A paucity of ideas

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re involved somehow with #linux and/or Linux.Ars. Well, as it turns out, I won’t have much time at all Monday or Tuesday night to be able to research and write a decent TTT, so I’m calling for suggestions for a topic. The sooner you can give me a decent suggestion, the more likely it is that I’ll be able to finish the write-up in time for this week’s Linux.Ars.

Incidentally, I may not be going to Muscat after all. It seems the airline has some issue with my not holding an Oman visa, so I might fly across the Persian Gulf to Kish Island (a part of the Islamic Republic of Iran) instead. That schedule will require me to depart around 9 a.m. GST from Dubai airport and arrive again around 6 or 7 p.m. GST. And I have to be in bed by about 12 a.m. GST so I can make it to work on time on Wednesday. (This should explain why I have no time on Tuesday.)

So get busy coming up with suggestions. ;p

PS: GST is UTC+0400 and nine hours ahead of EST.

Update: I am going via Kish, after all.

Thanks, Jorge, for inviting me to Orkut.

And I just realized I’ve been a member of the Ars Technica discussion forums for four years now. That’s scary.

An approximation of the ideal

So I managed to get dmix working with ALSA. I finally have semi-transparent audio mixing — for most ALSA applications, anyway. (Stuff like mplayer that tries to do retarded stuff like detecting the first sound card and then outputting to it directly won’t use dmix, since it bypasses my .asoundrc altogether. Fortunately, aside from things like IM clients, which I rarely use, it isn’t such a big loss to lose audio mixing while watching a movie. Unfortunately, while mplayer is outputting audio, other stuff will be able to open the device, then block on attempting audio output, which isn’t so cool. I’ll find a workaround eventually.) Even some OSS stuff works via aoss and the libaoss.so.0 preloadable wrapper library.

I couldn’t get Flash working via Mozilla, though, and I’m sure there are lots of OSS apps that’ll misbehave. It sure beats having to wrangle with esddsp/artsdsp/audiooss, though, and as newer apps build in proper support for ALSA, things can only get better.

Maybe someday distros will determine whether the ALSA driver chosen for the detected device can do hardware mixing, and if it can’t, they’ll install and set up dmix by default. That’ll probably be as close to the completely transparent audio mixing that Windows does, as it gets.

Happily, my sister’s coming on Feb 4, so I might be able to see RotK sometime two weeks from now.

I go to Muscat on Tuesday for a visa change. It’s a bit silly, really — the government won’t let me get a residence visa for the place without a sponsoring employer (despite the fact that I was born here), and they’ll obstruct my ability to easily get a new visitor’s visa through conventional channels so I can stay with my parents, but they’ll let me fly out of the country and fly back in to hop to a new visitor’s visa (60 days). A sane place would likely give me either citizenship or permanent residence rights, but this place won’t even let me do an extended visit.

I need to get out of here. Someone in a civilized place, please give me a job so I can get myself a life.