Armed with a text editor

Editing Appreciated Posted 2007.07.09 18:23 PDT

Nis Martensen, who has undertaken to translate my CairoTutorial into C, found several typos and a source code misalignment. (The latter possibly introduced when I fixed the real error Mark spotted.) I fixed the typos and updated my code display macro to work with tagged lines of code so it should be much less brittle against future code updates. Thanks, Nis!

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Fixing im-ja Posted 2007.07.06 23:16 PDT

My favorite Japanese input method for gtk+, im-ja, broke when I updated to Debian's gtk+ 2.10 packages. Since there's no upstream activity to speak of (much less new packages), and I can't seem to find this on the web anywhere else, here's the solution I eventually found. No doubt there's a better one out there that updates the package to use the new debhelper support for gtkimmodules to create this file, but I made mine by hand:

% cat /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodule-files.d/imja.immodules 
# edited by hand
"/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.4.0/immodules/im-ja.so"
"im-ja" "Japanese" "gtk+" "/usr/share/locale" "ja"

I had tried compiling a new version of the existing package that would go into the 2.10.0 immodules folder, but that didn't help. When I wired that version up with the slight mode to the above file, it crashed applications that tried to use it. But the original im-ja package is still kicking!

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ReReplayGain Posted 2007.04.07 20:16 PDT

After ending up with too many MP3 files without proper ReplayGain information, and knowing that mp3gain doesn't suit my needs quite right, I went jonesing around in GStreamer once again. Today was my lucky day, though; René Stadler had created a GStreamer element which calculates ReplayGain.

In what's starting to feel usual, Debian doesn't have up to date versions of the software I want to use in either testing or unstable, but this hasn't prevented the maintainer from packaging what I want to use and mirroring it in experimental. After downloading and installing it, I was good to go. First I put together a command-line example of the process, to make sure I knew what was required. Then I munged it into a plugin for Quod Libet.

There's still something fishy about it, as MP3s which I have previously found peak values for above 1.0 are now being reported capped to 1.0; Ogg Vorbis files, on the other hand, correctly exceed this cap and run presumably all the way to 2.0. I hope to clarify my understanding of this probable GStreamer bug shortly, as other than that all values match what I've seen before. I'm quite pleased the results of tonight's work.

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Script your build, no really! Posted 2007.03.20 20:05 PDT

Thanks Mark Edgington for finding and alerting me to an error in the code behind my Cairo Tutorial. Somewhere between when I originally wrote it and used it to generate it, and when I uploaded it, I introduced an ordering problem that caused the Mask diagram to fail to draw. The trivial difference just required moving the call to super(Mask, self).__init__(*args) to the end of Mask.__init__. For anyone reading the tutorial: don't fear; no informative parts have changed.

This simple error has been sitting there since I originally wrote the code some nine months ago. Even a small project like this tutorial could have benefited from continuous integration.

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