screenshots, PictureInPicture ), but hopefully we will finally think about a new release, cause it really has been to long.

Will be going to my parents this weekend. Show my parents the ibook. Hopefully i'll get a bit more work done, cause the list is long (hell I have a laptop now, should be easier :D )

Posted by The DJ at 01:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Random

March 16, 2005

"Please mummy, make it go away!", the distressed child said

It seems the Australian Actor's Guild doesn't think much of the concept of sharing. A company called MOD films had asked permission to release work of several their actors under a Some Rights Reserved Creative Commonse License. Apparently they are very afraid for the concept of Some Rights, because the actors had all agreed to take part in this experiment and new about the consequences of the project. The guild however forbid their actors to participate. I'm guessing some people will just not accept that a new form of Freedom is coming and they are afraid to loose their power or something.

See also: Boing Boing: Aussie actors' guild forbids members to use Creative Commons

Posted by The DJ at 03:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Technology

March 13, 2005

The blatent ripoff that is CherryOS

As if software patents in europe aren't bad enough, this week Cherry OS went to the market with their blatent rip from the PearPC project (among others). You can read about it here.
It's a shame that relatively small companies try to get away with making money over the backs of volunteers and hobbyists.

Posted by The DJ at 01:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Open Source

March 08, 2005

mozilla plugin for VLC

So I have been spending the entire afternoon trying to get the OS X mozilla plugin working again. The biggest problem here is that there simply is no gecko-sdk for Mac OS X atm. So instead I have been trying to build my own. It's not an easy task, I can tell you that. It would definetly help if mozilla could just distribute a valid Mac OS X 10.2 SDK.

This posting has helped a lot though.
http://www.iosart.com/firefox/gecko-sdk-macosx/

Anyways, this didn't seem to work at first. After much searching I realized that this SDK was incomplete of course. To build a plugin, you not only need xpcom, but also plugin support.
The folks in #mozilla@irc.mozilla.org pointed me at this module list: http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/tools/module-deps/all.dot

So changing the line to --enable-standalone-modules=xpcom,plugin should do the trick hopefully, and generate a sleek install of the mozilla tree.

I will let the current complete mozilla build finish first and package the sdk though. Might never know if it will come in handy.

UPDATE:
OK, I tried 1.7 trough 1.8b1 of the mozilla releases with --enable-standalone-modules=xpcom,plugin, and all builds fail with
[4]: *** No rule to make target `../../dist/lib/libmozreg_s.a', needed by `libxpcom_compat.dylib'. Stop.

Ergo with this configure line, I apparently get a dependency on libreg. I tried adding libreg to the standalone modules, but apparently libreg starts compiling a slew of other stuff, including chrome, which i have no use for whatsoever.

1.6 ends with:
c++ -I/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/include -no-cpp-precomp -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wconversion -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -Wno-long-long -I/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/include -no-cpp-precomp -fpascal-strings -no-cpp-precomp -fno-common -fshort-wchar -I/Developer/Headers/FlatCarbon -F/System/Library/Frameworks -pipe -DDEBUG -D_DEBUG -DDEBUG_pjotr -DTRACING -g -fPIC -arch ppc -o libembedcomponents.dylib nsModule.o nsPrompt.o nsWWJSUtils.o nsWindowWatcher.o nsDialogParamBlock.o nsPromptService.o nsAppStartupNotifier.o nsWebBrowserFind.o nsFind.o nsWebBrowserPersist.o nsBaseCommandController.o nsCommandGroup.o nsCommandManager.o nsCommandParams.o nsControllerCommandTable.o nsPrintingPromptService.o nsPrintProgressParams.o nsPrintProgress.o nsJSConsoleService.o nsProfileSharingSetup.o -L/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/lib -L../../../dist/bin -L../../../dist/lib -lgkgfx ../../../dist/lib/libunicharutil_s.a -L../../../dist/bin -lxpcom -L../../../dist/bin -L/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/src/mozilla/dist/lib -lplds4 -lplc4 -lnspr4 -L/Volumes/Genitus/pjotr/Development/vlc/extras/contrib/lib -lpthread -L../../../dist/bin -lmozjs -framework Carbon /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Carbon -bundle -lm
ld: can't locate file for: -lgkgfx
make[4]: *** [libembedcomponents.dylib] Error 1

Posted by The DJ at 08:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in VideoLAN

March 07, 2005

Yet Another Failure

IDIOTS. The reps really fell for the excuse? Come on. 4 countries tell their EU reps to vote NO, and they still vote YES. This is redicilous. I'm not gonna start on wether patents and shit are good or wrong, but what has just happened in the European Council defies all my ideas of a democratic and unified Europe.

FFII pressrelease
More News

Posted by The DJ at 02:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Open Source

March 05, 2005

I book

Wednesday the 2nd of march I finally received my iBook. I'm posting this from it right now. It took me a long time, but I finally ported all my required data from the old G4/400. The old machine is now disconnected and removed from my room. I have to say the experience has been great so far. The ibook is just an amazing machine. I do really need to get that extra memory though. Switching apps or windows can sometimes take a lot of time. I'm guessing the extra memory will give it quite a speed improvement (i saw what it did to my older G4/400 and I suspect similar results with the ibook).

As a dynamic IP user I ran into several problems though. For instance WLAN simply disconnects sometime and of course the machine goes to sleep sooner than i was used to. This makes my ssh connection fall out regurly. Since my server contains my screen sessions with the shells to all my servers that i have accesss to, and also contains my irssi session, this can be quite annoying.
I installed SSHKeyChain to prevent me from having to reenter my ssh key everytime when i log back into the server. This was getting quite annoying as you might imagine. When you set SSHKeyChain to only show a menubaritem and launch it at boot, it's quite unobtrusive. I have come to enjoy it.

Another issue is that I host all my mp3's, movies and series on my linux server (I can't afford more than 1 mac :) ) On my old static ip workstation, I used to connect to my server trough NFS. It was more reliable than AFS, SMB or FTP and the speed was fenominal. Now with the dynamic IP, I have a problem with applying access restrictions to the NFS share... I haven't quite decided yet how I will solve this.

The next issue is mail relay. My server has exim, and I had allowed my server machine relaying for the static ip's of my workstations. Off course this isn't a good solution now. I guess I will have to build exim with authentication support, but that might have to wait a tad at the moment.

I also installed gentoo on the iBook. Immediatly I know again why ppl think installing linux can be hell. But it will be good to test VLC on ppc linux once in a while. Perhaps I will not keep the linux install, but at the moment I have room plenty on the machine, so when I run out of that, I might delete it of course.

Last thing that his me thinking is all the cables I need to hook it up to my home setup. I have a 19" CRT monitor, and it really is much nicer to use that one if it's there anyways. Audio on my stereo is also nice, and 100Mbps as well if you are watching a movie. So I have a total of 5 cables that can be hooked up to my ibook and they all hang on the backside of my desk. I need something to keep them from falling down when they aren't connected :)

Posted by The DJ at 11:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Random

March 01, 2005

Pardon me?

So you wake up and you think you live in a continent that is democratic and sensible. Well guess again.

This is getting redicilious we now have:
1: a patent vs. non patent issue.
2: a directive that has been rewritten so much over 4 years that it's a joke
3: a directive that was accepted in the EC undemocraticly, cause Denmark never actually accepted it.
4: a power struggle between European parliament and the European Commission

What the hell happend? Has everyone gone beserk?
And with the current outsourcing we are really cutting into our own foot. Korea/Japan took over our consumer hardware innovation for a large part. Do we really think we can keep software innovation to ourselves? With this directive we are driving innovators out of Europe if anything.

Posted by The DJ at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Posted in Technology