The Fugue

Leonard paniq Ritter sent me a nifty patch for hearnet some time ago. I really dig it, and I finally got around to incorporating the patch and releasing a new version. Here's what paniq has to say about it:

changed code so that it uses 32-voice polyphony and plays bridges / chromatic orders.

as an effect, you get very harmonic sounds if packet sizes on a site are the same, and quite weird stuff if packet sizes vary.

Go get it and see how much cooler it sounds!

LAM is a site that aggregates music made with linux and spits it back out at you in the form of HTML, RSS (podcast), and M3U. I wrote it as an excercise in learning Ruby on Rails while reading the Pragmatic Programmers' excellent (as always) book Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide.

It was, and is, a lot of fun. More fun than I've had doing web-stuff in a very long time. But the real reason for this post is so that it will be linked from somewhere so Google will eventually pick it up and return it on a search for "linux audio music" or "music made with linux".

I've been windowshopping again, this time for mp3 players. I've decided that this is the one I want: the iRiver iFP-795. It has everything I require, and I think I would be quite happy with it. It also comes highly recommended from several friends.

Here is what I require (at least, if I'm the one shelling out the dough):

• OGG Vorbis. Most of my music is encoded in this format. Incidentally, I think I would use an mp3 player mostly for podcasts and listening to new music. The made-with-linux music scene is 75% OGG Vorbis, so this condition still holds. Plus, I want to buy from a company that does OGG.
• USB Mass Storage device. Anything else is likely to not work well in linux.
• At least 512MB. Actually 512 will probably be about perfect based on my intended use: not to store my entire music archive in and have eternal shuffle, but to give me a chance to listen to new music and podcasts during the bus commute.
• Affordable. Ok, it's not actually within my budget at the moment, but it's not insanely expensive ($130 new).

In addition to the above, here is what I really like about the 795:

• Standard AA battery
• USB 2.0
• FM Tuner and Recorder. I wonder if it's programmable; I have a tendency to forget when Car Talk comes on.
• Line-in and voice recorder. This will come in handy for recording interesting sound sources to later become Musique Concrète.
• Decent battery life (~40 hours)

iTunes does not support OGG Vorbis, which makes me sad. The qtcomponents project used to fill that gap, back in the Panther/Quicktime 6 days, but that project has not done a thing to get it working in Tiger (more accurately, Quicktime 7). More on that in a later post, probably.

So what is an OGG-lover to do? I looked for native OS X OGG players, I really did. All the links were broken, and the promising players were broken or maliciously murdered (e.g. Mint Audio) by their authors. Audion 3 turned out to be the only one that could play OGG, but it has serious stability problems, is EOL, is not libre, and is crippleware to boot. No thanks.

Once upon a time (just after getting Tiger and finding the qtcomponents OGG compenent was broken), I tried XMMS (via DarwinPorts), but XMMS didn't play. Lot of good that did. Today I decided to try again, to see if it had been fixed. Sure enough, XMMS will play (with the ESD output plugin) and happily handles OGG files. Why, I might even be able to use IMMS! (But this much optimism should be discouraged.)

When we moved to Las Cruces I ditched Qwest for telephone service, and went with standalone DSL, Asterisk, and NuFone for my phone service. The other day someone was downloading stuff from my website, using all my upload bandwidth, and my wife was trying to talk to someone on the phone. Although she could hear them just fine, they couldn't hear a thing she said because she was breaking up so bad. Thus began my quest for QoS.

Actually, I had downloaded and set up a script to do QoS that I got from the wiki, and I forgot to reconfigure it to my current bandwidth. So ironically, undoing what that script did helped just because it let me use all of my bandwidth. Then I tried to adapt the script to my current situation, and found that it didn't really work. So I went to the lartc and read up on Queueing Disciplines and tried to make my own VOIP QoS script. I spent hours on this, and although I gained a pretty good understanding of it all I never did get a script that worked well. It kind of worked, but not well enough.

This morning, I stumbled across the Wonder Shaper and decided to give it a try. If it didn't work well for VOIP at least I'd have a starting point for modifications. The results were truly wonderful. I was able to carry on a normal conversation with my mother while uploading an ISO with scp to my ISP.

The added bonus of having really great performance for other interactive applications such as ssh has really sold me on the Wonder Shaper. Even if you don't do VOIP, you should give it a try. If you have a recent kernel it's so easy to use, and has such great returns, that you would be foolish not to.

When devfs first came out, it was cool and neat, and I liked the idea of not having to wade through 1000+ entries in /dev so much that I jumped on the bandwagon. Then udev came around and devfs bashing became the popular thing to do. Eventually I was convinced of the technical merits of udev, and so converted to udev.

Or so I thought. It turns out I had never quite done that on my desktop, although I had deluded myself into thinking that I had. So when kernel 2.6.13 came around and ripped devfs out from underneath my feet, I fell flat on my back. It turns out I had not only been running devfs all along up through 2.6.12, but somewhere along the line I had lost the real, static /dev. The error I was getting was something along the lines of "Unable to open initial console."

After some head scratching, googling, and false starts, it turns out the best thing to do was to boot a rescue disk, mount the root partition, and copy over /dev. (I did rsync -a /dev/ /mnt/tmp/dev).

One of my false starts was MAKEDEV std hda hdb hdc hdd. In retrospect this should have worked, but my delusion was so complete that I thought udevd was being started at boot when indeed it was not, and only those devices were not quite enough to get me booted. At that point I lost interest in just how minimal a set of devices I needed, and copied them all over.