Projects
This is a partial ist of projects, mainly intended to to catch the attention of people who might want to be involved and to make sure I have some sort of public paper trail if I ever need to demonstrate long term work on them.
GPS Streetmaps
For a few year now, I have been developing a model for collating comparitively low value GPS location data (which really only says that someone was at that point) and using statistical methods to aggregate things like topology and rich attribute data. the only code exists as snippets on paper, but I have a heap of notes on issues and approaches. A useful side effect is the development of an XSLT to pull GPX dumps into Well Known Text (WKT) representations suitable for import into PostGIS.
Radiostation Logging
In most places, radiostations need to log what they broadcast. I figured I'd
replace the aging Mac II based homebrew logger at the station with some easy
to grab, ready rolled application. Some research has shown that none of the
FOSS solutions meet all the requirements particularly well. I was going to
brew up a hands off solution in summary:
- There has to be an immediately obvious, clueless friendly user interface
- The signal gets recorded off air, not from the the studio line out
- I wanted to be able to keep CD and logging quality, either by tee-ing a named pipe or down-sampling older recordings
- Ideally, we should not lose any bits at all, there should be no breaks to swap files or such (think of a logrotate for audio)
After some investigation, I started writing my own rotating recording tool
using Perl and the ALSO recording utility, setting up a bunch of cron jobs
to mange recordings, etc. etc. etc. Alas, this would still need a lot more
effort (plus X11) to create a friendly GUI. Luckily I then saw Flumotion
and I think this covers all the requirements.
As we are recording from the air, we may as well create an all-in-one unit by
putting an FM tuner card in a PC.
Solutions considered
- GNURadio - nice pipeline, but not at all set up for out-of-the-box simple audio manipulation. Not many pre made UIs either. Still need seperate FM radio in (or a signal converter).
- GStreamer - pipeline designed for multimedia, but no nice UI. Need some way of getting radio signal in.
- MythTV with MythFM - Promising but MythFM is abandoned and the UI includes many extra bits that are not required. Unsure about logging (FIFO) style recording
- BTTV - ?
- FreeVo - more configurable than MythTV (i.e. drop extra UI elements like TV), also more multimedia centric than MythTV
- fmtools - Runs the FM tuner card I have,
- GnomeRadio - Has nice UI, records, but doesn't do FIFO style continual recording
- Some guy's C based logging tool whose name escapes me. Preset and no GUI.
- Flumotion. Fully configurable networkable UI, flexible sources and sicks, handles tees, based on GStreamer. Looks promising.