Nodal Point - blog

The Orb

2008-06-21T06:15:00Z

The Orb - мастера многослойного звука. Взять кучу сэмплов, замешать, обработать, растянуть, заскретчить и гранулировать так, что оригинал и не узнать - это их стиль.

В Таллинском Куму они отыграли очень бодрый и плотный сет, завели не только полный пьяный зал, но и трезвого меня.

А перед ними выступало открытие этого вечера - девушка-соло-аудио-видео-проект Planning to Rock. Очень органичное сочетание звука и видео меня заворожило. Рекомендую смотреть именно видеоряд со звуком.

The power of Qt

2007-11-09T07:03:00Z

For the (N+1)th time I'm praising Trolltechs and their divine wisdom.

While hacking on Skype support for Eee I ran across a feature request to make a small system tray applet to show current power management status of the Eee camera.

The words (Q)SystemTray(Icon) obviously led me to a Qt4 path - and thanks to geniuses at ASUStek Eee has Qt4.3.0 preinstalled in full glory. So 20 minutes later this little utility was born, all in Qt4, small, handy, good lookin'.

Skype 2.0 Beta for Linux: Great Social(ist) Revolution

2007-11-07T17:14:00Z

A great time is upon us. A time of change. A time of revolution.

In the past, we have struggled in a world of glass panes and fruits. Forbidden from seeing the world around us. Denied the possibility of showing who we are. But today, our eyes open. We are not afraid to see, and we are not afraid to show ourselves.

Indeed this is a time of excitement, but it’s also a time where we can share our happiness, our sadness, our anger and our love, for video has arrived to Skype for Linux.

This release is not just a revolution for us in Linux, but a revolution for the Skype world at large. No longer are we, the people of Linux - the workers of the world, prevented from socialising in the same way as our peers.

So join us in this revolution, join us by downloading Skype 2.0 Beta for Linux today.

Read on for less of my speech and more technical information about this release.

ps/ This post is courtesy of Andy, and today is 7th of November if you haven’t noticed yet.

pps/ Just a bit of known issues with video stuff:

Using uvc webcam driver with new Logitech cameras can cause a split video effect which does not recover until you restart video. [this is fixed in internal versions]
Using uvc webcam driver with ATi fglrx graphics card driver results in a memory leak and potential crash currently. [this is fixed in internal versions]
gspca webcam driver can crash sometimes during webcam initialisation (which can also happen during the call).
Using a display driver with only a single Xv port means you can only see video in one direction currently.
Using a display driver with no Xv support will not work at all.
ATi fglrx driver versions before 8.42.3 may crash your X server and lock up video during the call.
ATi fglrx driver version 8.42.3 may crash your X server and lock up video at the beginning of the call.

EeePC quicklook

2007-11-07T13:14:00Z

Quicklook is a series of small posts with first-view impressions on some things. I’m not going to post longish reviews but instead just several one line descriptions of what I noticed or stumbled upon. Sometimes with pictures.

Let’s get on.

Device looks slick and sturdy. Feels pleasanly heavyish but not heavy.

Boot up time is amazing - < 10 seconds from power on to working desktop. I had to make 3 tries to capture the eee logo screen.

Interface is nice, bright and appealing.

Keyboard has all the regular laptop keys. markings are english and chinese (looks funny, now i know how chinese keyboards look!)

Quite web oriented.

Has Skype 1.4.0.118 preinstalled.
Applications are divided into nice categories, which help finding (or losing) the proper ones.
Based on Xandros Desktop with ASUS modifications. Forked off of Debian Etch. i call it Xeeendros.
Sound quality is very good.
Camera is good even if only 0.3 Mpix. Webcam works in skype. The only tweak was to power it on: “echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera” (or enable in BIOS)
Has a mix of KDE and Gtk software preinstalled. Many of kdeedu apps are there. Default mail client is Thunderbird, but KMail can be installed from debian repos and runs fine. Akregator runs fine also :P
Device unfortunately misses bluetooth. A few solutions using USB or SD/MMC BT dongles are proposed, but would be better to have this integrated.
Available connectors: 3 USB, 1 SD/MMC, RJ-45 lan connector, D-Sub video output.
A nice helper application lets you set up output settings - to internal LCD only, to both internal and external and external only, and set resolution from autodetect up to 1280x1024.
WiFi interface is very nice, shows all available networks, AP signal strength, remembers network keys between reboots.
Battery lasts slightly over 3 hours - as specified.
MPlayer video playback is very smooth.
Touchpad became a bit stubborn after a few hours - I need to put my whole thumb on it to make it move. I personally would prefer clit - it’s nicer to use on such small device.
“Voice command” didn’t work in the office, probably because it was too noisy. at home it recognised the commands but didn’t run anything :(
Running startfull.sh from terminal window brings you into a full KDE session instead of iceWM-based AsusLauncher.
Since it’s basically Debian you can install millions of available programs with ease (but beware: some packages may break your system because of wrong dependancies, read eee wiki to know more), yet small 4Gb solid-state disk with only 1,5Gb free doesn’t leave much choice.

Conclusion.

wow factor: high
overall rating: 95% qoolies

DevDays aftermath

2007-10-17T21:46:00Z

Here I am sitting in super-nice small hotel in the center of Munich, taking a short rest after the DevDays before flying back to Tallinn.

It has been an insane two days, packed with meeting new people from all over the Earth and consuming knowledge Trolls have to offer. And they got quite a lot.

I've met in person a lot of Trolls and all I can say they are amazing people. It was extreme pleasure to see them on stage, talking with a real passion about the things they know and love - Qt, Qtopia and life in general.

There is tremendous amount of interest in Qt from a lot of developers from all areas - from microcomputers to space, from medicine to construction, from seismic research to business solutions. In my estimation there was about 500 people writing or maintaining Qt programs for a living. Somebody said there are not too many Qt applications out there. Well, they didn't bother to look. Maybe a TMR scanner in a medical facility nearby you runs Qt, how do you know?

Trolltech's commitment to developing Qt is so big, that I'm completely smashed and totally happy for choosing Qt for working on Skype for Linux. And more interesting things are only ahead.

I've also met my outstanding goal - to finally see some KDE developers I've known for long on the IRC but never managed to talk to in person. You guys are absolutely awesome.
While roaming around with a bottle of wine, I stumbled into Matthias Kretz sitting doing some Phonon debugging, so we sat together and shaped an API for VOIP and real-time audio applications in Phonon. With Torsten Rahn talked a bit about Marble and Google. This kind of meetings is really facilitating and I hope to have more chances to see them all more frequently in the near future.

My special "thank you" for inspiration to Aaron Seigo, the Man behind, above, below and in front of KDE. I even went to his talk two times in a row. Good job and have more working examples at hand!

DevDays ahoy

2007-10-14T12:15:00Z

Looks like there is literally A LOT of Qt and KDE people going to Munich and I'm already lost how am I going to see and talk to all of them in just two days, given that I'm pretty antisocial person (especially in autumn).

Probably I shall abandon sleep (mine and theirs) and go through these two days with lots of Red Bull, Red Eyes and popping blood vessels.

To all KDE and Qt folks I might virtually know (or not) - do not hesitate to come over and talk to me. While I'm myself too shy to talk to strangers usually, I'd be really glad if I could communicate a bit with everyone. (It's a real shame I didn't manage to go to aKademy this year! So consider DevDays a small replacement for it.)

Viva Trolls

2007-09-25T20:12:00Z

Worked yesterday and today on extremely nasty deadlock on D-BUS.

Even though I don't like D-BUS (and this I am saying lightly), I spent whole night testing this issue and came up with a test program that reproduced the case sensibly. Then I turned to Trolltech for help and Thiago was extremely helpful in diagnosing the problem and providing hints on proper solution. Thank you very much Thiago!

Also Trolls were so nice to send me a fresh Russian translation of their "C++ programming with Qt4" book by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield. Thank you guys, I'll sure enjoy (proof)reading it :)

Progress! What? Progress!

2007-09-20T18:42:00Z

Today I sweeped the last pack of bugs on our way towards the golden 1.4 client. This includes several crashes when using public API and some audio fixes.

Tomorrow I expect to go through a list of not-so-critical-but-nevertheless-nice-to-have-fixed bugs and fix some just for fun.

It will take some time for testing and maybe a couple iterations of "fixing the fixes" before we put this 1.4 out, but gosh it's close!

Comments posting reinstated

2007-09-14T22:35:00Z

Just a notice that comment posting can be done again.

Turned out to be a very weird caching issue in Mephisto vs. Apache.
Comments section still needs some more love and CSS work.

I also resurrected some of the old RSS feeds, so they should be reachable for older configured clients.

Ruin my dream, start a new hope

2007-09-14T21:48:00Z

Well, the widget I wanted to write for KDE4 to hone my skills was already written (and it seems it was written one of the first, just right after the ubiquitous clock applet :)) - it was a Twitter widget of course.

Now I'm still in this stubborn state, asking myself how do I start writing KDE4 code.
I can't think of anything. (q) Fight Club

Somebody, push me to set KDE4 as default environment.

Progress? What progress?

2007-09-14T21:38:00Z

This week I did for Skype: nearly nothing. My coughing is still bad but I might be getting better (just to get worse again).

We started a fancy side project to radically improve Skype UI. Can't tell you how much better it will become (I just don't know yet!).

After Trolls left, I've been mostly sleeping, but it seems that I'm going to Trolltech devdays - if you want to come and smash a huge white creamy cake into my face or just talk about some Qt and Skype stuff - I'll be waiting for you in Munich this October ;)

And, erm, The Gold Release - it's some day Real Soon Now(tm).

Trollhelp

2007-09-11T17:14:00Z

Last two days've been full of hacking and testing.

Two folks from Trolltech came to our office to give us some assistance with Skype and Qt4. We spent wonderful two days hacking and actually managed to achieve our goals!

Soon I'll dive into finishing and polishing what we did. Hopefully, it will not take too long time for you to see it.

I hope to see more trolls during the DevDays in Munich this October.

Kinetic scrolling in Qt?

2007-09-08T12:35:00Z

Can't be easier!

Copied from Kenneth Christiansen python demo of kinetic scrolling, here goes a Qt4 port. Very simple, and it works.

The unfinished thing, so called "magnetic scroll" which is ought to align topmost item with the top of the listview, is not working yet, due to differences between e17 and Qt coordinates handling. It's not a big deal per se, just my legendary lazyness works hard again.

Burner feeds

2007-09-07T18:24:00Z

If you had read this blog from an aggregator and noticed that the feed links are dead - I'm sorry, but I'm too busy to provide legacy links, so please use FeedBurner feeds mentioned in this post to read my blog in aggregation. I promise, I will update them if anything else changes here :)

Another thing is that comments work somewhat flakey - I myself wasn't able to post a comment, yet a couple of people managed to do it. Again, I don't have time and spare serotonin to mess with it right now, so don't be upset if some of your comments will not be answered for a while. And save your comments text before posting, as it can all go wry. I'm looking into fixing this as soon as possible.

Towards world domination

2007-09-07T16:40:00Z

Converting skype to not use libsigc++ was indeed easy with the first, simpler, approach. Polling code now works, skype runs, and I have a slight feeling it eats a little bit less cpu when idle. Must be my imagination.

Since it's Friday, instead of working on my bugfixes pipeline I ventured into uncharted territory of Qt for Windows and compiling with Microsoft compiler. Qt itself builds and works fine, but I want to build Skype with it. I started cleaning up my code, commenting out pieces that are too hard to rewrite correctly for gcc and msc this time, marking other things that need to be changed and went on into about a quarter of my source code. Then I hit some more complex things and left this excercise for later. I'm looking a Windows programming specialist around the office, so we can sit and go through the hoops together.

Now I'm going to sketch some ideas for future Skype UI, I'm sure it's gonna be more than just fun.

Oh, and mushroom soup was excellent. Thanks.