rob.log

As of linux 2.6.31 there is no mainline support for the Ralink rt2680 Wifi chipset. While there is an official driver provided by Ralinktech, it is incompatible with 2.6.31 due to the fact that post 2.6.29 the kernel's net_device_ops API has changed and 2.6.31 also removed CONFIG_COMPAT_NET_DEV_OPS backwards compatibility.

So I came up with a small patch to the Ralink driver. The solution is to get the module source from http://www.ralinktech.com/support.php?s=2 (tested with version 2.1.2.0 from 05/21/2009) and apply the patch before compilation..

Ralinktech provides a README file how to do this, basically you'll need the kernel-source or kernel-headers, and then simply type make after unzipping and patching the module source.

slideshow

This years FOMS (Foundations of Open Media Software) Workshop took place in Hobart, Tasmania and has not only been fun but also a great success! The focus was on video & film, development of multimedia and collaborative video editing software such a metavid, pad.ma and videobin as well as free video codecs: dirac and ogg.

Quite a few of the short-term Community Goals have been tackled, not only resulting in interesting discussion on ffmpeg-devel, but also yielding funding for open media now to publicly document codecs and prior art as an anti-patent strategy. linuxfilm.org started to index FLOSS authoring tools as a first step to indicate gaps for a professional workflow and and and..

FOMS was a very busy two days, extending into a multimedia mini-conf at LCA and quite a few days of hacking thereafter, not to mention the T42 bar evening excursions.

Happy new 1984 2009! Neujahr what a great day to update the blog.

I spent the quiet days unwrapping the web-interface of the sodankyla film server; adding an audio-decoder and streaming capability. Quite a cool gift for media archivers. It's the last piece of infrastructure before work on the compositor and session management can begin. I've attached a few screenshots of the bare-bone interface: seeking to frames and streaming/exporting an excerpt.

The PHP front reports few new dokuwiki plugins; that require documentation and announce emails. I'm about to put it all together by concluding updates to the linuxaudio.org web-style over the next week.

• tagentry - provides checkboxes to assign tags to a DokuWiki page.
• tbt - renders time based text.
• dokuladspa - visualize LADSPA plugins and demonstrate effect presets on a wiki page.
• metabox is being rewriten and the tagmatrix plugin is having a comeback..

“Diane, when two events happen simutaneously, pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention!” (Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks)

I've been one of the lucky persons to have been at the diyfestival.ch last weekend. A festival for art and technology hosted at the Dynamo in Zürich. Apart from there amazing collection of Theremins, there were quite some impressive installations, performances and talks.

Under the motto do it yourself together; we've conducted a touch-screen workshop based on frontera and http://fronteraproject.net. The standards were quite high: One team set up improvised screens using a beamer and two web-cams. While an other team worked with pure-data, MAX/MSP|| and processing.org|processing on interaction and design. Communication between the screen and visualization software was done with OSC. We ended up with a virtual Theremin, some touchable flame/interactive flare animations and even improved justpoint software tools with long awaited user-feedback. Really impressive for only an afternoon of work.

It's been one of the best hands-on workshops and even better you had an amazing taste for music and community. I had a great time. Many thanks to the organizers of the festival and anyone involved.

I've been too busy the last weeks to keep up with blogging. So here's a few more updates before x-mas. I'm thinking of attending 25c3 and to check out the dokuwiki developer room there. After all kind of Audio/Video coding I think I need a break and write some different languages before heading to FOMS and LCA mid Jan 2009.

I'm following the discussion on oAuth-body signatures which won't be hard to add to liboauth and might also become a requirement for the dokuwiki PubSub plugin; but for the time being I am laying low, lurking on that end.

I've finally improved my knowledge of c-sound - something I've been wanting to do ever since I first heard and learned it at the LAC 2006. - With Wicked in need for a lot of atmospheric sounds I've fired up Algoscore to produce a score and had lots of fun spending hours tweaking csound instruments. For the title song I've used hydrogen and AMSynth; mixing and mastering is due next Tuesday. hang in there.