I got as a Christ­mas gift an exter­nal USB audio device: an Asus Xonar U1. It’s a nice device with a decent audio qual­ity. The audio itself, both in and out works per­fectly with the stan­dard snd-usb-audio ker­nel mod­ule. Unfor­tu­nately the audio con­trols on the device are not stan­dard, so I devel­oped a sim­ple dae­mon and accom­pa­ny­ing udev and pm-utils script to get the device to work. I’ve pub­lished every­thing under the GPL hop­ing that they might be use­ful for some­one else. Feel free to clone and fork my repos­i­tory on github

https://github.com/alexp-sssup/asus-xonar-u1-utils

I’m very happy to annouce a new major release for Lightspark, the open source flash player imple­men­ta­tion. This release includes quite a lot of fixes, both inter­nal and vis­i­ble to users. The most impor­tant ones from a user point of view are prob­a­bly the improved sup­port for PulseAu­dio flat vol­umes, which makes it impos­si­ble for lightspark to manip­u­late the sys­tem vol­ume and the newly added sup­port for the BBC video player. To use BBC site you might need to use AdBlock, which is gen­er­ally rec­om­mended since more often than not flash adver­tise­ments are not sup­ported by Lightspark and causes fail­ures in oth­er­wise sup­ported sites.

From the ChangeLog:
* Enable RTMP sup­port by default, requires librtmp
* Fixed sup­port for IEvent­Dis­patcher imple­men­ta­tion pat­tern
* Improved seri­al­iza­tion robust­ness
* Improved matrix han­dling
* Imple­ment string and name­space pool­ing to reduce mem­ory con­sump­tion
* Proper sup­port for pri­vate name­spaces
* Improved sup­port for fonts
* Sup­port LLVM 3.1
* Fix full vol­ume issue when PulseAu­dio flat vol­umes are enabled
* Ini­tial sup­port for AIR desk­top appli­ca­tions
* Sup­port for www.bbc.co.uk video player

Source tar­ball is, as usual avail­able from Launch­pad.

This year, hav­ing joined the com­puter secu­rity group at UCSB for my phd, I’ve helped in the orga­ni­za­tion of the 2010rh edi­tion of the iCTF, the biggest inter­na­tional online hack­ing com­pe­ti­tion. It has been plenty of fun, with more than 70 teams par­tic­i­pat­ing from all over the world. The CMU team “Plaid par­lia­ment of pwn­ing” won it,  get­ting the  1000$ price (thanks Adobe and IEEE Secu­rity & Pri­vacy mag­a­zine for the sponsorships!).

Since peo­ple have been ask­ing for the solu­tions of the two chal­lenges I wrote, so here they are.

chal­lenge 5:

This chal­lenge is easy, I encour­age you to give it a try, it’s fun!

Ques­tion: “Who’re you’re gonna call?”

File: call
Points: 300
Teams that have com­pleted it: 44 (congrats!)

Solu­tion: in an html com­ment fol­low­ing this line

chal­lenge 4:

This chal­lenge is a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult, but if you know python you have all the skills nec­es­sary to beat it.
Question:

To make it run, unpack this file and run server.py (it’s all python, you can check it for back­doors). To start the chal­lenge, you should read only the con­tent of the “pub” direc­tory: that was the mate­r­ial that was given in the ctf.

Points: 500
Teams that have com­pleted it: 0, as most of the dif­fi­cult chal­lenges — because of the struc­ture of the iCTF 2010, it turned out that it was more con­ve­nient to focus only on the easy chal­lenges. We’ll have to fix it next year!

Solu­tion: in an html com­ment fol­low­ing this line. The given file also con­tains a script that can solve the chal­lenge (the test_* files)

For the solu­tion of another dif­fi­cult chal­lenge, head over to Bryce’s blog.

Finally, after a long delay caused by sev­eral issues Lightspark 0.4.5 is out. Here it is a brief Changelog.

• Include the new Advanced Graph­ics Engine, that should pro­vide smoother and faster graph­ics and sup­port for clipping
• More robust input sup­port (makes it pos­si­ble to use Play/Pause on YouTube)

The work on this released has been espe­cially slowed down by an issue found in libxml++ and another one found in mesa. Pack­agers should pay atten­tion to ful­fill the fol­low­ing depen­dency requirements:

• Libxml++ ver­sion 2.33.1 or bet­ter. If an older ver­sion on libxml++ must be sup­ported some com­mits must be back­ported. More info about this in the README file
• Mesa should include the fix for this bug. The issue affects some radeon and maybe intel cards.

Pack­ages will be avail­able for Fedora Rawhide and are already uploaded on the PPA for Ubuntu Mav­er­ick

Me and most of my engi­neer­ing col­leagues here at Sant’Anna School for Advanced Stud­ies are leav­ing tomor­row morn­ing for a week long tour of uni­ver­si­ties and labs in Bel­gium and Nether­lands. This means I’ll have no time to work on Lightspark, sorry

Any­way the 0.4.5 release will be prob­a­bly out in the last days of the month. The crit­i­cal bug in libxml++ is now fixed as my patch was accepted upstream. If (as I believe) a new ver­sion of the library will be released and pack­aged before i get back there will be no rea­son to hold the release any­more.

Another week, another bug­fix release for Lightspark! Apart from restor­ing the sup­port for YouTube this release fea­tures the new plu­gin based audio frame­work that makes it pos­si­ble to sup­port other back­ends beside PulseAu­dio. At the moment both an ALSA and Ope­nAL plu­g­ins are being worked on.

As always you can grab the release here on Launch­pad

Hello planet!
I’m back from GUADEC. It was my first con­fer­ence about open source and it was great.
I’ve found par­tic­u­larly inspir­ing the talk by Guil­laume Desmottes about Telepa­thy and Epiphany, which can be great to extend GTG pos­si­bil­i­ties in col­lab­o­ra­tion.
The talk by Jake Edge about pro­mot­ing free soft­ware projects was also very inter­est­ing, in par­tic­u­lar for the young Lightspark project (that went com­pletely unno­ticed for a few months before show­ing up on planet GNOME).

Thanks to the excit­ing talks and peo­ple at GUADEC,   the GTG team (even the peo­ple who were not there!) has been work­ing fer­vently on a nice rewrite of some parts of GTG core, along with a lot of unit-tests. Hope­fully, a lot of bugs will be closed thanks to this, and GTG will be nicer to code.

Some of the GTG peo­ple at GUADEC. From left to right: Bertrand Rousseau, Karlo Jez, Lionel Dri­cot and me.

As for my Google Sum­mer of Code on Get­ting Things Gnome sup­port for mul­ti­ple back­ends, this week has seen:

• a port of my Evo­lu­tion plu­gin as a back­end (that was the last one planned)
• refac­tor­ing of the Twit­ter plu­gin to get autho­riza­tion through Oauth (using  the tweepy library, thanks Tante for the hint)
• docs, docs, docs

Next week, I’ll keep doc­u­ment­ing and test­ing. I should also write a guide on how to write new back­ends. See you next week!

Try­ing to keep up with the old rule “Release early, release often” I’ happy to announce release 0.4.2.2 open source flash player.

This appar­ently small point release actu­ally includes the biggest fea­ture plan­nend for the upcom­ing 0.4.3 release, namely Gnash fall­back on older SWF clips.  Lightspark cur­rently relies no Gnash for any Flash con­tent that does not require AVM2 (Action­Script 3) support.

I would also like to explain an issue that many users and testers reported. Fire­fox is not able to han­dle mul­ti­ple plu­gin for the same file type! Not even if only one of those plu­g­ins is actu­ally enabled. So, if lightspark is installed along­side adobe’s player or Gnash no flash con­tent will be dis­played. This is a fire­fox bug, I’ve reported the bug and pro­posed a patch that is cur­rently wait­ing the review.

The source of the release is as always avail­able on launch­pad. Binary pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Mav­er­ick will be avail­able on the usual PPA (in a cou­ple hours from now, Launch­pad seems pretty busy at the moment). More­over, since the last announce­ment lightspark has been also included in the debian exper­i­men­tal suite (thanks to Didier Raboud and Luca Falavigna).

Stay tuned, and fol­low the roadmap

This week in “Get­ting Things Gnome!” devel­op­ment of mul­ti­ple backends:

• As for yesterday’s post, we can now auto­mat­i­cally import (some) Evo­lu­tion mails in GTG
• I’ve been work­ing on the Remem­ber The Milk back­end to speed it up. Since RTM allows only one API call per sec­ond, any­thing cacheable must be cached.
• I’ve been test­ing and fix­ing the couchdb back­end. Now it syncs on ubuntu one with­out error on my machine. It would be great if some­one is will­ing to test it. Keep in mind that ubuntu one is sync­ing couchdb data­bases every ten min­utes or so. Instruc­tions on how to test are here.

Next week, I’ll be at GUADEC! I really don’t know if I’ll have the time to work on this at all, but if I do, it will be all about the RTM backend.

See you in Den Haag (or L’Aia, in Ital­ian. I won­der why..)!

I’m very proud to announce the the sec­ond release can­di­date of Lightspark 0.4.2: the mod­ern, effi­cient and open source Flash Player imple­men­ta­tion. Thanks to all the peo­ple that tested the project and reported feed­back on the bug tracker and on the IRC chan­nel, with­out their help this awe­some results would have not been possible.

Although we’re still miss­ing a cou­ple of fea­ture before the real 0.4.2 most of the pieces are already in place. Let’s see what you can expect from this release:

• Youtube sup­port for H264 videos. Cur­rently only those are sup­ported as they are played using the Action Script 3 based player. This may seem a huge lim­i­ta­tion, but actu­ally a huge part of the YouTube con­tents are avail­able in H264 for­mat. This lim­i­ta­tion will go away when lightspark will be able to fall back to Gnash. This fea­ture is sched­uled for 0.4.3
• Even faster video pre­sen­ta­tion after a bit of refine­ment of the SSE2 based video packer
• Sound sup­port using pulseau­dio. If you want to try Lightspark with­out installing the pulse server that’s ok, as Lightspark detects at run­time if the  server is avail­able and if not it just politely dis­ables sound.

As usual you can grab the source from Launch­pad

Offi­cial binary pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Debian test­ing are avail­able from my PPA http://launchpad.net/~sssup/+archive/sssup-ppa (in launch­pad build queue as I’m writing)

Pack­ages for Fedora 13 are also avail­able here

As I men­tioned before we’re not yet ready for the final release as the fol­low­ing issues needs to be fixed:

• Sound is not synchronized
• Sound sam­ple rate is not always cor­rectly detected

Beside those known issue, every­thing should be pretty ok. So go on, give it a try!