Author archives: Mike

Pulse, when installed, will unconditionally overwrite your carefully crafted .asoundrc settings that, for instance, use an environment variable to choose the ALSA device on which to output.  This is one of those things that everything tells you "is good", without telling you how it happens, or how to stop it.  Long story short, the offending ...

If you have PyOpenGL dependent code, now would be the time to check that it runs against the latest beta.  Assuming no show-stopping bugs are reported this will be the last beta before 3.0.2 final is released.  Available in PyPI now.

So you have an "embeddded" Django instance where you want to strip the thing down to the minimum required files.  You run compileall on your site-packages, then strip/delete all of the .py files... and your Django becomes pretty useless, because it no longer recognizes any of your management plugins (not even the built-in ones).

This ...

While waiting for a server to get back online today I've been playing with a QIII map (BSP file) loader. Not much to it at the moment, it "parses" the whole file, but the rendering isn't particularly useful.

The loader uses numpy mmap'd files and typed views onto those to do the interpretation of the ...

So you want to be able to capture the output of N Alsa "devices" (think N separate programs). It seems like the correct solution to this should be an Alsa loopback device... so, here's how to create them.

• Add snd-aloop to your /etc/modules
• Add a file named /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-aloop.conf (content below)
• Create a .asoundrc that makes ...

So I finally got the ALSA loopback working with gstreamer. Key is to use ALSA's plugs to get the right format on both sides of the capture:

{% for spk in cards %}
pcm.spk{{spk}} {
  type plug
  slave{
    pcm "hw:Loopback{{spk}},0,0"
    rate 48000
    format S16_LE
  }
}
pcm.monitor{{spk}}_snoop {
  type dsnoop
  ipc_key 68659{{spk}}
  slave{
    pcm "hw:Loopback{{spk}},1,0" ...

So you want to create a stupid-and-dirty HTML5 video tag to allow you to monitor a (local-only) multicast stream from your (Django + Nginx) web site?  Not something to be seen by "real people", but a way for you to see if anything is broadcasting?

This is a pretty simplistic thing, again; do *not* do ...

So we want to capture the (alsa) output of processes and pipe it into an mpeg-ts stream.  Except gstreamer's alsasrc can't do "monitor", so we wind up having to do a pulsesrc... which brings the server to its knees in a few minutes with memory exhaustion for no reason I can fathom.

Annoying part is ...

Each time I sit down to help someone relatively new to coding I find myself somewhat awe-struck at how much I've "forgotten".  Just install nginx with gunicorn and django in a virtualenv.  Package up your code with a setup.py using distribute.  Run your unittests with Nose.  Use sphinx and embedded doctests.

You tell someone that ...

In one of those cases where you ask a question, don't get an answer, then spend far longer than you intended playing with the problem, I've just added a Pipe mechanism to Fussy (why to fussy, you ask? Well because that's where I wanted to use it).  Basically it provides a small wrapper around subprocess ...