pterjan's diary

  Zune

The now famous bug of Zune not booting this year on December 31 has been identified.

    while (days > 365)
    {
        if (IsLeapYear(year))
        {
            if (days > 366)
            {
                days -= 366;
                year += 1;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            days -= 365;
            year += 1;
        }
    }

As you can see, when day > 365 but <= 366, so on the last day of a leap year, it will loop forever. It's basically because the while loops thinks that every year is 365 days long. The optimal way to compute it would be with a division but it needs to think about it before writing ( :) ) so I would write it like the following to not duplicate the length of a year (or better, create a function NbDays(year)):

nbDays = IsLeapYear(year) ? 366 : 365;
while (days > nbDays)
{
    days -= nbDays;
    year += 1;
    nbDays = IsLeapYear(year) ? 366 : 365;
}

  Flickr upload from gThumb

Due to some comment spam on a very old post I noticed a valid comment posted 3 years ago :)

This comment is asking why I'm not using flickr_upload inside gThumb. Actually I am, but with an ugly hack as I could not find a plugin API (this was 3 years ago, maybe there is a nice one now).

[pterjan@plop ~]$ cat /usr/local/share/applications/flickr_upload.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=Flickr Uploader
GenericName=Flickr Uploader
Comment=Upload pictures to your Flickr account
Exec=flickr_upload %F
Icon=Flickr
Terminal=false
Categories=Graphics;2DGraphics;RasterGraphics;
StartupNotify=false
MimeType=image/gif;image/jpeg;image/jpg;image/png;image/tiff;
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.11
NoDisplay=true

And then to upload I select some images, and use "Open with" > "Flickr Uploader". The nice part is that it also work from other apps, like nautilus. The bad part is that there is no interface for feedback so maybe I'll switch to one of the Gtk uploaders, I have read several posts about one on the planet.

  Pulseaudio

Today I updated to unstable GNOME and got a dialog telling me that some applets had been removed from my panel. Indeed I no longer had volume control.

It was replaced by gnome-volume-control-applet, which was running but did not display the icon.

The reason is ** (gnome-volume-control-applet:12914): WARNING **: Connection failed, which means in an obvious way that I don't have pulseaudio running.

This new gnome-volume-control only knows about pulseaudio, so if you don't want to have pulseaudio running, just stop changing volume or change desktop.

  null_applet

And what is 12593 pterjan 20 0 55188 26m 10m S 0.0 3.6 0:00.36 null_applet ? I hope it does a lot despite its name given the amount of memory it uses.

  More on pulseaudio

As my comment on J5's blog is still awaiting moderation, I'll post the followup here.

What I feel wrong is to drop a working solution for one which despite a lot of work still makes so many people have no sound, or bad quality sound, or a machine too slow too read dvd, or…

Enforcing people to use it when it works for 99% of people might be good as the 1% may be fixed then. But currently I feel that much more than 1% people get issues with pulseaudio, and there are not enough people to fix them… (And some can’t be fixed, it will always add overhead so not powerful machines, like netbooks, will not be able to do things they can do when it is disabled).

I was in favor of pulseaudio being enabled by default on distros, because there was an easy way to disable it for people who had troubles with it and a few people got new functionalities.

Despite all the mails by lennart and others, I still see no real benefit in using pulseaudio for me (I have a laptop with 2 internal speakers, most of the time my sound is mute except when I have only one source of sound: when I listen some music or watch a movie, my brain can’t handle both at the same time), and have cases when it’s better to disable it.

For a long time I have been hearing that the issues are not in pulseaudio but in alsa or the apps. I believe it, but actually I don’t care. alsa has a lot of bugs but works fine, showing alsa bugs that will need years to get fixed, meaning that people won’t have sound during the next few years doesn’t make sense to me.

The desktop is supposed to be used, I don’t see the point of telling people “we broke it and you should keep an old version of the desktop or not use our desktop during the next few years until we stabilize this if you want a decent experience”

Mails like this does not help too.

« Before we can properly fix this we need some more groundwork in ALSA done. Due to lack of manpower I unfortunately don’t see this coming any time soon »

Also note, that you can always drop to “alsamixer -c0″ to fiddle with all the exotic mixer controls directly. It is very unfortunate that this might be necessary for now, »

Yes this is very unfortunate that you have to tell people to use alsamixer and that won’t change anytime soon.

  One last post about the pulseaudio story

My first post was not about pulseaudio itself, but about pulseaudio becoming mandatory in next GNOME version (the situation about this improved, the old mixer applet is back in svn).

I did not want to reply to Lennart's reply to my second post, as I don't want losing one week talking about it, that won't solve anything. I resisted yesterday but there are two parts I feel I have to answer so I'll try to make it short.

The first is the sentence then folks will complain: "Oh my god, it doesn't work with my software/drivers, you suck!" -- like you just did (though in more polite words).. No I did not. I don't think "you suck!", I complained about it becoming mandatory now while it still fails for a quite important number of users. It's not about my machine, I know how to deal with it even if I will lose some time because of that. It's about having tens of thousand of users of next GNOME version who, when they will manage to get sound working fine by disabling pulseaudio, will find that they no longer have mixer applet and their keyboard's volume keys no longer work.

The second point is The list of cards that are currently known to be problematic are listed in our Wiki.. I went to that page and was shocked. "snd-intel-hda on Realtek chips", doesn't this mean most (maybe all) dell laptops sold over the last few years ? And "snd-intel8x0", almost all laptops sold before that (including my Thinkpad) ? I think this list matches about 30% or 40% of people, while I was thinking that less than 10% of people have issues with pulseaudio. So, you are actually telling me that pulseaudio should actually not be used by default now while I was in favor of using it...

  FOSDEM

Oh and I forgot to tell, so people can hit me with a pulseaudio bat. That's OK, I should have enough beer to drink to not feel the pain :)

  The worst plush Tux ever

I think the winner is "Günter the Linux Penguin" from bytelove. Did they ever manage to sell one ? To scare children ?