Bloggy

Because I wanted to install clee’s updated SPC player plugin for gstreamer, I went and created a couple of ebuilds for Gentoo Linux.

The overlay for Portage is here, and includes two ebuilds, one for the required libopenspc library, and another for gst-spc. Note that if you install libopenspc, then the gst-plugins-bad-0.10.4 package also contains the gst-spc plugin. I didn’t feel like installing all the broken plugins just for spc which is why I split it out into a separate ebuild (you also save all the download time ;-).

In theory libopenspc and gst-spc should work on non-x86 platforms, unlike the last version of gst-spc that clee and I developed. It works just fine so far in AMD64 and I can’t see any reason why PPC would be different (except for endianness ;) so feel free to try it out.

Looking for good SPC music? I recommend Zophar’s Domain or SNES Music. The soundtracks for any of the Final Fantasy games are good, along with Donkey Kong Country (IMHO).

At some point I need to finish my taglib bindings for SPC support so I can work on making SPCs play in JuK. :-)

Posted by mpyne under Programming | 3 Comments »

So last time I mentioned that I bought a new computer and moved my user and system data over, and that I would mention some of the steps I took. It was actually much easier than I thought it would be.

The simple solution, of course, is just to copy over everything in /home to the other computer using scp or rsync and hope everything continues to work. :-). And actually, that worked just fine for my wife’s user account since her user name did not change.

In my case however, my username was still kde-cvs from way back in the day when KDE was developed using CVS. I switched my username to kde-svn to reflect the current repository for KDE, but then I had to make sure that stuff still worked.

The reason software would break is that the configuration files typically save the full path to any files that may be listed in the configuration. KDE applications, by and large, don’t do that, instead using $HOME to represent your home directory. (although I have a list full of exceptions which I will get to. :). Most of my other apps, however, would refuse to work due to the file paths being wrong until I corrected them all at once using a small Perl script.

One of the largest offenders in KDE is actually my cover manager code in JuK. Not only does it save the absolute file path, but the cover cache is stored in binary for speed, so I can’t quickly fix it! So I have no covers showing up until I write a Qt program to fix the file.

Other than that, things were actually amazingly easy to copy over and have work. KDE’s good support for relative file paths made the job very simple.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & Tutorial | 3 Comments »

The title isn’t referring to me visiting New York. Rather, it’s referring to my old computer, which I have replaced as my main computer/server. The new computer serves a few important uses for me that the old one did not:

1. It is faster, both due to the improved processor technology and the fact that I bought a dual-core version of the CPU to get 2 processors. It was still fairly cheap since I bought a CPU that is no longer the top-of-the-line. It also uses less power and runs much, much cooler. The old CPU was constantly overheating, even though I had it set to run at a slower speed than normal.
2. It is easier to backup. My backup regimen on the old computer was pretty atrocious: I would occasionally kick myself for the fact that I hadn’t backed up anything and would tar up some files and burn them to a CD. I bought an extra hard disk with the new computer to use for RAID 1 (which is basically a hard disk devoted to being a backup drive). So hopefully if one of the drives dies I’ll still be able to recover. It’s hardly a bulletproof backup solution because you still can’t recover files that you accidentally delete, for example, and a corrupt filesystem will ruin your day as well. But it does protect against the threat that I find most credible at this time.
3. It is much smaller and quieter. My old computer was huge, using what is apparently a slightly taller than standard mid-tower case. It was also rather loud. The new computer has a nice small case, the fans are quiet, and can be set to run slower when they are not needed for cooling. Also, the video card is fanless as well.

So the old computer was called broadway. The name of the new computer is, in keeping with my current scheme of Nintendo characters, midna. Later on I’ll detail how I migrated my data from broadway to midna, including an intervening user name change. Also I helped my gamer uncle with his game hosting problems caused by NAT, which I think is a halfway elegant solution if you have the type of hardware he does. But at this point I have to run.

Posted by mpyne under Personal | No Comments »

So I’m finally back from my first patrol. The patrol itself went pretty well, we did a successful test launch and I learned a crap load about the engineering systems (but I still have oh so much to learn). There have been quite a few changes in things while I was gone as well.

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Posted by mpyne under KDE & Personal & Pictures & Programming | 4 Comments »