Today I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04. At reboot I wanted to start my apps in the usual workspaces : 1 for the browser and mail, 3 for xchat… but OMG! CTRL-Alt-DOWN doesn’t work… Quick search first to learn what the heck those things are called then the sad truth: workspaces are disabled! What a moronic choice to disable them by default. Guys, come on! I understand making things simple, but dumbing down on Mac and Windows on their limitations is a stupid choice.

To enable them again there is a settings in the panel as described on Ask Ubuntu. I feel like my respect for Ubuntu’s team is at its lowest point ever and this makes me unhappy.

I think removing the workspaces is the dumbest idea ever, on par with grouping windows from the same app in the Alt-Tab cycle. Please somebody explains why. Is this because Microsoft doesn’t have workspaces, so we should copy them, right? Wrong! What’s next? Disable paste with middle-click? I might as well go buy a Mac then or learn how to live with Windows if I have to learn and live with moronic systems.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | 8 comments
Post tags: design, mac, ubuntu, usability, windows, workspace

git log –pretty=format:user:%aN%n%ct –reverse –raw –encoding=UTF-8 –no-renames –no-merges |\
gource \
–title “OpenStack Block Storage – A Visual Development History”\
-1280×720 \
-f \
–hide mouse,filenames \
–logo /home/reed/Documents/lavoro/openstack/openstack-logo-small.png \
–background-image /home/reed/Documents/lavoro/openstack/openstack-page-bkg.jpg \
–font-colour 535353 \
–highlight-users \
–highlight-colour CF2F19 \
–selection-colour 325C6B \
–dir-colour 325C6B \
–seconds-per-day .5 \
-c 2 \
–max-file-lag 0.1 \
-o – | \
ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i – -vcodec libvpx -b 10000K cinder-2013-04.webm

The challenge is to make the videos the same length or at least an acceptable ‘web’ length (closer to 3 minutes than 12 minutes). I played with the –seconds-per-day option and the -c of gource trying to find an acceptable speed.

There is very good music on ccMixter, especially in the Music for Games and Videos section appropriate for this sort of projects and OpenShot helped made the titles and mixing the audio and video tracks. Results will appear soon on OpenStack Foundation’s YouTube channel.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | One comment
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The output of lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 147a:e03d Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc.

Hooked them all together, installed avahi-daemon on the Pi so I can ssh into it easily from any lan (ssh raspberrypi.local, although I should change its name to something more unique). Tested arecord locally first. It took me a while to figure out how to use arecord, it’s old stuff that I’m not very used to. You need to specify the hardware device. If you get this sort of error:

arecord: main:682: audio open error: No such file or directory

probably you haven’t specified that you want to record from the card that actually has an input device

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 1: Audio [2 Channel USB Audio], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

I hooked my phone’s audio player to the mic input of the USB card so that there would be constantly audio coming in the Pi, then started recording

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ arecord -D hw:1,0 -f s16_le -c 2 > test.wav

I have specified the hardware device I want to use, the format and the number of channels. Playing back that file worked.

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ aplay -D hw:1,0 test.wav

Next step was to capture live audio from the line input of the USB card, transcode that to OGG Vorbis and ship the bits to the remote Icecast server I setup last week. I quickly gave up on ezstream and started using ices2, the Icecast client: it seems easier to manage as it takes care of the encoding. This is the input module I used for the Pi:

<input>
<module>alsa</module>
<param name=”rate”>16000</param>
<param name=”channels”>2</param>
<param name=”device”>hw:1,0</param>
<!– Read metadata (from stdin by default, or –>
<!– filename defined below (if the latter, only on SIGUSR1) –>
<param name=”metadata”>1</param>
<param name=”metadatafilename”>liveaudio</param>
</input>

The USB soundcard I’m using sends 16000hz samples. I chose not to resample that, only to downmix stereo to mono to save bandwidth.

<–  stereo->mono downmixing, enabled by setting this to 1 –>
<downmix>1</downmix>

And all seems to work: the Pi sends a clear signal up to the streaming server and it’s been doing that for a while. Big success so far. Next step for me will be to write a script that grabs data from the OpenStack Summit schedule for one room and adds that information as metadata for the streaming: this way the listeners will have an idea of who is speaking or what the session is about.

Update: the stream was having a wide latency, around 20 seconds so I decided to play a little bit with the sampling rates. The latency went down to around 1 second using  <param name=”rate”>48000</param> in the input module and  <samplerate>48000</samplerate> in the encode module, with no resampling. Unfortunately the USB card dies every now and then when not connected through a powered USB hub. Too bad, because the USB hub looks ugly.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | 10 comments
Post tags: communication, community, openstack, participation, raspberrypi, streaming

First thing: spin up a virtual machine on a public cloud that will be serving as public icecast server. I have used my UniCloud account, created a small server, 512Mb ram, Ubuntu LTS 32bit. I updated the default security groups to allow traffic on port 22 (SSH) and 8000 (icecast), and I also needed to assign a public floating IP.  Once the machine is up, simple apt-get install icecast2 took care of starting the audio streaming server. That’s it, streaming server part is done.

Back to the RasPi, in order to test the streaming server, I installed ezstream, copied the config files from /usr/share/doc/ezstream/examples. I copied ezstream_vorbis.xml to pi home dir:

<ezstream>
<url>http://INSTANCE_NAME:8000/armin</url&gt;
<sourcepassword>TheSecret</sourcepassword>
<format>VORBIS</format>
<filename>playlist.m3u</filename>
<!– looping the stream forever, for testing purposes –>
<stream_once>0</stream_once>
<svrinfoname>OpenStack Test Streaming Rradio</svrinfoname>
<svrinfourl>http://radio.openstack.org</svrinfourl&gt;
<svrinfogenre>OpenStack Test Streaming</svrinfogenre>
<svrinfodescription></svrinfodescription>
<svrinfobitrate>320</svrinfobitrate>
<svrinfochannels>2</svrinfochannels>
<svrinfosamplerate>44100</svrinfosamplerate>
<!– advertising on public YP directory –>
<svrinfopublic>1</svrinfopublic>
</ezstream>

The playlist.m3u is a simple text file with one .ogg file in there, enough to test it. Start the stream to be sent to the icecast server with

ezstream -c ezstream_vorbis.

And go play the audio in your favorite icecast player, the URL is something like http://YOUR_INSTANCE_NAME:8000/vorbis.ogg.m3u

Simple, rudimentary but I like because it seems to be easy. The next step for me is to buy a USB microphone to stream live audio captured in a room. The optimal configuration though is to use this system to stream audio easily from the OpenStack Summit rooms. I need a way to connect the USB input to a regular audio mixer: any idea on how to do that?

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | 3 comments
Post tags: communication, openstack, participation, raspberrypi

Just think: if a million Google Glasses go out into the world and start storing audio and video of the world around them, the scope of Google search suddenly gets much, much bigger, and that search index will include you.

Google Glass is one step above and beyond personal espionage: your face captured and archived, your voice, including the things you say when nobody watches, stored forever without you knowing, matched with your full name, as you specified it in Google+ or on your Android phone… Definitely this is the conversation the tech community should have.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: glass, google, privacy

3 Ways Apple Actually Innovates – OnlineMBA.com.

Stef for ][ stefano maffulli, 2013. | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: apple, innovation, market

As opposed to flying. The landscape is beautiful just the same, crossing the Apennines on a slow train between Foggia heading to Roma.

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The Wheelmate Laptop Steering Wheel Desk on Amazon seems like a joke but I believe it highlights how bad the dashboards of current cars are. I drive rarely but when I do I realize that in normal cars there is no easy way to take a fast note on a laptop *while parked* after a meeting. There is a place to put your travel mug, all sort of electric outlets and adapters but no retractable desk, not even for the passenger/shotgun seat. I think dashboards are ready for disruption.

PS comments and pictures on Amazon are hilarious

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Post tags: amazon, car, design, laptop, weird, wheel

the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.”

This morning I was listening to a show in Italy a volunteer that talks to prisoners incarcerated into the horrible Italian jails. She mentioned a conversation with a man sentenced to six years for selling counterfeited CDs and DVDs on the streets. His words: “Six years! That’s too long”. We’re accepting that selling a song with no rights to do so is a crime worst than hitting a singer with a baseball bat. Our politicians should be ashamed.

.

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Post tags: aaron, community, copyright, suicide

Google’s FTC Settlement Is An Epic Fail For Microsoft.

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