Posts Tagged ‘coolness’

Flickr coolness

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Decided to have a play with Flickr today. I haven’t really bothered uploading stuff to it before, since I have my own photo album, but just wanted to have a play. Then I saw a ‘blog this’ button alongside my first upload, hence this post. The fact that it can blog direct to my Wordpress blog using it’s API is also a great example of the coolness that is Flickr.

I will need to give some serious thought to using it instead of the photo album I spent ages coding…

Edit: Required lots of editing to fix brokenness in the generated-HTML, which made a bit of a mess on the page. A small amount of fail is OK.

Firefox 3

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Well it’s been a while, loyal readers, but here I am blogging again. Bloglines tells me I have four subscribers, and presumably there’s also some people out there subscribing through Google Reader and other means, so I guess I have some sort of duty to post stuff…

Anyway, I had to jump on the Firefox 3 bandwagon and help with the target of breaking the world record for most downloads in a day – actually there is no record, this’ll be the first, but Firefox 2.0 got 1.6 million downloads on the day of release so I guess they’ll be looking to exceed that.

I must say that I wasn’t actually going to download it today, I was going to wait until it arrived in Debian, but after reading about some of the new features earlier today I decided I had to give it a go.

The only thing I’ve really noticed so far is that pages load/render much quicker. As an example, I use MythTV’s MythWeb application to allow me to view the program guide without having to turn my head 15° and look at the TV. Under Firefox 2.x, it took a good few seconds to load as it’s a very complicated page with an awful lot of content. Under Firefox 3.0, it’s instant. Literally. Very cool.

The other feature I’m expecting to be useful is the ’smart location bar’, which means that soon as you start typing a URL in the location bar it will search through not only the URLs, but also the titles of previous sites you’ve visited to help you find the site you’re looking for. Pretty good if you’ve forgotten the URL of the site, but can remember the name.

However there is one very unfortunate problem I have with Firefox 3.0 – it refuses to let me access my website. Seriously. Every other website in the world, including my other websites, work fine but it won’t let me access this one – it just says it couldn’t look-up the domain. However my old version of Firefox, which I’m using now, works just fine. Maybe Firefox 3 has some kind of clever crap filter, designed to stop users being exposed to drivel like this….

Linux Hardware Support

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Just now, I plugged a USB mouse into my Debian Linux box and immediately started using it.
Then I plugged in a USB Digital TV device, started a media player (which prompted for DVB region details) and having scanned for channels, began to watch TV.

No manual intervention required – no driver-loading, no configuration, no extra software installed, no nonsense. This may seem fairly trivial, but such a thing was inconceivable when I started running Linux nearly 12 years ago and looking fairly far away even 5 years ago. Without wanting to Windows-bash, even Windows users don’t have it this good – they’d be guaranteed prompts for drivers, then lots of fun messing about with usually-buggy vendor-provided software just to get the mouse to work.

I’m not saying everyone’s experience is as good as this and we’ve surely got more work to do, but we’ve come a hell of a long way in a relatively short time. I think we spend too much time focusing on the negatives in the Free Software community (that’s what encourages progress, I guess) and it’s nice to consider the positives every now and then.

GStreamer rocks!

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

It’s dull and takes a long time to do anything? No, quite the opposite actually. I was rather dismayed to recently find that GStreamer was unable to play an MPEG2 transport stream, as neither of the two plugins that are supposed to be able to do this (ffdemux_mpegts which is part of GStreamer and flutsdemux which is produced by Fluendo) were working. So this morning I reported a bug against ffdemux_mpegts, mentioning in passing that the Fluendo plugin didn’t work either. Three hours later, both plugins have been fixed.

Rock on GStreamer devs!

Me, the kernel developer

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

Yep, I’ve just had not one but two patches accepted into the Linux kernel.
From the 2.6.14-rc1 changelog:

commit 05ade5a5cd32f8393c22fc454b0546df2ed497c5
Author: David Johnson <dj@xxx>
Date: Fri Sep 9 13:02:55 2005 -0700

[PATCH] dvb: bt8xx: Nebula DigiTV mt352 support

Add support for Nebula DigiTV PCI cards with the MT352 frontend.

Signed-off-by: David Johnson <dj@xxx>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Stezenbach <js@xxx>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxx>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxx>

commit 1f15ddd0b79d1722049952b7359533a18a72f106
Author: David Johnson <dj@xxx>
Date: Fri Sep 9 13:02:54 2005 -0700

[PATCH] dvb: bt8xx: cleanup

Indentation fixes and remove unnecessary braces.

Signed-off-by: David Johnson <dj@xxx>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Stezenbach <js@xxx>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxx>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxx>

This all started when I bought a Nebula DigiTV-PCI DVB card which didn’t work under Linux. Looking back through the linux-dvb list archives I found an old patch someone had submitted to make it work. This patch didn’t get accepted because it needed fixing and cleaning up. So I took the patch, re-made it to apply to the current dvb-kernel CVS and fixed the problems. So no I didn’t actually add the support for the card myself, but I got it into the kernel. I still wouldn’t suggest anyone goes out and buys one of these though: not only are they overpriced, but they have some hardware issues which cause lots of people problems.
The other patch is to clean-up the particular file I was working on to fix the coding style, formatting and so on.

OK so I won’t be winning any "Best Linux kernel contributor" awards, but it’s nice to see my name in the changelog and know that I’ve actually contributed something useful.