Don Marti

Tue 06 Dec 2005 05:30:40 PM PST

Instrumenting software

Arnaud Legout has some excellent data on the real-world performance of Bittorrent's "rarest first" and "choking" algorithms. Also see this journal entry from Bram on why no error correcting codes in Bittorrent.

Personally, I'm having fun with GStreamer and its groovy debugging and logging system, which I'm using to write a "HEadless Music Player"—I squatted a sourceforge.net account for it and everything. So far it's not ready for public consumption since my supposed-to-be-nifty shuffling code somehow figures that the user wants to listen to Jonathan Coulton's cover of "Baby Got Back" over and over. If you get the print Linux Journal, check out the article by Robert Love on GIOChannels. Just what I need to fix the joystick support. The basic idea is that with a laptop in the trunk, plugged into the aux in of the car stereo, I can use a USB joystick for pause, skip, and all that. When I get time I'll take the joystick apart and mount the board behind one of the little black "you didn't buy that accessory" panels, and put a switch on the front. Until then, that's why there's a joystick lying on the center console.