CLAM

A couple of weeks ago I went to a concert by Wilco in Barcelona. Wilco is a great band, with great songs and extremely good musicians. Above all they are one of the best bands live. All this makes Wilco one of my current favorite bands and I really ... [More] love most of their records. Their concert in Barcelona was awesome (albeit being too crowded).The thing is that the "genre" of music that Wilco plays, which is somewhere in between country rock and symphonic rock, is by no means among my favorites. But, what can I say? I love good music and musicians whatever they do and Wilco excel at that.I was thinking how hard of a time an item-based recommender would have interpreting this particular like. It reminded me of Flixter's awful recommendation approach that keeps on recommending me japanese animation just because one day I said that Akira is a great film.But if you take a look at any collaborative filtering service like Lastfm or Yahoo Music you will see that actually Wilco's similar bands include many of my other favorite music although they cannot be considered similar in any other sense (are The Flaming Lips, The Arcade Fire or Interpol at all similar to Wilco??).Is there any counter-example where item-based recommendation can perform better? [Less]

This is a quick post (or should I say nanoblog?) to share my new home page. It’s at parumi.org. After using so many web2.0-social networks I felt the need to have a boring, simple and static home page written in html. Actually, I happily failed at ... [More] writing directly in html just because I had wiko at hand. Wiko stands for wiki compiler, and is the project name we gave to some python scripts David and me have been lately developing for personal use. It basically convert wiki text files to html, LaTeX and blogs; as is easy to imagine it combines very well with your favorite version control system to create an actual wiki (it’s collaborative but only through committing to the version control system). Visit the wiko home page to learn more. And maybe use it. [Less]

The past few weeks a couple of CLAM-related journal articles have been published in two top-tier journals. The article entitled “A framework for efficient and rapid development of cross-platform audio applications” - coauthored by Xavier Amatriain ... [More] , Pau Arumi, and David Garcia - has just appeared in the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal. This can be considered as [...] [Less]

The past few weeks a couple of CLAM-related journal articles have been published in two top-tier journals. The article entitled “A framework for efficient and rapid development of cross-platform audio applications” - coauthored by Xavier Amatriain ... [More] , Pau Arumi, and David Garcia - has just appeared in the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal. This can be considered as the “ultimate” CLAM article. Apart from presenting the main features in CLAM, we talk about the metamodel and some of the patterns present in the framework design. Also Xavier Amatriain published the article entitled “A Domain-Specific Metamodel for Multimedia Processing Systems” in the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. This is a more detailed and justified explanation of the metamodel that was derived while designing and implementing the CLAM framework. [Less]

Last month Pau Arumi and David Garcia from the CLAM team attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Hundreds of mentors from many of the participating projects were invited to a one-day workshop where different issues related to the Summer of Code and Open Source in general were [...]

Last month Pau Arumi and David Garcia from the CLAM team attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Hundreds of mentors from many of the participating projects were invited to a one-day workshop where ... [More] different issues related to the Summer of Code and Open Source in general were discussed. It was a great opportunity for the CLAM team to make connections with related projects and meet many interesting people. Read more at David’s blog. [Less]

Some time ago I posted about my frustrating experience with the software on the ipod. Already at that point hordia advised to install Rockbox. A few weeks ago I decided that it was worth to give it a try... and I have not regretted it!Apart from ... [More] getting rid of the annoying file management system in iTunes/iPod and allowing to browse files in folders Rockbox offers many more features than the original Mac firmware/software. Things like different kinds of EQ, spatializers, visual themes, advanced settings.... And above all, all sort of codecs that allow to play (finally!) any kind of file such as oggs, wmv's, movs, mpegs, mp4s, divx....I feel like I have gained control for the first time of my ipod!But to be completely fair I have to say that I have experienced a couple of quite annoying issues. First life of the battery is reduced (according to Rockbox this is as far as they reverse engineering goes and Apples does not open specs for their battery package). Also, and I think related to this, every now and then it is difficult to turn on the unit having to use different key combinations. In any case I still think they are minor issues compared to the huge gain in features and usability.Finally, it should be noted that Rockbox is completely crossplatform working on OS X, Windows and Linux. The reason you see Tux in mine is because I selected the Linux visual theme but you have plenty to choose from. [Less]

I’ve been a long time longing for a N700 or N800 so this short message that just popped into my inbox made my day ;) Assumpte: N810 maemo submission accepted Data: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 18:17:31 0200 (EET) (17:17 CET) Congratulations! You have been ... [More] accepted to the N810 maemo device program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the device is available in your selected shop (soon). maemo team - http://maemo.org The N810 maemo device program aims to offering a low price for the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet (99?) to the active contributors of the maemo community, open source programmers, designers, bloggers and the like. I’m eager to have it into my hands. We’ll see how hard it is to port Clam and other Linux audio apps to it. [Less]

On my last entry I talked about the trip to San Francisco. Besides the GSoC mentor submit, we also joined the Trolltech developers days. The slides and examples of the Trolltech event are available online. It is worth to take a look at them ... [More] although slides are not as nice as having some trolls explaining them in live. We really learned a lot of such event: Andreas Aardal Hansen, a very smart hacker, gave us a nice lesson on how we could exploit the Graphics View framework to turn CLAM into a cooler environment. The framework has been massively adopted in just one year since it was published, and the reason is that it is just impressive how easy you can do complex and cute things on a snap. The reason why we didn't used it is because we did the full rewrite of the NetworkEditor just before Qt 4.2 which included such framework. Another rewrite at that time would have been too hard. We also could have a little talk with Thierry Bastian who is responsible of turning KDE's Phonon multimedia interface into a regular cross platform module in Qt. Unfortunately we were still travelling the first day and we missed his talk on Phonon. Another nice session I assisted was the one presented by Girish Ramakrishnan on Qt style sheet support. Just by taking a look at the latest demos you can realize that Qt application can be very cool and even use such style sheets to let designers enhancing the look and feel of your applications without even programming. While I was on the style sheet presentation Pau was on the Model View talk. I thought that it was about the old Smalltalk MVC model we failed to generalize in CLAM so many times and in so many flawors. So I thought it was a mistake on the troll's side to generalized it so much, but I just took a look at the presentation, and maybe is worth a try. It seems that they did a smart twist to the pattern to make it worth to work with. I also nagged Jason Barron, at the support team, with some bugs we found on latest Qt version and some question on how to implement some things for CLAM. I still have to get in contact with him again to get some solution for some problems. As I said we learned a lot, and we are eager to apply such knowledge to CLAM. A month later we have just applied such knowledge to fix some QtOpenGL bugs but we are planning at some time to port the NetworkCanvas to QGraphicsView. [Less]

A couple of weeks ago, Pau and me were at San Francisco for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Submit. At the submit we joined some interesting sessions on how to improve the next GSoC, but also we met a lot of other hackers of free software projects ... [More] all around the world: Mixxx, Inkscape, KDE, Amarok, Pidgin, Scumvm, Haiku, Crystal Space, Ogre, Moin Moin, Drupal, VideoLan, XMMS2, audacious... Well, as you can see in this picture we were pretty much people:I knew about most of all other projects, but, sadly, nearly no one knew about CLAM. :-( The good news is that most of them get pretty interested as they saw CLAM capabilities on audio processing and application prototyping. We need independently packaged end user tools!!I also was glad to confirm the collaboration between projects that one could figure out being competitors: People working on desktops (KDE, Gnome...) are in fact in a very close collaboration. Wiki implementations (Moin Moin, Wikimedia...) meet there Also several 3D engines (Crystal Space, Ogre...) met there Comunity portals such as Drupal, Joomla, Plone...They all share common challenges and solutions and they used the submit to join efforts.Related to common issues and efforts, we took a very productive meeting on multiplatform development where some multiplatform projects, including us, shared experiences. We explained how we faced such problem at CLAM: the use of portable 3rd party libraries, crosscompiling from Linux to other platforms, and the use of testfarm to rapidly detect multiplatform issues. Some projects, such VideoLan had automated third party compilation scripts a step we have not automated at all. We realized that a lot of people was also solving such problems and we compromised to share experiences and results. For example, we talked about having a single repository of precompiled binaries of third party libraries. We also realized about our not-so-open-source mind we most of us realized that we were not reporting back patches we did to external libraries. We compromised to send them to upstream or making them available in a common place for the other project using them. [Less]