This is How I Measure Success
It's three a.m. and Lee Aaron is playing.
This is a big deal, not because its Lee Aaron, but because something is playing at all. I have successfully ripped Apple's mDNSResponder out of wmamp and replaced it with a version of mdnsd (itself ripped from libopendaap). wmamp is just a little more Free. Not like I'm all militant about Free Software or anything, but I got to kill two birds with one stone here. Not only is mdnsd available under the GPL but it was also designed with embedded systems in mind (so I guess there are still some of us left). Here's how I measure success tonight: wmamp is running, and appears to be working as well as it ever did. (I have to give credit to those who worked on wmamp before me - all its multi-cast DNS code is contained in a single source file, so I wasn't hacking on half a dozen files all evening.) But more than not breaking it, wmamp is now smaller. I have an archived version of wmamp that's timestamped 6/29 19:29 - that would be the one that plays ogg files, but doesn't walk the album's playlist. The stripped binary is 218076 bytes. The canonical version of wmamp 0.6 builds to 213508 bytes. So I added a couple of kB to the program itself, and then dropped a 100kB decoder for oggvorbis in the image as well. The good news tonight is that after all my work wmamp weighs in at a measly 115600 bytes. Switching to mdnsd has reclaimed 102476 bytes. The net result is that wmamp just got ogg playback for free. That's a clear win in my books.
And speaking of walking the playlist, I was pondering the correct behaviour yesterday, thinking that I had probably introduced a bug that caused that last song to play ad nauseum. Today I read in a README or something (damned if I can find it just now) that it's always been like this. I should really get on that. All this other stuff is more interesting to me, but at some point the program's got to be usable as well. My personal goal is that it should be a better application than the original. This is no mean task, the stock software (for the WMA11b itself) is pretty good.
One other thing is starting to drive me nuts as well: I can't make the video look good on my widescreen TV. The output is standard 640x480, and my TV knows all kinds of tricks for stretching a 4x3 image to 16x9, but none of it looks any good. I really want to take a closer look at the video controller and see if I can't make it emit something more appropriate. I've worked with this processor before and I'm pretty sure it can accomodate me.
This is a big deal, not because its Lee Aaron, but because something is playing at all. I have successfully ripped Apple's mDNSResponder out of wmamp and replaced it with a version of mdnsd (itself ripped from libopendaap). wmamp is just a little more Free. Not like I'm all militant about Free Software or anything, but I got to kill two birds with one stone here. Not only is mdnsd available under the GPL but it was also designed with embedded systems in mind (so I guess there are still some of us left). Here's how I measure success tonight: wmamp is running, and appears to be working as well as it ever did. (I have to give credit to those who worked on wmamp before me - all its multi-cast DNS code is contained in a single source file, so I wasn't hacking on half a dozen files all evening.) But more than not breaking it, wmamp is now smaller. I have an archived version of wmamp that's timestamped 6/29 19:29 - that would be the one that plays ogg files, but doesn't walk the album's playlist. The stripped binary is 218076 bytes. The canonical version of wmamp 0.6 builds to 213508 bytes. So I added a couple of kB to the program itself, and then dropped a 100kB decoder for oggvorbis in the image as well. The good news tonight is that after all my work wmamp weighs in at a measly 115600 bytes. Switching to mdnsd has reclaimed 102476 bytes. The net result is that wmamp just got ogg playback for free. That's a clear win in my books.
And speaking of walking the playlist, I was pondering the correct behaviour yesterday, thinking that I had probably introduced a bug that caused that last song to play ad nauseum. Today I read in a README or something (damned if I can find it just now) that it's always been like this. I should really get on that. All this other stuff is more interesting to me, but at some point the program's got to be usable as well. My personal goal is that it should be a better application than the original. This is no mean task, the stock software (for the WMA11b itself) is pretty good.
One other thing is starting to drive me nuts as well: I can't make the video look good on my widescreen TV. The output is standard 640x480, and my TV knows all kinds of tricks for stretching a 4x3 image to 16x9, but none of it looks any good. I really want to take a closer look at the video controller and see if I can't make it emit something more appropriate. I've worked with this processor before and I'm pretty sure it can accomodate me.
Labels: hacking
posted by zar' at 02:59
<< Home