Found this really cool idea of tagging portions of a video to easily jump to. It’s a matter of time before YouTube supports it. You’ll be able to search for Video Deep tagging and jump right where you want. Neat!
Check it out.
Finally, this week-end, I was able to find the crazy memory leak that had crippled XBMC. JMarshall was able to constantly reproduce it by connecting his laptop to the same network the xbox was on. Finally, a few ethereal dumps later, I found out that he was running ICS on his laptop and that ICS would respond to the XBMC UPnP M-SEARCH requests that it sends every 6 secs. So it had to be that the response was causing the leak. Of course, somehow it took me 1h to figure out how to set up ICS (you need 2 active network adapters to even see the option in XP!). Even after setting it up, it wouldn’t respond to the M-SEARCH requests for me. Instead, I was able to see what would happen when ICS go alive (and catch the NOTIFY) using the Windows version of Platinum.
After hitting a pretty big race condition bug (2 threads accessing the same device list), I assumed the leak was there. While I was talking to GeminiSer on irc describing what I found, I was also stepping through the code as it was receiving the Device Description and SCPDs and then I saw it. Right there, the leak. Somehow, I made asumptions that the SendEvents attribute in SCPDs was required and was bailing out of my parser when it couldn’t find it. Of course, I was not cleaning up the dom tree in that case!
Now I don’t know if SendEvent is optional but in any case, it’s the first time I see this problem. In any case, the latest xbmc t3ch release is leak free at last!
Engadget recently wrote an interesting piece: An Open Letter to Microsoft – Why you shouldn’t kill FairUse4WM – Engadget.
While the tone is pretty candid, I have to say they have a point:
“Does the fact that we could quit and “keep” the music that we’ve been “renting” a problem? Theoretically, but what’s going to keep consumers paying those monthly fees isn’t the threat of losing access to their collection (though that’s part of it); what keeps them paying is the continuing access to a large, frequently updated catalog of new releases and older tunes.”
What if they were right?
On the fun side, what I love about the article is the last sentence:
“FairUse4WM means that all our PlaysForSure tracks will actually play for sure, so please don’t go and spoil it.”
Little Madison Emilie Elisabeth was born Friday August 18th 2006 @ 4:30pm after an amazingly fast 4 1/2 hours of labor. 19 1/2 in long & 6lb 15oz, she’s a healthy little beauty. Mom and baby are doing well and we’re all at home now recuperating and getting to know each other.
Needless to say that our stay at the hospital over the week-end was amazing. I highly recommend CPMC if you’re expecting a little one. The nurses were great. We had our private room with a cot for me. They took care of Madison at night so that we could sleep and would bring her back every 3 hours for the feeding. They gave us countless tricks of the trade.
Kelly has mastered breast feeding already and Madison cannot stop eating now. We had our first visit to the pediatrician this morning and everything looks normal. She’s lost weight as all babies do after the birth but now that Kelly is producing milk, Madison is expected to gain back a few oz really fast (which we will check up on this friday).
This is an amazing experience so far. From the moment I started timing Kelly’s contractions at home, the frantic drive to the hospital (I did use the horn a few times :-)), the thought of me passing out the first time I saw a needle going in her hand, the next hours helping Kelly with the breathing, the epidural, me using the relief she got from it to send IMs to my buddies using my sidekick (Yes, Matt it is ok to use a cellphone in the delivery room ;-), the 1/2 hour pushing, the doctor holding a baby in front of me and letting me find out on my own that she was a girl, me cutting the ombilical chord…on and on.
It all happened so fast and here she is now resting in mommy’s arms at home.
Life is beautiful.
More pictures temporarily here.
Check out this interesting mashup. I finally got to use that stupid word on my blog.
Although I have been using Statcounter for a while (and I am pretty happy with it), I have decided to give Google Analytics a try. Interface looks cool. So please hit me! hit me!
-s