| One thing that windows and mac users have had over linux users for a really long time is voice and video chat. While Skype has offered voice chat capabilities to linux users for a long time, their video offering only works with Windows and the Mac. Ayttm has, on the other hand, had video chat capabilities for several years, but for various non-technical reasons, we've been unable to add voice capabilities to the mix.
As I type this post, I've just gotten off a voice-video chat with my dad in Mumbai. The solution was pretty simple.
We got voice through Skype, and video through Ayttm, and ran the two in parallel. There weren't any discernible syncing issues.
Research has shown (though I can't find a link to the specific paper at the moment) that users will forgive bad video if audio quality is high enough. That's basically what you get with this arrangement. Yahoo! Messenger's video chat actually sends single frames spaced a few seconds apart rather than a video stream (Note, this information is publicly available via the libyahoo2 sources, courtesy Michaël Kamp), which means that you don't really see continuous lip movements, but you get the gist of facial expressions. | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| I spent most of FOSS.IN Day 2 in the hack centre. Met Rasmus at the office, and we took a cab out to IISc. Unfortunately, the cab driver didn't know the way, and I hadn't noticed all the one ways while biking around the place. The result was that we had an extended tour of Frazer Town, Benson Town and Vasantha Nagar before getting to IISc in time for lunch.
After lunch, we both headed to the hack centre, to hack. Rasmus was busy cross compiling, while I was trying to coerce Yahoo! Pipes into helping me write an ayttm plugin. Hit some more Pipes problems, but chatted with Kevin later and got them sorted out.
Head was saturated at 5, so we headed down to the 60 seater for the first day of lightning talks. Danese moderated it, and it was a lot of fun. Rasmus started off telling everyone why he was so jet lagged. He was followed by a bunch of technical talks, then I did a talk on food in Bangalore. A Math prof did a hilarious talk on how he looks after his class while all his kids are on their PCs.
Decided to head home after that, and started walking in the hope of hitting a restaurant along the way. I didn't, so I ended up walking all the way down to MG Road. Had rossagolla at K C Das, and Chicken Shwarma at Empire. Then spoke to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) code_martial, who said he was meeting up with LJers at Mainland China, so I walked across there and had dinner with them.
Was pretty tired by then, but ended up in the office, and saw Kevin online, so decided to get the Pipes problem fixed before my talk. Ended up succeeding, and getting my code and slides finished. Completely crashed after that.
Woke up early this morning, since my talk was at 10am. It was freezing outside, and had no water at home. Anyway, pumped up some water, and got ready to get to the conference.
We got here around 9:30 this morning, which gave me enough time to prepare for my talk.
Plugged in the laptop, got my stuff on screen, and got connected to the network. Everything I needed for my demo... except, no audience. I had two people in the room, and they were expecting me to explain client-server architecture using XMPP. Well, I tried to cater my talk to them, explaining how they'd go about building plugins to do the kind of collaborative work that they actually wanted to do.
People started streaming in a little later, and I ended the talk with 8 people in the room. Finished off at 11:15, and headed to Andrew and Shreyas' demo on the tools of the trade. Had a bit of fun with IRC projecting off Shreyas' laptop onto the big screen.
I'm now in Rasmus' talk which is mainly about why PHP is the way it is, and where it's heading in the next few versions. There's a new ?: operator that does the same as the || operator in perl/javascript. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Yaay, two of my talks got accepted at foss.in.
The first is on Hacking YUI, so if you're someone who uses YUI in your apps, and think that you have something you need to get in there, this talk is for you. To get started, check out the project on sourceforge, join the mailing list, and the IRC chatroom.
The second is about writing ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) ayttm plugins. Ayttm is a project that I've long been associated with, and I've worked very closely with the plugin architecture, tuning it a lot to clean up the interfaces and just make writing plugins easier. You should attend this talk if you want to become an ayttm dev, or if you think you can offer suggestions on our plugin implementation.
So yeah, see you there. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
|  On Feb 1, I visited Delhi to speak at LinuxAsia 2007. I'd wanted to speak about Ayttm for a long while, and this seemed like a good enough time for it.
As it turns out, ilug-delhi boycotted the conference because Microsoft sponsored (or so I've heard from ramblings on #linux-india). In any case, I'd wanted to meet up with the ilug-delhi guys, and Freedel was nowhere in sight, so this was a good chance to get out there for a day. I'm glad I went.
The conference itself was nothing to write home about. The talks were so-so, and I'm not even sure all of them were relevant to the FOSS movement. I spoke to some folks who were at the CxO summit, and they felt the same. The crowd was largely made up of students, which is a good thing. I had a chance to speak to many of them about how to go about getting development experience by working on FOSS projects.
My talk went off well, but there were some organisational glitches. First, they brought up a windows PC. The hall was empty. Then they brought up a linux box (SuSE I think), and the hall filled up. I was ready to start, but the organisers wanted me to wait. This basically ate into about 10 minutes of my talk time. They then introduced me, and let me start.
Now I'd planned to speak for 35 minutes, and give about 10 minutes for Q&A. It turns out that I'd only been given a 30 minute slot. As expected, I went beyond time, and there were more questions than expected. I decided to take the questions outside the room before the organisers threw me off the stage.
People asked me about VoIP, localisation and how they could start working on ayttm. I guess I did point them in the right direction, because at least one person has started mailing the list and is working on a Hindi translation.
Met a bunch of guys after that. Karunakar was around, but he disappeared after lunch.
I'd been working on a product release on the night of the 31st, and only got to bed around 2:30am. I slept in office itself since I'd planned on taking the cab to the airport in the morning. Woke up at 6, showered, shaved, and headed off for my 7:30am flight.
Reached delhi at 10:30am, and couldn't find the cab. After a few calls and a pigeon shitting on my neck, the cab turned up. My talk was already starting. Anyway, got to the IHC, and headed straight for the washroom. Once I'd cleaned up, I strolled around a bit until it was time for my talk.
I had to sleep off in the afternoon, so found a convenient table, and dozed off.
Later in the evening I met up with Raju, Gora, Karunakar and Kishore. We went to a Golden Dragon for dinner, and then for HCF at Nirula's. Pretty good that HCF is. I was stuffed by that time, and then Raju went out for chocolate paan.
I was dead tired by this time because I hadn't slept the previous night.
Went off to Raju's house, and crashed. My flight back to Bangalore was at 6:30am, so I had to wake up at 5. Got to the airport well in time, and had breakfast in the lounge - wada sambar... in Delhi!
Got on the flight and slept off for the whole two and a half hours, which helped a bit.
Go see the pics, there's some interesting ones of Raju and some birds in there. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Heh, my french teacher was flying Sri Lankan airlines from Bangalore to London, and saw my interview on the plane. Cool | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| Many people have complained to me about Ayttm's yahoo portion not working anymore. This follows news reports about the upgraded auth protocol (you'll find the links around the place). Users on the gaim forums and tracker state that the upgrade did not cause older official clients to break.
There have been reports on the libyahoo2 mailing lists from all over the place. A report from NZ suggested changing the server to cs50.msg.sc5.yahoo.com - which, as anyone who's followed the protocol changes since March 2001 will tell you, is on an unsupported server (or something like that).
Cool thing is that I found a long lost friend on this server. Heh. I couldn't see her while I was connected to the main server (scs.msg.yahoo.com), but yesterday, after changing servers, I was able to chat with her. Much as I hate the change, I must say thank you for this. :) ... heh, this is almost like mudding again.
The unofficial blog has the story and links.
Question - how long would it take the OpenSource community to make their clients work with the new auth?
Answer - Trillian (not opensource) had it in less than 24 hours and passed it on to gaim (GPL), from where it'll very likely get into libyahoo2 and thereby find its way into all the other clients outside.
Bigger, more important question - when ayttm is finally fixed by the current team, how do I get my sis to cvs up, configure, make and make install it?
Hmm, is my absence from home going to turn her into a linux guru?
Jeremy has blogged about this stupidity as well. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | what mozilla, and in fact, most browsers need, is a way to start up the browser while passing in a URL, and a bunch of cookies that need to be passed to that url. Perhaps a referrer would be useful as well. | | comments: 12 comments or Leave a comment |
| I have the CD with me. It's come out nicely, except that all parts where Colin, Edward and the rest of the development team are mentioned have been edited out. They story was focussing on Indian IT enterpreneurs, and I guess they only took the parts relevant to India.
Note to _op_, yes, you are a TV star. There is a clip with you, and also one with nvivek | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| Apparently I was on TV yesterday. On CNBC in Qatar. The interview I'd given about ayttm was aired there as part of a business show. A friend of my cousin saw it, and asked her if she was related to Philip Tellis.
I have not seen the interview. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| 2003 was a good year. I haven't had a journal the entire year to check back on, but I do remember most of it. Let's see.
In Jan, I joined the ayttm team. The project had started on Dec 21st, and we used to be on savannah. Later moved to sourceforge as savannah wasn't as reliable.
I did four out station trips in 2003, six if you count December 2002 when I went to Goa and Mangalore.
February '03.
Was judge for the software design competition at Symbiosis' Gnunify. Benoy George won.
Visited Rajasthan for Pankaj's wedding, and then toured around. Was nice. Spent a week there. (Read all about it on the February page).
Soon after, Fred Noronha interviewed Colin and myself for ayttm, and the story was published all over the place, including the Hindustan Times and Express Computer
In May, I visited Talegaon and Belgaum for Tanmay's wedding. That was another fun filled trip. May 12th, I started with Alliance Française. Finished Level 1 in July, and Level 2 in December, and made a heck of a lot of new friends in the process.
I also started my journal in July, thanks to jace.
In August, I was invited for the 25th anniversary of Malhar. They interviewed several past OCs, and me (I was never OC), and made a video of it, and gave each of us a CD. Pretty cool.
Somewhere down the line we got webcam support into libyahoo2, and in December, got ayttm to do webcam sending. Coooool.
Vasistha - my project at NCST - became mature enough to release to the public, and we put up a demo on the NCST site.
NCST (now CDAC Mumbai) had taken on the role of pushing Opensource development, and my boss, sasi, asked me to take care of this area, given my existing experience in the field, and knowledge of licences and existing products. That was cool.
December saw me visiting Bangalore after a long time. Met up with many lj friends... hmm, maybe joining linux-bangalore and lj was just a ruse to ensure that I had friends when I'd reached bangalore :P
Got back, and got myself a new old Maruti Esteem ('95 model), and I like it so far.
Finally, the international herald tribune interviewed me for work on ayttm. A nice end to a good year.
Let's hope 2004 is as good. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| X Posted from ayttm
I was interviewed by IHT TV on Sunday and Monday for work on the Ayttm project. They wanted a story on Indian techies. Took shots at bandstand and my office, but none at home - which is where ayttm development is done.
This will be broadcast in 42 countries and 24 of the world's leading airlines (or so they say), but not in India. They say that they'll send me a CD in early Feb with the story.
Somehow I don't feel as excited as I should be. Maybe I've just grown too cynical of this world. | | comments: 17 comments or Leave a comment |
| Yahoo Messenger uses JPEG2000 for webcam and TrueSpeech for voice. Both these formats are patented by someone or the other. Although JPEG2000 is an IEEE/ISO standard, there isn't a Free implementation of it that I can find right now, primarily because of the patent.
It seems that yahoo loves to use patented algorithms... that also means that their software will only work on Windows, since there aren't any Jpeg2000 or TrueSpeech implementations on Unix or the Mac yet.
Ayttm does have a jpg/jpeg2000 converter, but it is a separate module not distributed with ayttm. Right now there seems to be an issue with the jpg to jpeg2000 part, because we're sending images in jpeg format.
i'm going to sleep now. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| Well, I've been running ayttm in debug mode for all of last night and all of today, and it hit me from where the Matrix producers got the idea for those green scrolling screens. Have a look at this:
( ayttm's packet dump )
It's a packet dump of a webcam broadcast... well, 1024 bytes of a single frame (each frame is about 10KB). Heh, so that's what I'd look like in the Matrix. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I've created the ayttm community where I'll be posting further news about ayttm. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Tags: | ayttm, webcam | | Current Music: | crickets! | | Subject: | Yaaay | | Time: | 01:36 am | | Current Mood: | accomplished |
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| It's done. I've got webcam working. Still need to stress test and stuff like that... but hey, that's what beta testers are for ;)
A huge thanks to Subash Jeyan for sending me the webcam. Dude, you get to use it now.
Even got it to send 2 frames through my cable network before the connection got reset. I wonder. Has the webcam host changed as well? I could also be doing something wrong.
Now it's time to sleep.
A couple of crickets chirp outside, my computer's fans whirr. An aircraft flying overhead, and my fingers striking the keyboard... those are the only sounds I hear. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| So, I think i've finished coding up the webcam broadcast code for ayttm, but i can't test it. My cable guy won't let me broadcast anything, and my phone line's so bad that I get a connection speed of 9600bps on vsnl's dial-up.
gaaaaahhh.
actually this cable speed pretty much sucks as well. the stylesheet for this page doesn't load. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
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