greener pastures

I’m retiring this painful-to-maintain-so-I-never-do-it-and-people-crack-my-account WordPress blog. New blog is here: http://spindazzle.org/greenblog .

I went to a real record store today (sorry Apple!) and a CD by somebody called “DJ Linux” caught my eye. DJ Linux? I added it to my stack and took it home. It turns out that DJ Linux is some guy who used to be a guitarist in Henry Rollins’ band. Nothing really suggests that there’s any Linuxy about this guy or his album. He must have picked the name because the kids are down with Linux. Yeah, that’s it… In any case, the DJ Linux album was actually a little better than I was expecting.

So if DJ Linux is at one end of the spectrum, I would put Dave Rowntree at the other end. Dave is the drummer for britpop sensation Blur and, unlike DJ Linux (AFAIK), Dave has actually written a Linux device driver. Back in the early days he used to take print outs of the Linux kernel sources on the Blur tour bus for light reading matrial. That is hard core. Apparently Blur is working on a new album. Their last one was pretty fantastic.

Back in FOSS-land… I wrote MIDI file reader/writer providers for GNU Classpath the other day. MIDI I/O has worked for a while, but we still need a Sequencer and a default GM synthesizer. Are there any freely distributable GM soundfonts out there? BTW - another bit of trivia is that Sun’s javax.sound.midi providers were originally developed for Sun by a company founded by the one and only Thomas “She Blinded Me By Science” Dolby. Strange world…

Casey’s visit to Google reminds me of my first visit to Silicon Graphics (and California) in 1994. It was a wonderland. In fact, I believe that the Google campus Casey describes occupies the same real estate that SGI did back in the mid-90s. The last 12 years have not been kind to SGI. I wonder what the next 12 have in store for Google.

Thinking of my days in an SGI shop reminds me of this timeless memo. Ah.. Irix 5.1. Good times.

x86 FC5 yum repository for cvs HEAD gcjwebplugin-test package. Details here: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-java-list/2006-June/msg00023.html.

Report bugs in the GNU Classpath bugzilla here: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla.

The sandbox security implementation is known to be incomplete, so use at your own risk. This implementation includes a rudimentary whitelist mechanism, and will ask you before running any applets. Details here: http://langel.wordpress.com/2006/06/05/gcjwebplugin-is-actually-worth-using/

Once installed, be sure to visit the GNU Classpath page to see our evil water droplet friend command your attention.

I think the OLPC effort is very interesting, although something about makes me feel uncomfortable. The OLPC FAQ reads:

In the target environment, any discarded laptops will be treasures for those who make their income from recycling garbage. If the program is run well by governments all or most laptops will be accounted for. No doubt some laptops will find their way into trash bins and garbage dumps, where there are strong financial incentives for almost all of them to be reclaimed. Will broken laptops be brought back and recycled or parted out for new laptops (refurbished)? Hopefully. And hopefully distribution and reclamation will be conducted in a responsible manner.

However, we know that depending on market forces for de-manufacturing and recycling just means that unwanted electronics will be exported and dumped in places with no environmental protections. It seems likely that these places will be the very “target environments” the OLPC project is aiming at.
This answer also asks us to have hope. Instead of just hoping, why not require that appropriate de-manufacturing and recycling be factored into any mass OLPC hardware deal? Even if we can’t require and guarantee that the OLPC hardware toxins (presumably mercury, lead, cadmium, beryllium, etc) be disposed of properly, perhaps some creative solution along the lines of “carbon neutral” programs could be made to work. Well, it’s just a thought. I’m no expert.

I’m really tired of hearing “Open Source” used as a verb, especially in the context of Java. I propose that we use “FOSSilize” instead, as in “Sun plans to FOSSilize Java". It’s nice because it conveys something about the time scale in which we can expect this to happen.

But, please, prove me wrong - and start with the TCK. Thanks!

Seriously, however, there does appear to be some good news from all this. The word on the wire is that they intend to adopt a JPackage compatible footprint for their Linux hosted binaries. This should make the FC release notes a little shorter.

I’ve updated the FC5 rssowl to 1.2.1.

Azureus has exposed some bugs in libgcj, which tromey and bryce quickly took care of. We desperately need a libgcj update to pull the fixes in. Jakub? Please?

Some of the azureus bugs are also fixed in the upstream sources. Unfortunately sourceforge.net’s anonymous cvs has been broken for weeks (they had to disable developer to anonymous cvs merges for some reason). I hope they fix this soon.

Andy Shevchenko submitted jack-audio-connection-kit for review a few weeks ago. This was great news for me, because it’s a key dependency of the GNU Classpath synth provider. It’s also a key dependency for many great audio apps. For my part, I’ve submitted ardour, fluidsynth, dssi, hexter, whysynth, hydrogen and two major LADSPA plugin collections. I also have a rosegarden SRPM, and will submit that soon. Here are all of the SRPMS: http://people.redhat.com/green/FE/FC5/

Many (all?) of these packages are updated versions of older PlanetCCRMA packages.

I was disappointed that Murderball didn’t win against March of the Penguins at last night’s Oscars. Murderball was my favorite film of last year, with Crash a close second. I guess MotP was being rewarded for being a tremendous commercial success. But for me, Murderball is just a great movie that works on many different levels. If you haven’t seen it yet, you will enjoy it.

Azureus 2.4.0.0 was released yesterday. They pushed out 1,046,119 downloads in one day.

/me rubs eyes.

Yes, over 1 million downloads in a single day.

Those 1M torrent files consumed 5GB of sourceforge.net bandwidth. An additional 300GB was consumed by only 41 thousand downloads of the win32 installer. Amazing.

This is a trap escaping release for them. The azureus hackers were very helpful in making the changes necessary to remove com.sun dependencies.

As for my azureus package… I continue to tweak it. I have a 2.4.0.0 build that should show up in Extras soon. It looks quite a bit different from upstream release, since it uses properly themed desktop icons (thank you java-gnome).

Azureus is available in the Fedora Extras development branch today. This, along with RSSOwl, make up two-thirds of my FC5 wishlist for java. I could be wrong, but it seems that gcjwebplugin won’t make it in time. Nailing the security issues is time consuming, although progress is being made. So now, what will get working in time for FC6? Here’s my personal wish list…

• gcjwebplugin including sound support (my bad!)
• WW2D - jogl is in Extras for a reason!
• Fedora Directory Server needs to be liberated from proprietary jvm shackles
• Netx, to support JNLP (aka Web Start) applications
• java-gnome should support gnome-applet development. Go AfC!
• fop, for rendering all the Fedora docs.
• subclipse, because GCC has migrated from cvs.
• General performance improvements and correctness fixes (as usual…)
• More FE packagers!

This looks like a great list to me. A little long, to be sure, but not unrealistic.

Azureus appears to be working with gcj now. I’ll submit it to Extras for FC5 shortly….

RSSOwl 1.2 is running like a top on our Free stack now and has been submitted to Extras for FC5. Joy.

I installed FC5t1 today. Once installed, I put Eclipse through some paces, and it looks good (although it could use a new Fedora logo emblazoned splash screen)

FC5 comes with JOnAS, which is awesome. Run “service start jonas” and point your browser at http://localhost:9000.

If you don’t need all that J2EE support, tomcat5 still works well. To see it in action, be sure to install the tomcat5-webapps package, run “service start tomcat5” and point your browser at http://localhost:8080. If you poke around you’ll see that there are also packages containing sample struts webapps.

Many of us are hoping future FC5 test releases will be based on GCC 4.1 (well, a preview I suppose). It contains countless improvements on the java side. And while RSSOwl and Azureus still don’t run perfectly, we have an excellent shot at WW2D (a Google-Earth-like program). I think it just needs GCC 4.1’s swing fixes (and jogl, from FE).

In other news, Jeremias Maerki is cleaning up batik so it will run on Free Software. This is terrific news!

And I promise to update the java-related Release Notes in time for FC5t2!

I just updated jogl in the Fedora Extras development repository for the new modular X packages. While doing so I noticed that a beta version of JSR-231 (Java Bindings for OpenGL) was made available a few weeks ago on the jogl web site. JSR-231 defines the javax.media.opengl package. This implemenation is a derivative of jogl, and is distributed under a BSD-ish license. It also appears to build cleanly with a slightly modified version of my jogl spec file. Nice.

Let me preface this by saying that I could not have done better. However, I’m struggling with the role that “Infinite Freedom” took in creating the new (or proposed?) Fedora logo. From a Free Software perspective, I don’t think “Inifite Freedom” really captures what we’re talking about. The Free Software community talks about “Essential Freedoms". These are the freedoms required to build a community around software. But there are only 4 of them.

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Free Software licenses then restrict you in ways to protect those 4 essential freedoms. This is kind of at odds with the idea of Infinite Freedom.
I like the sound of Fedora being a provider of Essential Freedoms as opposed to Infinite Freedoms, but this is really a Free Software centric point of view, and Fedora serves more than just the Free Software community.

MicroEmulator is a skinnable MIDP/CLDC emulation environment that runs on our Free Software stack now. Now people can develop midlets using Free Software tools.

MicroEmulator is a java app. Shown above, it is running on Fedora Core 4 with the very latest GNU Classpath.

piksel 05 is happening right now in Bergen, Norway. This event looks better and better with every year. I’m going to try to go next year.

I made a little demo app for Classpath in order to make it easier to test the MIDI code work-in-progress.

Also, it looks like Kepler’s isn’t closing after all.

I committed some javax.sound.midi providers into GNU Classpath today. There’s an ALSA provider that handles MIDI In ports, and a DSSI provider for software synthesizers. My DSSI soft-synth code uses Jack for audio output.

The simple version of plugging these things together looks like: MidiSystem.getTransmitter().setReceiver(MidiSystem.getSynthesizer().getReceiver());

Now you’re ready to tickle those ivories. If you don’t have a MIDI keyboard, you can use a virtual keyboard.

To record, just plug the soft-synth jack outputs into ardour. And speaking of recordings, here’s the very first one.

I used the DSSI trivial-synth example, so it’s a little clicky. Some of the DSSI controller handling code needs to be implemented before fancier soft-synths will work.

Independent book seller and Bay Area landmark, Kepler’s, has suddenly closed. I live just about 3 blocks from Kepler’s, and have enjoyed it for years. It will be missed.