Alive, hopefully

You may wonder what I’m doing since has been a long time since the latest blog item, well I was busy trying to do too many thing, searching, traveling and so on.

Here a summary:

– I eventually released feng as you can see on http://live.polito.it
That involved getting the website up, writing lots of documentation (that hopefully someone will read), hacking the code to be in the right shape and making the whole bundle bearable for people with less understanding of autotools and dependencies… I hope the first release isn’t that ugly and I thank dario and alessandro for their help =)

– The ffmpeg bug tracker is taking shape eventually, hacking roundup isn’t the simplest thing in the world
mostly because examples and alternate templates aren’t available; the documentation saves the day most of the times anyway. you may see it on https://roundup.mplayerhq.hu/roundup/ffmpeg/

– On the cell side I started hacking a bit the build system in order to have it working for me (using gentoo, standard paths and stock gcc toolchain) and for the ones that are using the IBM sdk/fedora (bogus paths, shortened prefixes) I hope the people in charge of deciding what would be the standard for writing and running spu code would provide a sane default. Hopefully one I’ll have more time I’ll start writing something on my own, so far I’m just testing pathes and contributions by others ^^;

– the vorbis and theora rfc are proceedings and currently feng and gst are interoperable, I hope to complete the standardization and move to something else, it’s taking too much!

– my altivec work on cairo is still on hold, I hope to get enough time to push an update (since the ibm/sony mathlib has an implementation of vector integer division I could rip it and add some more vector ops in pixman).

– the SoC with ffmpeg has already started, so far I’m receiving some good feedbacks from my student and I’m trying to find the time to reread the dirac spec in order to follow him better.

That’s more or less all, the keyword of the whole document is TIME, lately the lscube involvement took a bit too much mostly because you cannot manage the time well if you have your plans spoiled every by unexpected priorities appearing out of the blue.

Another reason to be ashamed of being Italian

Please have a look at this

Click to access protocollo_microsoft.pdf

If you don’t know Italian isn’t a problem since it isn’t even written in proper Italian.

Summary for this trash: Microsoft got a cofinancing in order to plant 3 new centers in certain cities of Italy (that also happen to be the ones in which you have active open source centers for innovations), the government grants some founds and Microsoft adds 1M$ in 3 years(in software licenses and other non-cash stuff like that). Note Microsoft receives at least 1000 times from the Italian public administration every year (the yearly cost of Microsoft licenses).

Why IBM, Canonical or even Novel won’t start making such deals?

Miguel, XUL is there…

Everybody and your dog knows that microsoft tried to rerelease ActiveX with a cool name and trying to play again the .NET card over it to make it look less stale. Miguel obviously got another dose of crack^W^W^W of optimism and tried to find something good in something that should be shot on start, well, restart.

He said that Silverlight will be something useful and 1/5 sites will use it in few years. Well I have lots of fun with standard tecnologies: javascript, SVG, HTML5 and so on…

Now, if you want richer applications there is something that binds everything together it’s called XUL, works EVERYWHERE (hi, minimo) it’s quite documented, mature, has an opensource implementation and a compact runtime (xulrunner).

and Oh, btw it has already more than the 1/10 of the market share and is steadly growing…

Now if we got a standard multimedia framework (maybe based on RTP, RTSP, codecs like Dirac, snow or vorbis) in the mix I think we are completely done, isn’t it?

Misc updates again

I spent much of my time trying to get the whole LScube project more alive, so far it’s just a slow start:

I moved the development to git ( https://live.polito.it/gitweb ) and now I’m trying to update the website to a newer drupal and with more documentation. Since the forums are just a spam magnet I guess I’ll nuke them, if you want to contact us just use irc or email =P

I put the efika in use to stress test the streaming server, you can watch

rtsp://130.192.86.166/tc.mov

or

rtsp://130.192.86.166/ed.mov

(both streams are h264+mp3, not many clients could handle that… Yet)

Hopefully a Feng release will appear soon.

That’s for the streaming stuff.

Now, I have a ps3 working and eventually managed to configure and install it, I already found something itchy: git’s ppcsha1+64ul == KaBOOM, I hope it’s just due my test with bleeding edge compilers but I’m afraid not. So far I’m quite impressed by the ps3, just a pity I’m slow in doing something nice there…

More will follow

lu

something new, well not so much

Just a quick update :

– got the ps3 running and well, I must say that its quite cool
– got swamped in many other things and so I’m slowly configuring my network to get the ps3 on, in the process I managed to brick my first access point (a belkin that now I’ll have to hack a bit to recover if possibile…)
– the lscube tasks are proceding nicely, currently we eventually ironed out some bugs due mp3 and the compositing layer, for the ones not following: I’m working on a new streaming server called Feng, currently it streams h264 and mp3 and let you either just point an url to a container and automagically provide a sdp or, more interesting, let you define a special editlist so you can just provide a simple textfile with the files and the start and stop time and have aggregated streams on the fly, pretty interesting if we manage to complete it and then make it usable =)
– I still have to fix B frames support in h264 and then move on improving those framers or eventually implement vorbis and theora, the gst crew beat me at it but I’d like to be at least a close second ^^;
– I hope to cleanup the roundup setup and the site restyle for lscube soonish once the previous task got addressed since I’d like to get more people involved and the current framework still has some rough edges…

– I’ll start probably hacking on the bfin due a course I’m attending, I cannot say I really like the arch since is a bit irregular, still much nicer than x86 (expect ffmpeg patches about it soon^^)

– last but not least I have my laptop eventually back!

that said I guess you may know why I’m not much reactive on bugs (I promise I’ll try at least the blender ebuild and to provide updates to ffmpeg and mplayer ones during the week end) and I less than lively…

PS: Cocoa programming isn’t that nice…

Drive failure, ps3, other news…

It was quite a busy week, we (me and dario) eventually end up gaining full access to our lab and got all the duties our previous mentor and colleagues had at lscube.

We had been at ONU for our first webcast in Geneva. The place was quite nice and the people were absolutely great =). Once we got back in Italy we spend some time preparing the feed for storage and preparing a new release for fenice (did we tell the 1.12 was the last? well not really since felix was missing….) and felix, the live feeder.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll set up everything for a proper release and then move to fenice-ng or fe.ng and libnemesi, while we were travelling I eventually fixed the h264 packetizer so now fe.ng can stream h264 and mp3 correctly =) Once I get also libnemesi supporting it I’ll do at least as rc snapshot. Dario worked quite hard to improve the scheduler in order not to choke on certain bad behaviours from a certain well known client…

Now I have a big news: I eventually got a ps3 =) It is japanese model sony graciously lent me for a while ^^ Sadly the label on says 100V~3.8A 50/60Hz and that means that I have to get a voltage converter… Luckily Geert pointed me a nice german shop with good prices, http://www.thiecom.de, I hope what I ordered (correcting at the last minute a product mismatch, I hope the order change email reached otherwise I’d get a 110to220 that is exactly the opposite I need…) will arrive next week since I want to check myself the new livecd and maybe complete the step by step docs.

I eventually complete the fbcompose altivectorization in cairo (check the mailing list for the patch) and hopefully now there is enough to start benchmarking it…

Now the sad news: my Alubook hd died, I’m trying to recover as much as possible and then send it for repair (this time I have a full applecare and I’m going to use fully ^^ ), so I won’t as much available as I was before for more or less 2-3 weeks, hopefully.

I guess that’s more or less all.

efika – eventually!

I got my efika long ago, just today I managed to get a null modem cable in order to start hacking on it.

So far I got some problems with the serial port on the pegII and nfs-utils not building but beside that everything went smooth.

Now I have a working setup, soonish I’ll do a disk install and then I’ll start doing something more or less interesting ^^

lu

Praise to firefox (or blame cairo, or praise cairo)

Lately I start getting firefox feeling quite slow, well sluggish from version to version. Today I started a discussion about that with Anarchy and nenolod, in 5 min we found out that the faulty lib was cairo and that the newer cairo snapshot makes things blazing fast again.

In short that is an apology to the firefox devs (and Anarchy) for thinking they are messing things up, a praise for the new cairo and a blame for the current stable one (once Cardoe’s wii addiction fades out probably we’ll have an updated ebuild to get the speedup)

PS:note even if you are fine with the current stable, the cairo .6 is quite suggested if you use boxes with different endianess and X over ssh ^^

Building on/for Cell/SPU

One of the most annoying things I’m starting to see are bogus way to check for presence of compilers or lib for SPU support…

Since it is almost the last day of the year here the top annoying pratices list:

– misnaming: ppu- isn’t a valid prefix, powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu- is, anyway if is the native compiler gcc would do perfectly, if isn’t someone would provide it to configure so. PLEASE AVOID PPU-

– misnaming: spu- could be a partially valid prefix, _maybe_ spu-elf- is the correct one . TREAT SPU AS A CROSS TARGET, ALWAYS.

– bad assumption: I may have a valid spu compiler but _MAYBE_ I didn’t registered elfspe or elfspe2 on binfmt so I cannot automagically run spu binaries or maybe I don’t have spufs mounted. TREAT SPU AS A CROSS TARGET, ALWAYS.

– picking cflags from env: the spu-elf-gcc and the native gcc may not share the same cflags, make sure your configure could pick CFLAGS_{powerpc,powerpc64,spu} as they fit.

– hardcoding paths: the ibm and the sony sdk are for non native system with non default cross paths, I know beside gentoo and few other crazy people nobody is using alternate paths, still since maybe native system should be expected and _maybe_ less custom paths could appear, please do not hardcode /opt/${STI_SDK}/blah as include/lib path in your applications or applications patches (like the one for lame). PLEASE KEEP THINGS CLEAN.

Here a top5, luckly there aren’t that many annoyances =)

Have a great new year.

who cares about fortran?

Ok, flamebait title….

Now with the new newlib release I’m pleased to announce that I’m just 2 steps from having a working out of box spu toolchain.

all you need currently is just to:
– patch the toolchain.eclass https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158495
– disable fortran useflag (since it won’t build because of a upstream issue)

and then just issue a crossdev –l 1.15.0 –g 4.3.0_alpha20061216 spu

and you’ll have a a full toolchain (including spu-elf-g++)

Many thanks to my fellow testers and to Shine for the ssh account over his box =)