Halt Condition

Fun things with an iAudio M3

I meant to get back into some Lisp hacking this Sunday but got distracted with fiddling with my new MP3 (and more importantly, OGG) player. Some useful discoveries:

• You can export playlists from Amarok to the player as long as your directory structure are similar. This can include playlists generated from Amarok’s various dynamic playlists (e.g. last.fm suggestions). Just dump the M3U file to the ‘playlist’ directory.
• You can hack the startup animation. iAudio even provide a utility to convert GIF animations to their bitmap format. This means I’ve finally managed to replace that break-dancing idiot on startup. I may reverse-engineer the format if I find I want to generate my own files.
• If your ISP provides unmetered radio streams you can use StreamRipper to record a night’s worth of audio and then upload it in the morning for some fresh tunes on the way to work/classes/whatever. There are two methods of doing this; rip to individual files or rip to a single. I prefer ripping to individual tracks with a sequence number so I can skip ones I don’t like or have heard before. You can use something like FAPG to generate matching playlists. Think Tivo for internet radio. This will probably work in other players too.
• It’s possible to flash the firmware from Linux, but you have to get hold of it first. The Cowon site firmware downloads are some sort of dotNet cabineted exe monstrosity, but you can get zipped .bin files from iAudio.com. The latest appears to be 1.38. The bin is dropped into the ‘firmware’ directory on the drive and the unit is rebooted with the power-cable connected but the USB disconnected. This triggers the upgrade. Works for me.
• The unit re-indexes the drive contents in some manner (possibly to flash) when connected and disconnected from USB. This speeds up file browsing (presumably) at the cost of a slower startup after disconnect. However it also appears to lose ‘resume’ information from the last run.

Solaris 10 on Vmware

After some messing about with virtual machines, DVD drives and MP3 players (don’t ask) I’ve got Solaris 10 installed on Vmware:

The main thing I wanted to have a look at was dtrace, but I’m spending a little time getting used to the package system, in particular the freeware packages. It also took some fighting to get X11 and the “Java Desktop” (AKA an ancient version of Gnome) working though.

The main issues was Solaris set the Xorg driver to ‘vga’ during setup, which broke on reboot (as the vga driver can’t handle 24 bit). The fix was to set it to ‘vesa’ and up the resolution.

It also turns out adding a user in Solaris is a right pain.

GCC optimisations run-down

Ximian monkey and all-round uber-hacker Robert Love has a run-down on the use of GCC-specific optimization flags: http://rlove.org/log/2005102601

Note however that compiler optimisations are relatively weak compared to profiling and generally thinking harder.

3D! Paper!

http://3dpapermodel.w-web.com/3dpms/

I wonder if you could algorithmically convert these into 3D models …

Illusion

Haven’t seen this one before …

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

Friday

Hoping to finally get some Shutup hacking done today.

App of the Day: Amarok

I generally agree with Gnome’s “Keep it simple, stupid” philosophy but some things don’t fit with that, and music players are one of those things. Plus it has a ‘Now playing’ script that generates images:

Talking of my router machine …

The drive was giving errors so I replaced it. This required using a second machine as a surrogate power-supply for the temporary installation cdrom. Don’t try this at home kids:

MRTG and the Billion 5102s

As part of my upgrade to ADSL2+ I got a Billion 5102s modem. This is basically the cheapest one available, and is woefully underpowered for router work, but as I already have a dedicated router machine this doesn’t matter as I can just run it in dumb bridged mode.

One cool aspect of the modem is its SNMP support. This allows me to use MRTG to generate graphs of the traffic; the resulting config is here.

More software

Xara Xtreme is being GPL’d and ported to Linux and the Mac. Apparently they also want to work with the Inkscape people.

One thing that interests me is that they claim to have a blazingly fast vector rendering engine, so that may make an interesting backend to Cairo.

Odd software for the day …

Tilda:

Tilda is a Linux terminal taking after the likeness of many classic terminals from first person shooter games, Quake, Doom and Half-Life to name a few, where the terminal has no border and is hidden from the desktop till a key or keys is hit.