Hartwork Blog (Posts about Planet Xiph)

Created with Free Software! A button to spread the word

Sebastian Pipping — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:08:12 GMT

Last month I did a presentation on the concept of redundancy in a human factor related seminar at university. As most participants were non-IT people and using Windows I felt like promoting Free Software without making it "too loud". So I came up with the idea of putting a rubber stamp "Created with Free Software" onto the front slide. I found an Inkscape tutorial on rubber stamps to get me started. This is the result: On the the front slide: To get the stamp appear at that very place can be a little tricky. Feel free to inspect the slide sources, particularly redundanz.tex. By now there is optimized PNGs

in 4 colors (original/red, gray, white and black)
in 4 sizes (88x28/59, 120x38/81, 180x57/121 and 300x95/201)
rotated or not (0° and 25° counter-clockwise)

and SVGs respectively. In case you need PDFs: Inkscape converts well on the commandline:

# inkscape --export-pdf=out.pdf in.svg

To see them all please visit the "Created with Free Software" page of the FSFE. Please make use of this stamp whereever you see fits. If you have photos or screenshots of the button in action please comment here. Please join promoting Free Software!

[EDIT] : The button sources (SVG) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license (unlike this blog post itself, see box below). The PNG versions are licensed even more liberally under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal license. The idea is to keep derivatives "in the pool" while allowing to use the PNGs without even attribution.

Inviting you to project "PackageMap"

Sebastian Pipping — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:42:50 GMT

Quick (re-)introduction: My task for Gentoo/Google Summer of Code 2009 is to give Gentoo a Debian popcon equivalent, a tool to collect statistics on "what package is installed how often". To achieve this goal I'm extending Smolt (a tool currently doing similar things with hardware information) by fine-tunable software stats gathering. The plan we have for Smolt is to make it cross-distro, not just fit Gentoo or Fedora. One point where the consequences and benefits of such an approach can be seen clearly is with counting packages from different distros into the same buckets.

What do I mean by that? Debian's Git counts for Gentoo's Git counts for Fedora's, you know the list. With packages counted from accross distros we can suddenly answer questions that we currently cannot answer, among them

What globally popular packages are missing in distro X? Let's say we don't have a package for product P. Do other distros have one? They do, maybe we need one, too? They don't, maybe P is not that important then?
How many Linux users are approximately using program X in total? Not just on Ubuntu or Arch - all across Linux, BSD, Solaris!
Does distro X have 10 times the packages of Y or is it just different splitting?

To count into the same bucket we use global identifiers for the "products" that fall out of a package. Gentoo package "dev-util/git" can produce product "cpe://a:git:git", Debian's "git-core" can, too. That string before is a CPE name, a concept close to package naming in Java. This "intermediate language" allows us to relate package names from distro X with those of distro Y and answer various questions from that data. To do such mapping we need code (or a "service") that does the mapping for us and base of collected data that the service can operate on. Both of these is project "PackageMap". I have started populating the database with packages (currently 312 in number) made from information extracted from the Gentoo tree and the National Vulnerability Database. Latter holds many CPEs. Let me state clearly that packagemap is not about Gentoo in particular. Sure, the initial data has lots of Gentoo in it but the whole point of the project is to get information and people from different distros together. To see what these 312 packages maps look like at the moment you best do a few clicks through the database folder yourself: https://git.goodpoint.de/?p=packagemap.git;a=tree;f=database Also, there are Relax NG schema and DTD for validation, more documentation than I usually write and a few scripts: https://git.goodpoint.de/?p=packagemap.git;a=tree

By now I hope you have gained interest in what this can become. Your active participation is highly appreciated. A few minutes from everyone can make a huge difference here. If you want write access to the repo - mail me: sebastian@pipping.org. Please have a look at the Git repository and ask questions. Thanks for reading up to this point. PS: I'm aware "hartwork.org" might not make a good longterm location for DTDs, XML namespaces and such for a cross-distro project. Any ideas where to put them best?

Forced push on libxspf Git repository

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:39:07 GMT

Sorry, in case that hits you. I had to do it: I made a mistake during the initial Subversion to Git repository import which is why several commits somewhere around libspiff-0.7.0 were not imported at all. The Subversion server disconnected a few times and it seems that continuing with the very same clone command was the wrong thing to do. This time git svn fetch did better. So all tags and commits should be available through Git by now.

XSPF at Google Summer of Code 2009

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:30:53 GMT

There are two XSPF-related projects for Summer of Code this year:

XSPF import and export for Songbird
Python library / Online validator refactoring

Please check the Summer of Code 2009 page at the Xiph Wiki for details and the complete list of Xiph projects waiting for you to apply. :-) Student application starts in two days (March 23). Looking forward to working with you!

libxspf 1.2.0 released

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:37:11 GMT

This release features build system changes and fixes, as well as an extension for the C bindings for parsing XSPF from a block of memory. Please see the change log for details. This release is both source- and binary-compatible.

libbs2b 2.2.1 released

Sebastian Pipping — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:17:36 GMT

bs2b is short for "Bauer stereophonic-to- binaural DSP", an audio effect increasing headphone listening pleasure. Check the well-explained algorithm details for more. I helped with making a shared library from bs2b using the Autotools family: Autoconf, Automake, Libtool, autogen.sh. The just-released libbs2b-2.2.1 is featuring that. bs2b plugins for many popular audio players are already available (e.g. XMMS and Winamp) or in the making and to be released soon (i.e. QMMP). Still, some DSP- supporting players lack a bs2b plugin (e.g. Audacious) and that's a great place for you to step in. Please contact me about details if you're interested.

libxspf 1.1.0 released (successor of libSpiff)

Sebastian Pipping — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:35:02 GMT

With this release libSpiff mutates into libxspf, same thing new name. Under the hood the build system has improved and generation of Qt Assistant-friendly documentation has been added. The source code moved from a Subversion to a Git repository. Please meet me at the XSPF mailing list to team up on any transition-related issues. Thank you!

SF.net Subversion to Xiph.org Git migration

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:36:51 GMT

I'm still at renaming libSpiff to libxspf and as part of that I also decided to move from Subversion to Git. In case anybody plans to do similar here is what I did:

Get a shell account at git.xiph.org and write access to /var/www/git.xiph.org/libxspf.git/.
Run a few commands only my local shell:

# Fetch old repository
echo "EdSchouten = Ed Schouten <protected>" \
    >> libspiff_authors
echo "hartwork = Sebastian Pipping <protected>" \
    >> libspiff_authors
git svn clone https://libspiff.svn.sourceforge.net/\
svnroot/libspiff --stdlayout \
    --authors-file=libspiff_authors

# Build new bare/remote repository
git clone --bare libspiff libxspf.git
echo "Official libxspf repository" \
    > libxspf.git/description
touch libxspf.git/git-daemon-export-ok

# Upload it
rsync -avz libxspf.git/* sping@git.xiph.org:\
/var/www/git.xiph.org/libxspf.git/

Hire me, I do Free Software

Sebastian Pipping — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:21:12 GMT

I'm looking for a job with following three required qualities:

Producing Free Open Source Software
Part time, about two days a week
From home or in Berlin, Germany

I'm quite open about the rest though I sure won't do Visual Basic ;-) Being sponsored on continuing development of uriparser would rock, for instance. Check out my CV here:

~~CV Sebastian Pipping~~ (taken off-line)

Mail me, call me, invite me:

sebastian@pipping.org
(+49177) 460 46 17

Looking forward to hearing from you. Sebastian PS: Thanks to Jason Blevins for his CV template.

Creative Commons'ing my blog

Sebastian Pipping — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:41:56 GMT

From today on all post content on this blog including past posts is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany License. I've been seeing value in Creative Commons for quite some time now but never really thought of applying it to my own blog...? I guess I wasn't really aware that this is work indirectly licensed "no rights at all" unless I make a conscious decision into another direction. In relation to this the Creative-Commons-Configurator WordPress Plugin deserves mentioning. After a few clicks your Wordpress blog is ready for Creative Commons. Recommended.