Tag Archives: openal

I really have to give up cheese

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Started late, but hey, you have to be in the mood for these things. So finished off coding the doppler shift sample. Then moved on to sound cones, which is basically directional audio. After a couple of silly bugs that was all working.

Then walked the dog. Sun was shining as we left, then at the half way point it absolutely pissed down. Came back, then worked on adding sound effects support to the music mixer. That took me up to gym time. Did pump, then about 30 mins of running.

Came back from that and sorted out some buffer alignment problems. Did a film review of some torture porn I watched the other night “Invitation Only”

Now it’s time for wine and bath.

Really need to stop eating cheese, bought a block last night and ended up eating over half of it. All it does is make me fat. But it does have the advantage of giving me very solid bowel movements, talking of which I’m pooing about five times a day at the moment. Obviously not enough salad in my diet.

Busy day tomorrow I expect. Need to catch up with house checks then Lisa and Andy coming over for dinner. No doubt they (including Jamie), will talk about Tesco’s, a lot.

Decided on the coffee machine I like (£600) and the one I’ll probably get (£200).

The joys of doppler shift

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Couldn’t sleep again last night, didn’t hit the wine, just stayed on MSN talking to Al, which kept Jamie awake so was a plus. The array allocing stuff I did yesterday seems to work, so that’s hopefully the end of the iPhone5 problems. Still don’t have one, but now ordered one from the Apple store on 2-3 weeks delivery.

So cleaner arrived on time, got mugged by the dog again then cleaned. Needs a bit of refinement, but she’ll get there. So today working on Octree, which was a success pretty much off the bat. Then tidied up a few bugs that had crept in. Then it was on to doppler shift. For those that don’t know that’s how the frequency changes depending on velocity and direction. That’s the weird police siren thing you get when the car goes past you. Anyway, coded it all up. Didn’t work. Tried it on iOS, didn’t work, played around with tons of stuff and went through lots of docs. Got bored and checked it in. Then worked out I was using a stereo source…doppler and positioning only works on mono sources, change the source, all worked fine. So tomorrow it’s doing a decent sample for that and then sound cones, which are even more strange.

Walked the dog. Went to the gym, ran for 63 minutes today. Watched a very interesting document about a plane crash, well a plane they actually crashed and monitored. Now it’s on to torture porn, choice of two tonight.

OpenAL continues to be an ass, but iOS also presents some issues

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So now the OpenAL saga continues. This time when testing on an iPod touch. As it has the power of a squashed tomato, I was getting buffer under runs when trying to decode about six MP3 tracks at once. So what happens when you get a buffer under run, well it queues the buffers as normal, and yes, marks all the bloody things as processed. So the work round for this was was to check the number of queued buffers, if that’s zero then call rewind, this resets the internal marker and every ones happy.

Sharing file handles between threads…on iOS don’t do it. It gets upset. Don’t open file on thread A, then read it using the same handle on thread B (they arn’t reading at the same time, it’s just opened on one then read on another). That threw me for quite a while as it was randomly working then failing. Still all sorted now. Now the next job is iOS hardware MP3 decoding.

In server news I’ve redone my apache configs to use the actual domain names now. Also added pop3 ssl in about 10 minutes, I’ve kind of got the hang of these things now. Final job on the server I think is to configure the UPS stuff, but can’t do that until it’s in place and can’t do that until I’ve reconfigured my mother (well her laptop mail setup).

I did head out on the bike, but by the time I got to the end of the road the weather looked very miserable, so took the dog for a walk instead. Now I’m going to have a bath and watch the Olympics opening ceremony.

The dog has a new pool. This is it before she probably ends up eating it.

OpenAL – what an ass

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Today I continued to do battle with Xcode and iOS, which made me even more heated in a very hot room.

What is it with OpenAL? It’s an open spec that is badly implement on every version I come across. The problem is, it’s too open and open to interpretation. The HW vendors are free to do what they want provided they adhere to the vague spec. So what you end up with is doing multiple workarounds for each platform for something which should really be platform independent. Take for example audio buffers, you queue them to a source and play them. If you call stop then all the buffers are marked as processed and you can unqueue them, nice, no problem. But what if you don’t play them? Well if you call stop not much happens, you can’t unqueue them they just vanish into a big pit of piss. You have to load a NULL buffer to the source, this then bins all the attached buffers and you can manually delete them, no unqueing. Except that’s only on iOS. On the reference driver calling stop will mark them all as processed and you can unqueue them as normal. Then you requeue them again, and what happens, well on the ref driver it works. On iOS it marks freshly queued buffers as processed so never plays them. You have to do an additional ‘rewind’ on the source to update the internal play marker that’s been shafted.

In server news I installed an old 250Gb hard drive into the box and set it up with ext3. Managed to mount it and set up a cron job to run a shell backup script. It now does a grandfather/father/son type rolling backup which I’m quite pleased with. Last couple of things are pop3 support, which I forgot about and a few bits on virtual domains. I also installed some stat stuff in word-press which I’m sure will be interesting at some point.

Once again the evening was warm so managed a couple of hours of fairly fly free cycling. And now about to settle down with the dog for some torture porn (see my other blog). If my dns ever sorts itself out, as the www is now pointing at the router address.

Oh, last nights shag, definitely rates in the top 10. That’s two entries my husband has on that leader board now:)