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I spent some of Tuesday porting some of my older OpenVP visualizations from XML-serialized scripted effect presets to “real” preset classes, and committed them to Banshee.OpenVP. The results:

Hopefully, anyway.

I spent some time this last week (probably over 15 hours total) giving the Banshee visualization pipeline another overhaul. In the process of doing this I finally filed a bug I found in the spectrum GStreamer element that I’ve been trying to work around for a long time.

Even though Sebastian was able to fix this specific bug, another crept up, which he did fix, but it became apparent to me that using the spectrum element was the wrong approach. I won’t go into too many details, but it made disabling and re-enabling the pipeline incredibly tricky and required a buffer of spectrum slices that had to be synchronized with a mutex since it was being accessed by three threads.

Sebastian gave me some pointers on using libgstfft directly, and this has reduced the amount of code required to do spectrum analysis while making it less laggy and less of a hack.

I’m told this patch (and possibly Banshee.OpenVP) will be going into Banshee 1.6. Sweet.

Mandatory screen shot of the new code and of the new Voiceprint visualization in Banshee.OpenVP:

Update 2009-01-22: I had to revise the patch to fix a segfault caused by a race and to eliminate some timing issues with thawing synchronization. The link to the patch has been updated.

I got the replacement for my defective laptop display on Saturday and got around to installing it last night. So far everything looks good. There are no defective pixels as far as I can tell and, as a bonus, it’s a matte display instead of the glossy one that came with my laptop. Woot!

I stumbled across this bit of Apple awesomeness today. If you look at the huge splash image, you’ll note this text to the right of the mouse:

Touch-sensitive technology detects right and left click.

Oh? I’m sorry, I was under the impression that you manipulated mice with telepathy, not with touch! What a revolutionary invention!

So here’s the timeline as I see it:

1. Apple comes out with their first Mac with one mouse button to make things simple, because two buttons on a mouse is too much.
2. People complain, so they come out with a two-button mouse. People associate those with PCs and hate them.
3. Some years later, Apple invents a mouse that looks like it has one button but behaves like it has two, due to fancy “touch-sensitivity.”
4. Apple fanboys everywhere rejoice that they can now do two things with their mouse without being seen with a two-button mouse.

I predict that next year Apple will invent:

• Touch-sensitive keyboards,
• precision air-compressing speakers,
• and light-emitting monitors.

Oh, and by the way, the price tag on that fancy touch-sensitivity? $70.