Mike Melanson—a primary author of the Linux Flash plugin, xine, ffmpeg, and a general crazy-good multimedia hacker—on the state of Linux Audio APIs:

There are 2 primary methods of sending audio data to a DAC under Linux: OSS and ALSA. OSS came first; ALSA supplanted OSS. Despite this, and as stated above, there are numerous different ways to do the DAC send. There are libraries and frameworks that live at a higher level than OSS and ALSA. In the end, they all just send the data out through OSS or ALSA.

The zaniest part is that some of these higher level libraries can call each other, sometimes in a circular manner. Library A supports sending audio through both OSS and ALSA, and library B does the same. But then library A also has a wrapper to send audio through library B and vice versa. For that matter, OSS and ALSA both have emulation layers for each other. I took the time to map out all of the various libraries that I know of that operate on Linux and are capable of nudging that PCM data out to a DAC:

Barry Schwartz would be shaking his head, methinks. And yes, I’m well aware of efforts to unify this mess. That doesn’t excuse that this jungle has been the state of Linux audio for the past ten years. I love the comments too: instead of admitting how dumbass this is, they give suggestions for using even more APIs (“try KDE4’s Phonon! That’ll fix everything!”)… totally missing the amusing irony, and also missing the point that Mike needs something that works on as many Linux distributions as possible.

Compare the response given by David Heinemeier Hansson to Alex Payne in the recent Rails and scaling controversy, to Ingo Molnar’s response to Con Kolivas regarding the new Modular Schedule Core in Linux. Which community would you rather be part of based on this little sample?

(Somewhat ironic since it was Hansson himself that said “It’s no[t] the event that matters, but the reaction to it”, as well as being an evangelist for the It Just Doesn’t Matter principle.)

OK, this is both ridiculous and cool at the same time. I need to write code for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux for work, and I like to work offline at cafes since I actually tend to get more work done when I’m not on the Internet (totally amazing, I know). This presents two problems:

1. I need a laptop that will run Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
2. I need to work offline when we use Subversion for our revision control system at work.

Solving problem #1 turns out to be quite easy: get a MacBook (Pro), and run Mac OS X on it. Our server runs fine on Darwin (Mac OS X’s UNIX layer), and I can always run Windows and Linux with Parallels Desktop if I need to.

For serious Windows coding and testing, though, I actually need to boot into real Windows from time to time (since the program I work on, cineSync, requires decent video card support, which Parallels doesn’t virtualise very well yet). Again, no problem: use Apple’s Boot Camp to boot into Windows XP. Ah, but our server requires a UNIX environment and won’t run under Windows! Again, no problem: just install coLinux, a not very well known but truly awesome port of the Linux kernel that runs as a process on Windows at blazing speeds (with full networking support!).

Problem #2 — working offline with Subversion — is also easily solved. Download and install svk, and bingo, you have a fully distributed Subversion repository. Hack offline, commit your changes offline, and push them back to the master repository when you’re back online. Done.

Where it starts to get stupid is when I want to:

• check in changes locally to the SVK repository on my laptop when I’m on Mac OS X…
• and use those changes from the Mac partition’s SVK repository while I’m booted in Windows.

Stumped, eh? Not quite! Simply:

• purchase one copy of MacDrive 6, which lets you read Mac OS X’s HFS+ partitions from Windows XP,
• install SVK for Windows, and
• set the %SVKROOT% environment variable in Windows to point to my home directory on the Mac partition.

Boom! I get full access to my local SVK repository from Windows, can commit back to it, and push those changes back to our main Subversion server whenever I get my lazy cafe-loving arse back online. So now, I can code up and commit changes for both Windows and the Mac while accessing a local test server when I’m totally offline. Beautiful!

But, the thing is… I’m using svk — a distributed front-end to a non-distributed revision control system — on a MacBook Pro running Windows XP — a machine intended to run Mac OS X — while Windows is merrily accessing my Mac HFS+ partition, and oh yeah, I need to run our server in Linux, which is actually coLinux running in Windows… which is, again, running on Mac. If I said this a year ago, people would have given me a crazy look. (Then again, I suppose I’m saying it today and people still give me crazy looks.) Somehow, somewhere, I think this is somewhat toward the evil end of the scale.

Right, it’s definitely shaping up to be one of those kind of weeks. I finally managed to catch some sleep this morning by missing the morning tutorials: considering I had a huge three and a half hours of sleep last night, about 6 hours the night before, and no sleep on the night before I flew off to New Zealand, I think it was about time to let my poor body recover for a while. I normally feel rather seedy and tired (in that unproductive-tired way) when I wake up at midday, but it was all good today.

So, I got my lazy ass over to the conference (O, the hardship of 5 minutes’ walk through beautiful university grounds) and actually managed to see all the talks that day, huzzah. Andrew Tridgell’s talk on Samba 4 absolutely rocked as you’d expect, even if you, like me, weren’t interested in Samba 4 at all. Being able to write Javascript to script server-related Windows RPC calls is crazy enough, but remotely editing a Windows’s machine’s registry via an AJAX-style interface in your Web browser was something else. Oh yes, and my little tip about inverting your screen to make it more readable also really saves your battery life: I was easily getting over 3 hours of battery out of my 3-year-old Powerbook. The temperature today’s a bit more like what the forecasts predicted, too: much cooler, being around 14℃ in the morning and night, and around 22℃ in the afternoon. I’m glad I brought along some long-sleeve tops!

Of course, it was after the conference proper when the fun started. Google were holding a round of drinks for conference delegates at night at the Bennu bar in Dunedin, so of course a lot of people came along to try to completely empty out the bar. It was meant to go from 9-10 only (so hurry up and get completely plastered in an hour) but it turns out that offering only beer for free makes a tab go a long way, so we were all still drinking courtesy of Google well past midnight. I managed to get several rounds of free vodka shots off the Google folks too, so overall, I didn’t do too badly considering I’m a Cadbury’s boy: four beers and three vodka shots left me in quite the happy mood when we left there some time after midnight. It was, again, damn good to catch up and socialise with everyone, and even more so when free beer’s offered! It’s a good week to be in Dunedin indeed :).

One interesting rule of thumb that Damian Conway mentioned in his presentation skills session is that, on average, it takes 8 hours of preparation per one hour of talking. I initially raised by eyebrows at this figure, but it turns out that Damian’s likely right (as usual): I ended staying up until around 4:30am to finish off our slides, and got up rather excruciatingly at 8am to grab breakfast at Jeff and Pia’s again. For those interested: Weet-bix + three pancakes (although I made a token attempt to be too polite to have their lovely pancakes, since I’d already had the weet-bix…). Ah yes, and the excellent Otago Daily Times’s front page story today was about how all the poor Dunedin citizens were all pasty-white thanks to a lack of sun this summer at the beach. I read this as a very nice excuse to slap pictures of three hot chicks in two-pieces on the front page of the paper.

I actually decided to skip the morning talks that day to work on the slides, so I ended up holing myself up in the (lovely) apartment until around 12. Yes, I think Damian’s 8 hours of preparation was correct indeed: Anthony and I probably spent around 10 hours of prep in total, though I’m fairly type A when it comes to making sure all the details are nailed down right.

I ended up having an energy bar and a Coke for lunch (sorry about that mum!) and managed to catch the end of Conrad’s talk on CMMLWiki when I got back, as well as watch parts of Keith Packard’s hilarious talk on Linux-powered rockets (complete with pictures of rockets hitting the earth at 800KM/h, and stories of their failed recovery of a CompactFlash card inside said rocket…).

I’m glad to report that I think our talk went pretty well: we had around 30 people attending, and Anthony and I got to chat afterwards with some people who were pretty interested in the stuff we were doing. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a videotape of it some time in the future, and I can place it here as a contribution to embarrassing myself more.

Since the talk was over, we decided that having some dinner was in order soon. No-one had any plans, so I made an executive decision to meet up at the Terrace at 7 o’clock, and the 4 or 5 folks who decided to go there grew to 8, then 10, then about 18. Hooray for lots of company! I had a most excellent mixed grill on hot rocks and more Speights beer for dinner, and enjoyed the merry company of all the other geeks until around midnight. Catching up with everyone here is truly great; since I’ve moved over to using a Mac as my main platform, I’m not so involved with the Linux community these days, and I forget from time to time how awesome everyone is (both from a social standpoint, and just how damn good these people are at what they do).

P.S. Linus is here, for those fanboys who are interested. The more amusing thing is that he’s really sunburnt. For the serious geeks, Van Jacobson (yep, that Van Jacobson) is also giving a talk. You can bet I’ll be attending that one.

We needed to set up some Annodex servers for demos this week, and our server software currently runs best on Linux. So, what to do if you’re using Windows machines which you can’t install Linux on for whatever reason, political or technical? Run Linux inside Windows, of course, via coLinux.

coLinux is great. No, scratch that — coLinux is really great. Not only does it work, it works really well: it’s fast (I really don’t think I’ve ever seen a Debian system boot up in 2-3 seconds), it’s stable, and it even uses a pretty small amount of memory, since Linux servers tend to be on the trim side. A full-blown Linux installation for us with Apache serving multi-megabyte multimedia streams to multiple Windows clients was using up less than 30MB of Windows’s memory pool. Low fat.

If you must have Windows on your desktop/laptop for whatever reason, but need Linux and are getting sick of doing the reboot dance just to switch OSs, give coLinux a whirl. And, if you want to get geek cred points, watch your friends’ jaws drop when they see X11 applications hosted on coLinux displaying in Cygwin/X; it’s pretty scary just how well it all works. Now, whither my coLinux for Mac OS X port (and flying car)?