Snow Way I’m Missing my ‘boarding Fix
Well this is just a small round up of my little holiday in Les Gets. I hadn't booked anything this year due to the general apathy of my usual circle of skiing/boarding buddies and also due to a pretty intensive work schedule. But I really needed to get away and on Tuesday last week I decided to just book something and get away!
This is the route to hell
So I would like to take a few minutes to talk about audio routing in PulseAudio. This is a oft misunderstood topic and it does sometimes seem like black magic and/or broken but, as always, it's pretty simple when you look at it properly. That's not to say it's sensible (I have a several reservations about the current way of working), but the first step to improving something is understanding it, so I'll try to explain here and then say what I think is needed to improve it. This is a rather complex and in depth post, so if this kind of stuff doesn't float your boat, it's a good candidate to skip :p
Mix it some more
OK, so this is really just an update on my earlier post about KMix PulseAudio integration.
I've spent quite a lot of time refining the initial support I added a few weeks back. What follows is a brief summary of the changes/improvements/bugfixes.
Mix it up
Hot on the heels of my Phonon PulseAudio integration, here is another set of patches for kdemultimedia that adds PulseAudio support to KMix \o/
Quick screenie before a more detailed description:
PulseAudio Phonon Support now in KDE trunk and heading towards 4.4
I've very pleased to announce that my work on Phonon to integrate support for PulseAudio has now been committed to trunk and will form part of KDE 4.4 \o/
There were a few teething problems due to some last minute merges I did (which I clearly didn't test properly - my bad) and which I then went on to mis-interpret which led me to commit two rather silly things in phonon (a revert and then a revert of that revert!). What can I say... I need more caffeine obviously!
Mandriva 2010.0 is out!!
I'm very pleased to say that Mandriva 2010 is now out! Checkout What's New! Also see the Release Notes and Errata.
Myself and the rest of the Mandriva Developers and Contributors have put in a lot of work this time round. I'm pretty happy with the PulseAudio->Phonon integration work I did for KDE which builds on our previous approaches which were not quite as functional (although did at least hide potential configuration problems from users unlike on some distros! (for which the usual "solution" was a urpme/yum remove/apt-remove pulseaudio rather than actually finding the real cause!)
Anyway, anyone looking for a change or wanting to see what other distros have to offer, I really encourage you to take it for a spin!
So how does the KDE PulseAudio support work anyway?
So I think it's probably worth me writing up just exactly how the PulseAudio support in KDE's Phonon library actually works and why using it will give you some nice extra features!
Kudos to Dell
Well hats off to Dell. I've had my current laptop (Inspiron 6400) for about three years and it's served me pretty well. Sure I've upgraded the RAM and put in a faster, bigger disk but the core machine has done well... until recently.
The screen seems to have developed a fault near the right hand edge and the seals that protect against dirt and detritus seem to have failed. I now have several lighter spots on the right hand edge and hair and dirt has now managed to get behind the screen and is very distracting especially when workin on photographs etc.
So I'm generally quite lazy and put such things off but I figured I'd give Dell a shout before I went off to Corsica. I'm glad I did as my three year warranty expires in just two days time! If I had left it until my return it would have been too late!
Speaking with Dell wasn't quite as easy as it could have been and I was initially told that the screen would not be covered under my warranty. In fairness it is easy to presume that this occured due to some kind of damage inflicted upon the machine or to thing I was just chancing my luck and just trying to get some repair work carried out before my warranty expired (I'm not oranised well enough to pull that kind of stunt!). But after speaking to a couple people and making my case, I sent some photos over to the. Showing the problem and indicating the general good order of the machine and it's casing etc. I was contacted soon thereafter saying they would indeed cover the repair.
I've previously received a new power supply under warranty. Overall I thunk both myself and Dell have got our money's worth out if the warranty. I know other people will have both horror stories and happy tales.
I just hope don't drop the thing before I get back from Corsica!
Nice
Well myself and Robin are currently in the sky in a orange metal tube laughing in the face of evolution. Who says humans can fly? Pah!
We're heading to Nice where we will hopefully manage to catch our ferry to Corsica. There is not much time between our scheduled arrival and the ferry's scheduled departure and we didn't do ourselves any favours by sitting in blissful ignorance in the coffee shop while our flight went to final call! We were last in the plane but still had to queue to get on so thankfully we cannot be blamed for adding any delay!
(update from the future - we made it!)
This week is a bit of an experiment. As our company, Tribalogic Ltd, is a web development firm with our office telephones using VoIP, our physical location often does not matter. So myself and Rob have packed one of the hardware phones into a bag an are heading off to meet our colleague Gerome in Corsica where his family have a holiday home (with an Internet connection obviously!).
We should still be able to answer calls and deal with customer support etc. But time will tell if the theory matches the practice!
If all this works successfully it will maybe make me think more seriously about spending a winter season in a ski resort somewhere. I'd be able to help out on the phone and speak to customers from a little base in the alps so the only problem would be how it would affect our small team if I was away for a period of time. But before I get carried away with myself, we'll see how this week works out technically!
I’ve got a new Internet
I've got a new internet and it's all shiney and fast 
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Listened to Our Day Will Come - Waldeck.
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Listened to The Same Party - Kate Rogers.
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Listened to The Famous Biting Guy - Xploding Plastix.
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Just testing my Supybot IRC Bot integration... (by Colin) [colinguthrie]
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