Justin TV is a streaming service that uses the broken flash concept in order to allow you to view channels.

Unfortunately it's the only source of Arabic movies, series and shows.

I wrote a GStreamer source that retrieves the channel information and uses libRTMP to connect to the Justin streaming server. The rest is handled by GStreamer ;-)

If you want to watch http://www.justin.tv/ammartv for example, you simply do

The 2nd plugin is a Totem plugin that indirectly utilizes the GStreamer source.
Given a language code (ar or en or ...), it will download the list of channels in that language and shows them in Totem's side panel. One can then easily double click on a channel and simply watch it. I originally wanted to do the Totem plugin in python but the inability to do asynchronous callback based HTTP requests prevented me :-(

Be warned that the code is of course a bit buggy and needs a lot of cleanups, it's been years since I coded anything in Gtk and that Justin might find out and either block the source somehow or even change the protocol but let's wait until that happens ;-) read more

This is a kernel module I cooked in a couple of days. The idea is to expose a v4l device that gets its data from user space.

I had 2 use cases in mind:
1) Educational purpose for myself (I'm really a kernel noob).
2) Streaming movies over skype, google talk, ... etc.

The idea could be good or completely rubbish but hey ? Learning can only be done with stupid ideas!

The code is highly unstable. It shouldn't oops the kernel but I'm not responsible. I've been developing and testing it inside qemu.

Clone it from the git repository via:

Here are a few missing bits off the top of my head:

* I'm not following the kernel coding style yet ;-)
* I'm sure my locking, unlocking and concurrency handling is flawed.
* The code is a bit fragile.
* It'd be nice to implement mmap support for the character device. This should eliminate data copies.
* Perhaps expose the character device all the time and generate "fake" frames when streaming starts ? Problem now is one has to be very fast in feeding data to the module otherwise select() on the v4l device will timeout.
* Many more...

If someone finds this idea useful, please drop me a line.
Comments, use cases, ideas and tips are really welcomed!

If I see a lot of interest, I might try to push it to the kernel tree one day ;-)

Update: Seems vloopback already exists and renders my code useless. I might still do something with it as my idea seems a bit simpler but whatever.

Update 2: There's also v4l2loopback and its fork. read more

Gunnar Wolf has written an interesting post about the current situation in Egypt, which includes references to Israel (where he lived for a few years) and Mexico (where he has spent most of his life) [1].Gunnar included a copy of Mohammed Sameer s blog post on the topic [2], which is a good idea as we can t rely on Mohammed s post remaining online.The Reid Report has an interesting summary of various news sources [3].I hope that the end result of this is a democratically elected government that respects human rights and offers fair trials to people accused of crimes and humane punishments those found guilty. It would be ideal if the transition could happen in a way that involves little violence and no interruptions to the food supply etc.Update: Chris Samuel provided some information on free PPP access in other countries for people in Egypt [4]. This will probably be of short-term use as the Egypten regime will probably cut International phone access too.Update2: Lars has written some interesting comments including links to articles about the US government wanting the power to cut off Internet access in the same way as the Egyptian government [5].

• [1] http://gwolf.org/blog/echoing-mohammed
• [2] http://foolab.org/node/7892
• [3] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/01/egypt-in-chaos-elbaradei-reportedly-under-
  house-arrest/
• [4] http://www.csamuel.org/2011/01/29/ppp-dialups-for-people-in-egypt-egypt-jan25
• [5] http://blog.liw.fi/posts/egypt-blocks-comms/

For those of you who follow me through anything other than Planet Debian (who will surely tolerate this repetition): Interesting but frightful things are happening in North African countries. We saw what happened in Tunisia some days ago. Now, Egypt is a way larger, way more populous... And, dare I say, way more important country. Also, it is a country which borders Israel, where I lived in for ~18 months, and to which although I am today unaffiliated is very important for me. And what happens in Egypt will surely shape the whole mid-East. So, here goes a copy of Mohammed Sameer's post Not just a link to it, as he might have to take it down. Of course, Mohammed, if you in any way think I should delete this, please please tell me, and I will comply immediately.

Egypt has been fighting for freedom already for 3 days now. The whole country has experienced a large number of street demonstrations and protests within the last 3 days to be continued also on Friday, the 28th of January and afterwards. The protests' main goal is to oust dictator Hosni Mubarak's regime, which has been in power for almost 30 years. We want him out. A massacre has happened in Suez. Police used live ammunition and tear gas. There are unconfirmed rumors that the army might interfere. Even a bigger protest is supposed to take place a few hours from now. After the Prayer on Friday. The internet has been shutdown completely. Egypt is no longer online since Friday, the 28th of January 00:45 AM. Text messages to cell phones have been cut off too and all cell phones services will be following. No one knows exactly the intentions of the regime but it doesn't sound good. Please help us.
Please blog about it in English and in all languages.
Please spread the news everywhere.
Please talk to media.
Please petition your government if that will help. If there's anything that you can do, please do it and help us save the country and the people. More news from twitter #jan25.

...From what I read from Israeli sources, what worries them and many people around the world is that, although Egypt is formally a democratic country, the ruling party has seen towards having basically no oposition Besides the stubborn Islamic Brotherhood (very akin to Hamas). Now, the Islamic Brotherhood (as well as Hamas, and as well as most other Islamic regimes I know off, although I might be way mistaken) have got huge popular support because... They are true to their beliefs. In short, they are not corrupt Something that cannot be said about many political organizations around the globe. They are true to their word. And although many of us shiver at thinking of their word getting more power... It is only the Egyptians who should have a say on who rules Egypt. I honestly hope the Egyptian people get their long-owed self-determination. Of course, I hope Tunisians also get it, and not just a mirage of it. And every people, including us poor Mexicans who have neither had a chance to rule our destiny. And I hope it is a change for good, for tolerance, for peaceful coexistance with the neighbours, even if they are in many ways the rivals. [Update] I just found out that, as expected, the news have reached Slashdot: Egypt shuts off all Internet access. I'm sure you will find lots of more information there.

Egypt has been fighting for freedom already for 3 days now.

The whole country has experienced a large number of street demonstrations and protests within the last 3 days to be continued also on Friday, the 28th of January and afterwards.

The protests' main goal is to oust dictator Hosni Mubarak's regime, which has been in power for almost 30 years.

We want him out.

A massacre has happened in Suez. Police used live ammunition and tear gas. There are unconfirmed rumors that the army might interfere.

Even a bigger protest is supposed to take place a few hours from now. After the Prayer on Friday.

The internet has been shutdown completely. Egypt is no longer online since Friday, the 28th of January 00:45 AM.

Text messages to cell phones have been cut off too and all cell phones services will be following. No one knows exactly the intentions of the regime but it doesn't sound good.

Please help us.
Please blog about it in English and in all languages.
Please spread the news everywhere.
Please talk to media.
Please petition your government if that will help.

If there's anything that you can do, please do it and help us save the country and the people.

More news from twitter #jan25. read more

I'm using Twitter plugin for Contacts and Conversations to twitter on my N900.

Twitter recently moved to OAuth. Problem is the Maemo package is outdated and seems to be unmaintained.

I did some research and came across a blog entry about exploring OAuth-protected APIs and some code. Nice idea but not usable for me.

I ended up sitting down and writing a small python script that will re-route your HTTP requests to api.twitter.com after adding all the OAuth bills and whistles, read the reply from twitter and send it back. Neat ? :-)

There's also supertweet.net which I've discovered after I finished writing my script but seems they don't support all of the twitter API call while my script does that.

The script is simple without much error checking but it's been working for me for a few days already.

Last thing, I'm not interested in running a service like supertweet. I'll not be implementing the full OAuth protocol. Need to use it ? Register your own application.

Get the code while hot!

Next step: Thinking of maintaining the twitter plugin for Maemo. I already compiled the latest code and it sort of works fine :-) read more

A serious limitation of the N900 connectivity subsystem IMHO is the inability to create multiple connections. One can only have one connection at a time. read more

Exactly 1 month ago ;-)

read more

I've spent the past few days trying to get MMS to work on the N900.

EDIT: Seems frals has managed to beat me! read more

It'll disappear any moment soon... May you rest in peace :

Thanks to all the hard work by the fglrx packaging team, DRI, MESA, Xorg, Radeon,... etc people!

I've been using fglrx with my laptop since I've had it:

And to the people behind the Debian packaging..
* xserver-xorg-video-radeon from testing.
* libdrm-intel1 and libdrm2 from unstable
* libgl1-mesa-dri and libgl1-mesa-glx from experimental

I probably lost the ability to suspend and resume but I don't usually do it with that laptop.

Now let's hope my lapop at work will be adapted easily too :)

UPDATE: Seems you lose OpenGL 2.0 if you use the free driver. If you are doing OpenGL stuff like me then you are in trouble ;- read more

I'm planning to move all my mailboxes to an IMAP server running on foolab.org, use offlineIMAP to sync between vader "my laptop" and naboo "foolab.org". read more

This post has a bit of my history and emotions. It can be skipped!

The summary is: Katoob has a new maintainer.

... read more

OK. This is the beauty of FOSS. The project has been dead upstream for a while now. It survived until it was removed from lenny.

Now me and 2 other users decided to adapt it. port it or rewrite it in gtk2.

We are having a discussion about the whole situation.

To anyone still using multi-gnome-terminal: Please share with us the features you were actually using. These are the ones more likely to be implemented and no new features will probably be added, maybe help us coding and/or testing or participate in the discussions. read more

And I thought I'll never do such things again ?
I wanted to insert a debugging statement at the beginning of each function.

It can probably be used to insert anything too.

It's dirty but it worked for me. Just keep a backup or make sure the latest code is in any RCS just in case.

It only failed with a function that was commented using C++ style comments "//".
I didn't try it with class methods defined inside header files read more

Thanks to those 2 comments. Although placing Xft.dpi: 96 in my ~/.Xdefaults did not help, but I managed to do it through the appearance control center applet. I had to purge the gtk-qt theme engine because it was freezing the dialog and setting it via gconf-editor didn't work as expected.

I had to fight with my fonts this morning but here's my configuration. Maybe it'll be useful to anyone:
DejaVu sans book 12
96 DPI
greyscale smoothing, subpixel slight RGB.

I'm not yet satisfied but it's more usable now.

Thanks Phaeronix for the help too. read more

I have 2 laptops. My personal one at home and my work one at the office. Both are running testing. A month or two ago, I did a dist-upgrade on the home one. Later on I rebooted (DUH!) it for a reason I can't remember just to end up with very tiny fonts under GNOME. It took me some time to tweak them back again and play with the GNOME anti-aliasing dialog. Now if you know me well, you know that the last thing someone should do to me is to touch my font settings. I have a very sensitive eye (Because I have a very low vision) and I hardly tweak the fonts. All went somehow fine after that. Problem is I wasn't sure whether it was fglrx or GNOME who's responsible for that. read more

So, today Multi GNOME terminal has been removed from debian as part of the efforts to get rid of gtk 1.x.

I'm neither ranting nor blaming. I'm just expressing my feelings.

I knew before it happened and I acknoledged the removel. It's dead upstream and I don't think it can be easily ported. I've been using this terminal since 4 or 5 years. Let's see if I can live without it. I know there are a lot but this one was lightweight and it was using zvt which was noticeably faster than vte.
This was one of the packages I worked on with "He" as part of the NM T&S and I quite learned a lot from it. read more

So the svn repository now contains what should be katoob 0.5.9 (Hopefully). Which can now run under maemo. read more

Here it goes. Lighttpd, php, sqlite and drupal with sqlite support.

All compiled inside scratchbox using the beta Chinook SDK.