Thrilling Adventures in Rhyme and Space

I’ve been married 6 months now. 6 Months living in a foreign country, with a new family and a wonderful woman.

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I thought I’d document what I did yesterday to get Internet DJ Console to work with Skype, partly for my benefit in case I need to get it working again, but also it should help with anyone having issues with Pulse and JACK.

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Following on from my previous post, I’ve discovered a great bit of open source software to help run this radio station we’re starting at work.

Liquidsoap is a powerful, script-based audio stream generator. Awesome for setting up a radio station and letting it run, hands off, on the server.

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After a busy Xmas I go back to work tomorrow, so time to catch up on my blog. First off, in a week where I discover that HRT2 (Croatian equivilant of BBC2) have started showing Doctor Who 2005 at a reasonable time (19:25 Monday nights), I’ve just managed to see the other end of this particular era.

A few thoughts on The End of Time (SPOILERS!) and the rest of the RTD era follows the break…

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A project I’ve been working on at work has been to set up an Internet radio station for the college. This is an initial test to prove the viability to the powers that be and maybe get some new equipment to run it full time.

The software I’m running at the moment is as follows:

On the server I have Ubuntu Server 9.10, mainly because I’m used to Ubuntu and I knew  could get LAMP up and running immediately. The stream is run by Icecast, easily configured with simple XML. The stream can be listened to via port 8000 in VLC or Winamp, or through a flash applet on the site called Native Flash Radio. I’ve also tried using Ices and Ezstream to play simple playlists server-side out of hours. Again, they both are configured with XML files.

On the source pc I have Kubuntu 9.10, initially to avoid Pulseaudio clashing with Jack. However the KDE sound system Phonon still gives me problems with Jack. The streaming software I’m using is Internet DJ Console, available from the Ubuntu repos. It uses Jack, has a lot of neat features and has some VoIP support via Jack. Right now I can play music on a playlist, crossfade between two lists, slip in some jingles and pipe live audio through a microphone.

The other thing we would like to be able to do is call in via VoIP. IDJC has the interface to do this easily with buttons that let the DJ talk to the caller “offair” before piping them through to the stream. However, we’ve gotta use Skype, which doesn’t have Jack support.

There is a way to pipe the sound from Skype into Jack via ALSA. However asound2-plugins in Ubuntu isn’t compiled with Jack support. I understand that’s because asound2 is in the main repo and Jack is in Universe. I’ve now got to work out how to recompile, not something I’m used to but might be easier than starting from scratch running something like Debian Sid or Ubuntu Studio.

Watched a few movies recently and I thought I’d share some mini rambles about them. Sussed out how to easily make DVD videos from any other video file with no hassle.

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Some bizarre news. The new series of Doctor Who (with Matt Smith as the Doctor and Steven Moffat as Exec Producer) is currently filming in Croatia, my adopted country.

Pictures at this blog (scroll down to 30.11.09) show Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and a familiar blue box filming in Trogir, a small coastal town not far from Split. It’s in fact not far from the area I spent my honeymoon 4 months ago!

Rumour has it that they’ll be filming for 2 weeks, which is longer than the previous overseas shoots, fueling speculation that they might be filming footage for 2 episodes. We shall have to see.

Who is not a big thing over here, the new series has been shown on Saturday mornings and is billed as a kids show. Maybe it’ll get more coverage with the new series filming here.

Vecernji.hr has an article and more pics here.

Finished reading “And Another Thing…”, a new Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy book written by Eoin Colfer continuing where the late, great Douglas Adams left off.

I enjoyed it a lot, it had a lot of clever uses for the characters, both our main heroes and some of the one-offs from previous books. Listening to the audio book read by Simon Jones certainly helps the feel.

While I enjoyed it, there was always something off about it. It could well be just the fact that Colfer is a proper novelist whereas Adams certainly wasn’t, thus the book loses a bit of it’s charm . Also while the guide notes were often funny and witty, they popped up so often that even a casual HHG fan would have noticed all the call backs to species from the other books.

It’s certainly a worthwhile read for fans and manages to reference the recent radio adaptations despite the mismatched continuity. It ends nice and open, even when it seems to be heading for a happy ending there’s a great swerve to avoid it.

Just got access to the preview service of Google Wave. Bit sluggish right now but it’s an interesting look at how the internet is changing. The basic use of the service seems to be a cross between instant messaging and a forum, you open a wave, title and tag it with keywords, make it public or invite particular friends, then start writing messages on the wave. The wave is updated in real time and you can either add your comment to the end of the conversation or nest it next to a particular comment.

There’s a lot of extensions being developed by both Google and thirdpartys and I look forward to seeing it stabilise. Since it’s open source I’m also looking forward to hosting my own instance on my server, indeed, i hope that sites like Facebook start using it so that all social networks can share their data and not lock you down to one service.

In other news, I’m wrestling with installing new operating systems on some HP blade servers at work. Everything is set up via a web interface and a java applet to mount virtual drives and view the monitor output. Every iso image I try to mount returns a boot sector error. Not sure what to do, more investigation needed methinks.