J5’s Blog

Christian Schaller has a post about Jokosher, a cool new multitrack audio editor.

Many musicians I know, in order to get around lugging equipment to some studio or apartment, have resorted to passing around mp3 files when writing songs. Each musician would “hold” the mp3 for a day, recording tracks over it and posting a couple of versions at the end of the day. The next musician would then take one of the recordings and layer over it, starting the process over again. In the end a song is created that is then brought to the studio and recorded in the traditional way.

What would be cool would be for this collaboration to happen in semi-realtime with each track being exported by jokosher via Fluendo’s Flumotion server or just posted to a known location. Each artist can make their own mixdown and share it as soon as it is finished, or even while it is in progress. Quality is not an issue at this point because it is just about getting ideas down when they are fresh. At the end, when parts are set, each track can be recorded by the individuals at a higher quality with the mixdown already set and in need of only minor tweaking. Final recording can happen anywhere since it essentially would be another node on this musical social network (all be it, a node with superior sound equipment and acoustic qualities).

I could even see the Creative Commons setting up a site for uploading tracks directly as they are done. Ok, so this is all a pipe dream right now with jokosher just gaining momentum, trying to become a useful multitrack recorder, but I see no harm in getting peoples creative juices flowing.

I’ve been trying to cut down on going out to eat lately. It ends up being a big expense and putting in a bit of time can really cut down on that spending. However, saving around $15 a day eating hummus, cheese and spinage pitas for lunch and noodle soup for dinner does leave something to be desired in the long run.

Tonight I was craving some spicy sausage and peppers over pasta so I went to the supermarket on my way home from work and picked up $7 worth of ingredients which made enough food for about five meals with leftover ingredients. What follows is my recipe for an easy to make sausage and pepper marinara over pasta. Measurements vary as I usually go by taste and sight.

Serving size 2

Ingredients:
1 green bell pepper
1/2 large onion or 1 small onion
3 links of spicy Italian sausage
extra virgin olive oil
minced garlic
dry Italian spice mix (basil, parsley, etc.)
red pepper flakes
black pepper
salt
1 small can of tomato sauce

Heat up a large sauce pan and coat with olive oil. Throw in the garlic and fry the sausage until both sides are seared. Don’t overcook, just cook them enough to get some oils from the sausage. Preheat the oven to broil and place the sausages in a broiling safe pan. Broil for 15 minutes. While the sausage is cooking, slice the onion and bell pepper. Put some more olive oil into the pan and throw in some more minced garlic to taste. Saute the vegetables over medium heat until they are soft. Add pepper, salt, Italian spices and red pepper flakes to taste. Saute a bit more and add the can of tomato sauce. Simmer on low heat. Start boiling a pot of water, adding salt to cook the pasta. After the sausage is done, cut them at an angle and make sure they are not too pink. A little pink is ok as they will cook longer in the sauce. Add the sausage to the simmering sauce. If you wish, pour the oil from the pan the sausages cooked in into the sauce. Serve the sauce over the pasta, adding a glass of red wine and you are good to go.

Time to make: 30 minutes and tastes as good as any restaurant I have ever been to.

WARNING: It was noted to me that it is unsafe to use a Pyrex dish in the broiler. This is because broilers heat unevenly which can cause the Pyrex dish to shatter. Use a dish that has been marked safe for use in a broiler or simply bake the sausages and adjust the timing accordingly.

D-BUS is a system for sending messages between applications. It is used both for the system wide message bus service, and as a per-user-login-session messaging facility.

Thanks to everyone who has helped. Special thanks goes out to Robert McQueen, Rob Taylor, Ricardo Kekki and Thiago Macieira who have contributed a lot to this release. Thiago Macieira is also the new maintainer of the Qt4 bindings.

As usual:

http://dbus.freedesktop.org/releases/dbus-0.61.tar.gz

Printing work is going smoothly. I was able to get PPD’s today and they integrate great with the dialog/settings work Alex is doing. Well, as good as generated UI can be. You don’t even notice it is all being done async.

I also moved out the CUPS async code so it is less dependent on GLib, though I still use glib calls and datatypes. It would be easy to move it to CUPS if anyone is interested. Basiclly a request is created that wraps a CUPS request, you add attributes to it (just like a CUPS request) and then you can step through the internal state-machine by simply calling egg_cups_request_read_write. Hook it up to a GSource (done in the backend API’s) and you are good to go.

I currently have GET and POST implemented with some of the edge cases ignored for now (we need to find a good way to upgrade connections without having to block for authentication input).

David Zeuthen posted a cool screencast of LUKS, hal, gnome-volume-manager, and gnome keyring working together to make using encrypted USB keys a breeze under GNOME. It even got a blurb on Slashdot. Why isn’t David on Planet Gnome?

Christian you have some good points but:

From the Bling (AIGLX) Page

Known Working

ATI: Radeon 7000 through 9250 (r100 and r200 generations)

Intel: i830 through i945

Occasionally / Possibly working

Intel: i810. Should work but not tested.

3dfx: voodoo3 through voodoo5. Might need NV_texture_rectangle emulation.

Known to not work
.
.
.
Anything without a free 3d driver.

So, we do support open source drivers and there are those working on drivers for newer hardware. I don’t think we will rely on 3d bling until a majority of our hardware supports 3d out of the box on Linux. We do need to make sure all of the developers don’t just run out and get working hardware to the detriment of all the other owners of the non working stuff.

What we should take from this is that developers now have a reason to getting decent 3d support on all cards where it is reasonable. Who knows, perhaps graphics card companies will start to listen and make it easy to support open source 3d drivers. The wheels are turning and we will see where they take us.