Would you trust Australia Post to open every letter and parcel; to remove pages at random; to finger cheques and money orders; to remove objects from your mail; and, for you to never know what went missing?

Would you trust the people who don’t believe adult Australians play video games to control the secret black list of what you read on the web?

Would you trust any government, once given the power to secretly censor, not to extend that power to choke its opponents and opposition?

Australia’s Federal Government, using powers from the last Government, is planning to impose the strictest and most complete internet censorship system in the world. Only we can stop them.

The government plans to slow the internet by 87% by opening every single exchange of information to look for “unwanted” and “illegal” content. Illegal internet content is so broadly defined at law that it covers everything from Facebook, to MySpace, to Wikipedia, to YouTube.

I’ll be attending tomorrow in Sydney. You should too, wherever you are. Saturday 14 December, 2008.

11am Brisbane Square: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=42526399601
11am Hobart Parliament Lawns: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39329861995
11am Sydney Town Hall: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=49916537640
12pm Adelaide Parliament: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39343300875
12pm Melbourne State Library: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=46838735931
12pm Perth Stirling Gardens: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=45738419714
12pm ACT/Canberra: City Walk (near the fountain outside of the Canberra Centre): http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=38717743533

i’ve moved myself over to alexhixon.com, because it makes much more sense for me to have a personal domain instead of using anything else. as such, i’ve also brought my blog across.

i was using Wordpress, but I’ve decided to switch to this cool little blogging software based on Django called ‘cx‘. it’s certainly minimalistic, which is one reason why i love it. also, a lot less security issues than wordpress, haha. no more upgrading every other week! it does have some neat things out of the box, like last.fm and del.icio.us integration (which i’ve just signed up to, by the way) and supports Askimet.

there was zilch documentation, however. i’ve started putting this into my own personal Bitbucket repository (a really cool Github-like service for us Mercurial users, by the way). i’ll be trying to push it back into the original repository. plus, it didn’t work on my machine because Etch comes with Python 2.4 rather than 2.5, so some things like the wp-import script needed some adjusting. nor did it work with Django trunk (or versions < 1.0).

so, anyway, you can email me by saying hi to alex at alexhixon dot com, too (since i’ve got this shiny new domain)! my old email address should still forward fine — you can use that too.

I don’t usually listen to Radiohead, but for the Nude Remix competiton, this guy went one weirder than everyone else: http://www.vimeo.com/1109226?pg=embed&sec=1109226

Who else do you know who can play a bass part with their scanner?

r5u870 We’re pushing out a release within the next week! 0.11.1 contains a whole heap of bugfixes, including a nasty syslog spamming one.

I’m also hoping to start adding proper support for 3 new webcams, with the help of some friendly folk in the community. Hopefully reverse-engineering it won’t be too difficult.

Also, if you use this driver and haven’t already, please sign yourself up to the mailing lists. I do love all bug reports, but it gets too much sometimes. There’s also a bug tracker, too!

Android I’ve been doing a bit hacking with Android lately. It’s really quite a cool platform, and it’s good to see an open platform being integrated in some smart phones (not quite here yet, but still). I’ve been doing some hacking on a classLoader to work around the Dalvik virtual machine, which is quite interesting, really (as a VM). Most of the work has been going into making i-jetty work smoother (Jetty is a web server for Java, you should pimp it out; i-jetty is an embeeded version for Android, and both are opensource). I might blog properly about this later…

Banshee 1.0 is coming real soon; and it’s going to rock your world! 1.1 is probably going to be slightly more polished, and luckily, you shouldn’t have to wait long after 1.0 for some more wholesome Banshee-loving goodness.

I’ve already got a library watcher extension coded up, and myself and Will Farrington have been doing a bit of hacking on the Radio extension.

Bongo I’ve pushed this back far enough, but I intend to get some decent work done on dragonfly-ng next weekend (sadly, I have real work this week/weekend). Alex has mentioned doing a server-bits only release, and then following up with the new client bits later on.

If you’re wondering what dragonfly-ng is, basically, I decided to stop the work I was doing on the brand new XHTML interface, and just re-use what we had already, aside from all the old Javascript. dragonfly-ng is completely client UI independent, in that you can easily slap on a different looking HTML/CSS frontend and just change the client definition file (which says what each element’s name is, etc) and away you go!

There’s only really a few things that need to be done before I think we should be relatively release-ready:

• Pagination! Looking at a single page of main is kinda boring.
• A composer view. A limited textarea would be sufficient for this release.
• Making sure that all our URLs are handled correctly and making sure it works against our current Dragonfly server and Crystal (half-completed).

I’ve also got a secret project underway, which I’ll be launching soon with a good mate of mine. Stay tuned!

Because having the stock standard USB VIDs and PIDs were annoying when trying to hookup a libusb filter driver under Windows, I decided to have a look around to see if it was at all possible change these values. After a bit of researching, here’s what you need to do (you’ll need to do this under Windows; I haven’t tried under Wine, but it’d probably be better to run underneath VMware):

1. Grab the D2XX driver setup executable from here, and install it. After you change the PID and VIDs and you wish to reprogram them again, you’ll need to make your own custom driver package; read about it in this document.
2. Now, we can program the EEPROM on the USB< -->Serial chip. Head over here to grab MProg. Install that, and open it up.
3. Click File->New and fill in the information in the main application panel as required. Device type is FT232R. Once you’re done, click on Device->Scan. The log panel should point out “Number Of Programmed Devices = 1”. If this is right, Device->Program should flash the EEPROM and put the new data on it. Then, quit MProg and re-connect the USB device.

Apparently, there’s also a version of the EEPROM programmer for FreeBSD. I haven’t actually tested this, since the above steps worked fine for me, but if you’re under Linux, it might useful to give it a go/modify it where necessary.

Happy hacking. =)

Well, I figured I might as well put to good use the Arduino board board I purchased about a month back.

Being such an original person that I am, I’ve decided to come up with another Arduino monome clone. I intend to build a nice 8x8 button surface; the size is good because it means I’m not buying zillions of dollars worth of components - only 64, not 144 (on a 12x12 board) as I had originally planned, heh - and because it’s not too large, so you can grab it nicely with your hands and muck around. This’ll probably end up very similar to the OcTinct in way of end-result.

I’ve ordered most of the parts I’ll be using; that is, 9x 8-channel multiplexers for reading the buttons (yes, cheaper than 3x 16-channel multiplexers), 50 RGB LEDs (these were cheapies for $10 off eBay, probably not the best quality, considering the price and that they’re getting shipped from some random place in Hong Kong, but hey), 100 diodes to prevent key press information flowing back into our matrix; and four 4x4 button pads and breakout boards from SparkFun. I’ve yet to purchase the extra LEDs, mainly because I’m not sure about the quality of the ones I’ve already ordered, and the demuxers to feed the color data to the LEDs with. I’ll probably end up wiring up a single row of LEDs to test first, then go buy it out once I work out how I’m going to feed the data; remember, we have 3 channels of information with the LEDs (red, green and blue) rather than just one if we were going with the single colour ones, so that makes things a bit more annoying. I’ll probably just by more demuxers and handle the yucky stuff in the firmware.

I’m going to make it compatible with the same protocol used by the original monomes. At the least, this means it’s possible to use the same applications and (hopefully) some of the software used for the Monomes. I’ll probably extend it a bit by adding a few extra functions to the protocol, and manually modify applications (like snake) so that things come up in different colours.

I’ll probably pop an accelerometer on by default, and feed that to the software via the same way the Monome does it - keep in mind that the accelerometer hack is an aux input on that. I’d also looove to have direct MIDI out on the box, so you don’t need to lug around a laptop to do gigs. Need to figure out a way to map each key to a different note dynamically without a computer, though.

Any thoughts on a name, some sort of enclosing, or some other awesome features?

Edit: fixed up linkage.

Looks like somebody tripped and fell over a cable in semi-slumber, the datacenter monkey at acpi.info broke something, or whatever. The site ‘acpi.info’ that contains all the ACPI specification documents and misc. information isn’t resolving

I’ve uploaded the mess that is the ACPI Specification to my website for the moment. Spending half an hour trying to get the darned PDF out of their slow servers (which isn’t really their fault; probably just temporary load or something) isn’t particularly fun, I can assure you.

Anyway, here’s the 624 page monster: http://mediati.org/temp/ACPIspec30a.pdf

Feel free to link to it while the official site is dead. Seriously though, who ever wrote this thing should be shot. It reads like an adult version of Pirates of the Carribean.

Speaking of datacenter monkeys, I’m finally changing everything over to the other machine, so, blog will be down but everything should remain up (except maybe if I fsck the DNS entries, again).

Was this really worth blogging, you might be asking, dear reader? Probably not.

Now, I’ll be honest. I haven’t bought much legitimate music lately, except for a couple albums I bought a few years back. I would buy LPs if I had a player that worked… But yes, shock, horror. I am a freeloader, to be fair.

Well, seeing as there was a multitude of songs that weren’t available on most P2P networks, I decided, hell, let’s at least have a look around and see if I could get songs elsewhere. Amazon’s MP3 downloads aren’t available in Australia, and iTunes is, well.. evil in so many different ways.

So, after looking around, I discovered Beatport (no, this isn’t one of those paid plugs, they’re just pretty cool). They provide a really large range of electronic music (incl. house, club, electro). The user interface is really nice, but it’s a bit annoying that they only provide Flash. But you can quickly go from song to song, artist to artist, finding songs you wouldn’t normally otherwise hear. It also provides 2-3 minute previews of songs (low quality of course). You can pay using PayPal or via credit card directly. What I did find annoying was that the songs are reasonably high priced to what I was expecting (something like from $1.49 for most tracks to $2.49 for newer ones), and that some tracks aren’t always available even though they’re in the catalogue, and some popular tracks they just don’t seem to have. Otherwise, I’ve been reasonably happy.

You can choose output formats of 320 Kbps CBR MP3, 192 Kbps VBR MP4 and 1141 Kbps WAV. They charge a WAV handling fee so that’s semi-lame, though, I can understand why.

If anybody has suggestions as to other similar websites, please comment and point me there. Also, anybody else used Beatport? What did you think of it?

No, I’m not dead (yet). Haven’t had as much time as I’d have liked to blog.

Expect a few entries this/next week from me.

For those of you who honestly couldn’t give a crap - don’t bother reading on. No, seriously. It’s pretty dull.

Just a quick update - I’ve recently updated the A records for the main mediati.org domain and a few subdomains, including mail.mediati.org, to point to the Xen server I have had running for a while now. Some notes:

• I will be moving blogs and wiki tomorrow, so don’t fear if you get a whole bunch of 404s (read: do not celebrate too early).
• SVN is not affected (for those checking out code) - it’s been hosted here for a long time now.
• The DNS will remain to be hosted on the MediaTemple server where Mediati was originally hosted - this’ll eventually get moved over too.
• My mail server setup is a bit shonky, so, if you get bouncing mails, try to resend them after a few hours/days.
• Yay for Debian Etch!

The new server is hosted on Chris Lamb‘s non-profit Xen server (via Bytemark), so that’s pretty awesome. I’ve got a (reasonably) beefy 2x Xen instance going, hosting mediati among a few other domains. Honestly, having complete control over the software thats installed on the server makes life much, much easier.

Just touched down in Melbourne, and have checked into the hotel. Internet’s pretty expensive, so I guess I’ll have to limit myself to freeloading off the internet at the conference. Hopefully might be able to do some hacking offline.

On a related note, I think Silvia Pfeiffer was on my plane. Hello there if you were! =)

Edit: John kindly pointed out Silvia had been in Melbourne for the last week or so. For some reason my retarded brain wrote Silvia’s name instead of Mary Gardiner. Obviously, I need to get my head checked.

Pushed out a new release of r5u870 last night. Woohoo! Few cool changes in this release:

• Includes recode-fw.scm. Very useful tool to extract the firmware blobs from your device driver, if your device isn’t supported. Instructions on how to use are on the wiki.
• Giant code merge from new modular usbcam library, posted by Sam to LKML back in May 2007.
• Support for the 05ca 183b, 05ca 1837 and 05ca 1839 UVC cameras! Sweetness! The HP Pavilion’s 1812 camera is currently experimental, though, I’d love folks to give it a go.
• Updated ChangeLog entries! What, you mean I wasted half an hour of my life?!

If you notice any bugs, don’t be afraid to email me (check the wiki for FAQs first, though). For those who already emailed me about stuff from previous releases, please upgrade, give it a go, and then email me back your status. I haven’t forgotten, I’ve just been very busy.

In other news, I’ve also managed to get the equalizer code for Banshee merged into trunk, so I’m pretty stoked about that. Style changes and all that have been sorted. Works lovely with both the older-gen equalizer element, and the current one in CVS. The element is currently in gst-plugins-bad, though, it’s moving to -good before the next release.

The new Banshee’s going to be sweet, I tell you!

Also managed to code up a pretty cool IRC log search script for Bongo. You can check (Jonny: not Czech ;) it out here. Looks a bit ugly, yes, but it sure does the job damn fine.

Well, I think that’s enough for now. Microsoft are at our LUG meeting this afternoon for a Q&A session. Hopefully we get some nice flames going, though, the committee has asked us not to. Though, cmon, we’re a loud bunch - someone can’t resist, I’m sure!

Gah, and I have to pack tomorrow, too. I hate packing.

… mushroom, mushroom!

Some 1up mushrooms for you. SVG sources are available here.

… to a Banshee near you:

I just noticed that the song Do It 2 Nite‘s chorus is a sample from SOS Band’s Take Your Time (Do It Right). However, there’s literally no attempt to make the sample any different from the other. All they did was speed it up a bit, increase the bass and add a highhat, and add some effects. Lame!

The fact that they got the credit for coming with a bouncy house track is even worse - the sample is basically the entire chorus. Appalling. Almost like Daft Punk’s Digital Love, though, I’d have to admit, at least they only used a few seconds of audio, rather than the whole damn chorus. Their Harder Better Faster Stronger use of Coca Cola Baby was pretty darn hard to beat, though; I think they’ve redeemed themselves.

Sorry, none for you, Rockefeller.

Attention those coming to LCA!

I’m considering having a BoF (Birds of a Feather) conference during the conference relating to Bongo and stuff. I’m asking here because, well, I honestly have no idea how many are going to come. If I don’t have enough numbers, there’s probably not all that much point in putting up a request for the room. Also, if you’d like to come, if you could optionally give me an idea of when you’d like the BoF to be held (ie which sessions), so that you don’t miss out on your favorite talks! :)

To quote the programme:

This year we have a dedicated Birds of a Feather room that is available during the main conference (Wednesday to Friday). More information on running or attending a BoF session will be available when the conference opens.

I guess I could always generalise it, and possibly get a few other speakers involved. I might email this idea to chat/mel8ourne list.

Also, if you want to catch me at LCA, PM/email me. Mobile number is 0401215248.

Good to see the Banshee crew push out a new release from the 0.13 series. Few minor improvements which make things a bit nicer, but generally Banshee ‘trunk’ is going to be the big one.

The new Last.fm playlist source is absolutely smashing. Cheers to Gabriel Burt for that. Last.fm the way it was meant to be.

Yes, it’s that damn good. Why else would I bother to blog? ;)

I will be traveling away to the null void for about a week until the 9th of January. You probably won’t be able to contact me during this time, since I won’t have ‘net access or anything; if you email me, it’ll stay in the backlog of mail and spam until I get back. Or, if you have my number, you could call me.

TTFN.

r5u870 is a terrific little driver written by Sam Revitch that provides support for Ricoh R5U870 webcams. The original driver itself supports the following devices:

05ca:1810 HP Pavilion Webcam - UVC 05ca:1830 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 (for VAIO SZ) 05ca:1832 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC3 (for VAIO UX) 05ca:1833 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 (for VAIO AR1) 05ca:1834 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 (for VAIO AR2) 05ca:1835 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC5 (for VAIO SZ) 05ca:1836 Sony Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC4 (for VAIO FE) 05ca:1870 HP Pavilion Webcam / HP Webcam 1000

Now, since the kernel doesn’t come with this driver, I couldn’t use my webcam on my laptop. Sucky. After a bit of researching, I found that this appeared to be the driver I needed. So, I clicked on the link to download the driver off Sam’s website (http://lsb.blogdns.net/ry5u870/ via the Wayback Machine). Guess what? The site’s down. Damn.

After a bit of peeking around in different places, I managed to download a .deb from here and took the source from the upstream/ directory inside. Haha, now I had the source.

I installed the linux-headers-2.6.xxx package (kernel-source on OpenSUSE 10.3; they’re headers package doesn’t work AFAIK) and compiled. Success! Go-go-gadget modprobe. The module loaded OK, but the driver didn’t detect my webcam. I went back and checked the original device support list - my device wasn’t there. It was actually a VGP-VCC7 (05ca:183a), which wasn’t built into the driver. Another quick Google sent me here. Ah hah, so I needed to patch the driver so it could support my device, and extract the firmware from the original driver.

After I had applied the patch, and got the firmware going, I compiled and installed. Finally, it seemed to have worked! I fired gstreamer-properties and tried to test the video input - it failed. After installing xawtv, I ran it and see what came up - my webcam. Apparently it doesn’t like being run through GStreamer, which sucks, ‘cause that’s where Cheese is at.

So, I spent the rest of the weekend debugging, and compiling, and debugging…

At the end, I came up with this: r5u870 0.10.1. And it works! See? (please don’t ask what happened to my eye, I must’ve been blinking at the same time, or something.. =)

r5u870 0.10.1 is actually modified version of the original device driver, that has several advantages:

• Properly implements V4L version 1 query functions. While version 1 has been obsoleted, it’s still necessary to have support for it as a number of apps still use it, including GStreamer’s v4lsrc element (v4l2src is on the way, I believe it’s in gst-plugins-bad at the moment).
• Native support for VGP-VCC7, including supplied microcode.
• Can compile against Linux kernels 2.6.24+. OpenSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0 uses this at the moment, I expect more distros to start using it sooner or later.

If you want to download or contribute, head over to it’s wiki page. I should probably note I’m merely the maintainer of the driver until Sam comes back from the null void, if that happens. I might attempt to get this into the current kernel tree, too.

Possibly a sign of things to come: mediati.org (all but SVN), ayhja.com and few other domains with client hosting were down, needed to login to Plesk to manually restart the VPS. Apparently had been like that the majority of the day. Great. Just great.