My thoughts in e-text

Chromium is not yet complete no matter what I say here. Please do not post bugs or assume this is the final version of chromium. It still lacks a lot of features. My intension here is to only show you how you can get started on building chrome in Gentoo. Google chromium project has come a long way. I have been building chromium once in a while but it was not stable and was slow until recently. But now I am using it as my primary browser (well there are some exceptions as I will explain later)! It is better than my firefox experience (at least in linux). To get started head over to this link . First you will need to have all the prerequisites . In ubuntu it is pretty easy. On gentoo we need the gentoo package equivalents of all the prerequisites. Here is the list of things I mapped from ubuntu packages to Gentoo. * Python >= 2.4 ---> python * Perl >= 5.x --> perl * gcc/g++ >= 4.2 --> gcc * g++-multilib >=4.2 --> ? * bison >= 2.3 --...

You have probably heard of Boxee and Gentoo (come on). I wanted to give Boxee a try, because of all the movies and tv shows that I can watch for free. I have already switched from Freevo to xbmc (which is a story in itself) as my primary media center. Since boxee is a fork of xbmc I thought I might give it a try. Why not? Because xbmc was so easy to compile and install. I did not have any problem compiling the latest code from subversion. I registered and downloaded the latest code from Boxee's website. There is no link to svn and so I downloaded version 0.9.11.5591. The compile was pretty simple 1. Untar the downloaded file 2. autoconf 3. ./configure 4. make -j3 However the compile was not successful. The first problem I ran into was this compile error: XAPP_MC.cpp:12:20: error: bxcurl.h: No such file or directory To solve it, I googled around and found the solution in the boxee forums. I had to make minor modifications to the following Makefiles xbmc/Makefile SRCS += BoxeeAuthen...

It has been over a month since part 1, so let me start off quickly and finish this part. I will try to explain how I got the 19 bpp working in mplayer. It was very straight forward really. I had to edit the following files from the mplayer-cvs (you can download the code from http://code.google.com/p/j2me-ctunes/ ): libmpcodecs/img_format.c libmpcodecs/img_format.h libmpcodecs/vf_scale.c libvo/osd.c libvo/osd.h libvo/vo_fbdev.c mplayer.c postproc/yuv2rgb.c postproc/swscale.c In libmpcodecs/img_format.c, libmpcodecs/img_format.c and libmpcodecs/vf_scale.c I added a few lines to return something to say 19-bpp is supported in RGB and BGR formats. libvo/osd.c is interesting. I added a method called vo_draw_alpha_rgb19() which draws the alpha for 19-bpp. In libvo/vo_fbdev.c, I disabled some code that was causing problems in ROKR and disabled clipping because it was done elsewhere. In addtion added code to initialize variables for 19-bpp format (i.e. r, g, b offsets and lengths. Each color is...

Ever since I posted the cTunes video on youtube ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=coV06ChYWJo ), I have been getting a few requests for the app to download and the source code. I have blogged a little about it here and the download link for the app can be found here , here , here and probably a lot more places too. It is wonderful to see an application that I wrote over a few weekends get such wide audience. Forums are still active on this half baked media player. But people have been asking for the source code and since I moved to a new job and had to shuffle my computers around, I don't remember where the code lives anymore. But the good news is I always have backups as my trusty little cronjob on my ever running PC takes care of backing up all the important files to a 1 TB drive every weekend so I never loose anything. Just hard to find that is all. Wish I had a google search on my .tar.bz2 files ;-). Anyway I took time today to search for the code because a student emailed me aski...

The most usable (for me anyway) VirtualBox release for mac is out. I just downloaded 1.6.0 from VirtualBox.org . I was finally able to load the virtualbox additions. Check out my previous blog to read about the issues I faced. Here is a quick recap of the issues: I could not use my full screen real estate which was 1440x900. The max resolution I could get was 1152x864. Unable to mount my shared folder. Cannot ssh from master OS (mac OS). First I am glad that VBox for mac has finally come out of beta. Just the fact that there is a release lifts the spirits a bit. Coming to my first issue, I am now able to make full use of my screen. It did not work out of the box, but the tweaks I had to do were small enough to not make me grumpy. I installed 1.6.0 on my macbook pro. Started my Gentoo guest OS. Loaded the virtualbox additions iso to the virtual cdrom by doing Devices > Install Guest Additions... Mounted the cdrom from Gentoo by doing mount /mnt/cdrom as root. Executed /mnt/cdrom...

I was finally able to clean up the code and add some comments to my pet project YAGTD which stands for Yet another getting things done. See my previous blog for more details. The code is available here if anyone is interested to modify for their specific needs. To try out the application go to http://yagtd.appspot.com/

The short version If you are having problems with elisa not playing your local media files (see https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/ticket/957 and https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/ticket/961 ) then you can fix it by editing ~/.elisa/elisa.conf and changing gstreamer:gst_metadata_client to gstreamer:gst_metadata . That is all and it works! The long version Ever since I heard about elisa , I have been trying to get it to work as my media center. It was well designed and the vector graphics are awesome. It plays music, videos and displays pictures, and has several plug-ins to play online music and youtube videos etc. You can even get cover arts from amazon from with in the software. But there is just one problem. It could never play my local media. Neither movies, nor music and not even photos. I gave v0.3.3 of elisa a try. It did not play my personal media. I thought, well it is still in development, so why not wait for the next release. I did not even take a look at the logs. Then...