Category Archives: tech

In-kernel audio mixing

Ever since PulseAudio started to be deployed by distributions the most common complaint I’ve seen about ALSA is that unlike current versions of OSS it doesn’t provide mixing of audio from multiple applications inside the kernel. Of course what it really comes down to is that people want the system to transparently allow multiple applications [...]

Full quoting

There’s a long standing idea tha one should make an effort to trim out text from the original which is not germane to the new content in your reply. This is not just a bandwidth thing, it’s also about decreasing the effort required for the readers to parse the message – to locate the new [...]

Chrome is getting a Linux installer

Looks like Chrome is going to get a Linux installer like people have been asking for. Might be overkill, though.

GMail UI issues

I read a lot of e-mail, mostly for Linux related purposes. Normally people use well behaved e-mail clients and everything is presented in a fairly standard fashion but there’s some that often stick out like a sore thumb. The obvious one is Outlook, which has well known idiosyncracies but which some companies force their employees [...]

Stuck on hold

Being stuck listening to hold music for an extended period is annoying. What’s even more annoying for me is when the IVR system regularly interrupts the hold music with a voice announcement, often telling you something enormously useful like pointing out that you’re on hold. Music I find easy to zone out without paying too [...]

ASoC changes in 2.6.30

Linux 2.6.30 was released today. This has been a fairly quiet release from the ASoC point of view with no substantial API changes for drivers but there’s a few new interfaces which people may find helpful. Highlights include: A simple wrapper for the standard ALSA jack detection interface. This helps makes jacks a bit easier [...]

DAPM power sequence optimisation

I recently implemented some enhancements to DAPM, the part of ASoC which minimizes the power consumption of the embedded audio subsystem by keeping any unused components powered off while avoiding audible artifacts as the power changes. Prior to these changes DAPM used to change the power for each component with an individual register write which [...]

Counterproductive nags

The Mac OS X version of Twitteriffic has a shareware style registration model: the idea is that if you like the software you’re supposed to register it. Apparently one of the benefits you get from this is that when you start the registered version up it will, instead of prompting you to click through a [...]

etckeeping git

Working with multiple upstream kernel trees and keeping an eye on more my git repositories tend to end up with large numbers of remotes (this laptop has 22, for example). It’s getting to the point where I need something like etckeeper to keep track of them all.

Buffer overflows ahoy

I may be wrong on this but it looks like Microsoft SMTP clients (at least Windows Mail and Outlook) don’t like being sent a large volume of SSL certificate information when opening a TLS connection. They appear to assume that the data they are being sent is malformed and assume that STARTTLS failed, continuing with [...]