Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Avinash Meetoo

No stuttering when using GStreamer

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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)

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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!!! ;-)

Yonah on next year’s iBook?

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During WWDC 2005, Steve Jobs announced that new Macs will use Intel processors instead of PowerPC processors.

The rationale behind this is easy to understand if you know some facts:

  • The PowerPC G4 is a 32-bits processor and it powers the iBooks and PowerBooks.
  • The PowerPC G4 was released in 1999 and has a FSB of only 167MHz therefore the overall performance of the computer is limited.

Now,

  • Intel has a very powerful mobile platform, Centrino, using the mighty Pentium-M processor which is much more efficient than the Pentium IV
  • Intel is currently developing a new version of the Pentium-M called Yonah which is a dual-core design with a shared 2MB L2 cache offering SSE3 instructions and Virtualization with a 667MHz FSB.
  • Yonah is 32-bits (i.e. it does not offer EM64T instructions)
  • Yonah will be available around June 2006 with the third version of the Centrino platform, Napa.

Now let’s add 2 and 2 together…

  1. Apple laptop’s have severely underpowered 32-bits processors…
  2. Intel will have a very powerful 32-bits mobile processor around June 2006.
  3. Steve Jobs has said that the first Intel Macs will be released around June 2006.

Conclusion:

In June 2006, Apple will release its first Intel-powered computers. They will be iBooks and PowerBooks using the Intel Yonah processor!

I think I’ll wait for 9 additional months. NeXTstep, nous voila… after 17 years and 9 months :-)

PS:

Intel is currently working on its next generation microarchitecture which will feature Conroe, the replacement for the (crap) Pentium IV and which will share lots of similarities with the Pentium-M. Conroe will be 64-bits (like the PowerPC G5) and will be much more powerful than current processors. It’s mobile version is called Merom. Both will be released at the end of 2006. And I think that Apple will then release Conroe-based PowerMacs and Merom-based PowerBooks. And leave Yonah in the iBooks for some time…