The p-Code Machine

Sometimes Totem/Rhythmbox/Jokosher and other apps that use GStreamer tell you they are missing a codec, so then you start Synaptic (or your package manager of choice) and install the appropriate codecs. Sometimes however the application keeps nagging about the codec. You can see what codecs GStreamer recognises using the gst-inspect-0.10 command, if you really have installed the proper codec, and gst-inspect-0.10 doesn’t see the codec, you might need to cleanup GStreamer’s cache (at your own risk):

# rm -Rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10

I’ve had a similar problem installing LADSPA plugins for use with Jokosher (Jokosher accesses LADSPA plugins via GStreamer as well).

If you’re wondering why Rhythmbox is transcoding your (FLAC) files to 128kbit CBR MP3 files for your DAP, it’s because the ‘lame’ GStreamer encoder plugin is semibroken and deprecated. Can we blame this on the Rhythmbox developers… No… Rhythmbox uses the “CD Quality, MP3″ GNOME Audio Profile for it’s transcoding settings, and GNOME ships this profile semibroken by default. It is however relatively easy to correct, start gnome-audio-profiles-properties, and change the “CD Quality, MP3″ profile’s GStreamer pipeline from:

  audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0 vbr-quality=6 ! id3v2mux

to:

  audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lamemp3enc name=enc target=0 quality=6 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

It’s highly debatable that a quality of 6 offers CD quality transparancy, hydrogenaudio has a lot of information on how to select a quality rating of your liking.

I’ve already reported this upstream, including a patch, which is being considered for a GNOME patch release.

It has been a bold move, for Canonical to partner with 7Digital to provide the Ubuntu One Music Store where Ubuntu users can download DRM free digital music (unambiguously legally). Because Canonical has partnered with 7Digital they have a sizable music portfolio available in their store, though not as extensive as the iTunes or Amazon stores.

The general user experience of the Ubuntu One Music Store is pretty good, Canonical by default supplies a Rhythmbox extension to integrate with the store. Banshee users haven’t been forgotten either, these is a extension for them as well.

Enough praise for now… I have been experiencing a severe lag between buying music and actually having it appear in Rhythmbox, I’m guessing this is just a post-release overload spike which will straighten out after a few days.

The shop also has some inconsistencies, for example not all music is made available at the same bitrate, some can be downloaded at 192kbit/sec, some at 256kbit/sec and some at 320kbit/sec. They do explicitly advertise this, so you are aware of the bitrate before purchasing. To be honest I don’t even care that much about any particular bitrate, it’s the inconsistency that annoys me most…

The track’s metadata isn’t perfect as well, lots of tracks do not seem to have been assigned a proper genre, as Rhythmbox just displays Unknown. Also some tracks have coverart embedded in them (which seems like a very good idea), and others don’t, no consistency can be found here either. Luckily Rhythmbox can easily compensate for this by downloading covertart online.

Another thing that’s worth to mention is the fact that the Ubuntu One branding of the Music Store is not just marketing, the Music Store actually integrates with your Ubuntu One online storage account, by uploading the music you buy to your online “cloud” storage. Then your local Ubuntu One client downloads the newly bought tracks to your local machine where Rhythmbox can find them. Pretty cool!

All in all the Ubuntu One Music Store works quite well for most practical purposes, with only some performance and anal retentive issues remaining to solve…

Only recently I noticed the Fluendo DVD Player, which is supposed to play DVDs fully legally anywhere in the world (with official patent licenses and all).

The Fluendo DVD Player is a proprietary application, though a very nice one at that. It’s a proper GNOME application, HIG wise, it truely looks like a native GNOME application (screenshot done on Ubuntu Lucid):

When talking about functionality there’s not much to say, it’s a no-nonsense DVD player, it does what it should, nothing more nothing less… It plays encrypted DVDs, there’s a tool to set your DVD drives’ region, and the DVD menu’s work…

In contrast to most other commercial software available for Linux, Fluendo provides proper stable AMD64 builds, proper packages for Debian/Ubuntu, with all files put in their proper locations. They’re not cluttering up /opt.

The price isn’t bad either, the base price is 20EUR one year of updates included (extending this term isn’t expensive either). Buying from Fluendo is like giving to charity anyways, the Fluendo blokes did a lot of good open source work on GStreamer.

For a while now, I’ve been told RTLgemist hasn’t been working with totem (or VLC for that matter). I just noticed why:

• “The stream is encrypted and decryption is not supported”

This does not seem to pop up in the web plugin, but if one opens the MMS stream in the standalone Totem player it does…

So this has to mean RTL recently added DRM to their streams. Wankers!

As I’ve blogged before I’ve played roleplaying games off-and-on for the past ten years or so. As most people around my age I started out playing AD&D (2nd edition). Although AD&D 2nd edition was still released under the original TSR brand, the company had already been bought by Wizards of the Coast. And soon enough they released D&D 3rd edition (they dropped the Advanced moniker somewhere along the way). Their third edition was pretty good, a lot of stuff got fixed and clarified. The only thing that was still icky was the skill/ranks system. Somewhere a long the line they also released 3.5, which was just a revision of 3rd.

But then Wizards released 4th edition. Initially I was somewhat excited about the release, but that wore off pretty quickly after I got the books. The classes seemed to have gotten a bit more bland, since even a Fighter now can cast spells (they are just called different). Also the base books now cover up to level 30, which is a big deal, especially since the base books have only covered up to level 20 since ever. And when properly played it takes ages to get to level 20, most campaigns die long before players ever reach level 20, let alone 30. They also crufted the base books with paragon path bullshit. And as a personal pet-peeve the PHB‘s text has been terribly set, it’s font is set way to large and fatty, which makes it relatively hard to read. All-in-all I’m sure D&D 4th edition is still a decent game, but I can’t really be bothered to play it, unless motivated by others…

Some folks would say, why not just stick to 3.5? Well there’s a problem with that, and it’s a problem akin to vendor-lockin, since 3.5 books are quickly disappearing from the shelves. While I own a 3.5 PHB, I have no other books, and since Wizards stopped publishing 3.5 there is no easy way to get them any more. Yes I know ebay, etc. But that’s way too much effort. As time passes this problem will get worse, since new players won’t be able to get any 3.5 books anymore. So keeping 3.5 alive would be bothersome at best.

But where there’s a problem there’s a solution, funnily enough even in the pen-and-paper gaming industry that solution could be called open source. There are boatloads of projects who are trying to rebuild either the 1st editions of D&D or 1st edition AD&D, both originally designed by Gygax and Arneson. Each of those projects have a different take on how to go about this, but I’m going to cover the two that appeal most to me: Basic Fantasy RPG and OSRIC.

Basic Fantasy RPG

BFRPG tries to recreate the feel of the original D&D game, but with mostly modernized rules (ascending armor system). The rules are based on 3.5, but a lot of weight has been shed. The author has masterfully seperated the essential from the non-essential rules, leaving a very lean-and-mean game. And while the core rules are quite modern, the races, classes, monsters, etc. are very old school. Only the four classic races are included: Human, Halfling, Elf and Dwarf. The same goes for the classes, only Fighter, Magic-user, Thief and Cleric are included, as in the original D&D.

Everything considered BFRPG is very very easy to learn, and still interesting enough to play more than once or twice. If you’ve never roleplayed before this is probably a great way to start out.

OSRIC

The second more ambitious project would be OSRIC, it tries to be a near perfect clone of 1st edition AD&D, which is basically the last version of D&D to  be written/compiled by Gygax and Arneson. Considering the OSRIC book is actually a combined Player’s HandBook, Monstrous Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide, it spans 400 pages of well written text. The game seems to offer as much depth as any current commercial version of D&D, while remaining faithful to the older traditions of D&D.

OSRIC has more races and classes available than BFRPG, and has more rules coverage, making a great refuge for more experienced players.

Concluding

Both games’ books can be purchased as dead-tree editions from Lulu at their respective storefronts. Both projects also offer free PDFs on reasonably liberal terms, so your not forced to pay a dime.

Since I’m quite partial to hardcover books, I already ordered a hardcover copy of both books (Lulu’s pricing is very competitive). I haven’t received them yet, nor did I actually play either of the two games though. I hope to soon though.

While I’m not yet on Lucid (I’m planning to reinstall after the beta is released), I did enable left style titlebar buttons. And to be honest I’m having huge issues adjusting to this… Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good decision from Canonical to move them to the left,  but I’m struggling with a 15 year old habit to move the mouse to the right when I want to minimize/maximize/close a window…

When you look at this almost everything is left oriented, the GNOME panel’s main menu, the applications file/edit/… menu’s, etc. So why would the titlebar buttons need to be on the right side. This makes no sense at all…

So I’m planning to continue to get used to the left-side model, even if that means getting highly annoyed at times.

The problem is not with Canonical moving the buttons, the problem is with me getting into a habit with a poorly designed user interface.

Yay for Canonical fixing things!

In the past I’ve always been a very assertive advocate of UFRaw (+F-Spot). I’ve never found rawstudio/rawtherapee any good for my purposes. However in recent months a new contender has emerged, and it’s called Darktable (obviously a pun on Lightroom (Lighttable & Darkroom)). It’s primarily authored by Johannes Hanika, who judging by the git log is a one man coding army.

There are a couple of things that interest me in Darktable, the first is that it is a combo of both photo management (lighttable) and raw development (darkroom), it’s really integrated, not two programs (F-Spot + UFRaw) stuck together with some ducktape.

The second would be the fact that Darktable seems extremely well designed, it’s entirely plugin based, even the raw import itself is a plugin. This means the code is well separated into these plugins, this inherently means functionality can be disabled by just disabling a plugin. No need to comment out some code before compiling.

Another strong point of Darktable is it’s imaging pipeline, except for the first and last few steps, the pipeline is entirely in 32bit floating point LAB colorspace, properly integrating color management. Which means it’s calculations can be extremely accurate. A nice extra benefit is the fact that some image operations just work better in LAB than other colorspaces, the Unsharp Mask being the principal example of this.

Something that’s also very important to me is the user interface, I really care about this. While Darktable does not always conform to common practice in user interfaces and often prevents novel idea’s for it’s user interface, it’s easy to work with. It works particularly well fullscreen (F11 just like Firefox), it’s dark theme makes sure you’re not distracted from your photograph. And the edge/buttons for expanding or collapsing the sidebars are at the screen’s edges, which means you can just quickly drag your mouse to the edge (without any particularly aim), and click to expand or collapse a sidebar, this works really fast!

Darktable is still a very young project, but it’s well worth taking a look at. Rolf Steinort from Meet The GIMP recently did a show on Darktable.

If you want to try Darktable yourself can get nicely packaged git checkouts (development versions) from my PPA for Ubuntu.

Recently I’ve become the proud owner of a spectrophotometer, besides profiling printers, there lots of other cool things you can do with it… For example making your own homebrew ColorChecker camera profiling target. While my replica isn’t accurate enough as a drop-in replacement, it does work very well, when each homebrew ColorChecker is measured separately to create per-chart reference data. Even with the per-chart reference data the homebrew ColorChecker isn’t as good as the original, because the original had it’s pigments selected to reduce metamerism, which the homebrew version is potentially vulnerable to.

The above picture is a first version of my homebrew ColorChecker. I made it by first looking for a good neutral matte white paper, which became Tetenal Photo Archival Matte, for which I then made a printer profile using ArgyllCMS. Generating a printer profile (actually it’s profile of the paper+ink+printer+driver configuration combo) means I can print images with a reasonable level of confidence the print will be color accurate. Then I made a custom sRGB version of the ColorChecker target (look for inspiration here). Then I printed the custom sRGB image of the ColorChecker with the printer profile applied. Then I measured the target using my spectrophotometer, so I know what colors the patches actually are. I scaled the print so that the target could fit inside the manual area of a traditional 14mm DVD case. The DVD case has a dual purpose here, first it keeps the target straight/upright and when closed it protects the target from dust/moist. To stick the target to the inside of the case I used 3M Photo Mount, which is Ph-neutral to prevent the glue from deteriorating the colors.

Initial tests are very encouraging, camera profiles generated from it work quite well, especially when shot using a decent hot-shoe flash.

I, as many others, read about Canonical’s decision to use Yahoo as the default search provider. When I read the headline I assumed without doubt the decision had to be made because of the recent search results privacy debacle of Google. However, after reading the article a bit later, it’s a business move… They get paid to do this…

The most problematic part of this all, is the notion, it’s all okay, “because it’s easy to change back”. This is the biggest bullshit argument in history. First how easy it is to do anything is very relative… There are lots of computer users which are simply not capable of changing this default, or any default at all anywhere… I suppose this is the audience where they intended to receive this revenue from… Since lots of default-changing-capable folks will most likely be changing back to Google anyway.

And of course there is a bigger point to be made here. I don’t want any external party to have any influence on how my operating system is defaulted. I mean… Will the release after Lucid have the Picasa/SmugMug uploaders disabled in F-Spot, only leaving the Flickr uploader available, because Yahoo paid for it. The other uploaders would obviously be “easy” to add back, because then it would be all okay… And an advertisement here-or-there never hurt anybody too…

While I do get it’s not particularly easy to build a stable company on open source software, and we shouldn’t expect Mark to endlessly pour money into Canonical, but we could ask ourselves, how viable Ubuntu would be in the long term if these kinds of decisions need to be made.

I’d much rather have them cut back on shipments of free CDs amongst other things…