Archives for October 2005

Want to get a $100 laptop???

15 October 2005 By Avinash Meetoo 3 Comments

The MIT Media Lab is currently working on a $100 laptop for children in developing nations. Nicholas Negroponte, Media Lab’s founder believes that by eliminating profits, expensive displays, and commercial software, he can build a laptop for less than $100.

As read in the FAQ, [t]he idea is to distribute the machines through those ministries of education willing to adopt a policy of “One Laptop per Child.” Initial discussions have been held with China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt.

The specs are not extraordinary (a 500 MHz processor, 1GB hard disk space, 1 Megapixel display (1024×768 I suppose)) but the laptops are WiFi- and cellphone-enabled (Bluetooth I suppose) and have many USB ports.

And they run Linux!!!

No stuttering when using GStreamer

14 October 2005 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

Lately, all my audio and video applications using the GStreamer framework started stuttering.

Today, while reading this post in the Gentoo forum, I realised that the latest ALSA GStreamer plugins (0.8.10) was the culprit and the problem could easily be solved by downgrading to 0.8.8 until 0.8.10 is corrected.

The procedure is trivial if you use Gentoo:

1) echo "=media-plugins/gst-plugins-alsa-0.8.10*" >> /etc/portage/package.mask 2) emerge -av gst-plugins-alsa

Voila! No more stuttering :-)

17 november 2005 : I am wrong!

While perusing this very interesting webpage on Dmix, I realised I’ve was wrong.

gst-plugins-alsa-0.8.10 is not buggy. Rather, my sound card (containg an ICE 1712 chipset) requires a larger buffer size than the default to play without stuttering. This is easily done in Amarok by specifying the appropriate parameters (period-size=1024 buffer-size=4096) in the Engine configuration dialog box :

Now, back to some nice music :-)

Joining the ACM (instead of IEEE)

10 October 2005 By Avinash Meetoo 3 Comments

I want to join ACM ko keep in touch with reseach in Computer Science. My field of research being OO programming languages and OO frameworks, SIGPLAN is obviously the main reason I want to join ACM.

SIGPLAN organises many conferences throughout the year. Three are very important to me:

OOPSLA – Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications.
ICFP – Functional Programming.
PPOPP – Principles and Practices of Parallel Programming

I’m planning to get a full ACM membership with complete access to the ACM Portal.

Now, I’ve just read a blog entry comparing the relative merits of IEEE & ACM and, in the end, the author finally joined ACM as, according to him, ACM was “more academic” implying IEEE was “more practical”.

Essentially, you can consider me as being an ACM member… except if you can convince me to subscribe to IEEE (or any other professional computer society) instead :-)

An update

I’ve done it! I am now an ACM member :-) I have paid only $43 (instead of the normal $198) as Mauritius is (as far as ACM is concerned) an Economically Developing Country.

I now have those benefits: web-based IT training courses, online IT books, full-text from ACM magazines and journals, bibliographic citations, preferential price for conferences, 34 special interest groups (among those SIGPLAN), networking opportunities, etc.

Hooray!!! ;-)