21 Jun 2000 zab   » (Master)

Wow, am I a slack-ass or what. Almost a month and a half since my last entry. At least I lasted longer than rth. OK, so, I guess if people care about anything here they might care about the state of my geeking.

I'm still flailing around trying to get maestro hardware so that I can fix up the known problems in the OSS Maestro driver. The APM hacks it has are not playing nice with ACPI, there are playback problems that feel like they're due to APU accessing races, and supporting FM synth and MIDI would be nice. Then there is the Big Bad Maestro3, aka Allegro, that is being shipped in lots of machines now. The bad news is that we can't get full docs on its DSP core. The good news is that the sparse docs that exist seem to be enough to get Sound Blaster emulation working. Yes, we're taking a PCI DSP and telling it to be probably the crappiest sound chip known to man. Go Team. All of this is made even more interesting by the fact that I don't have the hardware :) I have a fellow playing with the allegro remotely. I also have various people (including ESS) trying to get me hardware. It will sort itself out in the end.

I packaged up what little code exists for Matofali and put it up on http://www.zabbo.net/matofali/. Maybe some adventerous soul will pick it up and run with it.

I sent a note to the NSPR list saying that I had a neato IO abstraction model and it felt like it might be fun to include it in NSPR. I got two responses. One of the form "duh, we have something like that over here.." and "ACK, wrong wrong wrong." The former wasn't too surprising, but the code they have is nowhere near ideal. The latter proved to be quite interesting indeed. A fellow at Netscape sat me down and explained to me why the IO engine API I had come up with was on serious crack. Given our discussions, I'd love to sit down and write an IO engine. But I need some sort of real world daemon to use it. FTP is tempting, but... Anyone have any bright ideas?

The BeBox is still lying idle. I still don't have the infrastructure to be happy coding on it. Someday, someday.

I've just put Gnebula up on http://www.zabbo.net/gnebula/. Its incomplete, but there you have it. I always wanted to make it a real Etherman clone, but I just don't have the patience for interface design.

Another phhttpd release is pending. Chuck is cleaning up his patches that make the event loop much more clear and fix the signal queue failover.

Is that it? I guess so. Real Life is as fun as usual. I'll tell you about it sometime when we're nowhere near computers.

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